Countries in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom — the list goes on — have made childhood much safer in my own 30-year lifetime.1 It’s just something we rarely hear about. I also don’t think that this is a “solved problem”; it is still too common for parents to see their children die, and there’s a lot more that we can do to save their lives. …
It’s only when we look at the relative reduction in child mortality that we see that rich countries have also made impressive progress.
I think it’s important to highlight this point for two reasons.
First, the idea that progress on health has stalled (or even regressed) in rich countries is, I think, a common one. I’ve previously held that view myself. But it’s not true: improved treatments and vaccinations developed by scientists, dedicated care from doctors, midwives, and nurses, health policies developed by governments, and parents’ choices have made things much safer for children even in the world’s richest countries. These efforts were not for nothing: they’ve given kids a future and spared many families the pain of losing a child.
Second, child mortality in rich countries is not a “solved problem”. 23,000 children still die in the United States every year. That’s around 50 times more than the number who die from natural disasters.3 And more than the total number of homicides.4 No one would say that murders in the US are a “solved problem”.
I appreciated reading these passages from Hannah Ritchie’s Children in rich countries are much less likely to die than a few decades ago, but we rarely hear about this progress over at Our World in Data, for both the data and the shift in perspective: