Turn on the news or listen to doom-mongers in politics and the media, and you could be forgiven for thinking the world is a more violent and unequal place than ever, but according to economist Max Roser, we’ve never had it so good in many ways. Roser, based at the University of Oxford, spends his time digging through data on human living standards across countries and decades, and makes jazzy graphs and slides for his website OurWorldInData.org and his 30,000 Twitter followers. Reams of data on living standards are pumped out every day by governments, charities and international organizations, said Roser, but much is hidden behind paywalls or buried in the footnotes of obscure reports. “Often they go and put their spreadsheets out on a server and think their job is done.”

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