Max Roser

In 2019 he worked with Y Combinator on Our World in Data.

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."

Our World In Data covers a wide 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. The publication has more than 1.5 million readers every month (November 2018).

In 2015 research with Tony Atkinson, Brian Nolan and others he studied how the benefits from economic growth are distributed.

In 2012, Inequality and poverty researcher Tony Atkinson hired Roser at the University of Oxford where he collaborated with Piketty, Morelli, and Atkinson. In 2015, he established a research team at the University of Oxford which is studying global development.

Roser's research is concerned with global problems such as poverty, climate change, child mortality and inequality and all his work is available open access. In 2012 and 2016 research publications with Jesus Crespo Cuaresma he studied the history of international trade and its impact on economic inequality. In 2017, he and Felix Pretis found that the growth rate in CO2 emission intensity exceeded the projections of all climate scenarios. In October 2019 he co-authored a major study of child mortality that was published in Nature. It was the first global study that mapped child death on the level of subnational district (17,554 units). The study was described as an important step to make action possible that further reduces child mortality.

In 2011, he started working on 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." During the first years he financed his project by working as a bicycle tour guide around Europe.

About his motivation for this work he wrote "The mission of this work has never changed: from the first days in 2011 Our World in Data focussed 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." Roser has said that global poverty, inequality, existential risks, human rights abuse, and humanity's environmental impact are among the world's most severe problems.

Roser was born in Kirchheimbolanden, Germany, a small village close to the border with France. In 1999, he and a friend won a prize in the German youth science competition Jugend Forscht 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. Roser graduated with degrees in geoscience, economics, and philosophy.

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.