This video is based on an article
by Max Roser at Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org is a website
providing open access research and data to make progress
against the world's largest problems. The world is awful.
The world is much better (than it was).
The world can be much better (than it is). All three statements
are true at the same time. It's wrong to think
that these three statements contradict each other.
We need to see that they are all true to see that
a better world is possible. Discussions about the state
of the world too often focus
on the first statement: The news highlights
what's going wrong, rarely mentioning
any positive development. A push back on this narrative
takes it to the other extreme, which is equally damaging.
Solely communicating the progress that the world has achieved
becomes unhelpful, or even repugnant
when it glosses over the problems that are real today.
It's hard to resist falling for only one of these perspectives.
But to see that a better world is possible,
we need to see that both are true at the same time.
The world is awful, and the world
is much better than it was. To illustrate what I mean,
I'll use the example of one of humanity's
biggest tragedies: The death of its children.
But the same is true for many of the world's other problems.
Humanity faces many problems where things have improved over time,
which are still terrible, and for which we know
that things can get better. The world is awful.
Globally, 4.3% of children die before they're 15 years old.
This is the data for 2020, the latest available year.
This means that 5.9 million children die every year -
16,000 children on any average day, or 11 children every minute.
Clearly, a world where thousands of tragedies
happen every single day is awful. The world is much better than it was:
History's big lesson is that things change.
But it's hard to imagine how dire living conditions once were,
and that makes it difficult to grasp just
how much the world has changed. Perhaps looking at the data
can help us get our head around the scale of the change.
Historians estimate that in the past, around half of all children
died before they reached the end of puberty.
This was true no matter where in the world a child was born
and it only started to change in the 19th century,
just a few generations ago. It's hard to imagine,
but child mortality in the very worst-off places today
is much better than anywhere in the past.
Even in the world's richest countries the mortality of children
was much higher very recently. In Somalia, the country
with the highest mortality today, around 14% of all children die.
Just a few generations ago, the mortality rate
was more than three times as high, even in the best-off places.
What we learn from our history is that it's possible
to change the world. Unfortunately, long run data
on how living conditions have changed is rarely studied in school
and rarely reported in the media. As a result,
many people are entirely unaware of even the most fundamental
positive developments in the world. But this fact - that it is possible
to change the world and achieve extraordinary progress
for entire societies - is something that everyone should
know. The world can be much better than it is. Progress over time
shows that it was possible to change the world in the past,
but do we know that it's possible to continue this progress
into the future? Or were we perhaps born
at that unlucky moment in history at which progress has come to a halt?
Studying the global data suggests that the answer is no.
One way to see this is to look at the places in the world
with the highest living conditions today.
The best-off places show that extremely low child mortality
is not just a possibility, but is already a reality.
The world region where children have the best chance
of surviving childhood is the European Union.
99.55% of all children born in the EU survive childhood.
To see how much better the world can be,
we can ask what the world would look like if this
became the reality everywhere. What if children around the world
would be as well-off as children in the EU?
5 million fewer children would die every year.
Of course, the child mortality rate in the EU is still too high,
and there's no reason that progress should stop there.
Cancers like leukemia and brain tumors kill hundreds of children,
even in today's richest countries. We should strive to find ways
to prevent these tragic deaths. However, the largest opportunities
to prevent the pain and suffering of children
are in the poorer countries. There we know not only
that things can be better, but how to make them better.
You can use this research on how to make the world a better place
to contribute to this progress yourself.
I recommend relying on research published by the nonprofit
organization GiveWell.org. GiveWell's team spent years
identifying the most cost-effective charities
so that your donation can have the biggest positive impact
on the lives of others. Several of the recommended charities
focus on improving the health of children,
offering you the opportunity to contribute to the progress
against child mortality. Research on how
to prevent child deaths, and the fact that child mortality
in entire world regions is tenfold lower
than the global average show what is possible.
Millions of child deaths are preventable.
We know that it is possible to make the world a better place.
The world is awful, this is why
we need to know about progress. The news often focuses
on how awful the world is. There's a large audience
for bad news, and it's easier to scare people
than to encourage them to achieve positive change.
I agree that it is important that we know
what's wrong with the world. But given the scale
of what we've achieved already and of what's possible in the future,
I think it's irresponsible to only report
on how awful our situation is. To see that the world has become
a better place does not mean to deny
that we are facing very serious problems.
To the contrary, if we had achieved the best
of all possible worlds, I wouldn't spend my life writing
and researching about how we got here. It is because
the world is still terrible that it is so important
to see how the world became so much better than it was.
I wish we could change our culture so that we take
this possibility of progress more seriously.
This is a solvable problem: We have the data and the research,
but we are currently not using it. The data is often stored
in inaccessible databases, the research locked away
behind paywalls and buried under jargon
in academic papers. With Our World in Data
we want to change this. If we want more people
to dedicate their energy and money to making the world a better place,
then we should make it much more widely known
that it is possible to make the world a better place.
