Warm-Up 1.What are some of the social factors from your research that represent developing nations and/or people living in absolute poverty? 2.What type of relationship did you find between your 4 nations when you analyzed the indicator “income by percentage share?”

Unit 4: Is Capitalism good for the poor? Objective: 1.WWBAT investigate world poverty trends 2.WWBAT analyze the concept of income inequality 0

Since the early 1800s, the human population on Earth has been growing exponentially. Current world population estimate is: 6,973,738,433 people as of October 21, 2012

Human Population History

In 1850, the human population reached its first billion. By 1930, it was 2 billion. By 1960, the human population reached 3 billion. Then in 1975, 4 billion, and so on…

The human population is now growing at a rate of about 3 people/second or 260 thousand/day or 1.8 million per week or 93 million/year

Each dot represents 1 million people

Approximately 1.3 billion of the world's people are impoverished, living on the equivalent of less than 1 dollar a day. Some 60% of the 4.8 billion people in developing countries lack basic sanitation, and almost one-third have no access to clean water. Nearly 1 billion people in the world are illiterate, two-thirds of them women.

So what do you think… Now that you know that the world’s population has been increasing exponentially the last 100 years, do you think the percentage of people in absolute poverty has increased or decreased over the last 100 years?

Has absolute poverty decreased or increased in the last 100 years? For the first time in human history, we are experiencing a sustained decline in the percentage of the world’s population that is poor

An overall decrease in absolute poverty While the percentage of people living in poverty fell continuously over the 200 year span following 1800, it is true that until very recently, the total number of poor people continued to grow as world population grew. Recently, however, even that barrier to reducing absolute poverty has fallen. The number of poor in the world peaked around 1980 at an estimated 1.4 billion. After 1980, population growth in the world was not sufficient to offset the decline in the percentage of people in poverty, so that not only the percentage but the absolute number of the poor began to fall. Globally, the number of extreme poor – those living on less than $1.25/day – has declined by nearly 650 million people since 1981.

China and India’s Poverty Lines

Unequal Income Distribution: Command versus Market Economies

GDP Growth and Poverty Reduction

Income Distribution Income Distribution – Unequal Income Distribution – Redistribution of Wealth -

Redistribution reduces poverty by giving the poor a bigger “slice of the pie”...

Economic Growth improves the lives of the poor by making the pie bigger