The general impression is that we live in a world full of misery, inequality, and injustice. All of that exists, but, fortunately, it’s becoming less frequent. Every time we turn on the TV or visit a news website, we almost always find catastrophes of all kinds.
Unfortunately, we don’t usually find good news. Even though this kind of news is much more important.
The truth is, today, on our planet, most of the population either belongs to the middle class or to the wealthiest classes. In other words, as you can see, poverty is now not such a looming issue.
Yes, there’s still a lot of poverty, but the truth is that we’ve never before known a world where poverty didn’t affect most of the population. Every day, we are heading towards huge growth -- hundreds of thousands of opportunities for business, more consumers.
Now the question is -- can our world sustain after so many people consuming so much?
According to the Brookings Institute and the World Data Lab’s estimates (September 2018): We hit an extraordinary milestone for the first time in the history of humankind; most people who live in this world are no longer poor. We’re talking about more than 50% of the world’s population, of approximately 3.8 billion people who belong to the middle class or wealthy homes.
Now, what exactly do we mean by the middle class? Fundamentally, people with enough purchasing power to allow them to live comfortably. That is, they can buy washing machines and refrigerators; they can go to restaurants and on vacation.
These are people who can endure some unexpected instability such as an illness or a period of unemployment without falling back into poverty. To be more specific, the households that have a consumption capacity of more than $11 a day per person, adjusted by the price level, are part of the middle class.
As we know, there’s still a lot of poverty in the world -- no less than 650 million people live in extreme poverty. The good news is that changes are happening so quickly that in a few decades this issue may have disappeared entirely.
In our world, for every second that passes, one person escapes extreme poverty. It’s exactly this lightning-fast rate that caused the population living in conditions of extreme poverty to fall by 75% between 1990 and 2015.
However, in that same period, every second, approximately five people leave poverty behind and join the middle class. That means, if this rate continues, in just about 12 years, by the year 2030, the middle class would make up the vast majority of the world’s population.
A middle-class world means a world with fewer poor people, with a greater commitment to academic studies and knowledge, with a greater tendency to set up companies and a population that’s more demanding toward politicians.
The middle class is a proprietary class. People in the middle class have houses, savings, businesses, and that, of course, leads them to be more committed to stability and to be more demanding.
Climate change, refugee crisis, water pollution; we’re facing many challenges. In fact, if we just look at the news, we could get the impression that we’re heading directly and at full speed towards economic growth.
And, of course, with so many people consuming more and more resources, many of us are quite concerned about environmental sustainability.
When we talk about development, economic growth, consumption, two issues logically concern us a lot -- pollution and damage to the environment, and the second is whether there will be adequate resources for everyone.
Technological developments and new environmental concerns are helping the world produce more while polluting less. In 1960, the US issued 0.94kgs of CO2 for every dollar of production. In 2014, this value was just 0.34, 64% less.
The EU reduced its CO2 emissions per dollar of production by 54% between 1991 and 2014. Same for Japan. Even China, the country that used coal for everything, has reduced its relative CO2 emissions by 75% over the past 4 decades.
Improved technology and increasing concern for the environment are managing to slow down and even reverse our damage to the planet. Since 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the US has slashed its emissions of five air pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by more than 40 per cent, and those people became two and a half times richer.
The truth is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that the relationship between the environment and wealth has an inverted “U” shape. That is to say, after a determined level of wealth, societies begin to worry more about the environment, begin to take measures to take care of it, and begin to develop and use cleaner technologies.
According to the Environmental Performance Index, the richer a country is, on average, the cleaner its environment becomes, the more environmental awareness exists, and the better results it gets.
Richer countries can allocate more resources towards technological development and protecting natural areas. Today, deforestation, one of the great ecological threats, is undergoing a clear decline.
There are many challenges ahead, but the trend isn’t nearly as bad as it’s often portrayed. We are convinced that we need to promote cleaner production methods and technologies, but we’re not in an apocalyptic or irreversible situation.
Of course, the empirical evidence tells us that the best way to overcome these challenges is with more investment and with richer and better-formed societies.
The human activity aims to seek better ways of production, including recycling, the development of new technologies that allow for the exploitation of new resources, or that manage to do more with less.
Arafat-Al-Yeasin is a student of the University of Dhaka.
