Human Progress

HumanProgress.org is a project of the Cato Institute with major support from the John Templeton Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust, as well as additional funding from the B & E Collins Foundation, and William H. Donner Foundation. The website requires no registration or membership. All of its content and features can be used for free, but acknowledgment is always appreciated.

Evidence from individual scholars, academic institutions, and international organizations shows dramatic improvements in human well-being throughout much of the world. In recent decades, these improvements have been especially striking in developing countries. Unfortunately, there is often a wide gap between the reality of human experience, which is characterized by incremental improvements, and public perception, which tends to be quite negative about the current state of the world and skeptical about humanity’s future prospects.

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary defines progress as “advancement to a further or higher stage, or to further or higher stages successively; growth; development, usually to a better state or condition; improvement . . . applied especially to manifestations of social and economic change or reform.” But, what do “higher stage” and “better state” mean? Are those terms purely subjective or can a near-universal understanding of human progress be arrived at?

For most of human history, life was very difficult. People lacked basic medicines and died relatively young. They had no painkillers, and people with ailments spent much of their lives in agonizing pain. Entire families lived in bug-infested dwellings that offered neither comfort nor privacy. They worked in the fields from sunrise to sunset, yet hunger and famines were commonplace. Transportation was primitive, and most people never traveled beyond their native villages or nearest towns. Ignorance and illiteracy were rife. Even kings and queens of yesteryear lacked such basic conveniences as clean water, anti-biotics, hygienic waste disposal, not to mention comfortable travel and speedy access to information. The “good old days” were, by and large, very bad.

To make progress, we must do something differently from what we did yesterday, and we must do it faster, better, or with less effort. To accomplish that, we innovate, and we imitate. That takes a certain openness to surprises, and that openness is rare. It is difficult to come up with something that never existed. It’s also risky, since most innovations fail.

Human Progress does not produce its own data. All of our datasets come from reputable external sources (see Data Sources). When interacting with the data, users should be aware of the following: Dynamic and Static Datasets, Interpolation of Dynamic Datasets, Regional Calculations for Line Charts, and Regional Groups. Learn more about our datasets and methodology by clicking the link below: