Today there are about 650 million extremely poor people in the world. As a thought experiment, let’s consider what it would cost to lift all these people out of poverty. (As a caveat, let’s just remember that lifting people from, say, 90¢ a day to just above $1.90 is great, but they are still pretty darn poor—and actually distributing the money would be fantastically expensive.) It turns out that the theoretical cost to lift everyone on the planet out of extreme poverty would be less than $100 billion per year.33 Compare this to our current trajectory: we’ve committed to spending $1 trillion
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