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The Decline of Poverty: Where and When

            Figure 1 shows world population over the past ten thousand years, along with noteworthy inventions, discoveries, and events.  The graph conveys a literal explosion of the world’s population in the mid-eighteenth century.  Shortly before the United States won its independence from Britain, the geographical line bolts upward like a rocket, recently powering past six billion humans alive on Earth.  Advances in food production from new technologies, commonly labeled the second Agricultural Revolution, and from the utilization of new resources (e.g., settlements in the New World) coincide with this population explosion. Also noteworthy is the intense acceleration in the pace of vital discoveries.  Before 1600, centuries elapsed between vital discoveries. Improvements and the spread of the use of the plow, for example, first introduced in the Mesopotamian Valley around 4000 B.C., changed very little over the next 5000 years.  Contrast this with air travel. The first successful motor-driven flight occurred in 1903 by the Wright Brothers. In 1969, a mere sixty-six years later, Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on the moon.⁴
            Before 1750, chronic hunger and malnutrition, disease, illness, and early death were the norm, and it was not just the masses who ate poorly; as Nobel Laureate Robert Fogel (1999) reports:

Even the English peerage, with all its wealth, had a diet during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that was deleterious to health. Although abundant in calories and proteins, aristocratic diets were deficient in some nutrients and included large quantities of toxic substances, especially alcoholic beverages and salt. (p. 3)

            For most people, poor diet was not a matter of bad choices, it was the absence of choices, the fact of scarcity. Exceedingly poor diets and chronic malnutrition were the norm because food production seldom rose above basic life-sustaining levels. Meager yields severely limited energy for all kinds of pursuits, including production. Most people were caught in a food-energy trap, and low food supplies and inadequate diets were accompanied by high rates of disease and low rates of resistance.⁵  Remedies from known medical practices were almost nil.
            The maladies of malnourishment and widespread disease are revealed in evidence on height and weight.  Table 1 shows average final height of men at maturity from economically advanced nations with men gaining four to five inches over two hundred years.  Today the average American adult man stands five inches taller than mid-eighteenth century Englishmen.  The average Dutchman, the world’s tallest, stands seven inches taller.  A typical Englishman in 1750 weighed around 130 pounds, an average Frenchman about 110, compared to about 175 for U.S. males today (Fogel 1994, 2004). It is startling to see the suits of armor in the Tower of London that were worn for ancient wars; they vividly remind us of how small people of long ago really were.

Table 1
Average Height of Men at Maturity in Centimeters

	Great Britain	Sweden	France
1750-75	166	168
1800-25 (1775-1800)	168	167	(166)
1850-75	169	170	165
1950-75	175	178	176

Source: Derived from Fogel, 2004, Table 1.4, p. 13.

            The second Agricultural Revolution beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, and the Industrial Revolution which soon followed (first in England, then France, the U.S. and other Western countries), initiated and sustained the population explosion, lifting birth rates and lowering death rates. Table 2 summarizes research findings on life expectancy at birth for various nations, places, and times.  This and other empirical evidence (Preston, 1995) reveal that for the world as a whole, it took thousands of years for life expectancy at birth to rise from the low 20s to around 30 years in the mid-18th century. Leading the breakaway from a past of early death and malnutrition, poor diet, chronic disease (e.g., chronic diarrhea; see Fogel 1994), and low energy were the nations of Western Europe. From Table 2 we see that by 1800, life expectancy in France was just under 30 years, and in Great Britain about 36, levels that China and India had not reached 100 years later. By 1950, life expectancy in England and France was in the high 60s, while in India and China it was only about 40.

Table 2. Years of Life Expectancy at Birth

Place	Middle Ages	Select Years	1950-55	1975-80	2002
Sources: Lee and Feng (1999); Peterson (1995); Wrigley and Schofield (1981, 529); World Resources Institute (1998); UNDP (2002).
France		~30 (1800)	66	74	79
United Kingdom	20-30	36 (1799-1803)	69	73	78
India		25 (1901-11)	39	53	64
China		25-35 (1929-31)	41	65	71
Africa			38	48	50
World	20-30		46	60	67

            When life expectancy data are adjusted for quality by subtracting years of ill health (weighted by severity), “healthy-active life expectancy” indexes reveal years totaling 70, 62, and 53 in the U. S., China, and India respectively in 1997-99 (World Health Report, 2000).  These “quality life spans” are substantially more than these countries’ total life expectancies fifty to one hundred years ago.

            In the period before 1750, surviving childhood was problematic. Infant mortality was high everywhere; depending on time and location, between 20 and 25 percent or more of babies died before their first birthday. By the early 1800s, infant mortality in France, and probably England, had dipped below the 20 percent level, rates not reached in China and India and other low income developing nations until the 1950s. For Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, this rate is now under one percent, but remains at 4 percent in China, 6 percent in India, and 9 percent in Africa (World Resources Institute 1999 and UNDP 2000).

            Accompanying the declines in infant mortality were striking declines in maternal mortality.  For example, U.S. data show infant rates falling from 100 to 7 per 1000 live births (1915 to 1996), with maternal rates plummeting from 220 to 7.6 per 100,000 live births (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999).  The high losses of infants and mothers in birth reflect more than just lives lost.  They also reflect more pregnancy time over a woman’s life and more time futilely spent in caring for children who died before their first birthday, both time uses implying production losses.

            Tables 3 and 4 provide another long-term perspective on the escape from poverty and early death, in the form of evidence on real income per person, albeit very inexact, for periods
long ago. The gradual rise of real income over the past one thousand years was led by Europe. By 1700, Europe had broken into a clear lead, rising above the level of per capita income it shared earlier at lower levels with China, which was the most advanced empire/region, circa 1000.

Table 3. Real Gross Domestic Product Per Capita (1990 $)

Area	1000	1500	1700	1820	1900	1952	2003
Sources:  Development Centre Studies The World Economy: Historical Statistics, Maddison 2003. World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2003 AD, Maddison, 2007, http://www.ggdc.net/maddison
Western Europe	$427	$772	$977	$1,202	$2,892	$4,963	$19,912
USA			527	1,257	4,091	10,316	29,037
India			550	533	599	629	2,160
China	450	600	600	600	545	537	4,609
Africa	425	414	421	420	601	928	1,549
World	450	566	615	667	1,262	2,260	6,477

            While the rest of the world slept, and changed little economically, Europe and England’s colonies in America advanced. By the early 1800’s, the United States had pushed ahead of Europe, and by the mid 1900’s, citizens of the U.S. enjoyed incomes well above those of Europeans and many multiples above people living elsewhere. The real impact of regional differences in economic growth is apparent when we realize that the poor nations of today – such  as Zaire, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Bangladesh – have per capita income levels comparable to those in Europe 500 to 1000 years ago.  Even now, they have not attained levels of well-being experienced by western peoples at the time of the American Revolution (see Table 4).

Table 4. GDP Per Capita Then and Now - 1990 $

	1820	1870	1900	1950	1973	2003
Western European Countries
Austria	1,218	1,863	2,882	3,706	11,235	21,232
Belgium	1,319	2,692	3,731	5,462	12,170	21,205
Denmark	1,274	2,003	3,017	6,943	13,945	23,133
Finland	781	1,140	1,668	4,253	11,085	20,511
France	1,135	1,876	2,876	5,271	13,114	21,861
Germany	1,077	1,839	2,985	3,881	11,966	19,144
Italy	1,117	1,499	1,785	3,502	10,634	19,150
Netherlands	1,838	2,757	3,424	5,996	13,081	21,479
Norway	801	1,360	1,877	5,430	11,324	26,033
Sweden	1,198	1,662	2,561	6,739	13,494	21,555
Switzerland	1,090	2,102	3,833	9,064	18,204	22,242
United Kingdom	1,706	3,190	4,492	6,939	12,025	21,310
Western Offshoots
Australia	518	3,273	4,013	7,412	12,878	23,287
New Zealand	400	3,100	4,298	8,456	12,424	17,564
Canada	904	1,695	2,911	7,291	13,838	23,236
United States	1,257	2,445	4,091	9,561	16,689	29,037
Selected Asian Countries
China	600	530	545	439	838	4,609
India	533	533	599	619	853	2,160
Bangladesh				540	497	939
Burma	504	504		396	628	1,896
Pakistan				643	954	1,881
Selected African Countries
Côte d’Ivoire				1,041	1,899	1,230
Egypt	475	649		910	1,294	3,034
Eritrea & Ethiopia				390	630	595
Ghana		439		1,122	1,397	1,360
Kenya				651	970	998
Nigeria				753	1,388	1,349
Tanzania				424	593	610
Zaire				570	819	212

Sources:  Development Centre Studies The World Economy: Historical Statistics, Maddison 2003.
World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2003 AD, Maddison, 2007, http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/

 

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