> but most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that
I am extremely suspicious of this claim, and would like to see some kind of proof.
Most people do not understand just how bad life as a low-productivity subsistence farmer was, and in 1600, that describes approximately everyone. Agricultural productivity steadily rose in the early modern period, and this resulted in a rise in the standard of living.
What is problematic about the poverty measure in the TFA is that it is based on monetary exchange.
In the past, a lot of value was not based on actually buying things in the market. People grew food, or exchanged things within families or communities via non-monetary measures. Today, almost all value is exchanged monetarily. The poverty graph, at least at the lower end, is to a great extent a replacement of that self/social value with monetary value.
While living standards for most have improved, the story for those of the bottom is not accurately portrayed by the poverty graph.
Do you think researchers who dedicate their lives to measuring poverty haven't thought about a problem you thought of in a few minutes?
> These poverty figures take into account non-monetary forms of income — for poor families today and in the past, this is important, as many of them are subsistence farmers who live largely from their own food production.
This dataset certainly does not do this adequately. This is a very active area of research, and it will take a long time before we converge to reasonable estimates of the past. Even today, countries routinely change their GDP figures after a few years because of how difficult such a thing is to to measure.
You should mentally put large error bars on these graphs. The fact that they don't come up with them already is concerning.
I am extremely suspicious of this claim, and would like to see some kind of proof.
Most people do not understand just how bad life as a low-productivity subsistence farmer was, and in 1600, that describes approximately everyone. Agricultural productivity steadily rose in the early modern period, and this resulted in a rise in the standard of living.