Road deaths in the United States have fallen much more slowly than in other rich countries. Most high-income countries have reduced road deaths substantially over the past decades.

Electric cars are taking off quickly in Latin America— Five years ago, almost no one in Latin America bought an electric car. Today, the situation is different: electric cars now make up a meaningful and fast-growing share of new car sales.

I recently worked on a major update to our page on urbanization. It now includes dozens of new charts on where people live and how urbanization has changed around the world. I hope you’ll find it useful! ourworldindata.org/urbanization

Urbanization

Around 80% of the world’s population lives in cities, towns, and suburbs rather than rural settlements. How has this changed, and what does urbanization look like across the world today?

ourworldindata.org

Has Our World in Data been useful to you? We’d love to hear about it! Tell us about it in our two-question survey: buff.ly/DGIp31Z

We publish a lot at Our World in Data—new articles, data insights, updated charts. The OWID Brief keeps you on top of all our latest work. Plus, curated highlights from across our site, as well as what our team has been reading. 2x a month, right to your inbox. The latest edition just went out. 👇

Women in Spain, Italy, and Portugal marry on average six years later than just two decades ago— Marriage is closely linked to decisions about having children in many societies. It also matters for legal rights, family finances, and many other aspects of life.

✨ We have a whole new page on Work & Employment stats! ✨

Our World in Data@ourworldindata.org · 6mo ago

On our new Work and Employment topic page, we bring together the key labor market indicators — from unemployment rates and participation, to informality and much more — and explain what they mean in clear terms and with helpful diagrams. → ourworldindata.org/work-employm...

Being unemployed isn’t the same as not having a job — at least when it comes to labor statistics. The map shows unemployment rates around the world in 2025. Let’s see what this number captures — and what it doesn’t 🧵

✍️ New article: Tracking historical progress against slavery and forced labor: a long-run data view For much of history, forced labor was widespread and brutal. Tens of millions of people were made to work under the threat of violence or punishment. The situation today is very different.

China’s adoption of industrial robots has surged over the past decade— Industrial robots are rapidly becoming a common part of manufacturing in some countries.

Many children who could benefit from oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea still don’t receive it— In 2021, around 1.25 million people died from diarrheal diseases. Around a third of these deaths were children.

The International Monetary Fund asked me to review the literature on migration economics to draw lessons for low-income countries. In a new @iza.org paper, I argue that policy for the 21st century must discard four outdated ideas. www.iza.org/publications... 🧵 thread—>

We just published our “Top of the Charts”, a look at our most popular charts, articles, data insights & more in 2025! (link in 🧵) Here are our top 5 most-viewed charts. Each Friday over the next few weeks, we’ll share the top 5 for other categories (articles, etc.). Stay tuned! 1. CO2 emissions

In The OWID Brief newsletter, we have a section where our team writes about interesting things we've been reading lately. In today's edition, we wrote about articles in Transformer and VoxDev: www.transformernews.ai/p/claude-son... voxdev.org/topic/trade/...

Life expectancy has increased at all ages

Does the news reflect what we die from?

💡New feature: hovering over links to charts shows a preview! Look out for the little chart icon next to a link to know when you can see a preview. Our colleague Ike Saunders had this idea just a couple days ago and he already built it and made it live on our site — thanks, Ike!

India, China, Europe, and the United States are on very different population paths

Our @ourworldindata.org we visualise weekly updates of wildfire data from the Global Wildfire Information System. Spain was having a pretty low/average year until the past few weeks when it went roaring past previous years. You can track this data here: ourworldindata.org/wildfires

Gold export data suggests that Peru, one of the world’s largest producers, mines nearly as much informally as it does formally— According to official mining output records, Peru mined about 90 tonnes of gold in 2023, far ahead of any other South American country.

Duolingo came out fully embracing AI in April, and it’s hard not to read their latest revenue growth numbers alongside this new report on the state of formal language learning in the UK

✍️ New article: “$3 a day: A new poverty line has shifted the World Bank’s data on extreme poverty. What changed, and why?” 🧵

The reactions that many people had about 4o disappearing overnight really look like that scene from Her where Theodore realises the operating system is down. These screenshots I posted some weeks ago give a bit of a view into what some of these conversations that people miss actually looked like

ChatGPT is bringing back 4o as an option because people missed it

GPT-5 will no longer be the default.

theverge.com

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina@eortizospina.bsky.social · last yr.

If you struggle to understand why/how people chat to ChatGPT for hours without any goal, just for fun, have a look at this conversation that someone posted on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/... I’ll share the first couple of screenshots but click and read the whole thing, including comments.

The reactions that many people had about 4o disappearing overnight really look like that scene from Her where Theodore realises the operating system is down. These screenshots I posted some weeks ago give a bit of a view into what some of these conversations that people miss actually looked like

ChatGPT is bringing back 4o as an option because people missed it

GPT-5 will no longer be the default.

theverge.com

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina@eortizospina.bsky.social · last yr.

If you struggle to understand why/how people chat to ChatGPT for hours without any goal, just for fun, have a look at this conversation that someone posted on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/... I’ll share the first couple of screenshots but click and read the whole thing, including comments.

When the World Bank publishes new poverty estimates, it makes headlines. But making sense of these numbers is harder than it looks! Inflation, PPPs, national poverty lines, real incomes…There’s a lot going on. In this article my colleagues explain where the new numbers come from and what changed

$3 a day: A new poverty line has shifted the World Bank’s data on extreme poverty. What changed, and why?

In June 2025, the World Bank increased its extreme poverty estimates by 125 million people. This doesn’t mean the world has gotten poorer: it reflects a new, higher International Poverty Line of $3 a ...

ourworldindata.org

New article by me! Cardiovascular disease mortality rates have declined by around three-quarters since 1950, but we rarely hear about it. I explore some of the reasons behind the decline. ourworldindata.org/cardiovascul...

2/Cars are a useful comparison for thinking about technology adoption, because they are powerful, dangerous, and common. In just over a century, we moved from the first mass-produced car to about 1.2 billion cars on the road.

If you struggle to understand why/how people chat to ChatGPT for hours without any goal, just for fun, have a look at this conversation that someone posted on Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/... I’ll share the first couple of screenshots but click and read the whole thing, including comments.

1/ I recently listened to David Autor on @reidhoffman.bsky.social's podcast and really enjoyed it. It got me thinking about how we've adapted to past technological shifts and why we need to think differently about adaptation with AI. A few thoughts in this thread🧵

“La verdad, no sé cuándo decidimos que el progreso equivalía a gestionar la escasez en lugar de combatirla.” Interesante artículo de @jorgegalindo.bsky.social en su Substack sobre el crecimiento económico en España: open.substack.com/pub/jorgegal...

España: crecimiento sin abundancia (y dónde encontrarla)

Si tanto estamos creciendo, ¿dónde está tu parte, que no la ves?

open.substack.com