![]() Over the course of a quarter-century, 1.1 billion people (on net) have escaped poverty and improved their standard of living.”). ![]() This is down from 1.9 billion people in 1990. 19, 2018), (“In 2015, an estimated 736 million people were living below the international poverty line of $1.90 in 2011 purchasing power parity. 8 World Bank, Summary of Chapter 1: Ending Global Poverty, World Bank (Sept. and this is likely also true of global inequality. 15-7, 2015) (“Taking the global distribution of income as a whole, the Gini coefficient was 64.9 in 2013, down from 68.7 in 2003.”). This data is sourced from Tomáš Hellebrandt & Paolo Mauro, The Future of Worldwide Income Distribution 13 (Peterson Inst. And while Animal Farm portrayed a metaphorical world where increasing inequality is inexorably linked to totalitarianism and immiseration, global poverty has reached historic lows in the twenty-first century, 7 See, e.g., Max Roser, Global Economic Inequality, Our World in Data, (showing that the Gini coefficient of global inequality declined from 68.7 to 64.9 between 20). 6 Obviously this has been enabled by the internet and the emergence of online knowledge sources, such as Google Search and Wikipedia, which have both expanded the extent of the world’s information and brought it-in usable form-into the palm of every consumer. Fahrenheit 451 accurately feared that books would lose their monopoly as the foremost medium of communication, but it completely missed the unparalleled access to knowledge that today’s generations enjoy. 5 See, e.g., Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves 12 (2010) (noting that the present generation has access to more resources and opportunities than any previous generation). Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, presciently saw in 1949 the coming ravages of communism, but it did not guess that markets would prevail, allowing us all to live freer and more comfortable lives than any preceding generation. Though these novels often shed light on some of the risks that contemporary society faces and the zeitgeist of the time when they were written, they almost always systematically overshoot the mark (whether intentionally or not) and severely underestimate the radical improvements commensurate with the technology (or other causes) that they fear. 4 George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945). Fahrenheit 451, 3 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Brave New World, 2 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932). It has given us such masterpieces as Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (1949). The dystopian novel is a powerful literary genre.
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