CityReads│Is the World Getting Worse or Better?
110
Is the World Getting Worse or Better？
Max Roser uses statistics to tell a history of everyone, that is, of the lives of the 22 billion people that lived in the last 200 years.
Max Roser (2016) – ‘A history of global living conditions in 5 charts’. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts/ [Online Resource]
All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?
In Sweden 10% thought things are getting better, in the US they were only 6%, and in Germany only 4%. Very few people think that the world is getting better.
Max Roser thinks that we must go far back in time to see where we are coming from. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked during our life time it is easy to make the mistake of thinking of the world as relatively static . We have to start 200 years ago before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically. Max Roser uses statistics to tell a history of everyone, that is, of the lives of the 22 billion people that lived in the last 200 years.
First chart: poverty
The first chart shows the estimates for the share of the world population living in extreme poverty. Researchers measure extreme poverty as living with less than 1.90$ per day. These poverty figures take into account non-monetary forms of income – for poor families today and in the past this is very important, particularly because of subsistence farming. The poverty measure is also corrected for different price levels in different countries and adjusted for price changes over time (inflation) – poverty is measured in so-called international dollars that accounts for these adjustments.
In 1820 only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living, while the vast majority of people lived in conditions that we would call extreme poverty today. Since then the share of extremely poor people fell continuously. More and more world regions industrialized and thereby increased productivity which made it possible to lift more people out of poverty: In 1950 three-quarters of the world were living in extreme poverty; in 1981 it was still 44%. For last year the research suggests that the share in extreme poverty has fallen below 10%.
That is a huge achievement, maybe the biggest achievement of all in the last two centuries. It is particularly remarkable if we consider that the world population has increased 7-fold over the last two centuries. In a time of unprecedented population growth our world managed to give more prosperity to more people and to continuously lift more people out of poverty.
Economic growth was also so very important because it changed the relationship between people. In the long time in which the world lived in a non-growth world the only way to become better off is if someone else got worse off. Economic growth changed that, growth made it possible that you are better off when others become better off. It is hard to overstate how different life in zero-sum and a positive-sum economy are.
The second chart: literacy
The chart below shows the share of the world population that is literate over the last 2 centuries. In the past only a tiny elite was able to read and write. Today’s education – including in today’s richest countries – is again a very recent achievement.
In 1820 only every 10th person was literate; in 1930 it was every third and now we are at 85% globally. Put differently, if you were alive in 1800 there was a chance of 9 in 10 that you weren’t able to read – today more than 8 out of 10 people are able to read.
In 1800 there were 120 million people in the world that could read and write; today there are 6.2 billion with the same skill.
The third chart: health
One reason why we do not see progress is that we are unaware of how bad the past was.
In 1800 the health conditions of our ancestors were such that around 43% of the world’s newborns died before their 5th birthday.
In 2015 child mortality was down to 4.3% – 100-fold lower than 2 centuries ago.
It would be wrong to believe that modern medicine was the only reason for improved health. Initially rising prosperity and the changing nature of social life mattered more than medicine. It were improvements in housing and sanitation that improved our chances in the age old war against infectious disease.
Healthier diet – made possible through higher productivity in the agricultural sector and overseas trade– made us more resilient against disease.
But surely science and medicine mattered as well. A more educated population achieved a series of scientific breakthroughs that made it possible to reduce mortality and disease further. Particularly important was the discovery of the germ theory of disease in the second half of the 19th theory. The germ theory of disease laid the foundation for the development of antibiotics and vaccines, and it helped the world to see why public health is so very important. Public health mattered hugely: Everybody benefits from everybody else being vaccinated, and everybody benefits from everybody else obeying the rules of hygiene.
The fourth chart: freedom
The chart shows the share of people living under different types of political regimes over the last 2 centuries. Throughout the 19th century more than a third of the population lived in colonial regimes and almost everyone else lived in autocratically ruled countries.
In the second half of the 20th century the world has changed significantly: Colonial empires ended, and more and more countries turned democratic: The share of the world population living in democracies increased continuously. Now more than every second person in the world lives in a democracy.
The fifth chart: fertility
The world population was around 1 billion in the year 1800 and increased 7-fold since then.
The increase of the world population followed when humanity started to win the fight against death. Global life expectancy doubled just over the last hundred years.
Population growth then comes to an end. This transition from high mortality and fertility to low mortality and fertility is called the demographic transition. The world is going through this transition. Global fertility has more than halved in the last 50 years, from more than 5 children per woman in the early 1960s to below 2.5 today. Now that we see fertility declining everywhere we come to an end of population growth: The global population has quadrupled over the course of the 20th century, it will not double anymore over the course of this century. The demographers from IIASA expect an end of population growth around the year 2075.
The sixth chart: education
None of the achievements over the last 2 centuries could have been achieved without the expansion of knowledge and education. The revolution in how we live was not only driven by education it also made education more important than ever.
And we know that education is on track to improve globally. The younger cohort today is much better educated than the older cohorts. The visualisation below shows the projection of the IIASA institute (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) for the size and the educational composition of the world population until 2100. Focusing on the educational breakdown the projection suggests that by 2100, there will be almost no one without formal education and there will be more than 7 billion minds who will have received at least secondary education.
To make it easier for you to understand the transformation in living conditions that we have achieved I made a summarizing visualisation in which I imagine this 200 year history as the history of a group of 100 people to see how the lives of them would have changed if they lived through this transformative period of the modern world.
Related CityReads
2.From"Containment Paradigm" to "Making Room Paradigm”
35.CityReads│The Joy of Stats
44.CityReads│How Could Humanity Escape Poverty?
49.CityReads│1800: A Year of Significance
83.CityReads│Watch 6,000 Years of Urbanization in 3 Minutes
91.CityReads│Income inequality in Latin America in the 2010s
105.CityReads│Winners and Losers of Globalization
（Click the title or enter our WeChat menu and reply number ）
"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat,
posts our notes on city reads weekly.
Please follow us by searching "CityReads"
Or long press the QR code above