Christopher Ketcham
How billionaire elites help fund an Oxford statistics lab that makes the destruction of Earth look just great. Roughly a decade ago, a 30-year-old economic statistician at Oxford University named Max Roser set out to transform the way we see the world using datasets. As he later described his mission in a statement of purpose,he wanted to instill “trust in ourselves” that we can “achieve extraordinary progress for entire societies.” His worldview rested on what he considered the three most salient facts of global civilization: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time.” The world, having improved greatly for Homo sapiens, can be continuously improved, Roser believed, so long as we do not lose faith in the drive and innovation of global capitalism.
In 2013, Roser founded a research initiative at Oxford to further this sunny agenda. He called it, to honor the scope of his ambition, Our World In Data (OWID). Over the past decade, OWID has become a go-to source for mainstream journalists looking to publicize numbers that purport to ballast the idea of the ever-improving human condition. A visit to the OWID homepage is an excursion into these chipper metrics of progress across every conceivable subject, from employment to poverty, health to literacy, and education to the environment.
One can learn, for example, that the share of people living in extreme poverty, has plummeted since the 1970s; that GDP per capita after 1945 skyrocketed in the U.S. and Western Europe, and has been rising – far more slowly, and only recently – in the rest of the world; that child mortality is way down; that the share of world population that’s undernourished is declining; that the literacy rate is way up; and that 90.44 percent of people on Earth now have access to enough electricity at least to charge a phone or power a radio four hours a day.
“It’s hard to imagine,” Roser writes in one of his many essays that celebrate the good news, “but child mortality in the very worst-off places today is much better than anywhere in the past.” He cites Niger as an example, the country with the highest mortality today, where about 14 percent of all children die – a rate three times lower than even the best-off places in the pre-industrial past. Still awful, but better than ever.
So it goes at Our World In Data, with hundreds of datasets pleasantly presented and easily clickable, serving deadline-addled journalists and a lay public accustomed to simple numbers. According to the analytics company Critical Mention, Roser has had great success with this model, with OWID’s work referenced in nearly 25,000 articles in 2022.
For obvious reasons, Roser’s cheerful view of capitalist business-as-usual – and the data that would seem to support it – has made him a darling of libertarian market fundamentalists, who have lavished praise on his work. His admirers include some of the most extreme right wing think tanks in the U.S. and U.K. Among these are the Cato Institute, spawn of the noxious fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch; the American Enterprise Institute, best known for its spreading of lies to foment the US-Iraq War in 2003; the Foundation for Economic Education, the oldest libertarian think tank in the U.S., founded by business interests to peddle pro-market, antigovernment ideology; and the Institute of Economic Affairs, a U.K.-based organization that has promoted climate-change denial.
Roser’s most important supporter, providing hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, is the world’s fifth richest man, Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been the single largest donor in recent years, funding “general operations and data infrastructure development” along with “core project activities.” Gates and Roser know each other personally. Gates has referred to OWID as his “favorite website.”
Other notable allies are the philosophers and social theorists who make up what’s called “effective altruism.” EA is a boutique ideology of wealthy elites who wish to do the “most good” in the world through charitable giving. Silicon Valley tech bros have been prominent devotees, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Estonian billionaire Jaan Taallin, developer of Skype.
According to the EA platform, pursuit of lucrative jobs within the profiteering framework is the ideal, as this provides more disposable income for donations to EA-approved charities. EA philosopher William MacAskill, who teaches at Oxford University, has advocated hiring on with “immoral organizations” if it increases income for ethical giving. Put another way: If maintaining an exploitative, unjust system means more profits for elites, then utility can be maximized, so long as elites practice some manner of “effective” and “altruistic” philanthropy. Philosopher Emile Torres, a one-time EA enthusiast and now postdoctoral researcher at Case Western Reserve University, says that the movement “ultimately reinforces the neoliberalism that is, in fact, a root cause of so many of our global problems.” OWID is so closely tied with EA that it shares office space with the Centre for Effective Altruism, the movement’s flagship organization, which was founded in 2012 by MacAskill and Toby Ord, who also teaches philosophy at Oxford and, alongside MacAskill, is a leading public intellectual of the movement. The Centre for Effective Altruism is listed as an OWID donor, and Roser has cited Ord as a key reviewer of his work. One of EA’s biggest fans is Elon Musk, who is also a funder of OWID.
Given the support that Roser enjoys from billionaire oligarchs at the pinnacle of the capitalist system, one wonders if it is a coincidence that so much of the data he headlines for public consumption happens to valorize that system. The chief narrative that OWID deploys is that progress is due to economic growth driven by profit-seeking private enterprise and breakneck industrial productivity. He has made this view explicit in his essays published on OWID’s website. No mention that poverty mostly has been alleviated by the power of the state regulating capital, redistributing wealth, and providing services, counter to a system of immense inequities. Roser never mentions the labor, civil rights, and anti-colonialist movements that have pressed for social welfare benefits, safety nets, legal protections and political liberation for the poor. In his superficial telling, “The history of economic growth is the history of how societies leave widespread poverty behind by finding ways to produce more of the goods and services that people need.”
Christopher Ketcham writes at Christopherketcham.com and is seeking donations to his new
journalism nonprofit, Denatured. He can be reached at christopher.ketcham99@gmail.com.
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