An Incredible Success Story

I think this picture from last week's Economist is amazing:



It's a simple little graph, a few squiggles and shapes... and yet it signifies important economic progress - real improvements in the quality of life, and real reductions in material misery - for hundreds of millions of people. Hundreds of millions of people.

I think a good argument could be made that there's nothing that we do in economics that is more important.