Conclusion

Summary

To make sense of the forest of numbers that populate these pages, we first need a summary of the central findings. And although our question concerns the impact of political regimes, one would be blind not to note first the grip on people's lives of sheer poverty. Although regimes do make a difference for material welfare, their effect pales in comparison with that of scarcity.

In every aspect we have examined, the differences between poor and rich countries have been enormous. For one, even if democracies do occasionally spring up in poor countries, they are extremely fragile when facing poverty, whereas in wealthy countries they are impregnable. Hence, poor people are much more likely to be ruled by dictators. Obviously, poverty means that people consume less. They also live shorter lives, have more children, see more of them die and fewer of them become educated, and are more likely to suffer from collective violence. However one thinks of well-being, people with low incomes lead poor lives.

Moreover, while with regard to mortality rates and life expectancies the gap between poor and rich countries has been closing, the disparities of incomes and of fertility rates have increased. The coefficient of variation (the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean) of death rates fell from 0.44 when the countries were first observed (“entry” year) to 0.40 during the last year each country was observed (“exit” year).