Their analysis points to three conclusions. First, they find it is unlikely that extreme poverty was a normal or universal condition prior to the 19th century. Data on real wages indicates that, historically, unskilled urban laborers tended to have incomes that were sufficient to meet their basic needs, for food, clothing, and shelter. Extreme poverty tended to arise during periods of dramatic social dislocation, such as wars, famines, and dispossession, particularly under colonialism.

“If one assumes that extreme poverty was near universal in the past, then it may appear as good news that only a fraction of the global population lives in this condition today,” says Dylan Sullivan, the study’s lead author and researcher at Macquarie University, Australia. “But if extreme poverty is a sign of severe distress, relatively rare under normal conditions, it should deeply concern us that hundreds of millions of people continue to suffer this way today,” he states.

The second conclusion is that, far from delivering progress in social outcomes, the rise and expansion of capitalism saw a dramatic deterioration in human welfare. In all the regions they review, the process of incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and a marked upturn in premature mortality.

I knew it! I had a strong hunch that this was the case, but I also had the capitalist myth of “the best time ever for civilization” still in my mind. This clears things up a lot for me.