Before 1800, notes Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, most people were desperately poor. “The average income was equivalent to that in the poorest countries in Africa today (about $500 a year in international dollars),” he writes, “and almost 95 percent of the world lived in what counts today as ‘extreme poverty’ (less than $1.90 a day).” The Industrial Revolution constituted what Pinker calls the “Great Escape” from poverty.
