Isn’t this just a byproduct of the technology it is based on?
Commercial routes such as the Silk Road could be considered as the first massive, interconnected information networks.
Further, access to the internet surely has spread the world faster than any other tech. Which in my mind highlights just how important and powerful the tech has proven to be.
So invention of soap and hygene doubled life expectancy.
The industrial revolution / steam engine has taken us from 1% gdp frowth per ccenturyt o 3-5% GDP growth, so over 100x improvement.
Those are historic changes. What important metric has the internet increased at least by 50%?
Freedom indexes showing things like research and expression exploded with the internet.
I'd suggest these things are _far_ more important for humanity than growing a countries GDP, which may or may not result in life improvements for the majority of its citizens.
I would also nit-pick and entirely reject that hygiene doubled our life expectancy. Worldwide LE went from 30 to 60 over the course of many decades and no single region saw a double in less than a few decades. So this can't be attributed to any single event, much less something as discrete as soap/hygiene.
It's highly unlikely that extreme poverty reduction is caused by the spread of internet. Also, your numbers are way off [1], as the current percentage is around 10%, down from 36% in 1990.
[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/09/19/d...
> It's highly unlikely that extreme poverty reduction is caused by the spread of internet.
what do you suggest happened 30-40 years ago that triggered this massive spread of wealth, then?
It doesn't really matter what I suggest. Correlation does not imply causation.
But for instance, in China there were 700 million of people living in extreme poverty in 1990, and that number went down to 200 million in 2008, and 7 million in 2016 [1]. Regardless, internet penetration rate in China was 23% in 2008, and 53% in 2016 [2].
From the article in [1], it is easy to deduce that most advancements in extreme poverty eradication come from similar contexts, countries with larger populations that have experienced accelerated growth in the past decades, mostly because of manufacture and exports, e.g. India, Vietnam, or Brazil.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/56213271
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236963/penetration-rate-...
Look at GDP or poverty rate of any country, there is no 'bump' or infection point the year or even the decade internet was invented. You know what did create a bump? Decolonisation.
Conclusion: nothing happened, extreme poverty was receding for decades prior, and it's just the same trend continuing.