@humanprogress (Twitter)

The amount of labor that once bought 54 minutes of light now buys 52 years of light. The cost has fallen by a factor of 500,000 and the quality of that light has transformed from unstable and risky to clean, safe, and controllable.

The Chinese Gini coefficient rose from 0.16 in 1980 to 0.55 in 2014 (a sign of rising inequality) but this went hand in hand with huge poverty reduction as China liberalized. In contrast, Britain saw a fall in inequality after the financial crash in 2008.

Over the last decade, GDP per person and life expectancy are up around the world while infant mortality and undernourished rates are down.

In 1964, a worker on the average wage had to work 823 hours to buy a Programma 101, the first commercial desktop computer. In 2014? Only 34 hours to buy a Macbook Air, a mindbogglingly better product. That's a reduction of 94%. See other price changes: https://buff.ly/2Idhu6t

Homo sapiens are between 200,000 and 300,000 years old. The modern world, with all the conveniences that we take for granted, is merely 250 years old. For the first 99.9% of our time on earth, progress was painfully slow. Then everything suddenly changed.

Between 1960 and 2016, GDP per person in Botswana rose by 1,790% and in Zimbabwe by less than 2%. Institutions, like rule of law and property rights, matter! See the data for yourself: https://buff.ly/2GhD90N

Africa may be the poorest continent, but it is no longer a “hopeless continent,” as The Economist called it in 2000.

A worker on the average wage had to work 15 hours to buy a vacuum cleaner in 1979. In 2015, he or she needed to work only 2.3 hours to buy an even better product. https://buff.ly/2Ho4vi7

Despite what we hear on the news and from many authorities, the great story of our era is that we are witnessing the greatest improvement in global living standards ever to take place.

"The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. The average Botswanan earns more than the average Finn did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951" - @mattwridley https://buff.ly/2HD92hx