Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

So far this century, we've seen a stunning decrease in global income inequality,

bringing it down to levels not seen in well over 100 years.

The growth of China alone has contributed close to three quarters of this global reduction

in poverty.

Close to 800 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty in China over the last

40 years because of the major policy shifts that occurred when Deng Xiaoping took power in

1978. During this period, China tried a number of economic and social experiments that

reshaped not just China but the rest of the world. China was a very poor country in

1949 when the Communist Party took power.

The country had emerged from four years of civil war and before that a crushing Japanese occupation.

The economy mostly revolved around subsistence farming.

Under Mao's leadership, landlords and wealthier farmers had

their landholdings forcibly redistributed to poorer peasants. Mao's great leap forward from

1958 to 1962 was an ill-conceived plan to industrialize the country.

Millions of people died of starvation in China during the Great Leap would estimate

ranging from 15 to 55 million debts, making the great Chinese famine that occurred the largest

or second largest famine in human history.

Policies around how farming was organized and policies that incentivized the melting down of farm tools to increase steel production were disastrous.

Sparrows were suspected of eating too much grain and were killed off.

This led to the rise in the number of insects which decreased rice yields.

The cultural revolution which Mao launched in 1966 aimed to remove what Mao saw as bourgeois elements throughout society that he thought were intent

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