China brought more people out of poverty than the entire population of the US.

[dkf]

http://www.globalissues.org/article/4/poverty-around-the-world#WorldBanksPovertyEstimatesRevised


Accounting for the increased population between 1981 and 2005, the poverty rate has, however, fallen by about 25%.

While this at least sounds encouraging, it masks regional variations, and perhaps most glaringly the impact of China:

China’s poverty rate fell from 85% to 15.9%, or by over 600 million people
China accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty
Excluding China, poverty fell only by around 10%

[Systematic Chaos]

1. But they did it at the expense of their entire biosphere.

I'd rather have less money, but water that's safe to drink, air that is clean within reasonable safety guidelines, and soil that can grow uncontaminated crops.

But what do I know? :shrug:

[FarCenter]

2. Literacy rate went from around 65% to 95% from 1980 to present

[Exilednight]

3. We need to follow Finland's education model. They went from bottom of the pile of

post-industrial nations to the top claiming two of the three number one spots and second in science.

[ThomWV]

4. And took them out of the villages and pushed them into the Factories

And if even some of the reports about working conditions for the factory workers in China are true then I'd be hard to convince that their situation improved.

[FarCenter]

6. Factory worker may be bad, but peasant is worse.

[jwirr]

8. A Nigerian student in the 70s described this process to me of removing

the people from the land into cities until cities were nothing but slums and where they could no longer provide food and shelter for themselves and their families as they did when they were on the land. I do not know for sure that this is happening in China but it is one possible side effect of urbanizing the poor to work in yet another poor condition. in Nigeria the peanut growers wanted the land.

[Ezlivin]

5. Led by General Tso, I presume

His delicious chicken recipe made it all possible.

Either that or the fortune cookies.

[joshcryer]

7. Sorry, I usually rec your threads just because they're insta-unrecc'd, but I don't...

...look at merely socioeconomics as a metric for ones standard of living. It's far more intricate than that.