World population living in extreme poverty, 1820-2015

[Recursion]

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute

[whatthehey]

1. Damn those fuckers like Borlaug messing with natural agriculture!

Screw globalism and trade moving our jobs to third world shitholes!

To hell with the corporations seeking to abuse the oppressed subsistence farmer following their natural pathways!

[The2ndWheel]

2. And environmental issues follow, oddly enough, the green part of the graph

It's the price to pay for progress while living on a finite planet though.

[rafeh1]

3. Population explosion

As population goes up poverty goes down.
Malthusian and overpopulation types how do you explain that

[whatthehey]

4. I'm no malthusian but

this is at the very best confusing cause and effect and correlation and causation all at once. The population increases because more people have access to enough food and basic care in order to reproduce and survive. So a lack of extreme poverty in other words. About the only way it works the other way round is some decidedly second or third order effects in that with population growth we have a greater need for specialization so we have a greater need for schools, therefore more educated people, therefore a few highly educated people develop things like miracle wheat, which save a billion people from starving to death in extreme poverty. That big slope down in the 70s and 80s? That was almost all that one academic project led by one guy, which turned India from starvation central to a food exporter within a decade. It's a sad statement so few people know of him. When a pilot uses his knowledge and experience to save 100 or so people, he's a hero for the ages. When an academic uses his to save a billion, he's a barely remembered egghead.

[The2ndWheel]

5. Civilization is a resource concentration mechanism

We're the 1%. We privatize the planet for a single species and socialize the costs to the rest of life.