NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

Another way of looking at this miracle by analyzing the number of deeply poor people today vs. two centuries ago when that great economic upturn began: A new OECD report looks at global poverty in two ways, both the World Bank's $1.90 a day standard and the alternate Basic Needs Poverty line from researcher Robert Allen. Turns out, they tell pretty much the same story.

According to these measures, in 1820 roughly three-quarters of the world population, about 756 million people, could not afford a tiny space to live, food that would not induce malnutrition, and some minimum heating capacity. By 2018, global extreme poverty dropped to 10%.

Rather than celebrate this vast improvement in human welfare, some recoil. Perhaps they worry concession means ignoring the work yet to be done. Or concession means accepting the importance of economic growth at the expense of the environment. Or perhaps concession also means conceding the benefits of market capitalism. Don't like the c-word? Economist Deirdre McCloskey offers alternatives such as "technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among all the parties involved" or "fantastically successful liberalism, in the old European sense, applied to trade and politics, as it was applied also to science and music and painting in literature" or "trade-tested progress." Or maybe just "innovism," meaning an open society that allows and rewards change, as unpredictable as it might be.

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