Cheerful Data
Posting charts and data showing the many ways the world is getting better.
Why Cheerful Data?
How data can change the way you see the world.
Is the world getting worse?I’m Rob, a 42 year old Dad from Cambridge, UK. Earlier this year, I found myself feeling increasingly down about the state of the world. Climate change, war, inequality, inflation, the pandemic…there’s plenty to be concerned about, and I spent a lot of time worrying about...
Published 20 Dec 2022 | Read more
Average gain in real income 1988-2008...
...increased by an average of 40%
Today’s graph is one of the most interesting shapes I’ve come across, and requires some explanation. It may also help some Cheerful Data readers get clarity on why it doesn’t feel that life has got that much better for them over the last few decades.The ‘elephant’ shaped graph above shows...
Published 24 Jan 2023 | Read more
The number of people not living in poverty...
...has increased 15-fold in the last 100 years...
…and is increasing more rapidly than ever.We saw in my first post how rapidly poverty as a proportion of the population has decreased in the last 200 years. This in itself is an awesome success (see the graph at the bottom of this post), but when you factor in the...
Published 19 Jan 2023 | Read more
Individual income around the world...
...has dramatically increased in the last 40 years
We saw in the previous post the staggering increase in the Gross World Product, but today’s graph does a a better job of visualising how that growth has spread to individual people.It might need a little explanation - in 1800 the vast majority of people lived in extreme poverty, and...
Published 17 Jan 2023 | Read more
Gross world product…
…has increased more than 100x in the last 300 years
Of all the graphs I’ve come across so far, this one perhaps has the biggest ‘wow’ factor. The Gross World Product is like GDP, but for the whole world, and relative to the buying power of the dollar at a fixed period in time. The insane increase in wealth (and...
Published 12 Jan 2023 | Read more
Malnutrition in the developing world...
...has halved in the last 40 years
In the 1960s several books were written about the ‘population bomb’ - a geometrically increasing population combined with a linearly increasing food supply would result in starvation around the world. But the books were wrong on both counts - as we’ve seen, population starts to stabilise as child mortality rate...
Published 10 Jan 2023 | Read more
Deaths in children under 5...
...have halved in the last 30 years
In the last post we saw how life expectancy has more than doubled in the last 200 years. But it’s not just over the centuries that dramatic improvement has been made.As you can see from today’s graph, in the last 30 years, child mortality has halved. That is yet another...
Published 06 Jan 2023 | Read more
Life expectancy...
...has doubled in the last 100 years, and is still climbing
Take a few moments to consider the reality behind this graph. For the millennia of humanity’s existence, life expectancy has hovered around 30 years. This is not because most people died at 30. Plenty of people in the distant past lived to 70 or beyond. It is largely because child...
Published 03 Jan 2023 | Read more
Agricultural export subsidies
...have reduced from $6 billion to close to $0 in the last 15 years
Remember the Millennium Development Goals? One of humanity’s finest moments - an attempt to work together to reduce poverty and promote health, education and equality. I decided to take a look a look and see how we were doing (export more on these in the coming posts), and this was...
Published 29 Dec 2022 | Read more
Percentage of cage-free hens in the US
Has increased from <5% to 35% in the last 15 years
We hear a lot about the bad conditions that factory farmed animals are kept in, and of course there are still many animals in conditions that could be drastically improved. But under the general theme of ‘bad but better’, look at the progress that’s been made with cage-free hens in...
Published 23 Dec 2022 | Read more