I was reading Factfulness when I came across a quote that just wouldn't leave my mind
Do you know why I’m obsessed with the numbers for the child mortality rate? It’s not only that I care about children. This measure takes the temperature of a whole society. Like a huge thermometer.
Childmortality rates is as close to a perfect measurment of wellbeing that I could think of. You could measure how long people live, and that would be fine and well, but those numbers require either a heafty dose of patience or long estimations into the future
Asking people tends to be a though nut to crack, cause we are so influenced by the last few moments before the question and how it's formulated
But dying children? Few can say to not care!
The Data
A quick trip to wikipedia and something pops up at you; China (7.3) is very close to USA (6.3) at 2020:s rate of deaths / 1,000 live births
Of course wikipedia is not a source, let's head to UN for some more legitimacy and accurate data
Graphs!
Estimates generated by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME)2024-03-13
Remarkable progress, both countries have been improving at a rapid rate. However it's hard not to be impressed by how fast China has caught up!
Let's zoom in a bit
They are almost touching at the end, 2022 6.3 vs 6.6. For a more clear comparisson, in table format with some key years
| Year | USA | China |
|---|---|---|
| 1969 | 24.1 | 118.6 |
| 2020 | 6.4 | 7.5 |
| 2022 | 6.3 | 6.6 |
Something is missing here, where is 2023 & 2024? Well, getting good data takes time
But even a cursoury glance into the future shows that if China did not surpass USA in 2023, it certainly did so by 2024 unless the trendlines were sharply broken
China:s Victory!
Remember, children dying bad! This is a victory in the purest sense of the world getting better
And also suprising in how we think of the world
USA is a great power, with financial might and highly developed medicine?
China is a growing power, mostly good at making cheap stuff?
But more children are dying in USA than China?
We can no longer divide the world in this simplistic way. China is not only rising, it has surpassed USA in the measurment that really matter:
Children Not Dying!