Max Roser

Max Roser (born 1983) is an economist and philosopher who focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality.

Roser is a professor at the University of Oxford, where he directs the program on global development, based at the Oxford Martin School. He is the founder and director of the research publication Our World in Data.

In 2025, he received an honorary doctorate from the Universities of KU Leuven and UCLouvain for his work.

Early life and education

Roser was born in Kirchheimbolanden, Germany, a village close to the border with France. In 1999, he and a friend won a prize in the German youth science competition with a model of a self-navigating vacuum cleaner. ''Der Spiegel'' reported that he travelled the length of the Nile from the mouth to the source, and that he crossed the Himalayas and the Andes.

He has two undergraduate degrees (in geoscience and philosophy) and two master's degrees (in economics and philosophy). Roser completed his doctoral dissertation in 2011 at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

Career

After completing his doctorate, Roser joined the University of Oxford in 2012 under the mentorship of economist Sir Tony Atkinson, a scholar of poverty and inequality. At Oxford, he collaborated with Piketty, Morelli, and Atkinson.

Roser founded Our World In Data, a scientific web publication with the goal to present "research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems."

In the early years, Roser largely built and funded ''Our World in Data'' on his own. During the first years, he financed his project by working as a bicycle tour guide around Europe.

Roser credits Atkinson with encouraging him to share his growing dataset on global living conditions publicly, an idea that directly led to the creation of ''Our World in Data.'' In 2015, he established a research team at the University of Oxford, which is studying global development. In 2019, he worked with Y Combinator on Our World in Data.

Our World In Data covers a range of aspects of development: global health, food provision, the growth and distribution of incomes, violence, rights, wars, technology, education, and environmental changes, among others. The publication makes use of data visualisations which are licensed under Creative Commons and are widely used in research, in the media, and as teaching material.

As of May 2025, his research was cited more than 50,000 times, according to Google Scholar. By 2025, Our World in Data has an annual readership of 100 million people.

Purpose of Our World in Data

Roser said that there are three messages of his work: "The world is much better; The world is awful; The world can be much better". He listed global poverty, inequality, existential risks, human rights abuse, and humanity's environmental impact among the world's most severe problems. He said that "it is because the world is terrible still that it is so important to write about how the world became a better place."

He wrote, "The mission of this work has never changed: from the first days in 2011, Our World in Data focused on the big global problems and asked how it is possible to make progress against them. The enemies of this effort were also always the same: apathy and cynicism."

He is critical of the mass media's excessive focus on single events, which he claims is not helpful in understanding "the long-lasting, forceful changes that reshape our world, as well as the large, long-standing problems that continue to confront us." In contrast to the event-focused reporting of the news media Roser advocates the adoption of a broader perspective on global change, and in particular a focus on those living in poverty. The focus on the upper classes, especially in historical perspective, is misleading since it does not expose the hardship of those in the worst living conditions. Roser advocates looking at larger trends in poverty, education, health, and violence since these are slowly, but persistently changing the world and are neglected in the reporting of today's mass media.

Roser is known for his research on how global living conditions are changing and his visualisations of these trends. He has shown that in many societies in the past, a large share (over 40%) of children died.

One of the project’s most influential contributions came during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 Roser’s team pivoted much of their effort toward collecting and disseminating up-to-date data on the pandemic’s development. They built global databases on vaccinations and testing and built freely accessible tools to see and download all COVID data.

Roser advocates for academics and researchers to openly share their knowledge to benefit the public. “Science that is not communicated is not much help; it is just a stack of papers in a drawer,” Roser wrote. Accordingly, he has made openness a cornerstone of ''Our World in Data'' – not only is the platform free to access, but its content is licensed for free reuse, and even the tools and code are always shared openly.

Research

Beyond building public resources, Roser has contributed original research. Poverty alleviation is a central focus: Roser’s work has examined how poverty is defined and measured worldwide. Roser has criticized the practice of focusing on the international poverty line alone. In his research, he suggests a poverty line at 10.89 international dollars per day. They stated this is the minimum level people needed to have access to basic healthcare. The reason for the low global poverty line is to focus attention on the world's very poorest population. He proposes using several different poverty lines to understand what is happening to global poverty. In 2015 research, he studied with Tony Atkinson, Brian Nolan, and others how benefits from economic growth are distributed. With Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, he studied the history of international trade.

Economic inequality is another major theme of Roser’s academic work, building on his doctoral expertise. In one of his studies, they investigated why median household incomes in many OECD countries have grown more slowly than GDP per capita, exploring factors behind the divergence between overall economic growth and typical living standards. To make historical inequality data more accessible, Roser co-published the ''Chartbook of Economic Inequality'', which presents over a century of inequality indicators for 25 countries.

In the field of global health, Roser has published several studies. In October 2019, he co-authored a study of child mortality. It was the first global study that mapped child deaths at the subnational district level. The study, published in Nature, was described as an important step to make action possible that further reduces child mortality. During the pandemic his team published several studies on COVID-19. He also contributed to a global health textbook. His most cited article, coauthored with Hannah Ritchie and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, is concerned with global population growth.

Another significant research interest for Roser is environmental and climate change. In 2017, Roser and Felix Pretis found that the growth rate in CO₂ emission intensity exceeded the projections of all climate scenarios. Roser’s team at ''Our World in Data'' also publishes data and research on biodiversity, deforestation, CO₂ emissions, and other environmental indicators, providing an empirical basis for discussions of environmental problems.

By the mid-2010s, Roser was a regular speaker at conferences where he presented empirical data on how the world is changing. He has been part of the Statistical Advisory Panel of UNDP. UN Secretary-General António Guterres invited him to internal retreats attended by the heads of the UN institutions to speak about his global development research.

In 2015, Tina Rosenberg wrote in The New York Times that Roser's work presents a "big picture that’s an important counterpoint to the constant barrage of negative world news." In 2013, Angus Deaton cited Roser in his book The Great Escape. His research is cited in academic journals including Science, Nature, and The Lancet.

Data visualization

The data visualization expert Edward Tufte repeatedly cited and reprinted the work by Max Roser in his books.

Roser developed a global cartogram in which the area of each country represents the size of the country’s population. He published it open access and it became widely used in the media (including the FT, The Economist, and in open source applications).

Awards

In 2019, he was listed in second place among the "World’s Top 50 Thinkers" by Prospect Magazine.

In 2019, Our World in Data won the Lovie Award, the European web award, "in recognition of their outstanding use of data and the internet to supply the general public with understandable data-driven research – the kind necessary to invoke social, economic, and environmental change."

In 2021, he received the Covid Innovation Heroes Award "for an outstanding contribution to public understanding for helping people across the world see, and more importantly, understand critical pandemic data."

In 2022, he was selected as one of "The Future Perfect 50", as one of 50 scientists and writers who are building a better future.

In 2025, the Universities of KU Leuven and UCLouvain awarded him an honorary doctorate.

References

External links

*

Max Roser at the Oxford Martin School

Our World in Data
– one of the web publications of Max Roser

Work

The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it
– Our World in Data

The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics
– Our World in Data

The map we need if we want to think about how global living conditions are changing
– Our World in Data

Income inequality: poverty falling faster than ever but the 1% are racing ahead
– The Guardian

‘Seeing human lives in spreadsheets’ – Hans Rosling (1948–2017)
– British Medical Journal (BMJ) – Opinion; February 2017

Why do we not hear the good news?
– Washington Post; December 2016.
Inequality is a Choice
– in Nuffield College Magazine, Issue 18. An edition in the memory of Tony Atkinson.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Roser, Max
Academics of the University of Oxford
People in international development
Male feminists
Living people
German economists
Media critics
1983 births