The World is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better is the title of a recent WSJ article by its chief economics commentator Greg Ip. “If you spent 2018 mainlining misery about global warming, inequality, toxic politics or other anxieties, I’m here to break your addiction with some good news: The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year,” writes Ip in his opening paragraph. “Poverty around the world is plummeting; half the world is now middle class; and illiteracy, disease and deadly violence are receding. These things don’t make headlines because they are gradual, relentless and unsurprising.”
Ip’s article is mostly based on data insights from Our World in Data, a comprehensive website that quantifies the evolution of our global living conditions over the past few centuries. Our World in Data (OWID) is an initiative of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development, led by economist Max Roser at the University of Oxford.
OWID analyzes longitudinal data on how the world has been changing over decades and centuries, as well as explaining the causes and consequences of those changes in its accompanying articles. It makes extensive use of visual aids, including interactive graphs and maps, to present its analyses and insights. Its content is organized into 15 main sections: population, health, food, energy, environment, technology, growth & inequality, work & life, public sector, global connections, war & peace, politics, violence & rights, education, media and culture, - each of which further includes a number of subsections.
Let me summarize just a few of the key trends in the OWID website.