The good news about the developing world you probably haven’t heard

The world’s poor are, as we know, suffering under the yoke of capitalism, getting ever poorer as we rich grab an ever-greater share of the world’s resources and pollute the environment for everyone else. We know this because the Left keeps telling us so. But amidst the unrelenting gloom of an ever-more unequal world, one might think there would be a little room for reporting the odd piece of positive news. Yet it is not easy to find. One thing you probably haven’t seen this week are the latest statistics from the International Energy Authority (IEA) which show that the number of people without access to an electricity supply in their home has fallen to under one billion – for the first time ever, or at least since 1800 when the world’s population crossed the billion threshold.

The IEA reports remarkable progress in developing countries. In Indonesia, 50 per cent of households had an electricity supply in 2000.