World Progress Bar

Companion to the World Issue Tracker. The measurement layer of Humanity 3.0 infrastructure.

What Jacob says

"I started building the world issue tracker project and the world progress bar project. And so you could see progress bars towards human goals."

The point: legibility of motion. For each mapped human goal, a progress bar that updates as the world moves. Any action is then evaluable: did it move the bar forward, backward, or not at all?

The rationale

Jacob's framing:

"[Government's] job is to turn society into utopia. How do we make society into a paradise? And what does that break down into? Well, you can make concrete progress bars on human needs being met and human goals being met. You can kind of map out human goals and human needs in a structured way so that you can see any action that people are doing — bring society forward or bring society backwards."

This is doing some philosophical work: agreeing on the metric is most of the disagreement-dissolving move. If we can agree what the progress bars should measure, most of the strategy debate has a shared scoring function.

The challenge: which goals?

The hard part of any global progress-bar project is which goals make the list, with what weights, on whose definition.

Pre-existing comparable efforts:

UN Sustainable Development Goals — 17 goals, 169 targets, 230+ indicators
Our World in Data — many indicators, less unified
Roser's Long-Run Indicators — economic / health / education
Doughnut Economics (Raworth) — ecological ceiling + social floor
Bhutan's Gross National Happiness — alternative to GDP

Jacob's project would presumably synthesize, prioritize, and make legible a set of progress bars suited to the manifestos.world / World Issue Tracker graph it's embedded in.

Connection to "almost all agree on the basic needs"

Jacob's optimistic foundational claim:

"We almost all agree on the basic needs. Some disagreement on prioritization, but we don't disagree on most things."

If true, the progress bars can be mostly uncontroversial at the "what counts as progress" level, even when strategy disagreement is wide. The bars themselves become a shared object that strategy debates anchor to.

What this enables

If the bars are real, alive, and updated:

Individual actors can see whether their work moves a bar
Coalitions can form around specific bars
Resource allocators (foundations, governments, voters) can compare interventions against measurable outcomes
Learned helplessness loses its grip — you can see your contribution land

This is downstream of the Learned Helplessness page and complementary to the Accretive Collective Action mechanisms.

Status

Like the World Issue Tracker, "started building." Public state unclear from this transcript.

World Issue Tracker — companion problems layer
manifestos.world — companion futures layer
Learned Helplessness — what this is designed against
Vision for the World — the larger frame