State of the World: A Wiser Metrics Dashboard

Tagline: An updating dashboard of our progress and peril — tracking what truly matters for a flourishing civilization.

State of the World is a curated dashboard of vital indicators that go beyond GDP and economic growth to reflect the true condition of life on Earth. Drawing from the Wiser Metrics vision, it tracks ecological integrity, cultural health, and social trust — from biodiversity loss to energy use, from meaning and connection to institutional confidence. Each metric tells part of the story of how humanity is faring in an age of transformation. Together, they form a data-driven yet value-aware map of our collective state — a compass for the Second Renaissance.

3 paragraphs

1. The Vision The State of the World dashboard builds on the Wiser Metrics project at Life Itself — an attempt to redefine what we measure as success. Rather than defaulting to GDP or stock prices, it explores what really matters for human and planetary flourishing. It shows both the evidence of our current challenge and the seeds of renewal that may be emerging.

2. What It Tracks

It is not a comprehensive database but a curated selection. It spans ecological, cultural, and social domains — tracking indicators such as energy capture per capita, trust in institutions, biodiversity health, the global energy mix, and levels of civic engagement or well-being.

3. Why It Matters What we choose to measure shapes what we value. In selecting and framing these indicators, State of the World highlights what matters. It is both a resource and a demonstrator for the Wiser Metrics and Second Renaissance initiatives – as well as for Datopian

SCQA

Situation

In today’s world, our dominant measures of progress — GDP, stock markets, and economic output — fail to capture the real conditions of human and planetary well-being. While crises deepen in ecology, culture, and meaning, we still lack a coherent, accessible overview of how civilization is truly faring.

Complication

Existing dashboards and reports are fragmented, specialized, or purely technical. They either drown in data or ignore deeper dimensions such as trust, consciousness, and collective health. The result is that we cannot see the “state of the world” in a holistic, intelligible way — nor track the indicators that truly matter for a wiser future.

Question

What would it look like to build a simple, insightful, and value-aware dashboard that reflects the real state of our world — ecological, cultural, and spiritual — and invites reflection on what progress means?

Answer

State of the World is a curated Wiser Metrics dashboard presenting the essential indicators of human and planetary health. It combines data with narrative, showing trends in areas such as biodiversity, energy use, trust, meaning, and institutional vitality. Each metric is carefully selected and contextualized, offering both factual grounding and philosophical reflection. The project serves as a bridge between information and insight — a compass for navigating the unfolding Second Renaissance. It can live as a website, blog series, or interactive visualization, and doubles as a demonstrator for how data storytelling can express deeper values.

Outflow 2025-11-02

The State of the World idea is a bit of a mix. It combines the Wiser Metrics vision for the dashboard I was creating at Life Itself — where we were building metrics to track the state of the world and, in particular, the kind of Wiser Metrics we could use instead of GDP — with something newer.

Wiser Metrics is almost like a vision or a project, but I often want metrics I can link people to in debates or a place where I’m accumulating interesting metrics, especially those related to the Second Renaissance and Life Itself story — things about large-scale collapse, but also the shift in culture and attitudes.

Out of that, I thought a more defined dashboard could emerge — State of the World — which, again, could be a bit vague, but the main question is: what metrics should we select for it?

It’s better than “State of the Earth,” which sounds more ecological or planetary, whereas State of the World would cover both ecological and cultural dimensions — what’s happening on the planet, but also in our societies.

So, what are the things we should be tracking? What are the key facts? The vision would be to have a set of core metrics about how the world is going — ecologically, culturally — tracking what’s happening with the planet and species, but also things like trust in government. The idea is to go beyond the classic financial metrics to reflect our impact and presence on the planet at a larger level.

It could include more interesting indicators than the usual GDP — perhaps energy capture per person, for example. So yes, it’s a dashboard. What makes it interesting is the selection — it’s not meant to have hundreds or thousands of indicators. It’s not a comprehensive dataset but a curated subset.

I also think this could serve as a kind of promotional exercise — for Datopian and for Life Itself — since it involves presenting data in a meaningful way. The emphasis would be on selecting interesting datasets, the ones that really say something about the state of the world.

It could also work as a blog or series, where each entry highlights a specific dataset that’s revealing about the state of the world. For example, rather than just showing commodity prices, we’d show something like whether we’re running out of key resources — something that connects more deeply with our underlying situation.

Instead of asking “what’s the price of oil,” we might ask “how much oil do people think is left?” or show the global energy mix. It’s that kind of curation that matters.

The vision is to give an at-a-glance overview of how we’re progressing — or not — as a world. And that involves making choices about what we mean by progress. That’s part of the point: the selection of the dashboard itself expresses a certain vision of what matters.

It also connects directly to Wiser Metrics, and to the Second Renaissance project. So it could serve a double purpose — both as something genuinely useful for those initiatives, and as a demo of how to create such a dashboard in practice.