Good News!

Media confront us with bad news every day. In the face of political uncertainties and extremism, climate change, growing inequalities etc. it sometimes seems hard not to see the world as a rather hopeless place. However, we must not forget that - with regard to many aspects of human life such as health, education, life expectancy etc. - we actually live in the best world and time since the beginning of mankind. The good news is: There are tons of data that support this view of the world! There are some guys and pages I can really recommend in this context.

If you are on TED and watch talks there, then you might know Hans Rosling as an inspiring and humorous speaker. Hans is one of the founders of the Gapminder Foundation (www.gapminder.org/). The foundation's page offers great data visualization tools and contains a large number of datasets that can be downloaded for free.

Oxford economist Max Roser (www.maxroser.com/), by the way an alumnus of Innsbruck University like myself, is the mastermind behind the platform Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/) which also offers a lot of material and functionalities that can be used to develop and sustain a fact-based world view.

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