A living atlas of human progress, suffering, and uncertainty. The world is getting better. The world is getting worse. Both are true.https://hopeanddespair.world/en-ushttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/can-the-world-afford-to-eat-healthy/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/can-the-world-afford-to-eat-healthy/The price of a healthy diet is no longer a vague feeling. It is measured country by country. The news is split: the world is improving again, but billions are still priced out, and the worst places are being left further behind.Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTFoodhttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/can-the-world-create-enough-jobs/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/can-the-world-create-enough-jobs/The largest generation of young people in history is reaching working age, almost all of it in the countries least able to employ it. The same fact is the century's brightest opportunity and its heaviest risk, and nobody yet knows which one it becomes.Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTWork & Jobshttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-air-getting-cleaner-or-deadlier/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-air-getting-cleaner-or-deadlier/The air over the rich world keeps clearing. The air over South Asia keeps thickening. The death toll keeps climbing. Every one of those is measured — and all three are true at once.Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTEnvironmenthttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/are-more-people-learning-to-read/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/are-more-people-learning-to-read/In two centuries the share of adults who can read and write has risen from one in eight to seven in eight. That is one of the great quiet victories of the modern age. It is also only a doorway: a quarter of adolescents never finish lower secondary school, seventy million primary-age children never start, and one in five young people is in no school and no job.Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTEducationhttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-work-getting-better-or-worse/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-work-getting-better-or-worse/More of the world's workers can feed their families than at any point in history. Most of them still have no contract, no safety net, and no certainty about next month. The first fact transformed in a single generation; the second has barely budged in twenty years.Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTWork & Jobshttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-human-progress-slowing-down/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-human-progress-slowing-down/For seventy-five years almost every measure of human well-being improved. The world average is now rising slower than it has in generations. But the average is a fiction: progress did not fade evenly, it split apart.Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTHuman Developmenthttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-world-drowning-in-debt/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-world-drowning-in-debt/Government debt has never been larger, yet the size of the pile predicts almost nothing. What a debt is made of, and who holds it, decides whether it is a tool or a trap. And the trap is tightening on the countries least able to escape it.Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTMoney & Debthttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/are-we-beating-disease-and-death/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/are-we-beating-disease-and-death/The retreat of early death is the best news on Earth, and most people have never heard it. Then the pandemic took a piece of it back — and where you are born still decides whether your child sees five.Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTHealthhttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-electric-car-revolution-real/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-electric-car-revolution-real/One in four new cars sold in the world is now electric, and in China it is more than half. Yet most cars on the road still burn petrol, and an electric car is only as clean as the grid that charges it. The revolution is real; it is also just beginning.Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTEnergyhttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-climate-stabilizing-or-breaking/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-climate-stabilizing-or-breaking/Every measure of the carbon and the heat points one way: up, and faster. The only line bending back is the price of the fix — which is real, and not yet enough to turn the others.Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTClimatehttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-world-running-out-of-children/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-world-running-out-of-children/The average woman now has about two children, half what her grandmother had, and in the richest countries far fewer. It is the quietest revolution of our age, and it is read two opposite ways: a liberation, and a reckoning.Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPopulationhttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/who-shapes-science/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/who-shapes-science/Science is no longer a small Western archive. It is a ten-million-work-a-year machine, increasingly open, increasingly Asian, increasingly collaborative, and still brutally unequal in who gets seen.Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTKnowledgehttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-green-transition-happening/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-green-transition-happening/Solar got about five hundred times cheaper and wind and solar now make a sixth of the world's electricity. The same quarter-century burned more coal than any before it. Both sentences are true, and which one you lead with is the whole argument.Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTEnergyhttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/are-poor-countries-catching-up/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/are-poor-countries-catching-up/The same income data says yes and no at once. Weigh the world by people and the gap is closing fast; weigh it by countries and it barely moves. Which answer you get depends on what you decide to count.Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTWealth & Growthhttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-world-winning-against-poverty/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-the-world-winning-against-poverty/The steepest fall in the history of need — and it stalled, climbed the wrong way up the income ladder, and pooled into Africa. Whether a tenth of humanity is poor or four-fifths of it depends on where you draw a line.Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPovertyhttps://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-humanity-becoming-less-violent/https://hopeanddespair.world/questions/is-humanity-becoming-less-violent/One question, fifteen charts, every one real. The long arc of violence falls hard — and the closer you stand, the worse it looks. This is the verdict read at every distance at once.Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTWar & Peace