You've seen the headlines. Here are the numbers they leave out.
Bad news happens in an afternoon. Good news takes decades, so it never makes the paper.
Here's what an average day since 1990 looked like:
Average daily decline, 1990–2026. World Bank, $3/day line.
Not "can't afford a phone" poor. Couldn't-afford-enough-food poor. That was most people, for most of history.
Today it's 1 in 10, on a planet with eight times as many people.
Each dot is 1% of humanity. Moatsos (2021); World Bank PIP (2026 nowcast).
Today it's 3.7%. In 2024, 8 million fewer kids died than in 1990. That's about the population of New York City, every year.
Gapminder; UN IGME (2025).
For almost all of history the average person lived about 30 years, mostly because so many died as kids. A baby born today can expect 73.
That's the average for the whole planet, not just rich countries.
UN World Population Prospects; Riley (2005).
Smallpox killed around 300 million people in the 20th century. The last natural case was in 1977.
Guinea worm infected about 3.5 million people a year in 1986. Last year: 10.
Polio is down more than 99.9%. The wild virus is left in just two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
WHO; The Carter Center; Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
Since 2000, 2.7 billion people got electricity at home and 2.4 billion got clean drinking water.
Three in four people are now online, most of them on a phone.
Each house is 1% of humanity. World Bank; WHO/UNICEF JMP; ITU.
None of this has stopped. It's going on while you read this, in places that will never make the news.
Here's what it adds up to, so far today.
These are estimates, not live feeds. Each counter runs at the pace of the latest measured trend or study, listed under it.
"Developed" and "developing" made sense in 1965. Hans Rosling's idea was to sort people by what they can spend a day instead, into four levels. Drag through the years and watch humanity climb.
Each square is 1% of humanity. Levels in 2021 dollars a day, adjusted for prices: under $3, $3–10, $10–40, over $40. World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform via Our World in Data. Idea from Factfulness (Rosling, Rosling & Rosling Rönnlund, 2018). See real homes on every level at Dollar Street.
In Factfulness, Rosling put 16 terrible things in decline next to 16 wonderful things on the rise. Here's our version, using the latest numbers. Tap any row for the full chart.
Twelve questions about the world. Picking at random, a chimp would get four right. In a 2017 survey of 12,000 people in 14 countries, the average person got two.
The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
Her breathing and heart rate are tracked every hour. After a week, every one of them is improving, but she still can't leave the incubator. Is she doing badly? Yes. Is she getting better? Also yes. You don't have to pick one.
That's Hans Rosling's picture of the world, and it's the point of this site. Saying things are getting better doesn't mean everything is fine, or that anyone should relax. It means the work so far has been paying off, which is the best reason to keep going.
"I'm not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist."
Hans Rosling, Factfulness (2018). A possibilist is someone who doesn't hope without reason and doesn't fear without reason.