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

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

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

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...

Engineering isn’t the same as plumbing or car mechanics. In fact, you can be a great mechanic without designing the machine, or a great engineer who’s worse at repairs than a mechanic. It took me a while to realise this applies to software too. And with AI, that distinction is getting more relevant

🎉📚 Exciting news! My new book — Clearing the Air — will be published in the UK in September. 50 of the most common questions I get about how we tackle climate change. 50 short, data-driven answers. www.penguin.co.uk/books/462676...

OWID maps recently got a revamp. A key improvement: it’s now much easier to zoom and explore on mobile. Select a country or region, then pinch and pan to dive in 🪄 Fantastic work by @sophiamersmann.bsky.social and the team! In this video @parriagadap.bsky.social gives a quick demo

“In America job postings for software developers have dropped by more than two-thirds since the beginning of 2022, according to data from Indeed, a recruitment site.” From www.economist.com/business/202...

This article by my colleague @hannahritchie.bsky.social is one of my favourite recent OWID posts. It’s also a bit different from others—it brings a more personal lens to the issue of unsafe drinking water, and in doing so, makes the scale of the problem much clearer. Give it a read!

If you are interested in our work at Our World in Data, you can subscribe to our newsletters — in recent months we made them much better. Here is what we offer and how you can subsribe: ourworldindata.org/newsletters

💡 Very excited to announce new features: better interactive maps! 🗺️ – Enhanced country/region selection with several sorting options and a bar chart preview – Selecting a country highlights it and shows its value on the map – Zooming to your selection brings up a 3D globe view 🌍

Is it "good" or "bad" when skilled people leave low-income countries? We summarized the evidence in favor of "brain gain" vs. "brain drain": www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.... Ungated PDF: johanneshaushofer.com/research

England will be the first country to start vaccinating against gonorrhoea. The BBC explains the vaccine wasn’t originally designed for it. It’s the Meningitis B jab; but because the bacteria are closely related, the same jab can reduce gonorrhoea cases by about 1/3 ht/ @scientificdiscovery.dev

According to SimilarWeb, chatgpt.com had 5.1 billion visits last April (13% increase relative to March), and about 55% of the visitors were younger than 35. For comparison: Wikipedia.org had 3.7 billion visits (down 6%), with ~45% under 35

According to SimilarWeb, chatgpt.com had 5.1 billion visits last April (13% increase relative to March), and about 55% of the visitors were younger than 35. For comparison: Wikipedia.org had 3.7 billion visits (down 6%), with ~45% under 35

Colombia’s GDP per capita has roughly doubled since I was a child. But a road trip I used to do often as a kid, Bogotá - Bucaramanga, still takes about 8 hours, just like it did back then. Some things have improved a lot in the country... but these roads still suck

I thought everyone knew about the Web Archive... it’s as familiar as Wikipedia in my bubble. But recently I met people who discovered it and found it useful. So maybe this is useful: archive.org/web lets you see old versions of websites. It allows you to see edited pages + stuff that’s disappeared.

📩 Did you know we have a newsletter to keep you updated on all of our work? Our Biweekly Digest has all of our recent work, highlights of our other work, what our team has been reading, and more. Delivered right to your inbox every other Friday.

Traditional brick ovens across South Asia burn coal, contributing to over 50,000 deaths a year and emitting as much CO₂ as all U.S. cars This new RCT in Bangladesh shows that simple changes like better training, even without new tech or regulation, can cut emissions by 20% and improve brick quality

“If the administration demands, say, that the US pays the same price as Greece, pharmaceutical companies will likely simply raise the Greek price to the level America currently pays. America would likely still pay the same price, and Greece would walk away without access to medicines”

I thought everyone knew about the Web Archive... it’s as familiar as Wikipedia in my bubble. But recently I met people who discovered it and found it useful. So maybe this is useful: archive.org/web lets you see old versions of websites. It allows you to see edited pages + stuff that’s disappeared.

Colombia’s fertility rate was 1.6 births per woman in 2023 – the same as the UK or France. In 1950 it was 6.4. That’s a 75% reduction. Comparable to China’s drop, which included the one-child policy. It's a huge demographic change and I'm not sure we’ve fully grasped what it means for the country

This seems to be official data from The Port of Los Angeles (volumes.portoptimizer.com). For the week of May 4-10 it says -31% change from previous year

One of the most powerful measures of living conditions is child mortality: the share of children dying before their 5th birthday. It’s still tragically common in parts of the world, but history shows it can fall sharply when healthcare, nutrition, sanitation improve. You can explore the data here👇

It takes 15–20 days to ship a container from China to LA. So ~30 days to Chicago. That means April tariffs start showing up in May. Confusion, price hikes, demand shock, layoffs hit shipping and logistics... Even if tariffs are reversed, restarting supply chains will be slow and messy

Random observation: Manufacturing jobs make up less than 10% of all jobs in the US, and the declining trend we're seeing isn’t just American—it’s happening in other rich countries too ourworldindata.org/data-insight...

How effective and safe are measles vaccines? Data from large meta-analyses show that measles vaccination is highly effective and safe, reducing the chances of getting measles by 95%.

With all the current attention on trade, tariffs, comparative advantage, etc., this feels like a useful piece of context: China now files over half of the world’s patents—well ahead of the US and others. ourworldindata.org/data-insight...

Until seeing this chart I hadn't realised the post-WWII baby boom was actually part of a longer trend that had started before the end of the war. In the US and other countries birth rates started rising even in the late 1930s

They can also try to figure what on earth is going on with left-handedness. There’s gotta be something out there

When discussing foreign aid cuts, it’s crucial to understand what actually counts as foreign aid in budgets. One thing I didn’t know: a surprising share of it isn’t money sent abroad. It can include domestic spending like hosting refugees or scholarships for foreign students This article explains👇🏽

In 2004, it took the world a year to add one gigawatt of solar power — now it takes a day.

I wonder how many journalists use ChatGPT’s deep research feature. They should. I often get emails asking “Do you have data on [super specific question]?” In my experience deep research can be super useful for this kind of thing; including for quick research 'due diligence' and fact-checking

Ever start taking a screenshot on Mac (Cmd-Shift-4), then panic because you anchored in the wrong place? Hit Spacebar—you can reposition the selection anywhere. I repost this every now and then to pay it forward. Changed my life when I found out 😄

Hey researchers, bloggers, everyone interested in fertility data! We recently added lots of new data at Our World in Data on fertility rates, ages at childbirth, twin birth rates, birth seasonality, and more. Here's a thread of what you can find on the site! 🧵

In 2000, Sierra Leone had the highest rate of maternal mortality in the world; but in two decades they've managed to lower these rates by 74%! This is a huge achievement, though rates remain extremely high — rates in the safest countries are ~100x lower From: ourworldindata.org/data-insight...

South Korea’s under-15 population has halved in two generations. I knew the population was aging quickly, and it’s no surprise that means fewer children—but the absolute numbers are striking. It's easy to look at fertility rates and forget about absolute numbers. That's a lot fewer kids around.

I think this is right. There is another interesting dynamic that for AI labs it would be very useful if academic research were freely available and so you have a powerful new force against established, paywalled scientific publishing.