一个如今被视作目标的“消除贫困”世界，在过去曾几乎被认为不可能：约1800年时有超过十分之八的人处于赤贫状态，托马斯·马尔萨斯和赫伯特·斯宾塞等人都认为贫困乃生物学或经济上无法避免。文章指出，即使在20世纪中叶以前，广泛出版讨论中也几乎不出现消除贫困的观点，而《福音书》中“穷人将永远与你们同在”的表述也加深了这种悲观情绪。
联合国在上世纪末设定了2015年目标：将1990年人均日均低于1.25美元的比例减半。意外地，25年间有12亿人摆脱了极端贫困，全球率由43%降至13%，其中中国贡献了约三分之二的降幅，快速增长的印度和印度尼西亚提供了其余大部分。
但2015年后，减贫速度降为此前约四分之一：仍有8.3亿人、约十分之一的世界人口处于极端贫困，约70%的贫困人口集中在撒哈拉以南非洲，刚果民主共和国、埃塞俄比亚和尼日利亚单独占25%，若减贫率不再改善，这三国到2050年可能超过全球贫困人口的40%。
A world once imagined to eliminate poverty was long treated as impossible: around 1800, more than eight in ten people were destitute, and figures such as Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer argued that want was economically or biologically inevitable. The account notes that even before the mid-20th century, poverty abolition was barely present in print, and scriptural language that the poor would “always be with you” reinforced that pessimism.
The U.N. set a target around the millennium to halve the 1990 share below $1.25 a day by 2015. In 25 years, 1.2 billion people escaped extreme poverty and the global rate fell from 43% to 13%, with China accounting for about two-thirds of the decline and fast-growing India and Indonesia much of the rest. After 2015, reduction slowed to roughly a quarter of its earlier pace: 830 million people, or about one in ten, remain poor, around 70% of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria together are 25%; if rates do not fall, these three countries could exceed 40% of the world’s poorest by 2050.
A cheaper route is to close the income gap rather than replicate China everywhere: if someone earns $2 and the line is $3, only $1 is needed. Perfect targeting cost is estimated to have fallen from $330 billion in 1990 to $90 billion in 2023, while real-world imperfections mean a $2.15-day UBI would cost 2–3% of global GDP, and proxy-means tests miss up to 80% of the poor and misclassify roughly half of non-poor. A machine-learning method is estimated to cut poverty to 1% at $2.15 with $318 billion (0.3% of GDP), or $466 billion (0.5%) at $3, less than one-third of annual global alcohol spending, though implementation remains constrained by governance, conflict, exchange-rate pressure, and political resistance despite about 60% of rich-country respondents saying they would give up 0.5% of income to end extreme poverty.
Source: One neat trick to end extreme poverty
Subtitle: An age-old problem might have a surprisingly simple solutio
Dateline: 4月 09, 2026 04:24 上午