Thanksgiving is traditionally a good time to start counting your blessings. And for years, hundreds of millions of people have had this to be thankful for: they live in a time that has made historic progress against the scourge of extreme poverty.

Between 1990 and today, the number of people living in extreme poverty — meaning on the equivalent of $3 or less per day in US purchasing power — fell from 2.3 billion to around 800 million, even as the global population nearly doubled. To put it another way, each day over the past 35 years, an average of 115,000 people escaped from extreme poverty. Through financial recessions and technological revolutions, through wars and climate change, even through pandemics, this fundamental progress continued. It was the ultimate good news story.

And now it may be ending.

That’s the dire conclusion of a recent post by Max Roser, founder of the website Our World in Data. While Roser projects that the number of people in extreme poverty will decline by about 40 million over the next five years, he writes that “after 2030, the number of........

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