A woman who woke up from a thirty-year coma in 2018 would be forgiven if she looked around and came to believe our world is falling apart.

Cable news and social media are a steady drumbeat of negativity. There is a sense the world is not right.

Russian collusion. Xenophobia. Antifa. Unite the Right. Stormy Daniels. #MeToo. Mass shootings. The Deep State. It’s a cacophony of angst, outrage, and political anger.

The woman who emerged from her coma would have little or no idea that the world is experiencing an economic miracle, just as most people today do not. But it’s happening just the same.

The Middle-Class Miracle

As the Washington Post reported last week, people around the world are joining the middle class on a scale hitherto undreamt of (to borrow a phrase from Dr. Strange).

This revelation came during an interview with Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas, who noted that the world is quietly nearing a historic milestone few would have dreamed possible a generation ago.

“By 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be ‘middle class,’” the Post reports.

The surge, driven largely by a middle-class explosion in India and China that is now spreading to Southeast Asia, is perhaps the most incredible demographic shift ever witnessed.

It’s easy to forget that the middle class barely existed for most of modern history.

“There was almost no middle class before the Industrial Revolution began in the 1830s,” Kharas notes. “It was just royalty and peasants. Now we are about to have a majority middle-class world.”

Being Middle Class Is a Big Deal

One need not go all the way back to the dawn of the Industrial Age, however, to see just how extraordinary this milestone is. Our World in Data shows that 60 percent of the world still lived in extreme poverty as recently as 1970.

It’s important to note that reaching the middle class is not a mere class designation. Nor is it simply a matter of money. (A family of five in Burundi living on $324 a year would qualify, according to Gapminder foundation, a non-profit cited by the Post, as would a family of five in China clearing $121,000 annually.)