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The number of people in extreme poverty over the past two centuries We have seen that the chance of being born into extreme poverty has declined dramatically over the last 200 years. But what about the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty? The visualization combines the information on the share of extreme poverty shown in the last chart, with the number of people living in the world. For the years prior to 1980, we use the mid-point of the estimates from Bourguignon and Morrison (2002) as shown in the previous chart; from 1981, we use the World Bank estimates.
As we can see, in 1820 there were just under 1.1 billion people in the world, of which the large majority lived in extreme poverty. Over the next 150 years, the decline of poverty was not fast enough to offset the very rapid rise of the world population, so the number of non-poor and poor people increased. Since around 1970, however, we are living in a world in which the number of non-poor people is rising, while the number of extremely 1