In the most successful countries, the average citizen now enjoys a material standard of living that would have made the greatest king of two hundred years ago turn green with envy. Yet the last few centuries have seen us banish starvation and famine from a large part of the Earth. Increases in the size of population were typically accompanied by declines in the average income. Growth, if it could have been measured, was probably not 3 percent a year but, at the most, only a percent or 2 per decade. Even the most optimistic early writers could not imagine that more than a few percent of the population would ever be well off they thought that the best we could do for the masses would be to minimize their suffering on Earth. Before that, most of the world not only took poverty for granted, but also assumed that little could be done about it. Judged by the huge strides that people all over the world have made in overcoming poverty and want, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that little of economic consequence happened before the last three centuries.
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