CityReads│1800: A Year of Significance
1800：A Year of Significance
It was not until after the industrial revolution that human society broke the “Malthusian Trap”: the world population rose from less than 1 billion in 1800 to 7 billion today. Compared to the increase in real global GDP per capita after 1800, all changes before is insignificant. More importantly, people around the world enjoy higher life expectancy than it used to be before 1800.
Sources: http://ourworldindata.org/
For millenniums, the earth's thin and scattered population had grown by tiny increments. Human species is stuck in the “Malthusian Trap”: as standards of living improved, population increased which put a strain on resources and drove down standards of living, which in turn drove down population growth, rinse & repeat.
The industrial revolution broke this trap, although this is not true for the entire world. The industrial revolution demonstrated that the wealth of a nation could grow by multiples rather than percentages.
The world population rose from less than 1 billion in 1800 to 7 billion today.
孩子是最美丽的天使
Compared to the rapid increase in global GDP after 1800, all change before is hardly noticeable.
Global poverty overall has shrunk from 90 percent in 1820, fell to 44 percent in the late 1970s and now stands at around 10 percent in 2015.
Life Expectancy before 1800 was very low. For example, life expectancy in England was only at 36 years!
But then: Life Expectancy more than doubled over the next 200 years!
And with some delay, the same happened in countries around the world.
A comparison of life expectancy in 1800, in 1950 and today visualizes how dramatic this improvement was.
In 1800 life expectancy was very low in all countries. The worst off countries had a life expectancy of 25 - while life expectancy was 40 in the best off countries.
In the next step we look at the increase of life expectancy between 1800 and 1950.
It was a very unequal improvement: some countries experienced huge progress, while others still had life expectancies under 40.
And over the last 6 decades the less well off countries have caught up. The average life expectancy at birth rose to 71 today. The world has become vastly more equal in terms of health!
/ About the author /
Max Roser, a data visualization historian at the Oxford Martin School, creates the website: http://ourworldindata.org/
Picture source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-10/15/max-roser-data-visualisation-wired-2015
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