The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago. Take a longer perspective and it becomes very clear that the world is not static at all. When you only consider what the world looked during our life time it is easy to think of the world as static – the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there – and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and that it always will be like that.
Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from we must go far back in time. Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today.