In the year that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, when Rome controlled about 25 percent of the world’s population, global GDP per capita was the equivalent of US$463 in 1990. Roughly one thousand years later, around the time of the Norman conquest of England, global GDP per capita actually had decreased by a little more than $10. And about 500 years hence, when Columbus arrived in America, the world’s GDP had ticked up a mere 25 percent. In fact, it wasn’t until 1800 that GDP per capita finally topped $600. These data points suggest that for nearly 2,000 years — and presumably, researchers say, untold millennia before that — the global economy was staggeringly inert.
Then, on the wings of the Industrial Revolution, it suddenly expanded. New technologies, productivity improvements, and cross-border communications, trade, and travel took global GDP per capita to $6,000 in the year 2000; it stands above $7,000 today. This expansion occurred despite (or perhaps in part due to) a concomitant global population boom that has produced a six-fold increase in the number of people on Earth, to 6 billion.
Closely related to these rapid GDP gains is another revealing set of statistics. In 1820, 95 percent of the world lived in poverty; by 1929, that rate had fallen to about 75 percent. In 1980, 50 percent of people survived on less than $1.25 per day; today that percentage has declined by more than two-thirds.
Source: The Data-Driven Optimist
