The single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access (telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles) and institutional integrity (rule of law, regulatory quality, and open economies). Welzel found that the Knowledge Index accounts for seventy percent of the variation in emancipative values across countries, making it a far better predictor than GDP. The statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 228