Morbidity, Peak Child, And Collective Pessimism

By Stacey Vanek Smith,

Cardiff Garcia

Published April 5, 2018 at 4:25 PM EDT

Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie — part of the team behind — specialize in looking at how the world has changed over the very long run; as in centuries and millennia.

Over the course of their research they tend to come across some non-intuitive statistics that tell strange and sometimes wonderful stories about our world. So we called them up and asked them about a few of their favorite bits of data.

Links:
Yields and Land Use in Agriculture
Renewables
Collective pessimism and our inability to guess the happiness of others
When will the world reach 'peak child'?

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Stacey Vanek Smith

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.

See stories by Stacey Vanek Smith