The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

Core thesis

The three statements in the title do not contradict each other. Holding only one of them leads to either despair or complacency — both of which produce inaction. Only holding all three at once makes constructive action possible.

The problem with one-sided narratives

• The pessimistic framing dominates the news. Media coverage highlights what is going wrong and rarely reports positive developments, either nationally or globally.
• The optimistic pushback is equally damaging. Communicating only progress becomes unhelpful or even repugnant when it glosses over the problems people actually face.
• Both extremes paralyze us:
  • Seeing only problems → no hope that the future can be better.
  • Seeing only progress → complacency and blindness to remaining problems.
• Resisting the pull of one perspective is hard, but necessary: a better world becomes conceivable only when both “awful” and “much better” are held simultaneously.

Case study: child mortality

Roser uses the deaths of children as the illustrative example, noting that the same three-part structure applies to many other large global problems (education, poverty, political freedom, violence, nutrition, some environmental indicators).

1. The world is awful

• Globally, 4.4% of all children die before age 15 (2021 data, UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation).
• That equals roughly:
  • 5.9 million child deaths per year
  • 16,000 per day
  • 11 per minute
• A world in which thousands of such tragedies occur daily is, plainly, awful.

2. The world is much better

• Historically, around half of all children died before adulthood — true everywhere in the world until the 19th century.
• This held with striking consistency across wildly different societies: Ancient Rome, hunter-gatherer societies, pre-Columbian Americas, Medieval Japan and England, Renaissance Europe, Imperial China.
• Today’s worst-off place is far better than any place in the past. Niger has the highest child mortality today at ~14% — still more than three times lower than the historical rate in even the best-off places.
• The key lesson is not just that things improved, but that it is possible to change the world.
• Problem: long-run data on living conditions is rarely taught in school or reported in the media, so most people are unaware of even the most fundamental positive developments — which corrodes trust in our collective ability to build a better future.

3. The world can be much better

• Progress in the past doesn’t automatically guarantee future progress — but the data suggests we are not at some unlucky endpoint of history.
• The best-off places prove low child mortality is already a reality, not just a possibility. The EU has a child mortality rate of 0.47% — 99.53% of children survive childhood.
• The counterfactual: if every child worldwide had the survival chances of a child in the EU, annual child deaths would fall from 5.9 million to 0.6 million — about 5 million fewer deaths every year.
• Even the EU rate is too high: childhood cancers such as leukemia and brain tumors still kill hundreds of children in the richest countries, and progress should not stop there.
• The largest opportunities are in poorer countries, where we know not only that things can improve but how to improve them.
• Roser recommends GiveWell for identifying cost-effective charities, several of which focus on child health.

Why knowing about progress matters

• Bad news is easier to sell and has a reliably large audience — it’s easier to scare people than to encourage them toward positive change.
• Knowing what is wrong is important; reporting only what is wrong is irresponsible given the scale of past achievement and future possibility.
• Recognizing progress is not denial of problems. The opposite: it is precisely because the world is still terrible that understanding how it improved matters so much.
• The underlying obstacle is a solvable information problem, not a lack of knowledge:
  • Data sits in inaccessible databases.
  • Research is buried in jargon and locked behind paywalls.
  • Our World in Data was built over a decade specifically to fix this.
• If we want more people to devote energy and money to improving the world, the fact that improving the world is possible must become far more widely known.

Key figures at a glance

Metric	Value
Global child mortality (under 15), 2021	4.4%
Annual child deaths worldwide	~5.9 million
Child deaths per day / per minute	~16,000 / ~11
Historical child mortality (pre-19th century, global)	~50%
Highest today (Niger)	~14%
European Union	0.47%
Lowest-mortality countries (San Marino, Norway, Japan, Finland, Singapore, Iceland, Slovenia)	~0.3%
Lives saved annually if global rate matched the EU	~5.2 million

Takeaways

• The three statements are complementary, not competing: awful describes the present, much better describes the trajectory, can be much better describes the opportunity.
• Historical data functions as evidence that large-scale change is achievable; contemporary cross-country gaps function as evidence of how much room remains.
• The practical upshot is a call to action rather than either despair or self-congratulation.

Notes

• Originally published 4 October 2018; revised July 2022; last updated February 2024. Underlying figures are from UN-IGME for 2021.
• Article acknowledgments: Hannah Ritchie and Toby Ord.
• Published under CC BY — freely reusable with attribution.
• Related reading on OWID: Why do we need to know about progress if we are concerned about the world’s largest problems?