The Carpe Diem blog of The American Enterprise Institute has published what it calls the, "Chart of the greatest and most remarkable achievement in human history, and one you probably never heard about." Mark J. Perry writes:

Everybody's featuring their "graphs and charts of the year," like The Atlantic and the Washington Post (be sure to see Vice-President Joe Biden's "Graph of the Year" on Amtrak ridership). Well, the chart above could perhaps qualify as the "chart of the century" because it illustrates one of themost remarkable achievements in human history: the 80% reduction in world poverty in only 36 years, from 26.8% of the world's population living on $1 or less (in 1987 dollars) in 1970 to only 5.4% in 2006. (Source: The 2009 NBER working paper "Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income," by economists Maxim Pinkovskiy (MIT) and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Columbia University).

The cause of this unprecedented good fortune for humankind? Those two bugaboos of the left: globalization and capitalism. Which is why those leftists who claim to be interested in helping mankind need to sentence themselves to re-education camps, or some other method of changing their views that is congenial to their side of the political spectrum.

Of course, there is a prophet who has been explaining this to the world for quite some time: Herbert E. Meyer, frequent contributor to American Thinker, and thee man who foresaw (and helped bring about) the collapse of Soviet communism. You can read his prescient views in AT, or in Forbes or Powerline, or better yet, read his ebook (only $1.99!), The Cure for Poverty.

It is testament to the power of left wing media domination that Meyer's views and the AEI chart  are not known to every school child. It is the most politically inconvenient truth of our era.