July 28, 2025
Economic growth is easy to understand: it means that people have access to goods and services of increasing quantity and quality.
What is hard, however, is to measure economic growth. This chart shows two ways of doing this for US growth over the past 160 years.
The purple lines represent a straightforward approach: each line tracks the share of households with access to one specific good or service. Starting from the top, you see the rising provision of basic infrastructure like running water, flush toilets, and electric power. You can also see the increasing availability of communication technology: radios, TVs, the Internet, and mobile phones. And further down, you see the rise of technologies that reduced work at home: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers.
This approach is very concrete; it shows practical ways in which the production and consumption of specific goods increased over time. The downside is that it only captures a limited number of particular goods. Millions of goods and services are produced and consumed, and most are not recorded with such precision.
A way to measure how people’s access to the full range of goods and services changes is to measure people’s incomes. This way of measuring growth is shown in the top left panel. The data on average income, here measured by GDP per capita, tells us that the average American was 13 times poorer in 1860 than in 2022 (adjusted for inflation).
These two ways of measuring economic growth have pros and cons: one is concrete but not comprehensive, the other is comprehensive but quite abstract. If we want to understand what growth means for our societies, I find it helpful to combine them both.
Today
In the past, forests around the world were cut down on a massive scale. We lost some of the world’s richest ecosystems.
In recent decades, the picture has become more complex. Deforestation has not ended, but it is no longer happening everywhere. Since 1990, some regions have continued to lose large areas of forest, while others have slowed this long-run trend — and even reversed it.
The map shows regional changes in forest area based on the latest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Deforestation has been particularly large in South America and Africa. At the same time, the forested area has expanded in Europe, North and Central America, and large parts of Asia.
These gains show that deforestation is not inevitable. When pressure on land falls, forests can return.
February 24
The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001. Since then, almost 40 other countries have followed suit.
You can see this in the chart, based on data from Pew Research. By 2025, same-sex marriage was legal in 39 countries.
Last year, two countries were added to the total. Thailand became the first country in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, and a same-sex marriage bill also took effect in Liechtenstein.
February 21
The share of the world population living in extreme poverty has never declined as rapidly as in the past three decades.
The decline in China was particularly fast, and given that one in six people in the world lives there, we’re often asked whether the decline in global poverty was only due to the decline in China.
The chart shows the data that answers this question. In blue, we see the global decline. In red, we see the decline if we exclude China from the data. In the world outside of China, 33% lived in extreme poverty in 1990; by 2025, this share was down to 12%.
The large economic growth that lifted 940 million Chinese people out of extreme poverty since 1990 was a major contributor to the global decline in poverty. But the non-Chinese world also achieved a very large reduction.
It is not true that the global decline in poverty was only due to China. Extreme poverty has declined in China and the rest of the world.
February 19
Forty years ago in Japan, two babies were born for every person who died. Twenty years ago, these numbers were equal. And today, the ratio has reversed: one baby is born for every two people who die.
In the chart, you can see this change in the number of births and deaths over time.
Since deaths now greatly outnumber births, and because immigration is low, Japan’s population has started to shrink.
February 17
Debates over whether religion is booming or dying are common. What does the data say?
Most countries lack long-term data on religious identity, but results from the Pew Research Center offer insights into changes over the decade from 2010 to 2020. (Unfortunately, 2020 is the most recent year for which we have comparable global data.)
At a global level, there was barely any change. The share of people identifying with any religion dropped by just one percentage point, from 77% to 76%.
But religious affiliation did drop significantly across many countries in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. You can see this drop for a selection of countries in the chart.
In Australia, rates dropped from 75% to 58%. In the United States and Chile, the percentage has decreased from roughly 85% to 70%.
So while religious affiliation is stable in many parts of the world, this data shows religion is becoming less prominent in others.
Note that this data is based on self-identification with any religion; it doesn’t tell us about changes in practices or rituals, such as prayer or attending services.
February 14
This chart shows one way to compare automated manufacturing across countries — it plots the number of robots per 1,000 manufacturing employees.
The chart shows very large differences between countries. South Korea stands out, with more than one robot for every ten manufacturing workers.
Singapore comes second, and China ranks third, close to Germany. The United States sits in the middle, close to the European average, below Switzerland, Denmark and Slovenia.
This perspective shows industrial robot adoption in relative terms. In another Data Insight, I looked at robot adoption in absolute terms. From that perspective, China stands out by a large margin: it’s a large economy with a huge manufacturing sector, and it has by far the largest stock of industrial robots.
Much of this expansion has happened recently: China’s annual installations increased 12-fold over a decade, helping it catch up to South Korea in terms of robots per worker.
February 12
Most people in the world are religious. When asked whether they identify with any religion, three-quarters of respondents choose one.
But in the chart, you can see huge differences in rates of religious affiliation across the world. In some countries, such as India and Pakistan, it’s almost universal: almost everyone identifies with a religion.
The opposite is true in China, where just one in ten people does. Several countries in East Asia, in particular, have particularly low rates of religious identification compared to other regions.
This doesn’t necessarily mean these populations hold no religious beliefs; they may still engage in activities that can be considered religious or spiritual, even though they don't describe themselves as belonging to any one in particular.
