Human Development
The long-run, global view of the human condition: life expectancy, child mortality, extreme poverty, and literacy over two centuries.
The dashboards next door track the last few years of the US economy. This one zooms out to centuries, and to the whole world — and the through-line is the single most under-reported fact about the modern era: on the measures that matter most for a human life, the long run has been a story of dramatic, broad-based improvement.
In 1800 roughly 4 in 10 of the world's children died before their fifth birthday; today it's under 1 in 25. Global life expectancy has more than doubled. Adult literacy has gone from around 1 in 8 people to nearly 9 in 10. The share of humanity in extreme poverty has fallen from over 40% in 1990 to under 10%. None of this is finished, none of it was inevitable, and averages hide enormous gaps between places — but the direction, sustained over generations, is unambiguous.
Data: Our World in Data (CC BY).
Child mortality
yearly3.7% of children worldwide died before age five in 2023 — down from 42.8% in 1800. For almost all of history roughly a third to a half of all children died young; it was the ordinary experience of parenthood. The decline is recent and steep, most of it since 1950, driven by vaccines, clean water, oral rehydration, and antibiotics. By sheer number of lives, it is probably the largest humanitarian achievement on this dashboard.
@admin · 27 May 2026
Extreme poverty
yearlyUnder 10% of the world lived in extreme poverty (below the international line) by the mid-2020s, down from 43% in 1990. In a single generation — even as world population grew by more than 2.5 billion — the absolute number in extreme poverty roughly halved. The fall is heavily weighted by East and South Asia; sub-Saharan Africa's share has declined far more slowly, and the remaining poverty is increasingly concentrated there and in conflict-affected states.
@admin · 27 May 2026
Adult literacy
yearly87% of the world's adults could read and write by 2023, up from around 12% in 1820. Mass literacy is a recent invention: for most of history reading was the preserve of a small elite. The climb tracks the spread of public schooling, and it is still steepest where it started latest — the global figure is held down by older generations and by gaps that remain largest for women in the poorest regions. Among the young, literacy is now near-universal across most of the world.
@admin · 27 May 2026
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73 years globally in 2023, up from around 29 in 1800. For most of human history life expectancy at birth sat in the high 20s to low 30s almost everywhere — not because no one reached old age, but because so many died as children. The near-tripling since is the compounded result of falling child mortality, then the control of infectious disease, then slower gains against the diseases of old age. The two world wars and the 1918 flu show as dips; the trend swallowed them.
@admin · 27 May 2026