According to the Brookings Institution, in 2018, for the first time, more than half of humanity lived in middle-class or wealthier households, defined as spending more than $11 a day per person in purchasing-power terms. This was mostly driven by growth in Asia. The threshold is a convention, but the shift is real: poverty is no longer the condition of the majority.
That's the estimate from a WHO-led study published in The Lancet in 2024, covering the half-century since the Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched in 1974. It works out to about six lives saved every minute, mostly infants. The measles vaccine alone accounts for around 60% of those lives.
According to the World Gold Council, about 216,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of human history. Because gold is so dense (19.3 tonnes per cubic metre), it would fit in a cube about 22 metres on each side, roughly the height of a seven-storey building. Strikingly, about two-thirds of it has been mined since 1950.