To gauge the scale of the Great Depression, the US Senate requested an estimate of national income, a task entrusted to economist Simon Kuznets. His 1934 report laid the foundations of modern national accounts, and gross domestic product became the headline indicator after the Second World War. Yet Kuznets, a future Nobel laureate, warned in that very report that a nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from a measure of its income alone.
That's the estimate from a WHO-led study published in The Lancet in 2024, covering the half-century since the Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched in 1974. It works out to about six lives saved every minute, mostly infants. The measles vaccine alone accounts for around 60% of those lives.
According to the World Gold Council, about 216,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of human history. Because gold is so dense (19.3 tonnes per cubic metre), it would fit in a cube about 22 metres on each side, roughly the height of a seven-storey building. Strikingly, about two-thirds of it has been mined since 1950.