The Speed of Change Index is an experiment in measuring the pace of change, which is central to the work of futurists.

The challenge in quantifying change was finding phenomena that are meaningful, measurable, and measured.

Social Technologies devised a formula and fed in several thousand data points on change in:

• civil liberties
• urbanization
• GDP per capita
• literacy
• phone penetration
• TV penetration
• Internet penetration

The resulting index is intended to measure how people’s lives are changing, and covers 168 countries.

Some interesting patterns emerged from the data:

• Change in the developed world is generally slow, in comparison to the rate in developing countries.
• By this measure, the fastest-moving countries in the developed world are Ireland and Taiwan, which jibes with our qualitative knowledge.
• China and Taiwan both share high rates of change, though they are at different stages of development.
• The speed of change is not necessarily correlated with openness to it; many things force change, or impede it.

These results reflect a number of factors:

• The formula is based on measuring fundamental change in people’s lives, and the weighting of the factors reflects this.
• It is not about the smaller shifts in the lives of the world’s wealthy consumers.
• Because the data measures civil liberties rather than social freedom, it might underplay change in some places. China for instance has a great deal more social freedom than it did 20 years ago, even though political freedoms have remained outwardly stable.
• Instability is not the same as change: places like Colombia may have a kind of steady-state instability.

Conclusions of the research:

• This helps set out the overall picture: it is a starting point to understanding change in specific markets.
• Fast change means that people’s needs are changing, and new kinds of markets are opening up.
• Change means that the meaning of the past, and of the things that are stable, are also changing.
• Below a certain line—probably determinable by income and freedom levels—fast change probably greatly increases the chance of instability.

We have been pleased to have the Index covered by Foreign Policy and Forbes.