Economy · Global Output Since Year 1

World GDP

Two thousand years of economic output on one axis: near-flat for eighteen centuries, then vertical.

• ~700× growth since year 1
• 97% of the output added came after 1900
• Doubling: ~600 yrs → ~25 yrs
• Constant 2021 international $

The curves in this atlas are measured in incompatible units, and no physics converts petaflops into base pairs or lumen-hours into satellites. The price system is the transducer: every innovation eventually touches a price, so whatever its own unit, its economic shadow lands in the same currency, and global output is the sum of those shadows, the one curve here that every other one feeds. In year 1 the world produced about $250 billion of goods and services in constant 2021 international dollars, adjusted for inflation and purchasing power. By 1820 it was $1.6 trillion, 6.6 times as much after eighteen centuries. By 2025 it was $180 trillion, 110 times the 1820 figure after two more centuries. Individual technologies stall, and curves here end, plateau, or hand their metric to a successor, but the envelope compounds anyway: when one technology saturates the next takes over, and GDP never notices the seam. On a log axis this line accelerates rather than running straight, and few other curves here bend upward. The pre-industrial economy doubled roughly every 600 years; the modern one doubles about every 25. The series is the Maddison Project reconstruction, the standard academic account of long-run growth, extended with World Bank data and published by Our World in Data. The plotted line falls exactly once, in 2020: the COVID pandemic cut world output 2.8% below 2019, and by 2021 it had passed 2019 again. One honest caveat: GDP undercounts the thing it measures best. The price collapses elsewhere in this atlas shrink its numerator even as they enrich everyone, and free goods never enter it at all, so the envelope of progress is, if anything, steeper than its best available measure.

Source: Maddison Project / Our World in Data

Download the data: world_gdp.csv · world_gdp.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.