July 16, 2025
The Agricultural Revolution — the transition from hunting and gathering to farming — didn’t end hunger. That’s because more food didn’t mean more per person: it meant more people.
The English cleric Thomas Malthus predicted this would continue forever: food production would always be outpaced by population growth, making lasting progress against hunger impossible.
But at least since the mid-20th century, England has left mass hunger behind. How was this possible? How did English farmers prove Malthus wrong?
The chart shows one central part of the answer. For centuries, cereal yields in England — for staples like wheat and barley — were stuck at about 0.6 tonnes per hectare. That means farmers needed a plot of 100 meters by 100 meters to grow 600 kilograms of cereals per year. Hunger was widespread.
But this changed from the 17th century onward, accelerating a hundred years ago. In a dramatic transformation known as the Second Agricultural Revolution, farmers found ways to grow much more food on the same land.
Today, after four centuries of rising productivity, English farmers are growing about ten times more food on the same land than in the past. This has made it possible to increase food production faster than population growth, breaking England out of the “Malthusian Trap”.
The chart also shows that the world as a whole is changing in the same direction. Global average yields have tripled in the last six decades. Today, yields are already about five times higher than in England in the past. If yields continue to follow this trajectory, it would bring us much closer to the end of global hunger, while also sparing land for nature.
My colleague Hannah Ritchie wrote about how climate change might affect crop yields in the future →
Today
What difference does it make when people can choose their leaders? One area where the right to vote for political leaders may matter is corruption.
Democracy and corruption are hard to measure. One possible way to understand how countries perform on these fronts is to ask experts who study them closely. These expert judgments aren’t perfect, but we think they’re useful.
The V-Dem project surveys experts to assess how democratic each country is. Are elections free and fair? Do all citizens have equal voting rights? Are fundamental freedoms — like speech and assembly — respected? Experts also rate how frequent corruption is in public institutions, from bribery and embezzlement to whether laws are enforced fairly.
This chart combines these expert estimates: democracy on the horizontal axis and corruption on the vertical axis, with both scores on a scale from 0 to 1.
There are four corners in the chart. In the top left, you find many countries that are both autocratic and corrupt, such as Myanmar and Russia. In the bottom right, there’s a thick cluster of nations that have stronger democratic institutions and lower levels of corruption. What also stands out is that no country appears in the top right: none are rated as both having strong democratic institutions and being highly corrupt.
This chart shows correlation, not causation — but research on the causal link suggests democratic systems can indeed help expose and reduce corruption. And there is also a causal impact running the other way: corruption can weaken democratic institutions, for instance by lowering voter turnout.
November 05
The deaths of children are daily tragedies on an enormous scale. The UN estimates that between 1950 and 2024, 990 million children died. That’s almost a billion children who died in only 75 years.
The chart shows that the world has made progress. In 1950, 23% of children born died before they were five years old. Since then, the global child mortality rate has declined to 3.6%.
In absolute terms, the number of child deaths has also declined: in 1950, 20 million children died; by the year 2000, this number had halved; and since then, it has halved again.
But the deaths of millions of young children every year remain one of the worst problems in the world and deserve much more attention.
November 03
It’s a common misconception that life expectancy has increased only because fewer children die. Historical mortality records show that adults today also live much longer than adults in the past.
It’s true that child mortality rates were much higher in the past, and their decline has greatly improved overall life expectancy. But in recent decades, improvements in survival at older ages have been even more important.
The chart shows the period life expectancy in France for people of different ages. This measures how long someone at each of those ages would live, on average, if they experienced the death rates recorded in that year. For example, the last point on the top dark-red line shows that an 80-year-old in 2023 could expect to live to about 90, assuming mortality rates stayed as they were in 2023.
As you can see, life expectancy in France has risen at every age. In 1816, someone who had reached the age of 10 could expect to live to 57. By 2023, this had increased to 84. For those aged 65, it rose from 76 in 1816, to 87 in 2023.
The data for many other countries shows the same. This remarkable shift is the result of advances in medicine, public health, and living standards.
October 31
The world has made major progress in expanding access to education. A century ago, most children did not have the option to go to school at all. Today, access to education is widely seen as a basic right that governments are expected to provide. And most governments succeed — according to statistics compiled by UNESCO, about 9 in 10 children of primary school age are enrolled.
The chart shows how this expansion unfolded for boys and girls separately. Throughout most of the 20th century, enrollment rose steadily, but boys remained more likely to be in school than girls. It was only towards the end of the century that this gap began to close. Today, the gap is small: around 91% of boys and 89% of girls are enrolled in primary school.
While the gap is small globally, it remains large and persistent in some countries. In Chad, in Central Africa, about 80% of boys are enrolled in primary school, compared with 67% of girls. This difference has shown little change in recent years, as the data linked below shows.
October 29
A woman dying when she is giving birth to her child is one of the greatest tragedies imaginable.
Every year, 260,000 women die from pregnancy-related causes. This number rose to 322,000 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fortunately, the world has made continuous progress, and such tragic deaths have become much rarer, as the chart shows. The WHO has published data since 1985. Since then, the number of maternal deaths has more than halved.
October 27
In 1970, Cyclone Bhola hit Bangladesh, killing more than 300,000 people. It was a strong cyclone, but not unprecedented. What made it so deadly was the lack of any early detection systems, alarms, or mass evacuation procedures. A huge storm surged into a densely populated area, and hundreds of thousands of people drowned in their homes.
Since then, Bangladesh has become much more resilient to these events. The chart shows the country's annual death toll from storms, stretching back to 1960.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, a few large events claimed many lives. But in recent decades, the death toll has been low. That’s despite Bangladesh experiencing some extremely powerful cyclones. Cyclone Amphan (2020) and Mocha (2023) were both Category 5 — the strongest rating.
Bangladesh offers one of the clearest examples of how humans are not helpless in the face of “natural” disasters: investments in weather forecasting, early warning systems, and proper evacuation procedures can protect communities and save lives.
October 24
Electric cars have become incredibly popular in China. In 2020, one in eighteen new cars sold was electric. By 2024, this had increased to one in two.
This growth has pushed down sales of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, which run mostly on petrol. As you can see in the chart, sales of ICE cars peaked in 2017 and have declined since.
The world reached peak ICE car sales just one year later.
The displacement of petrol cars with electric ones is vital in decarbonizing transport. The rise of electric vehicles in China means the IEA expects oil demand to peak earlier than previously projected.
Here, “electric cars” include fully battery-electric ones and plug-in hybrids. In China, 56% of them were fully battery-electric.
