Max Roser
@maxroser.bsky.social
— Founder of Our World in Data — Professor at the University of Oxford Data to understand global problems and research to make progress against them.
Just read that Abdullah Ibrahim has sadly died this week. He died at 91 and played wonderful music until his very end. One of my very favourite musicians. If you don't know him, listen to his Blue Bolero — it's the just the first 2 minutes of this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5i4...
Abdullah Ibrahim: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
YouTube video by NPR Music
youtube.com
The poorest economies in the world are not achieving economic growth. The consequence is that progress against the very worst poverty is coming to a halt. This is one of the worst problems in the world today, but hardly gets any attention.
A way to see the amazing history of economic growth and declining poverty over the last two centuries. (from the article 'What is economic growth?' ourworldindata.org/what-is-economic-growth)
Most career advice is disappointingly shallow. Which is really tragic, given how important a decision it is. It's a decision worth reading a good book about. Ben Todd is the most thoughtful person on career choice I know. He spent 15 years researching it. Now his book is out: 80000hours.org/book/
Order the 80,000 Hours book | 80,000 Hours
80000hours.org
How will your country's demographics change this century? At Our World in Data, we built a tool to let you see for yourself. The UN's assumptions are the starting point. But then you can adjust the three drivers of change — births, deaths, and migration — to what you expect.
Congratulations to the data wizards at @ourworldindata.org who created this elegant tool so you can adjust fertility, mortality & migration rates for any country to see the impact on population sizes & age structures. This is really, really great!! Check it out!! Excellent tool, terrific write up.
Our World in Data@ourworldindata.org · 3mo agoHow will populations across the world change in the 21st century? 🔧 Explore for yourself with our new interactive tool!
Some people say we don’t build beautiful things anymore and, like, lol. Motherfuckers, we built this:
📢 We’re looking for a writer to join our team at Our World in Data! What we’re looking for is quite unique: someone who writes excellent narrative articles on large global problems, finds memorable framings to make hard ideas easier to understand, while being genuinely obsessed w/ technical details
We’re looking for a writer
We’re hiring a writer who can make the world’s largest problems understandable to our large Our World in Data audience.
ourworldindata.org
Hey Bluesky hivemind! What are the best data sources for the overall death tolls of wars? So not just dead soldiers, but also civilians, and deaths from disease and starvation due to the fighting. Are Necrometrics and Wikipedia as flawed as they seem — or do they actually hold up to some scrutiny?
'Four minutes of air conditioning' The new, excellent essay by my colleague @hannahritchie.bsky.social on energy poverty. ourworldindata.org/four-minutes...
Four minutes of air conditioning
Billions of people have access to far less electricity per day than is required to run an air conditioner for just one hour.
ourworldindata.org
This chart documents one of humanity’s greatest achievements, in my view. We just lived through the fastest population growth in human history. It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace — but on every continent, they grew even faster than the population.
It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵
"The problems are immense, but the solutions are immense too." I loved this short documentary about botanist Hugh Wilson, who spent thirty years protecting and growing a forest in New Zealand. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VZS...
Man Spends 30 Years Turning Degraded Land into Massive Forest – Fools & Dreamers (Full Documentary)
YouTube video by Happen Films
youtube.com
Over the last months, we’ve entirely rebuilt search on Our World in Data — we just launched it: ourworldindata.org/introducing-... Let me know what you think. Does it work for you?
Introducing our new, more powerful search
Finding what you’re looking for, or discovering something new, has never been easier.
ourworldindata.org
A big shift in technology. The purple bars show the sales of cars powered by combustion engines in China. In green, you see the rise of electric cars in recent years.
What we die from vs. what we hear in the news. Terrorism and homicides account for less than 1% of deaths, but for more than half of all media stories about death in the US — whether in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Fox News.
💡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!
Imagine all cars were electric, and then one Volkswagen engineer comes up with another idea … #EMobility
It is September 18. Today, @hannahritchie.bsky.social's book is out! www.penguin.co.uk/books/462676...
Clearing the Air
'We urgently need Hannah Ritchie' GUARDIAN 'Essential reading' RUTGER BREGMAN 'Read this book -- now' MARK LYNAS We can’t afford to delay climate action, but with all the shouting and disagreement i...
penguin.co.uk
"A refreshingly pragmatic and undoomy book." The Guardian just published a great review of @hannahritchie.bsky.social's new book 'Clearing the Air'. The book will be out in 2 days. If you are unsure whether you want to read it, the review gives a good overview: www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...
Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie review – practical climate optimism
A data scientist rebuts 50 arguments against green technology with lively pragmatism and authority
theguardian.com
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
My colleague @hannahritchie.bsky.social wrote a new book! For an author, pre-orders make a huge difference — as they convince bookstores to stock it. If you are interested in Hannah's writing, you can order it here: penguin.co.uk/books/462676...
Clearing the Air
'We urgently need Hannah Ritchie' GUARDIAN 'Essential reading' RUTGER BREGMAN 'Read this book -- now' MARK LYNAS We can’t afford to delay climate action, but with all the shouting and disagreement i...
penguin.co.uk
At Our World in Data, we spend much of our time counting deaths. But it’s just as important to know the number of lives saved — even though it is harder to estimate and involves much larger uncertainty. My Data Insight today includes this chart of some estimates.
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
Most electricity in the Netherlands now comes from renewables. This is today's @ourworldindata.org Data Insight from my colleague @simonvanteutem.bsky.social. All our Data Insights are here: ourworldindata.org/data-insights
At least since the mid-20th century, England has left mass hunger behind. How was this possible? How did English farmers prove Malthus wrong? My 'Data Insight' on @ourworldindata.org today is about rising yields and falling hunger. → ourworldindata.org/data-insights
No, it's not the case that only China is responsible for the large decline in extreme poverty over the past decades. We wrote about it recently: ourworldindata.org/data-insights/was-the-global-decline-of-extreme-poverty-only-due-to-china
My latest Data Insight is about extreme poverty in South East Africa. In Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, extreme poverty is not declining.
In 2014, half of Greece's electricity was generated by coal. A decade later, that share has fallen to just 6%.
