Should-Read: Max Roser: Economist
Should-Read: Max’s Our World in Data is a highly cool information source: Max Roser: Economist: “What I’ve been up to during the last year…
…I haven’t written much on this blog recently and so I thought it might make sense to just list–and link to–a couple of the projects that I’ve been working on during the last year…. What kept me busy mostly was the work on Our World in Data, the free online publication on global development that I started some years ago. Unfortunately quite a lot of time I spent on the search for funding. But there were also a lot of very positive developments! The publication grew quite a bit–we now have 87 entries on Our World in Data! You find them all listed on the landing page. Two of my favorite recent entries are: (1) The very long and quite detailed entry on global extreme poverty that Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and I wrote; (2) The still growing entry on yields and land use in agriculture that Hannah Ritchie and I are still working on. Jaiden Mispy, the web developer in our team, keeps making our own open source data visualization tool–the Our World in Data Grapher–more and more useful. Aibek Aldabergenov, our database developer, made it possible to access large development datasets directly (without uploading them manually) and that made the work of the authors much faster and more fun. And while I wasn’t active here on my personal blog, we actually now publish very regularly on the OWID-blog…
Max Roser: About: Our World in Data: “Our World in Data is an online publication that shows how living conditions are changing…
…The aim is to give a global overview and to show changes over the very long run, so that we can see where we are coming from and where we are today. We need to understand why living conditions improved so that we can seek more of what works. We cover a wide range of topics across many academic disciplines: Trends in health, food provision, the growth and distribution of incomes, violence, rights, wars, culture, energy use, education, and environmental changes are empirically analyzed and visualized in this web publication. For each topic the quality of the data is discussed and, by pointing the visitor to the sources, this website is also a database of databases. Covering all of these aspects in one resource makes it possible to understand how the observed long-run trends are interlinked. The project, produced at the University of Oxford, is made available in its entirety as a public good. Visualizations are licensed under CC BY-SA and may be freely adapted for any purpose. Data is available for download in CSV format. Code we write is open-sourced under the MIT license…