Humanity has built an extraordinary system for producing and sharing knowledge, yet many people still lack a broad understanding of the systems shaping their lives. That gap is becoming a democratic dilemma.

We live in what is routinely called the knowledge economy. Humanity has never produced, stored or had access to so much knowledge. Yet here is an uncomfortable question: how much does the average person actually know about the world in which they live?

Imagine a scale from zero to 10. Zero represents virtually complete ignorance. Ten represents something approaching comprehensive and expert knowledge across the fundamentals of philosophy, history, geography, science, politics, economics, law, culture, technology and the environment.

Nobody would score 10. Human knowledge has become far too extensive for any individual to master. But where would the world’s more than eight billion people sit?

My first instinct was provocative: perhaps around 80 per cent of humanity would score only about one. That is almost certainly too severe. But modify the proposition and it becomes harder to dismiss. Perhaps 70 or 80 per cent of humanity would fall somewhere between one and three, with the global median around two or three.

We cannot know precisely because, remarkably, we do not seriously measure it. Governments measure GDP, inflation, employment, productivity, school attendance and educational qualifications. International organisations test literacy, numeracy and aspects of science. But there is no serious global measure of whether human beings possess a broadly integrated understanding of the civilisation or the capitalism they inhabit. And that is quite different from asking whether they can read.

The achievement of mass education is nevertheless extraordinary. UNESCO estimates that around 87 per cent of adults worldwide are literate. But this still leaves about 739 million adults without basic literacy skills. Some 273 million children and young people remain out of school.

More troublingly, attending school does not necessarily mean acquiring even basic competencies. The World Bank estimated after the pandemic that around 70 per cent of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries could not read and understand a simple age-appropriate text. Nor is this simply a problem of poorer countries. PISA testing repeatedly demonstrates substantial weaknesses in literacy,........

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