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Utopia is loading

Proof the world keeps getting better, with the evidence on show and the hard parts named honestly.

The short version

By almost every long term measure, life has improved enormously, and most of us have no idea. In 1950 about one child in four worldwide died before their fifth birthday. By 2024 it was fewer than one in 25. Yet when YouGov asked people in Britain in 2020, 70 per cent said the world was getting worse and just 6 per cent said better.

That gap between the feeling and the facts is what this site is about. Progress isn’t slow. It’s a fast river running just beneath the surface, and the news mostly shows us the storms on top. Here you’ll find the current underneath: real data, real stories and, now and then, a joke.

The Loading Bar

1950, then today

Children who survive to age five75% then, 96% now

Adults who can read36% then, 88% now

Life expectancy at birth (out of 100 years)46 then, 73 now

Try this first

The Loading Bar lets you drag a slider from 1900 to 2050 and watch the world fill up, year by year, using real figures from the UN, the World Bank and others. It takes about ten seconds to watch a century load. The honest bars, the ones still loading or going the wrong way, stay on the page too.

Three layers of progress

• What we have: longer lives, less poverty, cleaner energy, and everyday marvels like clean water from a tap.
• How we treat each other: how values shift between generations, and how the once radical becomes ordinary.
• How we live inside our own heads: wellbeing, meaning and attention, using the psychology evidence and graded like everything else.

The three feed each other. That’s the compounding: each generation starts where the last one arrived, not from zero.

Read next

• Why the world feels worse than it is
• The Loading Bar: watch a century load in ten seconds
• All articles

How I keep it honest

Every main claim gets a plain label, from well established to contested, and anything that’s my own idea is marked as one. Every article ends with an Evidence panel listing its sources and the date they were checked. Mistakes are corrected in the open. The details are in the editorial standards, the corrections log and the funding page.

One article a week

A new article arrives once a week, each built around a real story and a real question. Email updates are coming soon. Until then, the articles page has everything so far.