Sure you can point at some changes but you don't know what is causing them and when they're begin to peter off. We do know that a lot of the poverty fixes of late are almost exclusively linked to the fall of communism in Asia. Now they're all on market economies and we still have 1/3rd poverty and 1/2 living with under $2.50 a day.
Now we've eliminated communism, now what? The market approach has itself bottomed out and even wealthy states are struggling with late stage capitalism which is extremely low growth and rising unemployment and taxation unable to keep up with entitlements. On of the dirty little secrets of capitalism is that rich countries need poor countries to stay rich. You can't just raise everyone up. Limited resources will always mean uneven distributions, the same way economies don't naturally have an even distribution of money/resources.
Also one of the main reasons things are better today is become of liberalism in regards to abortion and the lowered population in especially hopeless areas in the 70s and 80s that led to starvation and resource warfare, thus these people aren't here anymore to pad poverty stats. They're dead. We shouldn't see that as a win for economic prosperity.
You don't have to look at just the last couple decades.
You can look at the last 200 years.
Every decade some smart academic makes the same, Malthusian, population bomb, peak oil, or whatever argument.
And every decade that person gets proven wrong, for the last 200 years.
Is this decade different? Are the Malthusians going to proven right NOW even though they have been wrong every single other time they make these predictions? Maybe. But I think I am going to wait a little while before giving that argument any weight at all.
No arguments, no predictions, only evidence.
We are in late stage capitalism once living standards stop going up, and they have yet to do that.
The people that said you wouldn't be able to afford an apartment in overcrowded SF were dead-on right. The people who predicted widespread traffic jams were right.
The people who said that third world countries needed to cut birthrates before they could get richer turned out to be right everywhere.
The people that said Bengala-Desh would get to be like Bengala-Desh were right. As were the people who predicted overcrowding and exodus from the Sahel.
I pick 1960 San Francisco, when it was the home of emerging 1960s culture and twenty year olds with unskilled 3/4 time jobs could buy a house and start a family. (That's the exact same house you need to make $550k to buy today)
I pick 1950s Bengala-Desh because you didn't have to risk your kids lives from flooding because of overpopulation and DDT was just ending the malaria problem (some came back after the ban).
Lots of 1950s third world countries are first world today, like Mexico or Korea. In that case, I'd pick today over 1950s.
There are lots of benefits to growth in per capita income. There are no benefits to growth in GDP from population increase while GDP per capita stagnates.
> The people that said you wouldn't be able to afford an apartment in overcrowded SF were dead-on right. The people who predicted widespread traffic jams were right.
One doesn't need be a Malthusian to have predicted this. This is a simple consequence of Ricardo's Law of Rent, and the Tragedy of the Commons.
And in fact, the problems have been exacerbated by Malthusian-style rationing (ie Prop 13), the exact opposite of Georgist-style solutions for housing and traffic.
Answer: it was much much worse.
Yes, things are bad right now. But in the past things were worse. And now they are getting better, very quickly.
I see no evidence that this trend won't continue.