Vision

A Work in Progress

Our era is the living record of the successes and failures of Roosevelt’s vision in “Four Freedoms.”

At a global level, there has been unmistakable progress on the first three freedoms.

Yet:

1. The world as a whole remains far from reaching widespread freedom of thought and expression, or ending deep poverty.

   • Even at democracy’s flood tide at the turn of the millennium, no more than 55% of the world’s people lived in democratic regimes. Only for about a decade (1995 - 2005) did a majority of the world’s people live in a democracy (Fig. 1).

   • As of 2023, only 29% lived in a democratic regime of any type; and the absolute numbers of people living in either liberal democracies or electoral democracies had each declined since their peaks around 2010 and 2015, respectively (Fig. 1).

   • Although the number of extremely poor people has been halved over the last 40 years, much of that reduction occurred in autocratic regimes. Meanwhile, the number of “merely quite poor” people in the world (people living under $6.85 / day) has remained more or less stable since 1990, at about 3.5 billion, nearly 45% of world population (Fig. 2).

   • In only a couple dozen countries does a majority live on more than $30 / day (~$11,000 / year). In approximately 80% of countries, more than 80% of the population lives on less than $30 / day; and in countries accounting for more than 2/3 of the world’s population, roughly 95% of people live on less than $30 / day (Fig. 3).

2. Results around the world are highly uneven. Some places are highly free, prosperous, and secure; others are substantially unfree, but moderately prosperous and secure; or conversely, free but still poor, or again, still free, but economically stagnant in ways that imperil future liberty; while still others are highly unfree, poor, and insecure (Figs. 4 & 5).

3. Regress is real, and techno-power cuts both ways. Over the last 15-20 years, civil and political freedoms have eroded in many countries and regions of the world, as captured both by quantitative measures of regime type (e.g. number of democratic states, percent of world population living in democratic regimes), and by multi-dimensional, and more qualitative, assessments of freedom within countries of all regime types. Even some of the world’s oldest and wealthiest democracies have slipped backwards. At the same time, economic stagnation or regress of some countries, or important groups within them, have turned their politics into zero-sum contests.

   • Some of the world’s largest and most powerful states, and numerous states in regions poised to grow most rapidly through mid-century, are indifferent or hostile to civil and political freedoms for their own citizens; at the extreme, some are wiling to try to punish speech abroad by citizens of third countries.

   • Some of these same states have succeeded economically over the last 20 years. Success has in good part been rooted in a sustained push for better infrastructure, higher-value industry, and increased innovation capacity. This has delivered higher standards of living to the majority, and thus increased the legitimacy of these regimes domestically, and their power and appeal internationally, in particular in low and middle-income countries.

   • The growing power and generativeness of technology has given governments and private parties the world over access to vast pantry of technical ingredients, out of which can be fashioned practically unlimited new recipes for surveillance, censorship, manipulation, conditioning, coercion, and punishment. Some of these means are potentially operative across all borders and across indefinite spans of time — the Internet never forgets. Moreover, these ingredients and associated cookbooks are only in their infancies today.

• This same amplifying power of technology has contributed to widening economic and cultural gaps among social groups within democracies — and to some extent among them. Just when unity is most needed, it is proving most elusive. Over the last 40 years, the Sexual and Civil Rights revolutions raised expectations that formal fairness would translate into greater economic power for women and minorities. Over the same period, an easy consensus in economics and the third industrial revolution combined to create winner-take-all economies in which these groups (with exceptions) saw further progress slow or stop, while rural populations (again with exceptions) experienced economic stagnation or outright decline.

• Such gaps have both substantive and perceptual aspects, with technology amplifying each independently. Not only has the power of technology driven groups farther apart in materially and culturally, but it has made societies and the international space more transparent. Power reveals, and perhaps the most vivid effect of information technology has been to reveal us to ourselves and each other in higher definition and new dimensions — to heighten the self-consciousness of every group, as it is confronted with deeper “otherness” than it supposed.

• These effects have set the pre-conditions for the urban-rural gulf that forms the most pronounced political and cultural division within most North America and Western European countries today.

As to the fourth freedom — in modern terms, security from intra-state, inter-state, terrorist, and criminal violence — the picture is decidedly mixed.

• The number of states engaged in conflict increased (with the creation of new states) throughout the Cold War, declined somewhat in the 15 years after its end. It then began increasing again in around 2005, and since the mid-2010s has been approaching all-time highs (Fig. 6).

• The numbers and rates of battle and civilian deaths have remained considerably lower in conflicts taking place since the end of the Cold War than in conflicts of the 1960s - 1980s. However:

  • since the 2010s the world has seen an accelerating increase in casualties, driven by conflicts in the Middle East (Figs. 7 & 8);

  • Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the return of large-scale, intensive inter-state war to the international system, with levels of combattant and civilian casualties not before seen in inter-state conflict this century (Fig. 8); and

  • structural factors in the international system may be conducive to rising numbers and intensity of intra-state and inter-state conflicts over the next two decades.