"I was especially fascinated by the fact that global extreme poverty, contrary to the World Bank’s claims but according to its own data, seemed to have decreased from 38 to 29 per cent in the 1990s. I explained that poverty continued to decline rapidly and presented an extremely optimistic forecast that this could be halved by 2015. It was far exceeded. In 2015, extreme poverty was around 10 per cent. Between 2000 and 2022, extreme poverty decreased in a way we have never seen before – from 29.1 per cent of the world’s population to 8.4 per cent. (As recently as 1981, the figure stood at more than 40 per cent.) For the first time in history, fewer than one in ten people were poor. Despite the fact that the world population increased by more than 1.5 billion people during this period, the number of poor decreased by more than 1.1 billion. That is the greatest thing that has ever happened to mankind. The relentless hardship that most of humanity has suffered throughout its existence has been pushed back faster than ever in more places than ever. It is such a remarkable development that I must admit that I find it difficult to take writers and pundits seriously who do not take it as a central point of departure when analysing our time. A common objection is that this poverty reduction is not real because it ‘is just China’. It is a little strange to dismiss a country that holds one in five of the world’s inhabitants when talking about global development. Furthermore, it’s wrong. Even if China is removed from the 1990–2019 dataset, global poverty has been reduced by almost two-thirds, from 28.5 to around 10 per cent."