Max Roser

Max Roser
Born	1983 (age 40–41) Kirchheimbolanden, West Germany
Academic career
Field	Economics of income distribution, poverty, global development, global health
Institution	Nuffield College, Oxford Oxford Martin School
Influences	Tony Atkinson, Amartya Sen, Angus Deaton, Hans Rosling
Website	www.maxroser.com www.ourworldindata.org

Max Roser (born 1983) is an economist and philosopher who focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality.

Roser is professor at the University of Oxford where he directs the program on global development, based at the Oxford Martin School. He is the founder and director of the research publication Our World in Data.

Early life and education

Roser was born in Kirchheimbolanden, Germany, a village close to the border with France. In 1999, he and a friend won a prize in the German youth science competition Jugend forscht with a model of a self-navigating vacuum cleaner. Der Spiegel reported that he travelled the length of the Nile from the mouth to the source, and that he crossed the Himalayas and the Andes.

He has two undergraduate degrees (in geoscience and philosophy) and two master's degrees (in economics, and philosophy). Roser completed his dissertation in 2011 at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

Career

In 2012, inequality and poverty researcher Tony Atkinson hired Roser at the University of Oxford where he collaborated with Piketty, Morelli, and Atkinson. In 2015, he established a research team at the University of Oxford which is studying global development.

He founded Our World In Data, a scientific web publication with the goal to present "research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems." During the first years he financed his project by working as a bicycle tour guide around Europe.

Our World In Data covers a range of aspects of development: global health, food provision, the growth and distribution of incomes, violence, rights, wars, technology, education, and environmental changes, among others. The publication makes use of data visualisations which are licensed under Creative Commons and are widely used in research, in the media, and as teaching material. In 2019 he worked with Y Combinator on Our World in Data.

Motivation

Roser said that there are three messages of his work: "The world is much better; The world is awful; The world can be much better". He listed global poverty, inequality, existential risks, human rights abuse, and humanity's environmental impact among the world's most severe problems.

About his motivation for this work he wrote "The mission of this work has never changed: from the first days in 2011 Our World in Data focussed on the big global problems and asked how it is possible to make progress against them. The enemies of this effort were also always the same: apathy and cynicism." He said that "it is because the world is terrible still that it is so important to write about how the world became a better place."

He is critical of the mass media's excessive focus on single events which he claims is not helpful in understanding "the long-lasting, forceful changes that reshape our world, as well as the large, long-standing problems that continue to confront us." In contrast to the event-focussed reporting of the news media Roser advocates the adoption of a broader perspective on global change, and in particular a focus on those living in poverty. The focus on the upper classes, especially in historical perspective, is misleading since it is not exposing the hardship of those in the worst living conditions.

He advocates looking at larger trends in poverty, education, health and violence since these are slowly, but persistently changing the world and are neglected in the reporting of today's mass media.

Cartogram by Max Roser showing the distribution of the global population. Each of the 15,266 pixels represents the home country of 500,000 people.

He is known for his research how global living conditions are changing and his visualisations of these trends. He has shown that in many societies in the past a large share (over 40%) of children died.

Research

Global CO2 emissions by world region since 1750 – a chart from Our World in Data

Roser's research is concerned with global problems such as poverty, climate change, child mortality and inequality. In 2015 research with Tony Atkinson, Brian Nolan and others he studied how the benefits from economic growth are distributed.

In October 2019 he co-authored a study of child mortality. It was the first global study that mapped child death on the level of subnational district. The study, published in Nature, was described as an important step to make action possible that further reduces child mortality.

He and Felix Pretis found that the growth rate in CO₂ emission intensity exceeded the projections of all climate scenarios. With Jesus Crespo Cuaresma he studied the history of international trade and its impact on economic inequality.

Roser has criticized the practice of focusing on the international poverty line alone. In his research he suggests a poverty at 10.89 international dollars per day. The researchers say this is the minimum level people needed to have access to basic healthcare. The reason for the low global poverty line is to focus the attention on the world's very poorest population. He proposes using several different poverty lines to understand what is happening to global poverty.

In global health research he studied the impact of poverty on poor health and disease and contributed to a textbook on global health. His most cited article, coauthored with Hannah Ritchie and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, is concerned with global population growth.

Roser is a regular speaker at conferences where he presents empirical data on how the world is changing. He is part of the Statistical Advisory Panel of UNDP. UN Secretary-General António Guterres invited him to internal retreats attended by the heads of the UN institutions to speak about his global development research.

Tina Rosenberg emphasised in The New York Times that Roser's work presents a "big picture that’s an important counterpoint to the constant barrage of negative world news." Angus Deaton cites Roser in his book The Great Escape. His research is cited in academic journals including Science, Nature, and The Lancet.

Data visualization

The data visualization expert Edward Tufte repeatedly cited and reprinted the work by Max Roser in his books.

Roser developed a global cartogram in which the area of each country represents the size of the country’s population. He published it open access and it became widely used in the media (including the FT, The Economist, and in open source applications).

Life expectancy by world region, from 1770 to 2018

Awards

In 2019 he was listed in second place among the "World’s Top 50 Thinkers" by Prospect Magazine.

In 2019 Our World in Data won the Lovie Award, the European web award, "in recognition of their outstanding use of data and the internet to supply the general public with understandable data-driven research – the kind necessary to invoke social, economic, and environmental change."

In 2021 he received the Covid Innovation Heroes Award "for an outstanding contribution to public understanding for helping people across the world see, and more importantly understand, critical pandemic data."

In 2022 he was selected as one of "The Future Perfect 50", as one of 50 scientists and writers who are building a better future.

External links

• Official website
• Max Roser at the Oxford Martin School
• Our World in Data – one of the web publications of Max Roser
• Max Roser on Twitter

Work

• The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it – Our World in Data
• The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics – Our World in Data
• The map we need if we want to think about how global living conditions are changing – Our World in Data
• Income inequality: poverty falling faster than ever but the 1% are racing ahead – The Guardian
• ‘Seeing human lives in spreadsheets’ – Hans Rosling (1948–2017) – British Medical Journal (BMJ) – Opinion; February 2017
• Why do we not hear the good news? – Washington Post; December 2016.
• Inequality is a Choice – in Nuffield College Magazine, Issue 18. An edition in the memory of Tony Atkinson.