[sacomo]

One general flaw with any of these historical graphs concerning poverty, standard of living, etc. is that we don't have good data for most countries going back that far. The graphs are making some big assumptions for the older, spotty data.

> Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless.

> The data for 1820–1970 comes from a source (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002) that draws on the Maddison database on world GDP. That data was never intended to assess poverty, but rather the distribution of GDP — and that for only a limited range of countries. Data for the Global South is particularly thin, and there is very little that exists for prior to 1900. The data is not robust enough to draw meaningful conclusions about what was happening to people’s livelihoods during the colonial period.

[lwansbrough]

Read this earlier, from the founder of Our World in Data: https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809