"Throughout history the average person lived in extreme poverty. The destitution of the common man only changed with the onset of economic growth" which occurred as capitalism was established. "Economic prosperity was only achieved over the last couple of hundred years. In fact, it was mostly achieved over the second half of the last hundred years. The world economy has moved from a zero-sum game to a positive-sum game. This made it possible that when people in one place became richer, other people in other places could become richer at the same time."

For all of human history, virtually everyone was very poor — the economist Max Roser and the Our World in Data project date the turn to roughly the last two centuries. Economic historians call what followed the Great Enrichment: in Deirdre McCloskey's account, the average person's real income rose roughly fifteen-fold in ten or twenty generations, and she calls the onset of that growth the only truly important event in the economic history of the world.