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Good data will make you an economic optimist


15 Oct 2015

In order to understand global economics, you need perspective -- that's according to Max Roser, a 'data visualisation historian' at the Oxford Martin School. A lot of perspective. The good news is that all this perspective gives a surprisingly optimistic picture about the state of the world.

Take the growth of GDP per capita. Most people, studies have shown, think global poverty is increasing. But look at the trends since the year 1000, as detailed on Roser's website, and there's a very different story.

In the year 1688, the average income per person per year was around £1,177 (in 2014 prices) with most of that spent on essentials, with a little on taxes, Roser explained to the attendees of WIRED 2015 at London's Tobacco Dock. In 2014 that has ballooned to £27,714 per person, per year, with large chunks spent on transport, recreation, education, and tax, with far less as a proportion (though still much more in real terms) on clothing, food and housing.

Max Roser

Data-viz historian

Vincent Whiteman WIRED

"This is what economic growth means for you," Roser said. "You get a much richer life."

For another example, Roser said, take the fact that in 1800 the average person had to work for 5.4 hours to afford one hour of reading light In 1880 kerosene lamps reduced that down to 13 minutes per hour. In 1960 that shrank to 3.6 seconds. Today: 0.1 seconds, thanks to LED bulbs.

Or take the share of US households with basic electrical appliances, which grew rapidly from 1900 through the 20th century, as the number of housework working hours decreased massively.

Global spreads of GDP are also becoming more equal. In 1988 (the first year with full household surveys) the median income in developed countries (around $10,000) was still much more than the equivalents in Sub-Saharan Africa, India or China. But in 2011, that graph had shifted dramatically, with the previous bi-modal distribution becoming more of a single, larger and more varied curve.

Global poverty overall has shrunk from 90 percent in 1820, fell to 44 percent in the late 1970s and now stands at around 10 percent in 2015. The point of visualising this data is to challenge assumptions, Roser said, and make it easier to overturn bias. "[My goal is to] give a very long term perspective on global development and how living conditions change," he said. "I think [these things] matter hugely for the quality of lives of people, and our understanding of the world.

And the world continues to change, Roser said -- concluding with a visualisation that showed just how much growth in the global economy is skewed towards poor countries. "It is becoming a more equal world," he said. "This is something that should make us optimistic for the future." "We have more people that can contribute to the innovations, increase incomes and more people that can demand these technologies and ideas [...] the optimists of the 1970s were actually the realists."