A generation ago, 50 percent of humanity was malnourished, with calamitous famines widely predicted. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported in 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that malnutrition has declined to the lowest level in human history. Today only 12 percent of the world's population goes hungry. Of course 12 percent is too high, but the number means there are more than 6 billion people who eat sufficient meals. That's four times the total number of people alive when Theodore Roosevelt was the United States president.

Per-capita production of grain, beef, poultry, and dairy is rising faster than population almost everywhere in the world, in no small part owing to efforts supported by the U.S. [...]

The American media pays considerable attention to violence and air pollution in the developing world, as well it should. What about progress? Most Americans don't know that global poverty is in dramatic decline, again with a U.S. connection. A 2013 survey of the U.S. and United Kingdom by Novus, a social-change organization in Sweden, found that two-thirds of Americans and Britons believe destitution in the developing world has doubled in recent years. Actually, extreme poverty is less than half of what it was not so long ago.

The World Bank reports that the number of people mired in extreme poverty--defined as living on less than $1.90 per day--dropped from 37 percent in 1990 to less than 10 percent, the lowest fraction in history, in 2015, again latest year for which statistics are available. That's a drop from 2 billion people in 1990 to less than 700 million today.

Taking into account population growth, from 1990 to 2015, the share of humanity that does not live in deep poverty rose from 3.4 billion to 6.5 billion. In the current generation 3 billion people--most of them in developing nations--have joined the ranks of those who are not impoverished.