posts: 25304

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                    {
                        "text": "1 \u2014 ",
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                                "text": "The world is awful",
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                        "text": "In the visualization I show three perspectives on global child deaths. The purple bar represents the actual number of child deaths per year today. Of the 137 million children born every year, 3.8% die before their 5th birthday. This means every year 5.2 million children die; on average, 14,000 children die every day.{ref}Except for the historical data, all data in this post is taken from IGME the ",
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                                "text": "UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation",
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                        "text": ". They publish their data here: ",
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                        "url": "https://childmortality.org/data/World",
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                                "text": "childmortality.org/data/World",
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                        "text": "Child deaths in 2019: 5,188,872",
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                        "text": "This means 5,188,872/365.25=14,206 child deaths per day. Here I\u2019m assuming that the cohorts of children younger than 5 are all equally large. As the ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-annual-number-of-births-and-deaths-including-the-un-projections-until-2100",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "number of births per year is not rising much anymore",
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                        "text": ", this seems like a justified approximation that makes the calculation straightforward.{/ref}",
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                        "text": "Clearly, a world where such tragedy happens is an awful world.",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "2 \u2014 ",
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                                "text": "The world is much better",
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                        "text": "The big lesson of history is that things change. The scale of these changes is hard to grasp. The living conditions in today\u2019s poorest countries are now in many ways much better than they were even in the richest countries of the past: Child mortality in today\u2019s worst off places is ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-1990-vs-2017-slope",
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                                "text": "between 10-13%",
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                        "text": "; in all regions of the world it was more than three-times as high [",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#estimates-for-child-mortality-over-the-last-two-centuries",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "30-50%",
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                        "text": "] until a few generations ago. At the beginning of the 19th century, it\u2019s estimated that 43% of the world\u2019s 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.{ref}How many children actually died at the time we don\u2019t know because there I don\u2019t have estimates of the number of births globally at the time. For the 1950s and 1960s we have estimates of both the number of births and the mortality rate and the records show that around 20 million children died every year. See the data shown ",
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                        "url": "https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Max-Roser-three-facts-everyone-should-know",
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                                "text": "here",
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                        "text": ".{/ref}",
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                        "text": "This is what the red bar represents in the visualization.",
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                        "text": "Such large improvements are not limited to health; the same is true across other aspects (as I show in ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "my short history of living conditions",
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                        "text": "). In a number of fundamental aspects (obviously ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/obesity",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "not all",
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                        "text": ") we achieved very substantial progress and know that much more is possible. These aspects also include ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/global-rise-of-education",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "education",
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                    {
                        "text": ", ",
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                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/democracy",
                        "children": [
                            {
                                "text": "political freedom",
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                        ],
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                    {
                        "text": ", ",
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                    {
                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/homicides",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "violence",
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                        "text": ", ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty",
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                                "text": "poverty",
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                        "text": ", ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "nutrition",
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                    {
                        "text": ", and ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/ozone-layer",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "some",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/natural-catastrophes",
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                                "text": "aspects",
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                        "text": " of environmental change.",
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                        "text": "What we learn from this is that it is possible to change the world. I believe that knowing that we can make a difference is one of the most important facts to know about our world.",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "3 \u2014 ",
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                                "text": "The world can be much better",
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                        "text": "Progress over time shows that it was possible to change the world, but what do we know about what is possible for the future? Are we born at that unlucky moment in modern history at which global progress has to come to a halt?",
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                        "text": "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 ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-1990-vs-2017-slope",
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                                "text": "inequality",
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                        "text": " 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.",
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                        "text": "So what would global child mortality be if children around the world would be as well off as the children in those places where children are healthiest today?",
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                        "text": "The 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 (0.4%) is 10-times lower than the global average.{ref}Of the 46 different world regions for which the World Bank publishes average child mortality, the Euro area has the lowest and the EU the second lowest child mortality rate.",
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                        "text": "If we look at single countries this difference becomes even more striking as in the countries with the best health the child mortality rate is again almost twice as low as in the EU as a whole.",
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                        "text": "The country with the lowest child mortality rate today is Iceland where 1 of 508 newborns (0.197%) dies as a child.",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-1990-vs-2017-slope",
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                                "text": "This chart",
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                        "text": " shows the ranking.",
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                        "text": "Iceland however is a very small country and only few children are born there (per year only ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-annual-number-of-births-and-deaths-including-the-un-projections-until-2100?country=ISL",
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                                "text": "4,500 children are born on the island",
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                        "text": ").",
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                        "text": "At the mortality rate of 0.2% this means that 9 newborns will die as children.\u00a0[4425 newborns*(0.2/100)=9.3 newborns]",
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                        "text": "Because of this very small sample I relied in this discussion not on the single country with the best child health, but on a large world region like the EU where millions of children are born every year.{/ref} In the EU 1-in-250 children die, whilst globally this is 1-in-25. If children around the world would be as well off as children in the EU then 5 million fewer children would die every year.",
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                        "text": "Of course, a child mortality rate of 1-in-250 is still too high. It will be a major achievement if the world as a whole catches up to that level of health, but in the healthiest places we should also try to push the boundaries of what has been shown to be possible.",
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                        "text": "We should certainly not make the mistake of believing that it would be easy to reduce the global child mortality rate to that of the EU. For a society to achieve such good health many development aspects have to improve; today\u2019s best-off countries achieved two centuries of slow, sustained\u00a0",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth",
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                                "text": "economic growth",
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                        "text": " that bought the infrastructure (housing, ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/water-access-resources-sanitation",
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                                "text": "sanitation",
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                        "text": ", public health measures) necessary for good health.",
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                        "text": "But while a better world cannot be achieved overnight, from the best-off regions we learn what is possible and in this sense we know that these 5 million annual deaths are preventable. The fact that child mortality in entire world regions is 10-fold lower than in the world as a whole shows us that it is possible to make the world a better place.",
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                        "text": "Those who don\u2019t understand that life today is much better than in the past don\u2019t know how bad the past was. And many of those who don\u2019t believe that the future can be much better don\u2019t know how bad the present is.",
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                                "text": "The world is terrible, this is why we need to know about positive change",
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                        "text": "It\u2019s easier to scare people than to instill them with confidence and many writers on global development only report how awful the world is. I agree that it is important that we know what is wrong with the world, but given the scale of what we have achieved already and what is possible for the future, I think it\u2019s irresponsible to ",
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                                "text": "only",
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                        "text": " report on how dreadful our situation is.",
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                        "text": "The world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better. We have to study the data to know all three perspectives on global living conditions. By studying the world through data these facts are impossible to miss. But the facts of how the world is changing ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/wrong-about-the-world",
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                                "text": "are not known to most of us",
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                        "text": " because many of the writers that report on how the world is changing do not take the data seriously. This needs to change.",
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                        "text": "What we have to achieve as writers on global change is to convey both perspectives at the same time: We need to know how terrible the world still is ",
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                                "text": "and",
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                        "text": " that a better world is possible. This is what I hope to do with my work here on Our World in Data.{ref}And at times elsewhere: For example in ",
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                        "url": "https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Max-Roser-three-facts-everyone-should-know",
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                                "text": "this text",
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                        "text": " that Bill Gates published on his blog.{/ref}",
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                        "text": "If we had achieved the best of all possible worlds I wouldn\u2019t spend my life writing and researching about how we got here. What keeps me going is to share the knowledge that change is possible \u2013 though not inevitable \u2013 and the wealth of knowledge researchers around the world have brought together on how to make a better world for everyone.",
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                        "text": "We know that it is possible to make the world a better place because we already did it. It is because the world is terrible still that it\u2019s so important to write about how in several important aspects the world became a better place.",
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        "type": "article",
        "title": "The world is much better; The world is awful; The world can be much better",
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        "dateline": "October 7, 2019",
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    "createdAt": "2019-10-07T10:58:35.000Z",
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    "updatedAt": "2022-07-12T09:29:42.000Z",
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    "publishedAt": "2019-10-07T09:58:33.000Z",
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