I remember reading an article a couple weeks ago, I'm not sure where, but I think it was posted on HN, about democracy over time. While not the same, that's a good proxy for measuring freedom. It said that democracy reached a peak around 2000, and that it's declined a little since then, but much slower than it was increasing before then.

I think this article was either on The Atlantic, The Economist or BBC, if you want to go digging.

I thought of the same thing when reading the OP's question. Wikipedia has a trend chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Trends

And Freedom House's latest report talks about the recent decline (8th straight year): http://www.freedomhouse.org/article/freedom-house-sees-autho...

It was probably The Economist. Paired with an interesting experiment (for them) in their presentation of long-form essays.

http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-...

"Freedom score"? Really? Some number, representing "freedom", calculated from the US point of view - it's, how should I put it... Less than impartial. Not to mention method of calculating freedom.

It doesn't seem any less contrived than standard of living scores or happiness scores. It's obviously an imperfect metric, but while it might be useless for comparing the freedom of Germany and the US, it's perfectly adequate for comparing the freedom of the US and Croatia, or of Croatia and China. For the sake of calculating the overall freedom of the world over time, as in the case of the great-grandparent's question, it works as well as anything.

That's the one. The whole article is a great read, but the visualization a couple screenfuls down is what the grandparent was looking for.