Why not both?

Capitalism mostly.

Before capitalism all of the world was "Third world". And the equity you get without capitalism is everybody being equally poor. And then millions die, like in every attempt to build communism in past century.

I know it’s unfashionable to say on a venture capitalist forum, but millions die under capitalism too.

That's certainly true and remains an unacceptable state of the world, but it's also true that globally, it's a steadily decreasing number, even under conditions of population growth.

E.g. looking at child mortality over time

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-deaths-igme-data

And in same (many?) cases it's intentional, e.g. by overthrowing governments so the West has cheaper oil, gas, or bananas (Guatemala).

Billions have been lifted out of poverty in China and India alone. Africa is next.

The problem is not too many people. If anything, people who think there are too many people are a problem.

The combined population of those countries is 2.8 billion. For your assertion to be true, 71% of those countries would have had to have been in poverty in the recent past and now are not.

> For your assertion to be true, 71% of those countries would have had to have been in poverty in the recent past and now are not.

Yup, that is in fact the case. Look it up.

You got about a billion in China, they were at the bottom end of the country gdp per capita rankings, now they are well into the upper half. The commenter probably assumed India did a similar journey, but India is still full of poverty and not even close to China, so yeah probably less than two billions combined but definitely more than a billion.

"More than a billion" is enough to add the -s in English grammar.

As long as we're in the pedantic mode: "More than a billion" could mean from 1 billion up to 1.99 billion. You need at least 2 billions to be able to add the -s

The poster you replied to wrote "so yeah probably less than two billions combine", so that actually means you could not use the "-s" ending in this case.

To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s.

Which is all rather not the point because that's not what I said. I said "Billions have been lifted out of poverty." The meaning of that statement is: "the count of people who have been lifted out of poverty is measured with the 'billion' unit." That even includes 1 billion, exactly. If I had said "it numbers in the thousands", then 1,000 would have been an acceptable value, as would 9,9999.

But see my other comment. The number of people in India and China who have been lifted out of poverty in the last ~50 years or so is much more than a billion.

> To be pedantic, the pluralization for anything other than 1 billion exactly is billions. $1,000,000,001 would be 1.000000001 billions, with an s.

To be pedantic, “billions” is used without a specific number as a general measure of broad scale, but with any specific number, it is just “billion”, not “billions”. “billions of dollars” is fine, but “1.0000000001 billion” or “2 billion” or “999.999999999 billion”; none of the last three take an “s” at the end.

More than a billion means simply > 1 000 000 000, which can mean anything from 1 000 000 001 to infinity.

The parent of this comment and everything inside it is not worth reading and completely off-topic.

I mean India went from 11th to 5th largest economy in the span of a decade and it continues to grow consistently at around 7%. It has pulled 400 million people out of poverty in the last 10 years so it is a part of the story.

The PPP adjusted value within India is 3.5 versus the dollar in the US so the per capita GDP for India is closer to $12,000 per citizen, not all that far away from chinas’s $17,000.

Yes, and they have been.

Don’t derail my message with irrelevant pedantry :(