[nxm]

Global extreme poverty has fallen dramatically over the past two centuries. The extreme poverty rate, currently defined by the World Bank as living on less than $2.15 per person per day (adjusted for purchasing power), has dropped from around 60% of the world's population in 1950 to under 10% today.

[tavavex]

That people should be happy over this may seem obvious to commenters shuffling about charts and research papers. But ordinary people do not look at their living situation and feel overwhelmingly thankful on a daily basis that they're not living in a horrible shack eating nothing, like many people 100 years ago. They're looking at their immediate parents. Neither of them were likely to starve, or die prematurely, or be affected by many of the most horrible things that wiped out people for millions of years. And yet, people are still worried that what was seen decades, not centuries, ago is unattainable. Maybe most people aren't likely to be homeless, but that precarious threshold is getting closer than it used to be. There's less of a safety margin for most things.

[pfortuny]

You arw right.

But precisely that fact made life much less stressful than today: it was normal to be poor, it was normal to die young.