For the First Time Ever, the World Is Mostly Middle Class and Largely Old

When it comes to economic development, positive change is typically gradual and only noticeable over long periods of time; by contrast negative developments—economic crises—are often rapid and spectacular. This creates a biased narrative that focuses on negative news, while positive trends go unnoticed because they are less dramatic.

Amid an atmosphere of deepening gloom about prospects for the world economy, we want to draw attention to two long-term trends that illustrate the significant progress being made by most of humanity.

Two questions are central to each human being: How long will I live? How much money will I earn? While we all approach these questions with many nuances and influencing factors (such as education, health, political stability, climate, infrastructure), almost everyone in the world wants an uplifting answer to both questions. Everyone wants to live a long, healthy, and prosperous life and most of us now actually have a credible shot at it.

For most of human history, this was not the case. People tended to die young and in poverty. However, over the last 50 years, the world has made fundamental improvements in how long people live and how much money they can spend.

As people live longer there are also more older people than in the past. The classic population pyramid (with many young and few old people) was typical only 100 years ago. Not anymore. The shape will soon look more like a rectangle, with age cohorts of approximately equal size stretching out to 80 years of life expectancy.

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