Where Data Tells the Story
© Voronoi 2026. All rights reserved.
If you ask people about whether the world as a whole is getting better or worse, most people say the latter. People are generally pessimistic about global or societal progress.
But they are typically much more optimistic about improvements in their own lives.
In the chart, you can see what share of people think they would be higher or lower on the “Cantril Ladder” five years in the future. The “Cantril Ladder” asks people to rate their lives on a scale from 0 (the worst possible life) to 10 (the best). Here, respondents were asked to rate where they are now, and where they think they’d be in five years.
As you can see, most people say they will be higher on the ladder across a wide range of countries. They expect their lives to improve.
Of course, this is not true of everyone, everywhere, but these results tend to support the argument that people are generally “individually optimistic, but societally pessimistic”.