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In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, global GDP per capita rose from about $400 per person globally to about $1,200 per person in Western Europe by 1800 and to between $400 and $700 per person in Eastern Europe, China, Japan, the United States, India, and Africa. 3 Once the Industrial Revolution went into full swing at the beginning of the 1800s, standards of living began to improve in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and the United States. Then, after World War II and the end of the European Imperial era, economic improvement spread far more broadly. 4 Because of technological advance around the world, and the accompanying economic progress, the proportion of people facing extreme deprivation has diminished to around one billion of the world’s eight billion people at the start of the 2020s. In 1990, the proportion of people living below the international poverty line was …