Our World in Data

Our World in Data (OWID) is a scientific website dedicated to exploring significant global issues like poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, conflict, existential threats, and inequality. This initiative is run by the Global Change Data Lab, a charitable organization located in England and Wales. It was established by Max Roser, who has a background in social history and development economics. The research team operates out of the University of Oxford.

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Once a leading killer, tuberculosis is now rare in rich countries - here’s how it happened

5 days ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie |Fiona Spooner

As much as one-quarter of deaths in Europe and the United States were once from tuberculosis. People often romanticize what’s rare and look down on what’s common. This was not the case for tuberculosis. It was everywhere, but still carried a strange sense of allure. By the middle of the 18th century, around 1% of London's population was dying from tuberculosis (TB) every year. You can see this in the chart below, which shows modeled estimates of TB death rates in London.1Let’s pause on that.
Suicide rates are higher in men than women

2 weeks ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

How will artificial intelligence (AI) impact people’s jobs? This question has no simple answer, but the more AI systems can independently carry out long, job-like tasks, the greater their impact will likely be. The chart shows a trend in this direction for software-related tasks. The length of tasks — in terms of how long they take human professionals — that AIs can do on their own has increased quickly in the past couple of years.
Measles vaccines save millions of lives each year

2 weeks ago | ourworldindata.org | Saloni Dattani |Fiona Spooner

Measles once killed millions every year. Vaccines changed this, preventing disease, long-term immune damage, and deadly outbreaks. Measles used to be an extremely common disease.
Where in the world are babies at the lowest risk of dying?

3 weeks ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

It’s difficult to compare countries because they don’t always measure infant mortality in the same way. Which country is the safest for a baby to be born? Answering this question might seem easy: divide the number of infants who die by the total number of infants born; make a map of these rates and find the lowest number.
In some countries, women still don’t have the same freedom to work as men

4 weeks ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

Many previous generations of women in my family would not have been allowed to do the work I do today — even if computers, the Internet, and Our World in Data had existed then. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case where I live: I’ve had the same right to get an education, work, and build a career as my brother. Unfortunately, that’s not the case everywhere. The map highlights the countries where women had legal restrictions on their rights to work in formal employment in 2023.
Women in the US spend more time with children than men do, across all ages - Our World in Data

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org

In the United States, women spend more time with children than men. This is true for adults of any age.
Children in rich countries are much less likely to die than a few decades ago, but we rarely hear about this progress

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

In most rich countries, child mortality has more than halved in the last thirty years; we know we can go further. As recently as 1990, one in five newborns in Ethiopia would die before the age of five. This was the norm across many poorer countries. Since most couples would have more than five children, many parents had to see one of their children die.
People in richer countries spend more on food, but it’s a smaller share of their overall spending

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

Describing someone as “young” or “old” is rather arbitrary. However, something we can quantify is whether a given person is “young” or “old” compared to the rest of the world. Imagine we sorted all 8 billion people alive today from youngest to oldest. The person standing right in the middle would be about 30 years old; that's the median age today. The chart shows the global median age and the UN’s projection to 2100. In 2025, if you are over 30, you are older than most people in the world.
Most food is transported by boat, so food miles are a relatively small part of the carbon footprint of most diets

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Hannah Ritchie

Describing someone as “young” or “old” is rather arbitrary. However, something we can quantify is whether a given person is “young” or “old” compared to the rest of the world. Imagine we sorted all 8 billion people alive today from youngest to oldest. The person standing right in the middle would be about 30 years old; that's the median age today. The chart shows the global median age and the UN’s projection to 2100. In 2025, if you are over 30, you are older than most people in the world.
How effective and safe are measles vaccines?

1 month ago | ourworldindata.org | Saloni Dattani

One dose of the MMR vaccine (the combined vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella) reduces the chance of getting measles by around 95%.3 This means the risk was twenty times lower in the vaccinated. This is shown in the top panel of the chart. After two doses of the vaccine, the risk was twenty-five times lower than in unvaccinated children.