Our Perilous Prosperity: A Selection from Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet (2019)

“In the 1970s, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people in the world was hungry—‘undernourished,’ to use the term preferred by the United Nations. Today, the U.N. says, the figure is one out of ten.

In those four decades, the global average life span has risen by more than eleven years, with most of the increase occurring in poor places. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have lifted themselves from destitution into something like the middle class. In the annals of humankind, nothing like this surge of well-being has occurred before. It is the signal accomplishment of this generation, and its predecessor. This enrichment has not occurred evenly or equitably; millions upon millions are not prosperous, and millions more are falling behind.

Nonetheless, on a global level—the level of 10 billion—the increase in affluence is undeniable. The factory worker in Pennsylvania and the farmer in Pakistan may both be struggling and angry, but they are also, by the standards of the past, wealthy people.”—Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World (2019)