Data Insights
Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, written by our team.
The price of computer storage has fallen exponentially since the 1950s
This chart shows the dramatic fall in the price of computer storage between 1956 and 2023. It relies on the data carefully collected by the computer scientist John C. McCallum.
In the last 70 years, the price for a unit of storage has fallen by almost ten orders of magnitude. The data is plotted on a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis. The line follows an almost straight path, indicating an exponential reduction in price.
A 256-gigabyte storage capacity — commonly found in standard laptops sold today — would have cost around 20 billion dollars in the 1950s. (That’s in today’s prices.)
And cost has not been the only improvement: modern solid-state drives offer much faster and more reliable data access than early magnetic and hard disk drives.
Read more on the exponential growth of computing capabilities →
In the last 200 years, many countries have built institutions to collect statistics on their populations
Governments need accurate information about their populations to implement effective policies.
But historically, few countries collected basic statistics on their people, so they knew little about them.
The chart here shows that, over time, many countries have built such institutions.
Starting in the 19th century, they began conducting population censuses, creating civil registers, and establishing statistical agencies. In the later 20th century, they started setting up population registers and using register-based censuses.
Thanks to these efforts, these countries better understand where people live, what jobs they have, who was born, and who has died.
However, many countries still lack these institutions, which makes it challenging for them to direct projects and policies where they are most helpful.
More than 30 countries have legalized same-sex marriage
The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001. Since then, more than 30 other countries have followed suit.
You can see this in the chart, based on data from Pew Research. By 2022, same-sex marriage was legal in 32 countries.
Since then, 3 more countries have joined this group: Andorra, Estonia, and Greece — bringing the total to 35. Last year, Nepal also registered its first same-sex wedding, but it’s not yet clear whether these rights are available across the country.
Global population growth peaked six decades ago
The increase in the world’s population is not exponential. The global population is growing, but the growth rate has declined since its peak six decades ago.
The chart shows the annual rate of global population growth according to historical estimates and projections from the UN World Population Prospects.
The growth rate peaked in 1963 at over 2% per year, and since then, it has more than halved, falling to less than 1% by 2020.
The UN demographers expect rates to continue falling until the end of the century, eventually leading to negative growth rates and a shrinking global population.
Drug-resistant tuberculosis is much more expensive to treat
Tuberculosis is usually treatable with a specific combination of antibiotics. However, without proper treatment, the bacteria can survive and develop antibiotic resistance to an increasing number of drugs. This drug-resistant bacteria can then spread to other people, making the disease much more expensive to treat.
The chart shows the cost of treating a single patient with tuberculosis in India.
For tuberculosis patients without drug resistance, the average cost of treatment is only $24.
But among patients who have multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, the cost is almost $400. With extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, it costs more than $1,000. That’s about 50 times higher than patients without drug resistance.