SDS 492: The World is Awful (and it’s Never Been Better)

(00:19):
The world is much better than ever before. The world is also absolutely awful and could be much better. Over the past two centuries, life for humans on this planet has been improving. The covid pandemic notwithstanding, this general improvement has accelerated dramatically in recent decades; a point that could be reinforced by examining data on life span, literacy, food availability, armed conflict, or violent crime, to name a broad handful of examples.

(00:48):
To illustrate the perhaps initially paradoxical point that I used to open up this episode — that the world is much better than ever before while simultaneously being absolutely awful — let’s focus on one particularly tragic metric: child mortality, i.e., people who die before they turn five.

(01:06):
Historians estimate that as recently as two hundred years ago, 43% of children died before reaching their fifth birthday. To give you a sense of how recently this shocking statistic was the normal state of affairs, consider that the long-reigning British monarch Queen Victoria was born more than two hundred years ago. Victoria is the great-great-grandmother of the current British monarch, Elizabeth II. This means that only four generations ago, nearly every other child on the planet died.

(01:37):
In contrast, child mortality in today’s most underdeveloped countries is around 10-13%, so about one in every ten to one in every eight children are dying in places like Somalia, Chad, and Sierra Leone. This situation is absolutely terrible but far better than nearly every other child dying just two centuries ago. Looking back even just 30 years to 1990: The country with the highest mortality rate was Niger, where one in three children were dying; today, the figure’s a dramatically improved one in 12. As another example, the improvement in Liberia is equally dramatic, dropping by three quarters from 26% in 1990 to 7% today.

(02:26):
On average, across all countries, today’s global child mortality rate is 4%, less than one-tenth of the 43% child mortality rate around the time of Queen Victoria’s birth. This means that nine out of every ten children that would have died 200 years ago now survive. Even relative to 1990, global child mortality has more than halved from 9% to 4%, meaning that one out of every two children that would have died just 30 years ago now survive.

(02:59):
So, through the lens of child mortality, it is clear that the world is absolutely awful, but equally it’s never been anywhere near so good. Now for my final point, which is that the world could be much better.

(03:14):
We could make projections about how medical technology could vastly increase longevity in the decades to come, but instead of using projections, let’s simply benchmark against child mortality in the world’s most developed countries today. As examples: The lowest national mortality rates today are a fifth of one percent, so about only one in every 500 children, in countries like Iceland and Slovenia. In large regions like the United States or the European Union, the mortality rate’s a bit higher at about half a percent, so about one in every 200 children die, but this is twice as good as in 1990 and two massive orders of magnitude better than the global average two centuries ago.

(03:56):
Overall, averaging across the world’s wealthiest nations, the child mortality rate is 0.4%, again one tenth of the 4% mortality rate of the world’s most impoverished nations meaning again that nine out of every ten children who die in places like Yemen, Turkmenistan, or Myanmar today would survive if they had access to the same resources, support, and technology of the wealthiest nations.

(04:23):
To summarize, in just a few generations, the global child mortality rate has plummeted from over 40% to 4%. The world has never been better. On the other hand, the world is awful and could be much better, as over 5 million children born this year will die that would have survived if they’d been born in a better-off nation. So not long ago, the child mortality rate was 40%. Today it’s an order of magnitude smaller — 4% — in less-developed countries and yet another order of magnitude smaller — 0.4% — in the wealthiest nations.

(05:00):
I hope this episode has brought some perspective to you on how lucky you are to be alive today as opposed to at any other time in history, but perhaps this episode has also inspired you to tilt your focus gently toward the opportunity that exists to vastly improve our current state of affairs further.

(05:17):
If you’d like to read more about how the world is much better, the world is awful, and the world can be much better, check out the blog post of that name by Max Roser, a global development researcher at the University of Oxford and founder of OurWorldInData.org. Thanks to Benjamin Todd for pointing me in the direction of Max’s post.

(05:36):
All right, that’s it for today’s episode. Catch you on another round of the SuperDataScience show very soon.