The World Is Still Getting Less Free

That's because freedom is hard, and nature tends towards least effort solutions. Democracy is already too resource-wasteful , and it doesnt even guarantee half our freedoms. It's just like in tech, full decentralization does not work well, and people gravitate towards centralized, more authoritarian structures. The one positive thing about tech is that it enables the individual to break away from all power structures. Perhaps freedom should be seen as a technology problem.

Questionable title: if you consider the impact of economic growth/specialization on human freedom - from exceedingly unfree agricultural and domestic work towards much freer (but still, of course, not wholly free) forms of symbolic labor, then the world is still getting more and more free every day, but on an level unseen by existing media, which tends to focus on state/politics as this generates agitation that leads to revenue.

I think we live in a world where local politics has disappeared under the weight of national or international politics.

It would be good to have a comparative poll over time of do you know who your democratic representative is and what they believe. I suspect today most just vote for a party.

Representative democracy might be past it's sell by, but let us hope any replacement is some better sort of democracy.

> Unfortunately, the world is almost certainly becoming less free because many of those in power like it that way.

An odd conclusion for an article which up until this point was arguing that the world is becoming less free "because many of those who follow strongmen like it that way".