Around 1820, more than three quarters of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Today it's roughly one in ten, even though the population has grown nearly eightfold. Between 1990 and 2015, the number of people in extreme poverty fell by more than 100,000 a day on average. That's a headline that could have run every morning for 25 years.
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.