Proof the World Is Better Than It’s Ever Been!

If you’re contemplating 2017 and feeling depressed that the planet has never been in a worse condition… this good news should bring back your smile.

Our World in Data (OWID) – an online publication that presents the empirical evidence on the development of human living conditions – has published charts (see below) showing just how much the world has improved in the past 200 years.

Economist Max Roser explains he compiled the charts after a survey had documented the “very negative perspective of global development that most of us have”.

He blames the inaccurate negative perception partly on the media who don’t tell us how the world is changing but rather just tell us “what in the world goes wrong”.

He says one reason is that the media (and its readers) focus on single events, which are often bad – such as plane crashes, terrorism and natural disasters – rather than on positive developments… because those events often happen very slowly over time and therefore don’t make headlines.

Roser says most people are completely ignorant about global development. For instance, only 5% of Americans were aware that global extreme poverty has actually declined. Most think it’s increased, even doubled!

He says: “The only way to tell a history of everyone is to use statistics, only then can we hope to get an overview over the lives of the 22 billion people that lived in the last 200 years.”

Roser and his team at Our World in Data have been building this statistical resource over the last few years.

“We see it as a resource to show these long-term developments and thereby complement the information in the news that focus on events.”

He is aware that the most engaging stories for readers are those about individual people rather than statistics. He hopes people will find these summarising visualisation of 100 people a little easier to digest and understand the incredible transformation in living conditions that our planet has and is undergoing…

Roser stresses however that “there are big problems that remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent.”

View The World as 100 People over the last two centuries:

“Freedom is impossible without faith in free people. And if we are not aware of our history and falsely believe the opposite of what is true we risk losing faith in each other.” – Max Roser, Our World in Data

Source: Our World in Data by Max Roser which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.