AMA: Our World In Data

Max Roser:

Now I am working with a great team and we want to cover global development as broadly as we can to show how our world is changing. Our World in Data now includes data and research on global health, violence, poverty, inequality, economic growth, environmental changes, food and agriculture, energy, technological change, education and more specific topics.

While much of the news is focussing on what happened yesterday or even what is currently “breaking news”, I think that many of the very important changes, which fundamentally reshaped the world that we are living in, happen very slowly and persistently over the course of decades or centuries. On ‘Our World in Data’ we don’t report the ‘breaking news’ and instead zoom out to show the slow trends that dramatically change our world.

Other than that I am a researcher – mostly focussing on inequality and poverty – at the University of Oxford. (My personal site is here.)

It is easy to be cynical about the world and to maintain that nothing is ever getting better. I am working on this because I don’t want this cynical view dominate our understanding of the world we live. Because our hopes and efforts for building a better future are inextricably linked to our perception of the past it is important to understand and communicate the global development up to now. If you want to see some of the positive changes in the world you could have a look at my Short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it.

Globally we face so many very difficult challenges and I think we are making a mistake to not study good data and the empirical research that shows us what these challenges really are and how we were able to sometimes overcome those challenges in the past. If we see how far we have come, we can start to ask what made this progress possible so that we seek more of what works. I got into research on global development because I just couldn’t believe the very substantial progress the world has made and I hope that visualizing this data and making it accessible maybe motivates some others to work on these questions too. We have lots to do!