Now we're recording. Let's hope this works.
And maybe we reduce the so that first of all, can you just say your name and your position and affiliation here in Oxford?
Yeah. My name is Max Rosen, and I am the director of the Oxford Martin Program on Global Development.
Thanks very much. And first of all, can you just tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got you're an economist,
how you got interested in that subject in in economics?
Yes, I suppose that was like it took me some time to actually come up with this idea of studying economics.
Now, in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense, but at the time I had no idea.
I come from Germany and somehow, weirdly, economics doesn't have a high status in Germany.
It's not a very it's like it's a much lower status than back then here in the U.K., in the U.S.,
where we have very few economists, like major economists, say the last one was Marx or something.
And so when I started studying at the university, which was in Austria, I studied philosophy and geoscience.
And the idea at the time, which doesn't make that much sense in retrospect,
was that I had these interests, both in philosophy and ethics, but also in numbers and maths and science.
And I thought with geoscience and philosophy, I can somehow combine them into one.
But I think if I had known that economics was a thing,
then this would have been the right overlap between ethical questions and quantitative research or along.
But it took me like I did the two undergrads and I found out about economics, got fascinated by by that research.
I remember whether reading Amartya Sen, an Indian economist that impressed me very much,
it still impressed me very much, then ended up studying economics and later did my PhD in Austria.
And the research topic that I was focusing on at the time was inequality of incomes.
And at the time the big inequality researcher was here at Oxford.
His name is Tony Atkinson, and I randomly sent him an email one afternoon,
sending him my poor research that I was doing there at the time, and he was kind enough to write back.
And a couple of months later he invited me to come here to Oxford and I visited him for four months and thought I'd go home after four months.
But now it's ten years later and I'm still here. And you?
I read that you did a lot of travelling during your studies.
Yeah, I wanted. To what extent that influenced your focus on inequality in a global sense?
It definitely influenced me a lot. Like it's true. Like at the time when I was in Australia I was it was great there.
We had these three month summer breaks and overall undergrads there are a bit more to than over here in Oxford.
So people are just not thinking of doing internships or anything like that.
Everyone just went away. So I like maximised travel over time and actually I had my money that way.
So in the spring I would always go and do bicycle tour guiding across Europe like in
Portugal and Poland and Sweden and France mostly really got some money together.
And then in the summer I would go and travel like three months to Africa,
three months to South America, three months through Asia, like always on the go.
Mm. I don't recall like this moment where it was like it would somehow push me into this research.
But obviously just seeing this vast inequality in the world,
the poverty in most countries in the world really obviously makes you ask the question of what's going on, like how is that possible?
Like why are some people so rich and other people are so very poor, which essentially is the central question of economics.
So I don't recall like a clear path, but somehow it must have been in the back of my mind.
Mm hmm. So you got you arrived here in Oxford in 2012, 2012, 13th February 2012.
And I thought I saw something that said, oh, we're going data started in 2011 which it so had it already.
Yeah. So our world in data existed before you were right.
I mean, like, I started thinking about this project like it didn't exist, so it wasn't actually at the beginning so much tied to Oxford.
Oh, I see. Well, sorry, I should. I jumped ahead a little bit.
So you're you're currently currently mainly known.
For developing this incredible resource world in data.
So what? What was the origin story? I'm building data lake there.
The lake. The origin was really the year before I came to Oxford when I was in Brazil and I was working on my Ph.D. and overall I thought.
It's just not well known enough. Like, I was like when I was like,
like connecting that back to the earlier question about the times and look like I was just not
understanding even the most basic trends of like how living conditions in the world have changed.
I remember sitting in the lecture of Kansas Crespo Quaresma,
who later became a close collaborator and was supervising me during the time of the Ph.D.,
and he was showing these long run trends in declining poverty.
And I just didn't believe them. I thought, that's just made up.
Like it was like. Now it's strange to even think that because so much of the last years I spent researching these questions.
But at the time, I just really didn't know.
And so I thought, like, I am interested in all of these things, like how you travel to all of these places.
I read the newspaper and I don't know even the most basic developments in the world.
And when I was in Brazil, Brazil at the time was was in a much better place.
Like there was a lot of optimism, a lot of like like enthusiasm about the future.
This was good pre bonds. Bolsonaro. Exactly. Yeah. It was 2011.
There was like a period of high economic growth. There was lots of development.
And and also, like, what happens often in poorer places is when they develop, they can develop extremely fast, much,
much faster than the countries where I grew up in, where the development is, is stretched out over decades or centuries.
And so there was like you could just accede with your eyes that people knew,
like how things are changing, how health is improving, how poverty is declining.
And then I thought,
I need to convey that information to others that are not aware of these basic developments and thought I would write a book about it.
And for the book, I started collecting data on all of these relevant aspects, and that got out of hand.
And I still haven't written the book, but I had collected more data than I probably need for a book.
And that turned into the website. Mm hmm.
So, I mean, the website must have involved thinking about how the data needed to be organised and how the data needed to be accessed.
Yeah, exactly. Like that came also later.
Like at the beginning, it was just like there wasn't any plan for building a website.
I was just like collecting that on my, on my computer. I just had these like spreadsheets full of data.
And to a good extent it was actually Tony who I mentioned earlier, the inequality researcher.
I can remember this conversation with him where he published a book on earnings inequality,
and there was 80 countries and he was so frustrated that there was a typo somewhere in a table there.
Like it was a book. It was a book mostly of presenting data in a book format, which obviously is not a great idea.
But the publisher, I think it might have been Oxford University Press thought it was a good idea.
And so they so he had this like 200 page book with tables off the tables at a table and one table on page 70 had a typo,
and he was frustrated that he couldn't fix it and was talking about how it should all be online and really, you know, it's that's not the way to go.
And he was like present quite a bit for publishing data online.
So that was definitely part of the thinking.
And then I started building the websites in maybe 2012, but that was just a project in the evenings and weekends.
My main job was to finish my Ph.D. and to do research on income inequality, and then I kept on doing that for the coming years.
I didn't publish it, I don't think, until 2014, um, maybe 2015.
Um, and just built this website on my computer like I had like a local server running on my computer was building the website there.
I think that the mistake that many founders are doing where you're too shy to actually release
the work to the world and thought it needs to be all like perfect before I put it out.
And that's obviously just a bad idea because you want to actually get the work out,
especially if you don't have any like big reputation or any like risks in this in this regard to learn as quickly as possible from your readers.
But I didn't do that. And in 2014 or 15 it was then online.
I look that up quickly. I wrote this history of our and data for the website,
which goes all the way except like until 2019 and since the pandemic, everything has been so crazy that it is not in the.
May 2014. I exactly. In May 2014, I launched it over the following six months, 20,000 visitors every month.
And at the time, I just couldn't believe it that people would actually visit it.
Like I had like Google Analytics open and it was just like mega excited when,
when someone was like on the website and I saw someone popping up in India or something.
So how many different kinds of data were you collecting and where did you get it from?
Um, I tried like it's I think one reason why I waited so long was that I tried to be very broad.
I tried to cover health and food and hunger and inequality, obviously poverty, economic growth, violence.
So I tried to make it very broad early on because I thought that's kind of the unique angle of of this publication.
And I got it from a rate like it's very it was very similar to how it is now.
It's a range of sources from like things that are very straightforward to to get like the
U.N. data on population figures to things that are somewhere in the middle of a spectrum,
like the appendix of a particular paper where there's like some PDF with some table that you have to convert into,
like an actual spreadsheet that you can use the data. So a bit like middle of the spectrum.
And then sometimes I would produce datasets based on bringing different sources together,
very like what became a very central part of the COVID work much later,
where our job was in many ways to produce datasets and to collate the data from many different sources.
But it wasn't like that at the beginning as well. Mm hmm. So you're aggregating data collected by other lots of different organisations.
And then how were you representing it at the time when you actually presented the to the website publicly?
Yeah, that was also similar to how it is now. Like it was always like it was always a strong focus on data visualisation.
I always thought that there at this small extra step from turning a spreadsheet into an actual visualisation,
a graph or a diagram of some kind of world map. Mm hmm.
Like, actually just provides a lot of value. And I still find it odd how little emphasis there is in the presentation or the publication of data,
where most publications take it to the spreadsheet level,
but then neglect a bit the tools that actually bring this data to life and allow people to interact with it.
And I think that's what made it so appealing to so many people when it first came out.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it wasn't really all that much to it,
like it was just to tell a story that's like a story with my my partner and my girlfriend for many years.
She, like, knew about hours and days before and her dad also knew about it before and he was like excited at seeing our data.
Wrote her an email that I saw that even and she and he is excited that I our in
data access and she was like replying I well obviously I know and data they're
just taking the data from the UN and republishing it in charts which is true like in much of the work that we do is pretty simple in that in that way.
And I mean who were your main users early on?
Do you think it I mean, was it media, was it other researchers?
Was it the general public meeting with her? It was like it was I was definitely surprised that there were many more than I had thought.
That was like just a lot more enthusiasm from non-experts than I had thought.
Like just people who, like, I, I still really like social media and sharing research on social media.
And I was starting that early on in this in those days and it really went well,
like just putting out a nice Web map that shows you when I go to work and I was like, I remember like a very early one was two months.
One was child mortality levels in 1970 and one was tech, which has 11, I guess, in 2011 or something.
And just that contrast of how in all countries in the world, child mortality had declined.
That was interesting to lots of people and lots of people were shared.
So there was always a large share of the population who are just, like, generally interested people.
Mm hmm. And so, I mean, were you able to get funding eventually to get some more people working on it?
Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That was then basically the big next step where I didn't have the ambition at all to.
Search for funding. I didn't think that this would ever become a university project, and it was Tony who pushed for that idea.
He had the idea that really there should be an institution that like carries this work forward,
there should be people like there should be a team of people working on it.
And he had also the idea to approach the Nuffield Foundation in London to ask them for funding.
And then we I wrote the first of many grant applications over £75,000 and they rejected it and sent some referee reports.
And I had to rewrite everything. And ten months later or something they finally accepted it and I got the 75,000
and I started working with the first three colleagues over the summer back then.
And that was I think in 2015. Yeah.
Yeah. And was the work just to build on and expand and make the database better and better?
Or were you within your unit also carrying out your own research on the data that you'd collected?
Um, there's always, I think in the big picture,
I think it's a bit of an unusual project where like maybe the way to think about it is
that there isn't the status of data in especially social science research isn't very high,
oddly enough.
So I think of the natural sciences, it's often a bit better where you can produce a data set, and that's a major publication and people cite it.
And that's that's the way that you have an academic career in the social sciences.
That's not the case.
Like broadly, they're the models is that you produce a data set and then you analyse the dataset and you answer a particular question.
And that's the thing that that gets you an academic career.
But producing a data set as such isn't regarded as, as a, as a valuable contribution, which I think is, is a big mistake.
There's a lot of emphasis on on methods of analysing that data on statistical methods, econometrics in economics.
But if you have crappy data, then all of your fancy statistical methods don't help you that much further either.
So I think there should be a bit of a rebalancing where the status of data is is higher.
And so in some respects, like in that respect, this project has always been unusual.
Where I often left it at, here's the best data that we can produce.
Like it's not for others to make use of that data and, and take it forward.
And that's has been very much the case for COVID, especially where our work was not to analyse what we can learn from the data about,
I don't know, lockdowns or vaccinations or any travel restrictions,
but all of these many questions that people might ask based on this data,
our job was always sort like the way that I thought of our work was we bring we bring the global
data together in one place so that others have the basis on which they can do it in their research.
And that has always been has also been true before.
So we always do some research, but the balance is different,
I think from most academics where our focus is more on the data production and data presentation and not so much on the research.
And moving on from just academics, you would think that this kind of data is what policymakers should be basing their decisions on.
Do you think data has been neglected by policymakers? I mean, obviously the question is always the answer is always, yes, you do it like this.
But I mean, maybe I'm not so down on them like that's so pessimistic on it.
I think I think COVID has been like this kind of intense statistical data literacy course for the entire world.
And I think overall it has gone pretty well like there was there was obviously there
was like misuse of data and people like twisting the data and in unhelpful ways.
But by and large, I think I was like happy to see how, how the, how central the data was in the arguments of policymakers talking about with them.
Yeah. Yes, we even go it go. Oh I see. No, I'm I'm really thinking about when you started the project, you think data with less was less of a thing.
Yeah. A policymaker. So yeah I think overall the last ten years where.
Ten years in which the status of data and the use of data has increased just in all spheres from journalism to policymaking.
So I think this is really going in a good direction.
Obviously, anyone, everyone who's working in that wishes we would be much further and is annoyed by all of the problems.
But I think it's it's been it's now less neglected than it was back then.
Mm hmm. And just to sort of summarise what again, before you got to it.
The the the content of the data was or is geared towards essentially how how good a life people have.
Is that. If you could narrow it down to to what it's relevant to.
It's relevant to how well people are living in whichever country there.
Yeah, I think that's that's like fair.
Like now we usually frame it around the world's largest problems, which obviously includes a lot of progress and shortcomings around how people live.
But it's also a bit broader than that. It also includes especially non non-human animals and the biosphere around us.
Like there's been a lot of work by my colleague Hannah Ritchie on on those topics.
So it's not just about living conditions. It was also, to a large extent around the world more broadly.
But overall, I, I very much want it to be a publication of data that's relevant to how people to people's living
conditions and what it means for people to live at that particular time in that particular place.
So lots of data that's available in the world doesn't fit that.
We're not presenting data on sports where maybe sports is also relevant to how
people think about it or financial data or like all of these aspects don't.
I'm not I'm not so much part of the focus.
It's it's really problems that people have and the progress that we might achieve against these problems and the world's biggest problems that.
How many are there? Are there just a large number of them.
But I mean, what are the top five? The top five, I would think.
I mean, like the highest level, it's kind of like global health and early death.
It's hunger and poor nutrition.
It's all of the economic aspects from centrally about poverty.
Um, it is all of the, a range of environmental problems from climate change to biodiversity losses.
Um, it's existential risk or catastrophic risks of very large scale risks, including pandemics,
but also, for example, the worst case wars or nuclear, the use of nuclear bombs.
Um, access to education and the quality of education is a big topic.
Um, the functioning of the public sector and the provision of public goods from global health to education to social care, that range of, of aspects.
It's a long list, but yes, yeah, those are some of the. And you are capturing or letting in a few spreadsheets and a lot of spreadsheets.
That's right. Yeah. So let's okay, let's arrive at COVID now.
So can you remember where you were when you first heard about the the what was going on in China
and how it might look that it looked as if it might affect beginning it become a global problem,
right? Yes, I do. I remember very well I had lunch maybe on the early January, like maybe 7th of January or something in George Street.
And I had a burger and I was reading a message from a friend of mine who was here at the university as well,
Moritz Kramer, who is an expert in infectious diseases.
And he was sending me some data from China and was telling me about how his sick worried and getting interested in what's what's happening there.
He was like looking at travel out of China to understand whether that disease might possibly spread.
I mean, it was very early days where it was still a bit of a debate of whether human to human transmission was possible.
Like it's like, yeah, feels very far removed now.
Yeah. Early January was the first time I came across it.
Mm hmm. And how soon was it? How long was it before you?
Thought that that that our the data should be collecting data on the pandemic itself.
Like the week after I went to South Africa and I was in South Africa for the rest of January
and then in Tanzania for early February because my partner is doing research in Africa.
And so we were further away from from like The Daily News and what's going on there.
I was also further away just from work.
Um, I was working from there, but less so like we were like in some remote places there and that I think like slowed things down.
Like, I wish I obviously it was great to be in South Africa and Tanzania,
but I think it slowed things down a bit and it was really only when I came back from there that we started working on it.
And I was I was definitely worried when I was in Africa. I remember being worried about travels and I thought like, this guy has gone crazy.
Like, what's he talking about? Why is he worried about travel suddenly?
Um, and then I had actually told this story yesterday because we had like a similar conversation last night.
Um, I think the real, like a real big moment was Marc Lipsitch, you know, the epidemiologist at Harvard.
Um, he, he was at some point early February, he was saying he suspects now I don't want misquote him,
but I think 70% of the world would eventually have COVID or some like majority of the world would have COVID at some point.
And I like I was in bed reading this and I remember thinking like, that's just insane.
Like, what's he talking about? But then it was I was thinking like, I wouldn't quite know why he would be wrong.
So that, that like realisation that there's really nothing that stops this from going from the couple of hundred or a thousand cases
currently in China to just billions of cases was when I like got worried but I wasn't still that wasn't quite the time when um,
when we worked on it because we, we initially like, we thought it's not our job.
I, I mean, we're talking about, I'm, uh, my research focus was poverty.
It's not infectious diseases or pandemics. We had the bad luck.
That's on the 1st of January 31st of December, I guess a colleague who is an expert on infectious diseases on influenza just left us.
She took on a new job in Seattle. So we were also lacking someone in the team with the expertise.
So we were thinking we shouldn't really like we should stay in our lane and should focus on those things that we understand and shouldn't.
Yeah, like we shouldn't create any misinformation.
We were just worried that we would do do something wrong. So we stayed like we stayed away from it until late in February.
And then late in February there was, there was a weekend where I, I basically say then I was like, I didn't sleep much.
Like I was just constantly working on the data, looking at like trying to understand what the researchers are saying.
And I was I was thinking, this is going to be very, very, very, very bad.
I, I, I got very worried at the end of February.
And then we also and then I think and and then like,
I think one crucial aspect was early on was that there was lots of news reporting on case counts here in the UK.
There were these headlines of, um, there are four cases found in Bristol, there are three cases found in Bath or like these very low case counts.
And I think the, the messaging from the media and from many commentators online was, don't worry, these numbers are tiny.
But the crucial thing that was missing there was that there were also no tests.
And if there are no tests, you also don't find cases.
So nobody knew about asymptomatic transmission then I thought, yeah, exactly.
Like and maybe the, the epidemiology is, was for others to comment on.
But I thought like and other colleagues, Esteban Ortiz Ospina, a close colleague in the team,
Joe Haskell, Hannah Ritchie and others, they were pointing out that around the around the testing.
There's actually some data work to be done.
Countries were starting to say something like they were like there was no spreadsheet with with with the number of tests,
but they were like press statements or something from the health minister or something about like how many tests have been done.
And so we thought, we need to communicate that. You won't find many.
You won't find more cases than there are tests done and there are not many tests done.
So I think that's the crucial information for you to know if you want to make sense of these low case counts.
That was the one thing. And the other thing was just the power of of exponential growth.
Exactly. Yes. I guess like there's this quote of the biggest flaw, the human mind, is that it's not able to understand exponential growth.
And I think in the early days of oh, maybe throughout the pandemic, but especially in the early days of the pandemic, it was like on full display,
just like how how that that knack of that understanding was was in the way of people understanding where this might be, might be going.
And that that weekend was like the turning point. And then we shifted into, like, intense mode for the weeks after.
Mm hmm. So you began by collecting data on tests.
What what other data did you move on to collect?
Yeah, the test was an early one, but I had like, that's another aspect that was, was like triggering this.
The data that was published at the time was from the show was that it's the first source that we turn to and the and they and
then we thought like one thing that we could usefully do is to turn like the way that they presented that data was in PDFs.
So they had every day a status report or what they called it.
And there was a table in that PDF just listing the number of cases in the various countries.
And so we thought, well, like one thing that would make this a whole lot better is if someone copies these numbers from this spreadsheet,
from these PDFs and puts them into a spreadsheet.
And so Hannah and I were on the calls every morning, like Hannah Ritchie, my, my colleague, for many years.
And we would just type up the the PDFs from the W.H.O.
So she would be like, I don't know where she was.
Maybe she was here or I know like they must have had a spreadsheet to get the PDF and it stayed like this for ages,
like it was, it was crazy, but they just didn't have it in a spreadsheet online.
And then she would be on the call with me and then she would be like. Philippines 12.
Thailand four. Uh, China 3412.
And I would just like typing these numbers every morning.
And then like after we did this for like three days, I was maybe on the second day we realised that there were just like many flaws,
like the number of cases, like the number of cumulative cases up to yesterday was higher than the number today or something like that.
So just like obvious errors in the data.
So then we got even more worries. And did you communicate with W.H.O.?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. We like we wrote to them like like we stayed throughout the street and we stayed in close contact with the people there.
Um, and then we also got in touch with the European CDC.
They would, I think they were doing really excellent statistical work.
The Centres for Disease Control.
Yeah, because they are in Stockholm and they also reported case counts, um, death counts then globally or just the European,
you know, globally that they had some of the data they only did for Europe.
But the case in death comes, they did for a long time and they did it globally.
And it was quite the heroic effort by those guys.
They were up, I think in the in March we were having calls with them and they were always up like at 4:00 in Stockholm or something.
And like that remained true for a very long time that the data publication in
many countries was like much worse than you could imagine or you would hope.
And so they would have to go to various different websites, to social media accounts, typing up the case codes and death counts.
And the European CDC did a really good job there early on.
And then we thought, okay, like now there's another opportunity for us to actually do some useful work where we take the data
from the CDC and make it available in these tools that we have the web maps and line charts.
And all of this, like what we talked about earlier,
is doing this kind of extra step from the spreadsheet to do something where you can actually use it.
But that was also not that easy. That was like maybe early March then.
Like in February. I was still doing this with some other tools.
I was using data recorder and Google spreadsheets,
and I was doing this one off visualisations because our main tool that we intended to develop wasn't set up to report daily data.
So a tour was set up to show changes over centuries or decades.
And so this the shortest interval that the data a model could could handle was years, but not days.
And we were a tiny team. We were six at the time.
And the the engineers, the data at and the web developers in the team who were two at the beginning, they were saying, oh my God,
this is going to be just going to take us a long time to turn this into a tool that
can actually handle daily data and that which would work with with this demand.
But then we had a new colleague just joining on the 1st of March. We hired him weeks before.
So that was his first day of work. Brett Units and Brett came in and worked through the night or two nights like
incredibly fast and turned this whole thing around and like actually made it possible,
like, very hacky. But he made it possible to actually present daily data.
There's still like there was like in the back end of our tour, there was like a checkbox that says something like a year is day.
So and then the days are stored as like as years.
So it was a very hacky solution, but it works.
And then in early March, we, we did those things we like.
We showed the testing data soon. I'm not quite sure when that happened, but early and in March,
I guess we showed the European CDC data soon and in much of the communication we tried to emphasise exponential growth.
There was another tool that Daniel got rid of, another engineer,
another developing the team developed where we thought it's just hard to understand exponential growth as like in percentage increase per day.
So we would focus on the doubling time. That was the idea at the time.
That's what I always imagine.
Lily Somebody talks about lily ponds and it's how you your lily pond gets to have COVID and then the next day it's fully covered.
And so that's how I cope with exponential growth.
Yeah, it's just so much more intuitive that you go for 50%, 100% in one go and right?
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So then he built this tool that would reading the data every day.
And then for all the countries in the world, it would show the current doubling time.
And we would see like it's five days here, seven days here, and you would see these double to date.
And times are short. If. If. Hmm.
Mm hmm. And did you have to write?
Were you able to raise more funding or did you get more funding to increase the size of your team?
Yeah. So we were like funding was quite crucial, I guess.
So sort of like thinking about it in this, uh, um, like university discourse that we're in,
um, because it was really crucial was that we didn't have restricted funding.
So we were always keen to not allow funders to interfere with what we want to do with our data.
And that was really crucial at the beginning of the pandemic because it allowed us to shift from one day to the other.
Yeah, yeah.
So we didn't have any like deliverables or something that were like lined up where we would have to finish some paper or a report or something.
So there was like we were just free to say, okay, we're not doing climate change for next month at least we're now doing, we're not doing COVID.
Um, so that was, that was good.
Like, the funders were just great.
They're, um, which now helps me to make this case to future funders and that, that we would get unrestricted funding.
Um, and then some, um, some more funding came in like during the following months.
But it took a bit of obviously like the main,
the main focus was just to work on the data and make sense of the data, clean the data, find the best sources,
compare different sources against each other, try to speak with epidemiologists, learn from them whether what we are doing is sensible.
Like what I said earlier, that we were worried that we don't have an expert. So we were like lots of epidemiologists were just really helpful.
Natalie Dean I remember she was she was great. And. Giving us feedback.
She was in Miami at the time. I think she's now at a different university.
Eric Topol was was great early on helping us.
Adam Kucharski from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Jason Hendry.
Moritz Kramer Like lots of people who are experts in the field, Benedetta is herself Benedetta that a native who left us just a few months earlier.
All of them were really great in giving us feedback where we were trying to make sure that we are not spreading any misinformation,
that what we are doing is correct. And it was that typical of the way you worked?
I have. Another thing I'm interested in is the extent to which work that was undertaken as a result
of the pandemic was more or less collaborative than the way you'd worked previously.
So have you always been in constant touch with experts?
Yeah, I think that's true. Like, I mean, we were always a small thing.
We're still a small team, and so we can't be experts in all these different subjects and the like.
That's, I think, the big advantage from being orthodox of Martin School,
where it's this interdisciplinary department that brings people together from many different disciplines.
It's also the advantage of being at Oxford, where you just have experts on pretty much anything that you ever would need an expert on.
So we are we always ask people you just mentioned we're not in Oxford.
Those were all elsewhere. Some of them were they? Moros were us.
Jason was serious. Some, some some were here.
And I'm sure, like, I forget really important people who helped us.
Do that. I think you answered the question that that that collaborative way of working was typical of the way you worked anyway.
So it wasn't as if it was a new thing for you. No.
Yeah, but we were definitely like it was just that everything was just faster and way more intense than ever before.
Like in Mojave. Like I. But often slept in the office.
Like, because, like, I would wake up in the middle of the night and think of something new.
I would try to minimise the hours of sleep that I had.
So I was for like I would put a mattress in next to my desk and just like crash there for a couple of hours when, uh, when I was too tired.
But I would do the building not close. I mean, were you able to come into the.
No, no, I was at home. Oh, yeah. I have an officer home. Yeah.
I mean, yes. Yeah. Like there's a like a guest room kind of.
Right. And I put the the desk there and that and put a mattress there.
Uh, actually, I had enough from. From the racking up in the middle of the night to do our not fighting sleep like.
Yeah. So it would just, like, physically live in that, in that room.
Mm hmm. And, yeah, spending a lot of time on calls, presumably on.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There was, like, lots of.
Cause, like, there was also a, like a a difficult thing was that we just hired we were six before the pandemic.
We just hired four colleagues or so. So we would from 6 to 10.
That's I mean, that's almost doubling. So there was also a lot of growth in the team.
We had to onboard the new colleagues. They were entering the team at this moment of like absolute madness.
So that that came on top of it. Some of them were in the US.
So basically my day was always in like two shifts where I would do the mornings.
Hannah wakes up at like four or five, she works up, wakes up really early.
So I would work with her in the mornings. Then after lunch I would sleep for 2 hours and then I would do a night shift
with the people who are in Americas and many calls trying to coordinate that,
that everything's moving forward. And. And this could work.
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And yes, I mean, did you go beyond the testing and the and the the cases and deaths data?
What other kinds of kinds of data did you built into your system?
Yeah, so that grew over time.
I think in another early Oxford project where we worked together here with many colleagues from the university was on policy measures.
That's a team that's based at the Blavatnik School of Government, although the Global Governance Tracker.
Yeah, yes, yes. I've interviewed under Patrick. Oh, yeah.
Yes. And I had a question specifically about that. But now you've you've pre-empted me now.
No, I mean, yes, I was interested in the extent to which.
Apart from that one, because there are other people who collect and present data like Johns Hopkins, for example.
What how did you fit into this kind of ecosystem of data aggregators?
Yeah. So Johns Hopkins.
Johns Hopkins, they were also early. We didn't use them early because we thought the quality, I guess, of European CDC was just higher.
Um, Johns Hopkins was always done by volunteers. Oh, really?
I didn't realise that. Yeah, like, it's. I mean, they have a team there that was coordinating the work at like at the university.
But many of the contributions and the updates of the data, the changes of the data, they were all coordinated through GitHub and there was, um,
and I think overall they did an amazing job,
but I think early on we were sometimes a bit worried that they weren't as responsive as we would have wanted.
And we thought that the European CDC was more on top of things and thought they did a better job.
Um, we later then switched to the Johns Hopkins data when the European CDC stopped doing daily updates.
Right. But that was more than a year later.
Yeah. Now we're we're data from that coordinated by the Johns Hopkins colleagues.
And early on, what like we definitely did a lot of data then on like variations of the same.
Like, I mean sometimes these things are so trivial,
like the case counts and the death counts that are published by the European CDC were daily figures,
but there was there was obviously part, obviously, but there was less reporting on weekends because people had fewer tests.
So you would have this these weekly patterns in the data.
So you would want to smooth this data and look at a seven day moving average or a 14 day moving average.
And overall, it's like a bit odd maybe for people who are familiar with working with data and statistics,
but for especially for journalists, that's very helpful if someone actually turns the daily figures into a seven day moving average.
So even these small things of presenting a seven day moving average of the same metric
is is helpful for many journalists because they can they can then directly use it.
Another crucial thing there was to always publish the data in the same place,
because lots of the data sources would constantly shift and like the UK I think eventually did.
Amazing in presenting that data, what it like was one of the best countries in presenting the data,
but early on it was shifting around quite a lot and it was difficult for journalists or
epidemiologists also to access the data because suddenly it has shifted to another place.
The format has changed. The the column labels in the in the spreadsheet have changed.
And so if you have the column labelled hardcoded in your in your analysis, then it just messes up with your analysis.
So like standardising all of that data, that was that was very crucial early on.
But you asking about other data that we saw like exactly like we did the tests and then a thing that
we spend a lot of energy on is trying to get people to understand the importance of the positive rate.
So the share of tests that come back positive as an indicator for whether a country is testing enough or not,
where the basic idea is, if a lot of your tests come back positive, then you might miss a ton of other tests.
And um, when on the other hand the positive rate is very low, then it means your testing is, is at a large scale and relative to the, to the outbreak.
And we try to spend a lot of energy explaining the value of that metric, which took a really long time.
Um. And then these days we're publishing many, many more metrics, but those were added later.
I think the next big change was at the end of March, maybe when the first excess mortality data became available.
Whether that was from NASA, was it here for the UK like I think at the beginning of the people who have especially interested in Italy?
Oh, yes. Just because that was two weeks or so happening earlier than than elsewhere.
So then there were like the first reports coming out of Lombardy and the regions there in the north of Italy,
suggesting that excess deaths were just very high.
And so the number of confirmed deaths of confirmed cases was a huge undercount of what was actually going on.
That's gotten a lot of attention. And then that data became available from more and more countries.
And we worked with colleagues here at the university analysing this data.
John Mutambara and Janine Aron Um, we were then coordinating also with journalists.
I mean that's also a very interesting aspect to think about that a lot of this early data was done by journalists and which was I mean,
which is really frustrating. It's, it should really be the W.H.O. who's on top of it.
But it was in many cases journalists who did amazing work.
I just yeah. Like and at that, in addition to communicating after work, they just collated a lot of data and and did a really amazing work.
Amazing job. And it was people like The Economist I thought was, was really great because they were publishing everything, open access immediately.
Um, so they would also allow others to actually scrutinise the quality of the data.
They made it available to others to access the data.
The New York Times, that amazing in the US bringing together the data like even early in February, I think not quite sure about that,
but they started very early bringing together the data because the US was lacking an agency that would bring together, um, countrywide statistics.
Um, and that was also then true for the access.
That's where there were many calls with the people from The Economist trying to make sense of that data.
And that was then a big theme in going into April.
And then the next really big change was vaccinations.
So that that was I think that was. So then the summer came, we like things were quiet where we're becoming a bit more quiet.
Um, I was able to go home and see my parents family in Germany.
Um, I had a bit of a break. Um, but we were very sure that the next winter was going to, was going to be tough.
So we were like spending the summer preparing our tours and like getting everything cleaned up so that we would be ready for the next winter.
And then in the next winter things were pretty intense again.
So we were like very tired, everyone in the team.
And then on just before Christmas, like I wasn't like just reporting deaths and disease all day long.
It was like just not nice. So just before Christmas, then finally the vaccines were approved and we were just excited that this was happening.
So we thought, Oh, amazing, let's do this nice map where we can actually use the colour green instead of red.
And we showed that like now the first vaccine there was this elderly woman here in the UK.
Yeah, I remember like December 2020 as a, we only had like one data point.
It would like this, we all just got the vaccine, but we were not thinking that this would become a big theme then.
Edwards And what Matua is, is now the head of the data team.
He joined us early in 2020. He was a friend of mine.
He's a friend of mine, but he was a friend before. And he like he was like he has had quite the extraordinary 2020 that he got in touch with me.
And in March 2020, he was saying, Hey, I'm seeing that you're doing a lot of this COVID work.
I'm locked. I'm in lockdown in in Paris.
I have time. I know how to work with data.
If you have anything that you need my help with, just let me know.
And then two weeks later, actually, I think on the testing data, we were like, yeah, we actually hopefully if we would have some, some help on that.
So anyway, I started working in maybe March or April to.
Early 20:20 a.m. And he was amazing.
He was like from the start, we did an amazing job coordinating the work of others,
like just doing very high quality work and communicating it also very well to journalists,
to social media, to epidemiologists that were relying on us.
And so he did more and more, and he ended up doing two full time jobs.
So he had like this job from 8 to 4 for his like regular job in in France and then from four to midnight.
Or is that. Yeah, I guess that's another 8 hours.
He would work with us. So we had like full two full time jobs and he was just working constantly.
So he was also retired from Libya. At some point. He obviously dropped out that first job, but he still kept on working a lot.
And then at night, end of the year, when I was saying that,
we were like happy that we could finally report some positive developments and we had these vaccines.
He was like, Ah, we should really maybe think about bringing the vaccinations data together.
Like obviously it will be soon. The World Health Organisation that that will release this data, they do the COVAX initiative and so on.
So it'll be then, but we could just start and do a weekly update so it's not going to be too intense.
We just do it weekly and I have for some stupid reason, thought that this was like a reasonable approach.
So I said, Yeah, let's do that. Sounds fun. And then it became probably one of the most intense periods like early 20, 21 was,
was very intense because this vaccine rollout happened much more categorically than people had hoped.
There was many, many rich countries did very poorly.
My home country, Germany, I was very frustrated by how slowly everything happened.
There was this story that Israel did, this incredibly fast rollout.
So there was this huge discrepancy which was like constantly in the headlines.
And we had started putting this data together and suddenly we were responsible for that job.
That was like one thing like during the pandemic that we learned.
Like whenever you start doing something,
then the the first minute people are thankful that you do it and the second minute they demand that you do it and in the perfect quality all the time,
every day without a break. And if the data of some small country isn't updated Sunday at 10:00, then you get in like, yeah, you get emails like often.
Also like I think we all sort of struggled because these emails were often not nice where people are
just like everything was so political that people would see some political motive in whatever you do.
Like if you've, if you've updated, if you've not updated the data for that country in the last 4 hours,
then it's because you have this vendetta against this particular country and you don't like their right wing or left wing government.
And like I have no idea who was even in power in these places.
It's really far from the truth, but they would to see some kind of motive in whatever is happening.
And if you would update the data, then the other people would be like, Oh,
you're just updating it because you want to let them shine in the best light.
Or it was like so much of this kind of emails is coming our way and social media of just people being angry for no good reason.
And that happened a lot. And this vaccine work.
And then weirdly, the WTO just never got a lot, got around to actually publishing this data on the vaccine.
So for many, many weeks, it was Edward sitting in his in his kitchen in Paris building this data that everyone relied on,
that every newspaper in the world was relying on his data.
And it was he was getting it from individual health services, health executive departments.
And if so, he would get it like from like he would spend the morning or the day just going through all of the different websites,
which you would hope is there some place where you can actually find the data in the spreadsheet and you could just read it in?
And some countries obviously did that. And then he built this great place that would take the data out of the spreadsheet
and put it in a spreadsheet and job was done and you can automate that.
But many countries didn't do it like that. So then it was there were places where they just released the vaccine counts in press conferences.
So then he's sitting there listening to a press conference in Hungarian of the assistant to the Health Minister.
And you have to figure out what the word for second dose in Hungarian is so that
you can hopefully find something like a slide or something in that because.
Taken to type up the number, or it'd be countries where they would only release the numbers in a photo,
like in a kind of like a screenshot of, of a table in social media.
So you would need to know the Facebook page of the health minister of that country,
because that's where that country is, that the only place where that country would release the numbers.
So he would like piece that together from all these various places.
And that's how he'd remained for the first quarter of 2021, which was the time when the the infection rates were going up a lot as well.
Yeah, yes. I'd say that there was this big wave here in the UK just after New Years in particular, I think very early January 2021.
And we have the data here. Yes, I'm sure you do. You can look it up how this works.
But yeah. And then it was this one.
Yes. Yeah. So like it peaked on January 10th, so.
Yeah. And here it's like during Christmas was this underreporting for sure right away.
Like just few tests were done. But there was this. Yeah, first massive wave and second massive wave.
And then after that there was a lot of work with the vacc, the various variants that became a big theme.
Um, where we were like one variant was following the next and it was this covariance dot org team that made this data like the,
presented this data based on the G as a IDE, uh, sets on these, on these variants.
And then access steps became like obviously also a big state, a big one in excess deaths.
I think one of the, like I was praising The Economist earlier,
but like I think the most useful thing that they did was to present estimates
of excess deaths for countries around the world and call it they're quotes.
Sandra in uh at the economist did this this project where they tried to estimate how many how many
people and you try to estimate a baseline of how many deaths you would expect in normal years.
And you try to then, um, calculate the difference between what you observing and what you are, what you, what you would expect.
And those excess deaths are available for,
for many rich countries because in rich countries there are good records of the number of deaths from past years.
So you can use that as a baseline to compare it with. But most countries in the world don't actually have these despite those statistics,
and often the majority of deaths aren't actually recorded at the births on record as the number of people are unreported.
So like all of that data is lacking. So you can't calculate excess deaths.
It's not trivial to estimate that,
but I think it was very crucial to to do that because the world was focusing very much on the number of confirmed deaths.
And in rich countries, that's a reasonable number to know, like how many people have actually died due to the pandemic.
But in many poor countries, it's a huge undercount, surely,
of the number of people that have actually died because the testing is so low, because the vital statistics on there.
And so these estimates of excess mortality, I think were very crucial.
I think it was like one of the maybe yeah, I think it was one of the most important projects throughout the pandemic that
he and his colleagues did this to these estimates of excess deaths throughout.
And it's still frustrating. Like I have now seen several emails to the people at The Guardian because if you go to the Guardian website,
they have a tracker of how the pandemic is going.
Let's make sure that I'm not spreading misinformation, but I think it's still like this COVID tracker, uh, corona virus here.
Which countries have the latest global COVID data?
Total deaths, 6.5 million. And that's just the light. Like they're just spreading lies.
And I told them many times that this is not true. Like there were obviously many more deaths than the 6.5 million, with 6.5 million confirmed deaths.
That's the case. But confirmed deaths are a fraction of the number of total deaths in the world.
Because in the most poor. Countries. A few of the deaths are only recorded.
And so I think throughout the pandemic, because of these kind of practices from from journalists in particular,
the world has been just misinformed of the severity of of what was actually happening.
If you compare it with these estimates on excess deaths that are now available from three major sources,
the economist that does these weekly updates of it,
the W.H.O. and the NIH and here in Washington, all of their estimates are around 23 million deaths or so.
So like news outlets like The Guardian, they are under understate the severity of of what was actually happening by.
Yeah. Like it's it's a it's a quarter of what they're actually reporting as the number of deaths.
What I mean the next map they on this website is just as much of a nonsense like which countries currently
have the highest case rates you can't know this from this is no testing exactly as again there's no testing.
Like it's it's crazy. Like how which countries currently have the highest death rates?
It's just not true that no one is dying in Africa. No. And and I think because of this because of this information,
there's also not enough initiative to actually share the vaccines with with
the poorer countries that actually the new data is coming from Johns Hopkins.
Yeah, but it's it's just the number of confirmed deaths. So they need to explain that.
Yes. Mercifully, that is that these numbers are just a fraction of what's going on.
So these excess deaths, I thought, were like very valuable projects.
And that's that's included now in your in your data. Yeah.
Yeah. Which which is great that they make it publicly available.
Mm hmm. So you don't I interrupted very rudely when you started talking about your
collaboration with the people at Blavatnik and the Government Response Tracker.
Oh, yeah. They're, um, yeah, they did this very helpful data bringing together all of the policy interventions that were happening at the time,
which countries closed their schools, which countries restricted large gatherings and they made it all available for on their website.
They benefited a lot from the, uh, alumni community of the Blavatnik School.
They have people in all corners of the world, so they would report from their home countries and what's happening.
Um, so it'd be possible for somebody to look at what they collected about what governments did with what you collected about death rates,
you know, case rates and make draw some conclusions about the effectiveness of policy making.
Yes, exactly. Like and that happened a lot, uh, during the during the pandemic.
There was, I was part of this group I have to look up.
They had some complicated acronym. Um, I was it of.
First. Oh, is it called?
Like we had this working group with, with a number of epidemiologists coordinated by the UK government.
That was, that was very much trying to, to do those analysis of what can we actually learn from,
from how other countries are reacting to the pandemic.
And they would very much rely on the data from from their colleagues at the School of Government and don't quite know where the name is.
Yeah. So, I mean, how would you assess how well policymakers around the world used the data that was available?
Because there were as I said, there were a number of groups who worked extremely hard to aggregate data in in different ways.
So there was in a way, there was no shortage of no deficit of information.
But policymaking was was very different.
And policy decisions were very different in different countries. That's right.
Yeah. Well, so I was kind of trying to make the point that this was was going well in many ways.
I don't know. It was also obviously frustrating. Like I was very frustrated with Germany, which I thought did quite well early on in the pandemic,
especially compared with other countries were especially that took testing very seriously scaled up testing early on.
Um developed some of the tests in, in Germany.
Just used them early on. Um, and one of the vaccines was developed in a German lab.
Oh yeah. That's like local patriotism. Like, that's just done this.
That's very close from where I grew up. Their own minds and.
And the place where I grew up is 20 minutes from there. Exactly.
Like not a big. The company is called Biontech, founded by the daughter and son of Turkish immigrants who came to to the area where I'm from,
uh, a couple of decades ago and it was developed by then, but they needed a partner that could produce them at large scale.
So they worked with Pfizer like it's mostly known as the Pfizer vaccine and trying to keep the patriotism going.
And and they keep on referring to it that the biontech vaccine.
But he added they did amazingly well then build one of these first MRA vaccines.
But it was the actual approval of the vaccination rollout that Germany was slow on that.
Right. Um, the, the approval I think was, was with the other European countries and that was like the Europeans.
It was an EU. Yeah. The European Medical Agency is what it's called.
Um, uh, no.
But they was like, I think what was frustrating on, on the vaccine rollout was that they hadn't purchased many vaccines before,
before the vaccine was approved and they were too hesitant, like also like in coordination with the European Union.
But that was definitely frustrating. I think there were so many good ideas on what's called an advance market commitment, uh, to,
to finance such and such goods that don't exist yet that you, that you, that, that, that there's an advanced market for such goods.
There were so many good ideas around it had to have it had worked for other vaccines in the past.
Michael Cramer and Drexler Glenister um,
well mostly famous as development economists and develop these ideas many often for use these ideas for
development um policies they put them all in place just the decade before it was all ready to go like it.
I think the world could have moved much faster if that was more widely adopted.
The US did it to a good extent with this.
Um, what was it called? The Project Warp Speed.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yeah. Yeah. And the COVAX, AMC that the W.H.O. and others coordinated was also using that.
But I think on the European level, from what I understand, this could have been used more.
But what I meant, like why I was frustrated, was just how like the winter 20, 20, 20, 21,
I think Germany's very pretty where it was clear where things were heading and the it was election times during this very
federal country where the individual states have a lot to say and the coordination between the states took very long until.
Actions were actually taken. And I think then the restrictions had to be had to have been had to be much more
severe than than what would have been possible and maybe otherwise testing.
We could have been like way further at that point in time and wasn't used as much.
And um, I never thought that slipped my mind.
But you said when we were talking earlier, before, before we really got into talking about COVID,
you did say that you felt that the experience of the pandemic had raised the status of of data generally.
Right. And do you think that's dissipating now, or do I mean these that there's so much madness going on politically at the moment?
We're talking in in the beginning of September 2022.
Right. And that a lot of the political debate that's going on at the moment, if you can even call it that,
seems not to be focussed on what the real problems are, the big problems, the really big problems that you've been talking about.
From a UK perspective, I mean it probably happens a bit elsewhere as well.
I mean, that's for sure. That's right.
Like, I wish obviously that was what would be better, but I think lots of people learned to interpret data in ways that that it was just,
I think, impressive to see the quality of the conversation even on social media that's often given such a bad reputation.
I thought it was often great to see how people discuss growth rates and doubling times and oh numbers and ah and our know it's,
I think it's encouraging to see to see that and and I would not think that this goes away.
I think the world is moving into a direction where, uh, an understanding of numbers is just much more at the centre of, of debate between people.
Yes. Like there's a lot of screaming on the big political platforms,
but I think lots of people are are getting a bit of a more nuanced understanding based on on data and evidence.
Mm hmm. And do you think as far as the general public is concerned, I mean, you know, I come from a background in in science communication,
and there's been a a push for 30 or 40 years now to raise the level of understanding of science in in the general public.
Do you think social science has got a bit further to go on that?
I mean, is there a sense that communicating with the public is part of the responsibility of academics and social side for sure?
Like, I think it's the like we had we touched on a point of that a little bit earlier on when,
when we talked about the value of producing data, publishing data and social science.
And I think overall, it's just about it's about incentives.
There's just no big incentive for social scientists to communicate with with a wider audience that the one thing that counts,
like the central thing that counts is academic publications, academic publications and highly regarded high impact journals.
And so if you don't value if people speak with an audience with a with a wider public
audience and make an effort of communicating that if that isn't rewarded for your career,
then it's understandable that people who are in universities and have lots of other warriors to to take care of,
from teaching to supervision to grant applications, don't find the time and the energy to to do that in addition to everything.
So I think the universities need to change and value the engagement with the
public in addition to the academic research that obviously should also come.
Mm hmm. I look this up is called the International Best Practice Advisory Group.
That right. There was a meeting that we had at some point,
like every week and where often these questions of what can we learn from the
government's policy tracker and and the COVID data was very central to the conversations.
And what was the output of that group? I mean, did that feed back into policy making?
I hope so. Like that was that's beyond what I understood, that I took part in these conversations also not very often,
but I took sometimes part in it because I wanted I wanted to learn what data.
There were lots of epidemiologists there. There were people from government there.
And I wanted to understand what data they would require,
what what kind of things we could focus our energy on so that it would be useful for them overall.
I very much often try to. Very much tried to speak with the users of the data so that I hear from them what's what's needed.
It's like this. I think that's maybe another criticism of of of academia, where I think too much of academia is supply side driven,
where it's some academic thinking, I want to do this thing, I want to spend my energy researching that thing.
And they don't spend enough time thinking about Does anyone need the answer on that question from me?
Like what? I actually open questions here. Like, am I answering a question that others.
I had a much better position to answer. Has maybe someone else really answered this in a way that that I wouldn't even be able to achieve?
I think we're thinking too little about the demand side for the academic work.
And it's also like often that frustrating because then academics are often, I think, frustrated that their work isn't being picked up.
And partly that's what you said, that maybe the political discourse isn't relying on evidence enough and isn't like demanding it enough.
But I think it's partly also the blame of academics that don't think hard enough about which
questions are actually worth answering and which evidence is actually needed by the world.
Is the world actually waiting for me to finish this paper or why not?
And what do you what are you doing now? And are you is Kogan still high up in your priorities or have you been able to
go back to some of the other these other huge problems in global problems?
I mean, we worked on other problems throughout the pandemic.
There was always other work going on and on, various other topics.
But a lot of our energy, like our definitely the the focus of our energy during the in all of 2020 and 2021 was very much on on COVID.
That has changed now a bit. Not so much because we don't do this work anymore.
Like all of the data that we do is still the daily updates you find, the latest vaccination case and deaths and excess mortality.
All of the many metrics that we spoke about, you find them all always up to date, but the updating has become much easier.
So the governments are doing have have learned a lot in the last two years are doing a
much better job in providing this data and making it easy to automate the data updates.
It's also that other international organisations, including the W.H.O.,
are now doing a much better job in producing the data so that we can rely on on their
data also because countries are reporting directly to the W.H.O. in many cases.
So all of that has made our work much easier really since the beginning of this year, 2022.
Um, and, and so code work is still ongoing, but it has become easier.
And then on, in addition to this, we, we grew the team a lot like we are six at the beginning of the pandemic.
I said, and I think we're now 28 or 29.
Well yeah as has grown a lot so so it's like a big focus in the last two years was also hiring finding and was that on the back of the COVID work.
I mean I'm just is it going to is your funding going to fall off a cliff now that you haven't got COVID drive?
I hope not that no. I think we are we are good with with funding.
We and like, funding is good.
We we have the support for the next two years more for sure.
And we just, we are just received a good, a bigger grant.
Um, and we are also not increasing further. So the growth of the team and hiring was, was a big theme, but it has come to an end.
Natasha ahuja has just joined us yesterday and there might be a few hires that we have to do in the next year,
but it's not going to be it's not going to be as crazy as the last two years.
So we are finally actually able to lift our heads and just look a bit further ahead and and plan a bit like the next months or years.
During COVID, it was it was always whatever happened with the pandemic was determining what was happening.
And that week it was very immediate. And that's not the case, fortunately anymore.
So we we do a range of other topics, like one that I'm excited about now is is it the longest standing project?
Of our world in data, a big database on the history of war where obviously is a big question of is the world becoming more peaceful?
Is the world becoming more violent? Can we learn anything about what makes what regions more peaceful?
And so on? There's also a ton of research on this, but the big central database for the long run is of very poor quality.
There's great data from especially from the Second World War onwards,
but over the last centuries the data is poorer also because there was just no institution that had good funding to do this.
And so for the last six, seven years or something, we've been working on this big project of piecing together a global database on war casualties.
But going back historically, yeah. Over centuries, yeah.
To like trying to go back to 1300. Of course the data is very patchy, but the earliest records that are included in our database are from 1300.
And now we're building a big tool to make this data available to the world.
And the idea there's also like this data is not going to be perfect either.
But in contrast to the earlier work, it's documented well.
So you can actually know from before each war and each data points for the number of deaths in each.
What? You can know where where we have that data from.
And so the idea is that it's becoming a living database, like a constant work in progress where other people can contribute to the database.
And if you are an expert in the history of, say, Japan and you know,
of some wars that happened in Japan that aren't in our database, you would be able to to add them to the database.
Or if you find that the data source that we rely on for some war in Japan is actually a very bad one.
You can you can change that and add another data.
So it's like it should improve in quality over time. That's one project that we just got back to.
And are you including civil wars as well as wars between countries?
Yeah, it would include both. Yeah, I think that's one of the difficulties in this.
Like it's very hard to draw the borders between. Yeah, what is a war.
Exactly. Exactly where does one war started? Does it end?
Like is the Second World War? Is that one massive war or is that a series of many different wars?
And should you aggregate the numbers into one massive number for all of the people that have died in the Second World War?
Or should you break it down by what happened in regions of the Pacific and regions in Europe?
And like, I mean, it's, it's a question of, uh, where you like, how you structure this information.
And then another big one is who actually dies in a, in a war like what is actually a war death.
Like you can have a very narrow definition of that, like deaths on the battlefield between combatants.
Or you can have a very wide definition of that,
where war deaths also those people who died in famines or the outbreaks of infectious diseases that were caused by the war, maybe.
And that makes sense to some extent, because often, especially famines and the restrictions of food supply is actually used as a weapon of war.
So it makes some sense to include them. But it's I think what's crucial is that you have some structure to this and you
actually provide the information of what your definition of of a death is.
So that's one one project.
Another I have to ask, do you have an insight into what the the answer is as to whether where whether deaths are, um, proportionately less over time.
Right. I would think it's, it's definitely not easy to answer because, um, I mean, what's,
what's for sure true is that many world regions live through incredibly peaceful periods in history.
Like my own hometown,
there's like a historian that was looking through the southwest of Germany and tracking that the wars that were ongoing in the south west of Germany.
And I think there has been some way since I read this,
but I think they don't find them a period that's anywhere as long as has been has been peaceful for anywhere
as long as the period now from 45 to today in the last 2400 years or something like and then like 400 B.C.,
the data obviously gets very poor. So who knows what exactly was going on there, but it was just basically war following after war.
I mean, as any anyone who ever looked into Europe's history would know.
And then I think it's also. Not a question that you can just answer with the data on board, as you would also.
I think those people who make the argument that the world has become more peaceful say
that there were structural changes in the world that made the world more peaceful.
And we have to interpret the data on war deaths in light of these structural changes.
So it would be wrong just to look at these outcome variable because in the end especially big was fortunately don't happen very frequent.
Lee And so you might be actually mistaking this period of the accident of war for a signal that you actually can't,
uh, can't see in the data yet just because they are so infrequent.
And you would be fooled by randomness, as they say, and it's just the randomness of data.
So the argument that looks at these structural changes I think is convincing to some extent.
So I think there are four big ones. One is that democracies are much less likely to go to war with each other,
and the world surely has become much more democratic over the last 200 years.
Uh, so more democracies should make the world more peaceful.
We have the evidence that for this democratic peace theory backing this up to, to a good extent,
a few examples, if any of that would count as democracy use fighting peace, fighting wars against each other.
The idea there is that as an authoritarian leader, you have a lot to win from a war and little to to to lose.
So you might like extend the glory of your reign of that country a lot and you might just,
like increase your territory and your wealth, but you might not be the first one to actually run into the battles yourself.
While democracies, on the other hand, individuals have often little to win from a war and much to lose.
So once citizens have some say in whether the country is fighting a war or not,
they are much less likely to actually volunteer for for running into the next war.
So that's this change in democracy.
Another one is increase in trade, that it's just cheaper in many ways to trade than to raid another country and get the resources that way.
Trade has increased a lot. A third one is diplomacy, that diplomacy has increased a lot between nations around the world,
and that for some conflicts, at least, diplomatic solutions are found.
So that increases or decreases the likelihood of war.
And the fourth one, I think is also a big one is about just cultural change.
Like if you look at the like even at the high intellectuals from 100 years ago,
it was very common to praise war as this rite of passage for young men, especially, that like to become a man.
You actually have to fight a war. And it'd be wrong to not fight a war.
And like, there's like glory in war. And for you, a fatherland.
And and all of this rhetoric was extremely common 100 years ago.
Like throughout many periods in history, it's much,
much rarer for for young guys to get excited about going into a war these days and just looking at time with about 2 minutes left.
So I'm going to skip all those questions, so I'll just get to the last one.
So, uh, yes.
So has your work on this changed in any way, your approach to your work or and how would you like things to develop in the future?
Um, yeah, for sure.
Lots of changes came together, like obviously this much bigger team, really excellent colleagues that joined us in the last two years.
That's a bit hard to disentangle from the changes due to the pandemic,
but things have become a whole lot more like we're still not like us, still feels very much like a start up in the early stages,
but compared with two years ago, like those that have processes in place, like how the data is updated, all of these things have improved a lot.
Just because colleagues are really taking care of these things much more.
I think how like I think it definitely also changed my understanding of like existential risks.
Like we touched upon it a bit, but I think seeing how bad in many ways this pandemic has also gone definitely increased
my perception of how how likely or how yet how high the risks are of of future pandemics.
Um, especially now in technologies like in.
Much more are available to change pathogens in many ways.
And I think one of the things that I was thinking about a lot this last days is just a frustration of
how little the world is doing to prepare for future pandemics and reduce the risks for pandemics.
So I think I would definitely, based on what I was reading before, I was expecting a pandemic.
Like, I mean, any epidemiologist that you ever speak to is expecting pandemics or is definitely expecting outbreaks.
And what do they say? Like outbreaks are outbreaks are certain, pandemics are optional.
And so, like everyone always knows that pathogens jump from from animals, animal hosts through to humans.
And that happens. And there's always a risk of a pandemic. So that maybe didn't surprise me that much, but I'm definitely surprised.
Now, two years of two and a half years into the pandemic, that relatively little is happening in preventing future pandemics.
So I think I would like in also in the team, we very much want to make the case for the risk of future pandemics.
And when I focus on that, I think that's one lesson that we take away from the last two and a half years,
that it was bad enough let's not suffer through more lockdowns and not suffer through more millions of deaths from from these preventable tragedies.
And is there better data to collect on pandemic preparedness?
Because there was a date I mean, there was a ranking of pandemic preparedness for wasn't there?
And yet the countries that were at the top of that ranking didn't necessarily do all that well know.
Like it was one of these indexes that I messed up, I don't know, some data and was I think was nonsense to start with.
And then it was just proven that it was wasn't all that informative.
No, I think this is not all that much. I mean, once you have the data point about a terrible pandemic, it's kind of too late.
But but like, there are things that we I think we can do, for example,
and there isn't actually a great dataset on the history of the pandemic throughout history.
Mm hmm. So that's a very obvious thing to actually do, like lots of academic papers on the risk from pandemics.
They start with some kind of literature review and speak about the Justinian's plague and the Black Death and maybe the stars.
So they pull together a couple of data points, but it would be just helpful for the community to have like this one data's data set on pandemics.
So that's a very obvious thing that we can do. And it would just show hopefully to people like these things happen all the time.
Let's just make sure that COVID was the last one.
That's a very obvious data project. Another one is, I think, a big risk for future pandemics from influenza.
Many past pandemics were from from influenza viruses.
So we want to just work more on influenza.
We currently bring together the data historically,
and the W.H.O. does a good job in bringing together also real time data on influenza so that we make that data available.
Saloni Da Tani, a colleague who is focusing on infectious diseases,
she's working currently there on communicating and researching why some flu winters, like it's a very seasonal disease wave some flu.
Winters are also particularly bad. Why does that happen and why do we have these big differences?
What can we learn from that? And how can we maybe reduce the risk from from influenza?
Because I hope that this is maybe useful. I think it's I mean, the sad thing,
like maybe like yesterday I was speaking with a colleague who was who was more
upbeat than I about the the chances of preparing better for future pandemics.
He was making the point that this is only now starting this moment when when governments can possibly actually get involved in that,
because now we're coming to the end of actually like at least for for many rich countries, we're coming,
fortunately,
to the end or at least into a better phase where like a large share of the population is vaccinated and things are calmer for those people,
for those experts in governments that are focussed on infectious diseases.
So that he was making the point that from now onwards those people are actually
freed up to actually make the case about getting prepared for future pandemics.
Hopefully he's right and I'm too too early in my pessimism.
But for example, I think this like index on pandemic preparedness was a bit nonsense.
But I think some other things are just obvious.
Like I think one thing that. I would make the case for that's useful and many of the owners just make the case for is much better.
B So that especially in in even worse pandemics with, with, with more terrible viruses, you actually have a chance to,
to have to have people that have to do the most important roles in keeping people fed and electricity on and hospitals running,
that those people actually have excellent PPE that's produced before the pandemic actually happens, that's actually available somewhere.
And and you can count how many how many countries prepare for for that aspect.
That would be like one other aspect that you but I think is a sensible metric that actually tells you something about the preparedness of a country.
Mm hmm. Good. I think we have to stop because we've got to deadline, then turn off the record.
Let's do that.