The Roots of Progress

I've been thinking about the deceptiveness of the graph on the top left lately. It's easy to look at proportions and see that things have improved, but I don't know anyone who morally weighs suffering this way. When you take the graph and adjust for population growth, we get a decrease from 94 (out of ~100) to 70 (out of ~700). In absolute terms the impoverished population has been reduced roughly 25% over the past 200 years. I suspect there's also a lot of room for error dating back this far, and it's entirely possible that things have barely changed (or even become worse) in absolute terms. I've grown tired of the use of this term; it only seems to obscure.