9. Poverty
UN Ranking: 1
WEF Ranking: 25
Average Score: 13
Interestingly, the World Economic Forum didn’t list poverty as one of the biggest problems in the world that can be solved with inventions, though they included unemployment and income inequality as problems. The solution to poverty is productivity growth and improvements in income distribution. Most people take the economic growth that we have been experiencing in the last couple of centuries as “normal”. Actually, labor productivity has been pretty stagnant for thousands of years and most of the economic growth has come from population growth during most of human history. Worldwide poverty rates declined significantly over the last 200 years and as technological innovation keeps steaming ahead, poverty rates will continue to decline.
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