I could not decide whether the world was getting better or worse. So I built this instead of deciding.

I’m Bhuvan. I work in finance, and for the better part of a decade I went back and forth on the same question without ever landing. This atlas is what came out of not landing.

Where it started

Around 2017 I read Steven Pinker and the long-run optimists — the charts where almost everything you can count, from child mortality to literacy to extreme poverty, has bent the right way for two centuries. It should have settled the question for me. It didn’t. I had spent my life assuming I was a pessimist, and then I noticed something awkward: I invest like an optimist. I put money to work on the bet that things compound and improve. My self-image said one thing; what I actually did with my savings said the opposite. That gap is where this began.

Two true stories

One story is the optimist’s. The economist Joel Mokyr puts it about as strongly as it can be put: a person near the bottom of the ladder today lives better, in almost every measurable dimension, than the popes and emperors of the past. By the numbers, he is right.

The other story belongs to people like Daniel Schmachtenberger: we improve on the handful of metrics we choose to measure and optimise for, and quietly lose ground on the ones we don’t — soils, oceans, attention, trust, the odds of a genuinely bad century. By a different set of numbers, he is also right.

Both cases are made by serious people with real evidence. The mistake I kept making was assuming one of them had to win.

Hope is not optimism

The line that finally unstuck me came from Cory Doctorow. An optimist, he says, doesn’t bother to equip the Titanic with lifeboats, because the ship cannot sink. Optimism and pessimism are both just predictions — and a prediction tells you to sit still, because the ending is already written. Hope is a different thing. Hope is what you do while the outcome is still open. “Hope is the necessary, but insufficient, precondition for survival.” That stance — not the prediction, but the practice — is the one this site tries to take.

What this is

A living atlas. It asks one honest question at a time — is the world winning against poverty? is it becoming less violent? is the climate stabilising or breaking? — and answers it with open, cited data and plain writing, nothing else. Each question is read at every magnification, from the ten-thousand-year arc down to a single lived day, because the answer usually changes with the distance you stand at. And every reading comes in three temperatures: hope, despair, and confusion — the last of which gets equal billing here rather than a footnote.

Underneath all of it is one idea: progress and catastrophe are both real, at the same time. The work isn’t to pick a side. It’s to be honest about which one you’re looking at, and through which lens. There’s a longer essay on how I got here, if you want the full version.

Who makes this

My name is Bhuvan. I work in finance, and in my own time I build small, one-person websites that try to drag useful things out of wherever they are buried and set them down in plain language. This is one of them.

The others lean the same way. This Indian Life hauls the most important numbers about life in India out of horrible government PDFs and explains them; Akshara digitises public-domain literature and history. A few more carry the same spirit — Seneca, Smallweb, Tipsheet, Paper Lanterns — each a small attempt at one useful thing.

I am not a developer by training; I build these with the help of large language models, which is the only reason one person can attempt them at all. I’m strongest on economics and finance and genuinely shaky on a great deal outside it, so where this atlas wanders past what I know, it leans hard on cited sources and says plainly when it is unsure. You can reach me at bhuvan@bebhuvan.com or @bebhuvan.

License & reuse

The original prose, code, and chart designs are released under CC BY 4.0 ↗ — reuse them freely with attribution to hopeanddespair.world. The source datasets keep their own licences (usually CC BY), credited per article with licence and vintage. Where a source doesn’t allow re-hosting, I link to it rather than copying its numbers. The full terms are here.