From John Cassidy's forthcoming book, How Markets Fail: "In China between 1981 and 2005, according to a recent study by researchers at the World Bank, the poverty rate fell from 84 percent to 22 percent, a drop of almost two thirds. By the end of the period more than 600 million Chinese had been lifted out of poverty."
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Dan Akst is a journalist, essayist and novelist who wrote three books. His novel, The Webster Chronicle, is based on the lives of Cotton and Increase Mather.