Jordan Peterson on economics: what the evidence says · JRE #1769
SUBJECT: ECONOMICS
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
we've lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years than in the entire course of human history.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Global extreme poverty did fall sharply in the decades before this claim: World Bank data cited by NPR show more than 1 billion people rose out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2013, and the share of people in the developing world living in extreme poverty fell from 47% in 1990 to 14% by 2015. This decline, driven substantially by economic growth in China and India, is real and historically large in absolute terms given a much larger global population than in earlier eras. However, the claim that this period exceeded the entire prior course of human history in the number of people lifted from poverty cannot be verified against any dataset, since reliable global poverty statistics only extend back a few decades and poverty rates were far higher for nearly all of pre-industrial history, meaning no measurable comparison set for "all of human history" actually exists. Nearly identical "greatest improvement...in human history" framing has been used by other public figures describing this same 1990-2015 period, indicating it is a common but imprecise rhetorical device rather than a data-backed historical comparison. Overall: the underlying trend of large declines in extreme poverty in recent decades is well-supported, but the "entire course of human history" framing is an exaggeration not supported by any actual long-run dataset.