But here we are faced with the old question of causation – was the fall in poverty due to neoliberal globalisation as a system, or is it something that, in general terms, was likely to have happened in any event? The chart shows a classic curve, with the “global share living in extreme poverty” – after a slow start in the 19th century – falling rapidly between 1950 and 1970 at just as fast a rate as in the more recent separate data for those living on under $1.90 a day since 1980, i.e. the start of the age of financial deregulation.
The earlier period was one with different economic systems around the world – managed welfare states in the “developed” world, forms of socialist economy elsewhere, decolonisation and industrialisation in others… but what did not exist were uncontrolled capital flows. And therefore the major, ongoing fall in poverty overall was not, in that era, associated with today’s form of kleptocratic inequality.
That the welcome fall in extreme global poverty is not caused by financialised globalisation, but is rather a product of wider longer-term processes led by scientific and technological change, is further evidenced by the global statistics for life expectancy in different parts of the world. The next chart is also thanks to Max Roser’s.
Global life expectancy (weighted average) and by world region, 1770-2012