1.1 The world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better.

Here are three statements about the world.

The world is much better than it was.
The world is awful.
The world can be much better.

They sound like they come from three different people: an optimist, a pessimist and a reformer. Max Roser, who founded Our World in Data, argues that all three are true at once. Holding them together is a reasonable place to start if you want to help.

His example is children's health.

Much better. For most of history, losing a child was normal. Today, 4.4% of children worldwide die before the age of 15. In the European Union the figure is 0.47%. If we still had the health of our ancestors, more than 60 million children would die every year.

Awful. It is still 5.9 million children a year. That is about 16,000 a day, mostly from causes that medicine already knows how to prevent or treat.

Can be much better. The gap between 4.4% and 0.47% is a measure of what is possible, because it has already been achieved somewhere. If every country had the EU's child mortality rate, about five million fewer children would die each year. That is our own back-of-the-envelope calculation from Roser's figures: 5.9 million × (1 − 0.47/4.4) ≈ 5.3 million.

Each statement guards against a different mistake. The first guards against despair: progress happens, and much of it came from deliberate effort. The second guards against complacency. The third is what this course is about: the gap between the world as it is and as it could be, where that gap is largest, and what closes it.