One neat trick to end extreme poverty

Apr 9th 2026|5 min read

A WORLD FREE of poverty would once have sounded fanciful. For most of human history it was barely even imaginable. Around 1800, when more than eight in ten people were destitute, Thomas Malthus, a particularly dismal dismal scientist, insisted it was an iron law that “Some human beings must suffer from want.” Herbert Spencer, similarly cheerless and an early contributor to The Economist, cast poverty as the “survival of the fittest”. The pessimism was not confined to gloomy Englishmen such as these two. The idea that poverty could be eliminated scarcely appears in print before the mid-20th century. Even Jesus, in three of the Gospels, tells his followers that the poor will always be with them.