VoxDev Development Economics

S6 Ep15: How poverty fell

21 snips
Apr 17, 2025
Ask episode
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
INSIGHT

Huge Decline in Extreme Poverty

  • Extreme poverty fell from about 2 billion people in the 1980s to roughly 700 million today.
  • Despite population growth, over a billion people escaped extreme poverty since the 1980s, marking a huge achievement.
INSIGHT

Within-Generation Poverty Decline

  • Poverty decline happened mostly within generations, as people improved their economic status over their lifetimes.
  • This challenges the notion that poverty reduces mainly because successive generations are less poor.
INSIGHT

Poverty as a Slippery Slope

  • Households often move in and out of poverty, showing poverty is volatile rather than a permanent trap.
  • Poverty decline is more like climbing a slippery slope than escaping a fixed poverty trap.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
Get the app