Plato's Cave
Global Stats
The state of the world, by the numbers.
Plato's Cave uses publicly available data, research and estimates from credible organizations to help visualize the scale of the forces shaping our world.
Global Stats Journal →14 of 30 figures have been researched from credible sources and carry the date they were checked, their sources and a MEASURED, ESTIMATED or MODELLED label. The rest are still marked Placeholder until research reaches them.
Global population living in extreme poverty
Current total · ESTIMATED
Global military spending
This year · ESTIMATED
Global debt
Current total · ESTIMATED
People without safe drinking water
Current total · ESTIMATED
People & Poverty
How many people the global economy leaves behind.
War & Weapons
What the world builds to fight, and who lives inside the fighting.
Money & Power
The money that exists, the money that is owed, and who holds it.
Health & Mortality
The scale of death, and how much of it is preventable.
Human Rights
People held, trafficked or forced from home.
Resources & Living Conditions
Water, food, sanitation, shelter — the baseline of a life.
How we classify data
- Measured
- Counted or registered directly by an institution. Still incomplete in places, but not inferred.
- Estimated
- Built from surveys or partial reporting and scaled up. Reliable in direction, not to the last digit.
- Modelled
- No global count exists. The figure comes from a model and should be read as an order of magnitude.