In his 2012 lectures at Gresham College, London, Professor Douglas McWilliams described the last two or three decades as the “greatest ever economic event” — greater in consequence than both the industrial revolution and the “so-called discovery of the Americas.” In the 500 years before the discovery of America he noted that world GDP had been increasing by an average of 15% per century (or 0.15% per year). We didn’t have Offices for National Statistics in those times so no one can be quite sure!

In the century after Columbus’ great voyage the rate of growth doubled — to something like 33% per century. GDP per head of population also rose — at about half the speed. Then came the Industrial Revolution: “between 1700 and 1820 world GDP nearly doubled, increasing by 87%. And there was a further increase of 60% in the 50 years between 1820 and 1970.” But then, for McWilliams, came the extraordinary events of the last few decades:

If we take the more recent period since East Asia other than Japan started to industrialise, from 1970 to 2008 world GDP rose by 270% and world GDP per capita rose by 104%. This is an order of magnitude different from the scale of economic growth after the discovery of the Americas and during the industrial revolution. GDP per capita in China, the most important of the fast growing economies, rose by just under 8 times between 1970 and 2008. Over this period, world GDP rose at an average annual rate of 3.5%.

Read the article “What Cut Extreme Poverty in Half in Past 20 Years? Capitalism.” on social.shorthand.com.