““Today’s overwhelming volume and variety of information makes it possible—by selecting and connecting data points carefully—to paint practically any picture of the world and make it seem accurate. So the pictures we paint are often more a reflection of our deepest personal orientation, especially of our basic optimism or pessimism, than of empirical evidence.28 All the same, amidst the welter of information that sometimes seems to point in every direction, certain facts about long-term trends around the world ultimately shift the balance of evidence, in my mind, against the economic optimists. These facts indicate that there are chronic and widening ingenuity gaps in a number of domains of human activity. Significant problems, some of them fundamentally new in their character and scope, remain unsolved or are getting worse, in part because we haven’t generated and delivered enough ingenuity to address them. For instance, although average incomes and quality of life around the world are improving, these statistics—which are, again, highly aggregated—hide extreme and growing differences in wealth. Income per person, averaged globally, currently rises by about 0.8 percent per year, but in more than one hundred countries in the last fifteen years income has actually dropped. Some 1.3 billion people—about 30 percent of the population of the developing world—remain in absolute poverty, living on less than a dollar a day.29 And the gulf between the poorest and wealthiest people on the planet is widening very fast.””
