No. But...
https://www.positive.news/2017/perspective/28150/reported-decline-global-poverty/“If you’re over the age of 18, you probably grew up with the story of how the world is divided into the rich and the poor. But your opinions about global inequality really depend on where you’re standing.
That story was forged during a time of real global inequality. In 1970, around 60 per cent of the world’s 3.7 billion people lived in extreme poverty. If you plotted the world’s income on a distribution curve, it looked like camel humps. There was a small, high income group of countries up at the front, and then a bigger low income group at the back.
For decades, the language that we created to describe this world (first vs. third, developed v developing) dominated popular discourse, which is why it’s so deeply ingrained for so many of us. Which is a pity, because that world doesn’t exist any more. If you’re willing to re-examine some of your old-fashioned ideas, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that the story has changed.
Today, only 0.7 billion of the world’s 7.5 billion people live below the extreme poverty line. That’s less than 10 per cent of the world’s population. Not only is this the lowest proportion of people in extreme poverty ever, it’s also the lowest total number in more than 200 years. It’s the great economic success story of all time.
To paraphrase the indispensable Max Roser, the front-page headline every day should read:
‘Since yesterday, 250,000 people have been lifted out of bone-crushing, one-meal-a-day, soul-destroying, no-dentist, no-doctor, no-electricity, single accident-means-life-and-death, unrelenting, extreme poverty.’
It’s worth diving into this in a bit more detail. For most of recorded history, only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living. By far the majority of people were dirt poor. That’s how things stayed. Inequality wasn’t a social issue, it was just the way the world worked. In the last 200 years this has changed dramatically.
Poverty has been falling continuously despite the world’s population increasing seven-fold during that time. And since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that process has accelerated, with an average of 47 million people lifted over the extreme poverty line every year for the last 25 years."