[simonh]

You're right to call that out. There are one billion fewer people in extreme poverty now than there were then. A bit over 500 million compared to over 1.5 billion, even taking into account the increase in the worlds population. Most of this increase has been in Asia where hundreds of millions of people have risen into the urban middle class. Industrial wages in China have increased almost 10x in the last 2 decades, and industrial employment has ballooned.

The situation in Africa isn't so good, but has substantially improved. Of course the cost of this has been stagnant wage growth and anaemic employment in the developed world, as hundreds of thousands of people in China and South East Asia joined the global labour pool.