For centuries, mass poverty seemed inevitable.
Starvation, disease, death.
As late as the 1700s, roughly half of children globally would die before reaching adulthood.
This was the natural order of things.
And then, everything began to change.
Looking at a graph of development measures over the past 200 years is to witness the miracle of human development.
On any measure you can think of, child mortality, nutrition, poverty,
more and more people are able to live significantly better lives than their ancestors could even dream of.
Just 35 years ago, 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty.
Today, That number is just under 700 million.
That's still a lot of people.
But this staggering improvement proves that mass poverty isn't preordained.
My name is Jerusalem Demsis.
I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper,
a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.
Why did extreme poverty fall so fast?
And can we finish the job?
Loads of research and debate has gone into the question of why extreme poverty fell.
But today, we're going to talk about how.
Paul Niehaus is an economist at UC San Diego and the co-founder of GiveDirectly,