You will always have the poor among you --- Not so Fast, Check the Data.

The author of John wrote, “You will always have the poor among you.”  Data collected since 1820 may prove the gospel wrong. 

The numbers are compelling.  In 1820, of the one billion people living on the planet; 94.4% were living in poverty, while 83.9% lived in extreme poverty. By 1950 the numbers were reduced to 71.9% and 54.8%.  Since 1980 these numbers have plummeted; in 2015 the number of people living in extreme poverty dropped to 9.6%.  See: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

The 2015 number is the lowest % in the history of our species.  Also the overall number of people living in extreme poverty is lower than it was in 1820 (even though the population has grown from 1 billion to 7 billion).

When Barack Obama said:  “If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be – you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what county you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman – if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now.”  - it was not a political statement; it was simply a reflection of the data.

How did this happen, particularly considering the population has grown by 6 billion? Before the question can be answered, we must understand that poverty, just like entropy is the default state. Wealth must be created, and evolution of complex economies requires time and energy.

How did we get from there to here?

1. Humans have been free from war between superpowers for decades; for most of us our entire lives.  This is a new, modern trend.
2. Science and Technology.
3. Globalization and Free Trade.

Can we keep the trend going, can humans prove the gospel wrong and move 2015’s 9.6% to 0% by 2050?  Yes, we can, if:

• If the Left can be educated that there is no reason to be afraid of science such as GMOs and Nuclear Energy.  It takes much more time, space, and energy to grow an organic bushel of tomatoes than an intelligently modified version.  I believe the first step is to inform everyone that unless you are picking wild berries in the Teton Range alongside grizzly bears or hunting your meat, you are already eating GMOs.  Nature didn’t give us carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, corn, wheat or even cattle.  These are all human created; the difference is the methods we have today can produce the same change in one year, that it took a millennium to produce in the past.
• The second step is to reverse the Right’s fear of Globalization and Free Trade.  Two axioms are: 
• If one country is producing product ‘A’ for one million of its own citizens they can efficiently scale to produce the same for ten billion globally. Allowing the next country to focus on producing product ‘B’ efficiently.
• Democratically elected governments that trade together do not go to war against each other.

Given that engineers, economists, and scientists (who are historically are not the most outspoken groups) must change the minds of both the left and the right to accomplish the goal - there must be another catalyst out-there, or these groups need to start speaking up.