EA - The world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better. by Max Roser

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better., published by Max Roser on August 22, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. (Cross-posted from Our World in Data.) The world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better. All three statements are true. Here I focus on child mortality, but the same can be said for many aspects of global development. There are many aspects of development for which it is true that things have improved over time and are terrible still, and for which we know that things can get better. The world is awful In the visualization below, I present three scenarios of child deaths. The blue bar represents the actual number of child deaths per year today. Of the 141 million children born every year, 3.9% die before their 5th birthday. This means that every year, 5.5 million children die; on average, 15,000 children die every day. [1] Clearly, a world where such tragedy happens is an awful world. The world is much better The big lesson of history is that things change. The scale of these changes is hard to grasp. The living conditions in today's poorest countries are now in many ways much better than they were even in the richest countries of the past: Child mortality in today's worst-off places is between 10-13%; in all regions of the world it was more than three times as high [30-50%] until a few generations ago. It's estimated that at the beginning of the 19th century, 43% of the world's children died by the age of five. If we still suffered the poor health of our ancestors, more than 60 million children would die every year — 166,000 every day. [2] This is what the red bar represents in the visualization below. If you want to see how child mortality has changed, read Hannah Ritchie's post: From commonplace to rarer tragedy — declining child mortality across the world Such large improvements are not limited to health; the same is true across other aspects of life (as I show in my short history of living conditions). In a number of fundamental aspects (obviously not all), we have achieved very substantial progress and know that much more is possible. These aspects also include education, political freedom, violence, poverty, nutrition, and some aspects of environmental change. What we learn from this is that it is possible to change the world. I believe that one of the most important facts to know about our world is that we can make a difference. (You can see a larger version of this graph here.) The world can be much better Progress over time shows that it was possible to change the world in the past. But what do we know about what is possible for the future? Were we born at an unlucky time in modern history, in which global 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 those places in the world with the best living conditions. The inequality in living conditions in the world today shows that there is much work left to do. If health across all countries of the world was equal, it would not be possible to really know whether further improvements are possible or how to achieve them. But the fact that some places have already achieved much better child health leaves no doubt: Better child health than the global average is not just a possibility, but already a reality. So what would global child mortality be if children around the world became as well off as the children in those places where children are healthiest today? The dark green bar in the visualization shows the answer. The region with the lowest child mortality is the European Union. The average in the European Union (0.41%) is 10 times lower than the global average (3.9%). In the EU, 1 in 250 children die, whilst globally the figure is 1 in 25. If children around the wor...