Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
motivation
Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future is a 2016 book by Swedish writer Johan Norberg (a Senior Fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute), which promotes globalization, free trade and the notion of progress. In it, Norberg develops his ideas published previously in In Defense of Global Capitalism (2001).
Contents
The book is composed of ten chapters which discuss progress in various spheres of life, including "food, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, the environment, literacy, freedom, equality, the conditions of childhood". Norberg argues that today humanity has reached its highest ever (so far) levels of living standards. The author notes that in all areas of our lives, people are, on average, healthier and wealthier than in the past. For example, global literacy improved from about 20% to about 85% by the end of the century, and global average life expectancy has increased from 31 years in 1900 to 71 by the early 21st century. People are more intelligent (the Flynn effect). Access to modern sanitation tripled over the last thirty years. Famine went from being a universal phenomenon to being an exception affecting only a small fraction of the world. Global violence, whether homicide or war casualties, is in decline.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future” is motivation. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Progress, Reasons and Look, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “motivation” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q27536720. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2001 and 1900.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.