My friend Randy Parker, economics professor at East Carolina, recently started a macroeconomics blog that Locker Room readers may find interesting. Here’s an excerpt from his latest post:
…[W]hen it is all said and done, please remember that the only way
that you and your family and those of your ancestors have escaped the
grinding poverty that characterizes most of the world’s population is
through the evolution of free markets here in the U.S. and throughout
our economic history. If you take the income level of what we define
today as poverty ($10,400 for an individual in 2008), 13% or so of our
population are classified as poor. If you take that same income level
and put it into equivalent purchasing power dollars in the year 1900,
the turn of the last century, guess what percentage of the U.S.
population in the year 1900 was below what we consider poverty today?
The answer: 90%.
