But hold on a moment. The same data can (and should) be interpreted entirely differently if one changes the unit of analysis. We don’t care about poor countries; we care about poor people. And a high proportion of the world’s poor people happen to live in China and India. Both countries are huge (with a population over a billion); each was relatively poor in 1980. Not only have China and India grown rapidly over the past several decades, but they have done so in large part because of their increased economic integration with the rest of the world. They are “rapid globalizers,” as the Economist
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