People often get into arguments about what constitutes progress.
Some say that what others regard as progress is not progress at all. We bypass these arguments by considering a country or a section of a country to have progressed if people who have a choice move to it and adopt its ways - revealed preference , the economists call it. We give short shrift to arguments that people didn't know what they were doing when they made their choices. According to revealed preference , America is the most progressive country. So far as I know there is no other country that has more immigrants from America than America has immigrants from that country.