Data Insights
Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, written by our team.
Much more progress can be made against child mortality
The world has made great progress against child mortality. But in many countries, a significant share still die during childhood.
The data on this map comes from the UN IGME, which estimates child mortality rates worldwide using detailed household surveys and vital statistics.
As the map shows, child mortality is much lower in rich countries, where fewer than 1% of children die before the age of five.
However, the figures are much higher in poor countries, especially across Africa and South Asia. In Pakistan, for example, 6% die before their fifth birthday. In Nigeria and Somalia, the figure is 11%.
These statistics show that despite impressive falls in child mortality, much more progress can be made.
Child mortality: an everyday tragedy of enormous scale that we can make progress against
We live in a world in which 10 children die every minute.
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.