The Affluent World

We are used to thinking of the world as a sea of poverty with just a few islands of affluence in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and so on - but that has begun to change and will change dramatically in the coming decades. 

This graph projects the growth of per capita Gross World Product in recent decades to the end of this century. Notice that, in about ten years, the world will reach the level that the United States reached in 1960, a time when we were calling ourselves "The Affluent Society" and when we were building freeways and oversized cars with tail-fins to absorb consumers' surplus purchasing power.  And before the end of this century, the world on the average will reach the level of the United States today. 

The change is already well under way. The "global middle class" is large and is growing rapidly.  According to a study by the Brookings Institution, we recently reached the tipping point where, for the first time in history, more than 50% of the people in the world are either rich or "global middle class," defined as people who have discretionary income to spend on entertainment, household appliances, motorcycles and possibly vacations and who are confident they can get through economic disruption without falling into extreme poverty. Currently, 3.59 billion people are in the global middle class, and Brookings projects that will grow to 5.3 billion by 2030, well over half of the world’s population. 

It will put immense strain on the global environment if the world goes the way that the United States went in the 1960s, rebuilding cities around the automobile to promote rapid economic growth. Most likely, ecological collapse would throw much of the world back into poverty. 

But if the world tries to achieve the best possible quality of life rather than the fastest possible rate of economic growth, people will be able to emerge from poverty, have all the middle class comforts needed to live a good life, and have abundant free time.