👋 Did this email get forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Future Perfect in your inbox every Wednesday and Friday.

Hey readers,

It's Bryan here. Thanksgiving is traditionally a good time to start counting your blessings. And for years, hundreds of millions of people have had this to be thankful for: they live in a time that has made historic progress against the scourge of extreme poverty.

Between 1990 and today, the number of people living in extreme poverty — meaning on the equivalent of $3 or less per day in US purchasing power — fell from 2.3 billion to around 800 million, even as the global population nearly doubled.

To put it another way, each day over the past 35 years, an average of 115,000 people escaped from extreme poverty. Through financial recessions and technological revolutions, through wars and climate change, even through pandemics, this fundamental progress continued. It was the ultimate good news story.

And now it may be ending.

That’s the dire conclusion of a recent post by Max Roser, founder of the website Our World in Data. While Roser projects that the number of people in extreme poverty will decline by about 40 million over the next five years, he writes that “after 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase.”

If that projection holds, it would mark the end of one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments. And it wouldn’t be because the tools that worked for decades mysteriously stopped working. It would, in a way, be precisely because of the success of those tools.

Where growth fails

The last few decades of astonishing global progress were propelled above all by growth.

In the 1990s and 2000s, hundreds of millions of people in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and other rapidly developing countries rose above the extreme poverty line because their economies were growing at extraordinary speed. And because most of the planet’s poorest people lived in these countries at that time, they were able to experience explosive gains in income, infrastructure, education, and health.

Today, however, the majority of people living in extreme poverty are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and in fragile and conflict-affected states — places where economic growth has been weak, volatile, or nonexistent for decades. This means the remaining pockets of extreme poverty are concentrated in places where our usual engines of progress barely turn over at all.

Madagascar — where my Vox colleague Benji Jones just returned from — is Roser’s example of a country stuck in this trap: GDP per capita today is roughly what it was in the 1950s, even as its population has grown by 700 percent.

When an economy doesn’t grow but its population does, the math is brutal. More children are born into extreme poverty, and the total number of people living in deprivation stays flat or rises. And the problem will become more challenging in the future, as much of the world’s population growth is projected to be in countries mired in extreme poverty.

Layer on conflict and the situation becomes even more intractable. By 2030, the World Bank estimates that nearly 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor will live in conflict-affected economies. A civil war can wipe out a decade of economic progress. Climate shocks can do the same. When drought, flooding, or crop failure hits a region where people already live one bad break away from destitution, millions can fall back below the poverty line overnight.

Saving the future

Roser acknowledges that his projections are not prophecy. Change the growth pattern — through better governance, fewer conflicts, more investment, cheap clean energy, or even dramatically expanded migration opportunities — and the projections change with them. The future of extreme poverty depends on whether the countries where the poorest people live can finally begin to grow.

Keeping this progress going will be harder, but we shouldn’t mistake “harder” for “hopeless.” The gains of the last 35 years might feel like a miracle, but they were the result of specific choices, investments, and reforms that helped billions of people build better lives.

The challenge now is to extend that success to the places that were left behind. If we can do that, the age of progress against extreme poverty doesn’t have to end. If we can’t, then this Thanksgiving might be one of the last moments when we can look at the global numbers and confidently call them a blessing.

Bryan Walsh

Senior editorial director

Meet us on Patreon!

The Vox Membership program is getting even better with access to Vox’s Patreon, where members can unlock exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.

Become a Vox Member to get access to it all.

JOIN VOX ON PATREON

THE BIG STORY ➠

The long, fun list of things we could do with unlimited clean energy

Imagine we had cheap and abundant energy. Some radical ideas are actually within our reach.

What would we do if clean energy became so cheap and accessible that it became truly abundant? In his latest feature, Vox climate correspondent Umair Irfan invites us into that future, not in a hokey sci-fi way, but as a practical thought experiment for a future that’s actually surprisingly within reach. Because if the world really is on track to pour trillions into clean power this year, maybe the most interesting question isn’t how we decarbonize, it’s what we’ll do once we’ve done it.

What sort of things become possible? Farms that produce fresh berries in January without gulping down fossil fuels? Desalination plants turning seawater into drinking water without political drama? Burgers grown from cells instead of cows? What about carbon-gobbling machines that clean up the atmosphere like cosmic Roombas?

Energy abundance could assure our food and our water and repair our planet. It could also open up whole categories of invention we’ve barely begun to imagine.

But Umair also reminds us that abundance won’t magically solve inequality or the messy human parts of transitions this big. We’ll still need good policy, global cooperation, and — especially considering that there are still 685 million people in the world who don’t have access to electricity at all — a plan for who benefits.

Still, it’s energizing, quite literally, to imagine a future where our biggest challenge isn’t scarcity, but deciding what remarkable things to build next. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor

READ THE STORY

CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT...

with Kenny Torrella

Title: Senior reporter
What I cover: Animal welfare and factory farming
What I’m eating this Thanksgiving: Field Roast's celebration roast, stuffing and mashed potatoes with generous servings of gravy, and zero cranberry sauce

Last month, the European Parliament voted to ban plant-based meat companies from using words like “burger” and “chicken” on their packaging. It’s not policy yet — the European Commission, along with the 27 countries that make up the European Union, need to vote on it, too, and it’s unclear where they’ll land. But what is clear, according to a new story in Politico Europe, is that few European parliament members ever wanted it, though “almost no one is expending political capital to bury it.”

That’s likely because, over the last few years, European farmers have successfully created a literal stink — by dumping manure on highways and in city centers — in protests over agricultural pollution measures and proposed EU support for plant-based meat. That helped to quash some of the continent’s plant-based momentum and created a political environment in which national governments have “closed ranks around traditional agriculture,” according to Politico Europe.

Céline Imart, the European parliamentary member who pushed the labeling ban, appealed to this “traditional vs. nontraditional framing” when she said that terms like “steak” are ones that “belong to farmers.”

But this is a weak argument — plant-based meat alternatives have been around for centuries, and more importantly, they’re made using ingredients, like soybeans, peas, and potato starch, that are grown by, well, traditional farmers.

⭐ ONE WAY TO GOOD THIS WEEK

You can take part in an American tradition this Thanksgiving. And no, I’m not talking about the meal.

Sign up for a turkey trot — a race on Thanksgiving Day — that raises money for charity. The Long Grove Turkey Trot that I walk, not run, raises money for the Northern Illinois Food Bank. Find a race near you here.

And if you decide to sleep in – I won’t judge – rest easy knowing that your registration fee will go to a good cause. Seriously, register even if you don’t intend to go in order to raise money for charity.

Last year, 1.1 million people ran turkey trots at over 936 races across the country. Turkey trot registrations managed by RunSignup raised more than $3.6 million for a variety of causes. All states host turkey trot events, with 5K distances being the most common. And if you’re not much of a runner like me, you’ll be in good company if you decide to walk.

Expect to see people fully embracing the Thanksgiving spirit by dressing as turkeys. It’s a nice workout before a feast. —Shayna Korol, Future Perfect fellow

Want more Future Perfect in your inbox? Sign up for more newsletters here. Need advice? Submit a question to Sigal Samuels's advice column Your Mileage May Vary.

Today’s edition was edited and produced by Izzie Ramirez. We’ll see you next week. Feel free to reply with what you're having for Thanksgiving. :)

Access the web version of this newsletter here.

This email was sent to . Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe.

View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service.

Vox

The end of a miracle?