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7 Feb, 5 tweets, 2 min read
The US poverty line for one person is $35/day.

If we would apply the US poverty line for the world – and we would perfectly redistribute the world’s incomes, so that everyone has the average – the world economy would need to more than double to end global poverty.
The world is extremely unequal and extremely poor. For both reasons the world is far away from an end to poverty.
Also worth noting that the US poverty line isn’t high in comparison to other rich countries, in fact it is often criticized for being unethically low.
Many are asking what the global median income is.

This is @BrankoMilan’s latest estimate – the linked paper there by him is very much worth reading for everyone who is interested in global poverty, inequality, and growth:
@BrankoMilan Comparing global poverty data and national poverty lines isn’t straightforward and certainly doesn’t fit into tweets.
For anyone who wants to properly understand how global poverty data can be compared with national poverty lines I’d recommend this paper: ideas.repec.org/a/spr/joecin/v…

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More from @MaxCRoser

Max Roser Profile picture
9 Feb
Health researchers estimate that every year 8 million people die an early death due to smoking. This means that 15%(!) of global deaths are attributed to smoking.

Smoking causes incredible suffering globally – but we can win the fight: A thread. 👇
All data and research in this thread can be found in our @OurWorldInData entry on smoking: ourworldindata.org/smoking
With the knowledge that smoking causes cancer and the evidence that cancer didn’t only increase with smoking, but also declined when smoking declined, it may appear obvious that smoking kills.

But it wasn't obvious *at all* until the second half of the 20th century. Image
Read 26 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
5 Feb
Don’t know if this question is very odd, or if someone might perhaps have the same problem.

I like to write in Google Docs and I like to write in many, many documents at the same time.

Is there some tool, extension, etc that allows me to find and access many active Google Docs?
In the last months I “organized” that by relying on different tabs.

All the Google Docs in which I’m writing or in which I’m editing work of others would be in tabs – and via Tab Suspender they would be suspended, so as soon as I clicked on the relevant tab they became active.
A nice solution would be if there was for example an extension that would allow me to put together a kind of home page – perhaps a simple grid with all the links to the relevant Google Docs – and as soon as I click on one of them it’d open quickly.
Read 4 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
1 Feb
I agree with the goal of a “people’s vaccine” – we need vaccines for the entire world.

But I don’t see how these proposals would get us there.
It seems to me that our global situation is very much worse than these proposals assume.

1/
The various "people’s vaccine" proposals want to get rid of intellectual property restrictions for the COVID vaccines so that more vaccines can be produced.

2/
In the past there were such horrible situations in which patent restrictions prevented the world from making progress against diseases.

(For example the patent restrictions on ART that meant that HIV-positive people in poor countries could not get the treatment they needed).

3/
Read 13 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
30 Jan
How to accelerate vaccine availability during a pandemic?

A new working paper by the experts on that question bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/upl…

The good news: “even at this late stage, investment to expand manufacturing capacity would have large benefits.”
The frustrating finding “investing in the amount of capacity recommended by our model (as of August 2020) would have allowed ... the world to complete vaccination by October 2021 rather than June 2022.”

(The benefits would have been $1.14 trillion. Obvs much higher than costs.)
One of the key points to understand in the question of to get the world vaccinated is that the the social value of more vaccines far exceeds the commercial returns to vaccine the manufacturers from installing capacity.
Read 6 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
26 Jan
1/ If we had more vaccines we could bring an end to the deaths and lockdowns.

We could have produced these vaccines last year if governments had taken the risk to pay for their production, before they were approved.

It was a huge mistake to not do this.
We should not repeat it.
2/ There are 239 COVID vaccines under development.

It will take time until we know which ones will actually work and it will often take many months until they are possibly approved.



But we could risk now to produce these vaccines already.
3/ If a vaccine that we pay for now won’t work in the end we have to throw the produced vaccines away.


But if a vaccine does work we are in a much better position then:
We will have a working vaccine with millions of doses ready to protect people.
Read 8 tweets
Max Roser Profile picture
14 Jan
Let’s assume that the cost estimates of that study are much too optimistic and the true cost of producing the vaccine will be $200 billion in the end – it would still be less than the economic losses in just *month* last year.
That’s just the loss in production (4.5% decline of global GDP according to the IMF: imf.org/external/datam…).

The full ‘cost’ of the pandemic is of course much larger than that – the pandemic’s impact on our daily lives, people being sick, people dying.
The point is:
estimate of the pandemic’s cost that is much too low >> estimate of the cost to produce vaccines that is much higher than what this study estimates
Read 4 tweets

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