Max Roser Profile picture
26 Dec, 11 tweets, 3 min read
We live at a very unusual time. We are among the very first generations who can make progress against large problems.
If we want to make progress against the problems we face, then this fact – that we *can* make progress – needs to be absolutely central to our culture.

Some people are building this culture, but it is still a long way to go.
By and large our culture is still the culture of pre-progress times: our media is not drawing our attention to the large problems we face and our education system is not teaching us that progress is possible.
At OurWorldInData.org we want to change the status quo – we want to draw attention to the large problems we face and the fact that we can make progress against them.
It is not easy to make this shift because the situation we are in is so extremely unusual.

For thousands of generations the best you could do was to make sure that you – and those close to you – are safe and well.
This is not the case anymore.

In the last couple of generations it became possible to achieve progress for people across an entire society, or even for the world as a whole.
A concrete example would be the eradication of smallpox.

Edward Jenner and those who paved the way before him and those who perfected his technology and those who organized the distribution around the world protected the lives of perhaps half a billion people.
To use one’s life to prevent the suffering of millions of people was entirely unattainable for anyone before modern times.

In the last few generations there are thousands who achieved technological, scientific, political, and social changes that contributed to such progress.
And this fact – that it is possible to make progress – should matter for your life.

You can contribute to progress because you are in a situation that is extremely different from the situation of the thousands of generations before you.
Your situation is different from the situation of the many billions of people over thousands of generations that came before you.

None of these people were as rich, as free, and especially as knowledgeable as you.
*You* can contribute to progress against the injustice, the suffering, the problems in the world.

That's why we are building OurWorldInData.org.

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More from @MaxCRoser

24 Dec
In London the number of daily confirmed cases has doubled within the last week.

[→ To be able to follow the rapid outbreak in the UK we have made the data for subnational regions available here ourworldindata.org/grapher/uk-dai…] Image
If you want to see the UK’s subnational data on testing, cases, and deaths, my colleague Hannah Ritchie lists the links in her tweet.

This is not looking good. Several regions have outbreaks even worse than London.

[ourworldindata.org/grapher/uk-dai…] Image
Read 5 tweets
16 Dec
I guess this will be one of the most important maps to watch over the coming months.

Really happy that our page on COVID-19 vaccinations is online on @OurWorldInData: ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinat…

If you know of official data on vaccinations in other countries please let us know.
For data sources we will only include data published on official websites (or in press releases and by social media accounts of national authorities).

Otherwise it won’t be manageable – we’ve seen that when we built the testing database in the last months.

Thank you.
For all you researchers and journalists out there.

The vaccination data is now also available in our daily updated global COVID-19 database managed by our colleague @redouad.

You can download (and check!) all our data here:
github.com/owid/covid-19-…
Read 4 tweets
15 Dec
The number of confirmed cases has been declining in almost all regions of Spain.

The only two regions where cases are rising are the Balearic and Canary islands.

[source Spanish government here: mscbs.gob.es/profesionales/…]
The government started publishing the positive rate of tests a while ago – that’s very good and I wish all countries would do that.

But as you see the positive rate is still fairly high in many regions so that the true number of cases is likely quite a bit higher.
This is the number of confirmed cases in the whole of Spain and the positive rate in the entire country – both are coming down which suggests that this decline of cases is real and not just due to worsening testing.

ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-da…
Read 4 tweets
12 Dec
Around half the US population says that they are worried to be killed by terrorists.

The annual probability for an American to die in a terrorist attack during this period was 0.000051%

[ourworldindata.org/terrorism]
The countermeasures against terrorism – including the ‘war on terror’ – were extreme:
It cost trillions of dollars, killed tens of thousand of people, made millions to refugees, reduced civil liberties, legitimized intrusions into privacy.

And it failed entirely to reduce fear.
This looks unfortunately like a huge success for the terrorists.

As Scott Atran says “Perhaps never in the history of human conflict have so few people with so few actual means and capabilities frightened so many.”

[harpercollins.com/products/talki…]
Read 6 tweets
1 Dec
Just published my new @OurWorldInData post:

• Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
→ And what can we do to use this global opportunity for green growth?

ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewabl…
Today fossil fuels – coal, oil, and gas – account for 79% of the world’s energy production.

But as this chart shows they have very large negative side effects.
Why is the world relying on power from fossil fuels if they cause so many deaths and such large greenhouse gas emissions? 

Because in the past they were *far cheaper* than other sources of energy.
Read 27 tweets
27 Nov
The European CDC will soon be switching to weekly data and I see several people concerned that this would create problems for Our World in Data and those who rely on data that they obtain via us.

This is not the case. We are well prepared.

Our data manager @redouad summarizes: Image
What the ECDC was pulling off in the last months was really phenomenal.

Very early in the pandemic – when alternative data sources were often extremely bad – the colleagues there woke up at 4 o'clock every morning to bring together reliable data from countries around the world.
We would definitely prefer if the ECDC would continue doing this work, but I very much understand that it needs to come to an end. And it can because there are good alternatives for case and death data available.
Read 5 tweets

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