Progress studies

Apollo 11 Saturn V lifting off on July 16, 1969. Economist Tyler Cowen believes that the period of American growth prior to the 70s (including government prioritization of space exploration) was due to exploiting "low-hanging fruit" in terms of technology and labor.

Progress studies is an intellectual movement focused on "figuring out why progress happens and how to make it happen faster." The movement was formalized by a 2019 article for The Atlantic entitled "We Need a New Science of Progress" by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison.

The movement examines progress in standards of living through the lens of science, technology, economics, history, philosophy and culture. It includes work on the definition and measurement of progress, as well policies and programs aimed at improving the rate of technological innovation..

Progress studies has influenced broader political discourse, notably in the United States of America. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote, in response to Cowen and Collison's article, "the questions animating progress studies aren’t mere academic exercises; they are central to understanding how we can bring about a better future for all." In a subsequent article about supply-side progressivism, Klein wrote that progressive politics "requires a movement that takes innovation as seriously as it takes affordability."

Following publication of the article, Cowen and Collison were hosted by Mark Zuckerburg for a podcast. Around the same time, Jason Crawford committed full-time to his popular blog ‘The Roots of Progress’, calling for “a clearer understanding of the nature of progress, its causes, its value and importance, how we can manage its costs and risks, and ultimately how we can accelerate progress while ensuring that it is beneficial to humanity”. Elsewhere, the online magazine ‘Works in Progress’ was established by Sam Bowman, Saloni Dattani, Ben Southwood and Nick Whitaker in 2020, “dedicated to sharing new and underrated ideas to improve the world”. The publication was later purchased by Stripe Press in 2022. Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney founded the ‘Institute for Progress’ think tank in 2021, a “non-partisan research and advocacy organization dedicated to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future”.

History

The scientific revolution

During the Scientific Revolution, Sir Francis Bacon was one of the earliest known published thinkers who believed that we should examine all aspects of the world scientifically so that we can learn how to make gradual improvements. Through the seventeenth century, empirical science was done with telescopes and microscopes, with advances made by Gallileo, Robert Hooke, Jan Swammerdam, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Flamsteed, Halley, and others.

Natural theology

Nicholas Spencer attributes the rise of scientific writing across Europe to the influence of people such as John Ray and William Derham. In the eighteenth century a harmonious view of nature became predominant across Europe: it had become a religious, especially Protestant, imperative to study nature, God's creation. Spencer sees the origins of this in the pamphleteering of the 1640s during England's civil war. The rise of numerous heretical and dissenting religious ideas had to be countered, but scriptural arguments risked being dragged back into the torrent of ideas. "The book of nature offered a clearer, less contentious and more secure foundation for true belief." Atheistical thinkers were more likely to be persuaded by observation than doctrine. At the end of the century, Robert Boyle left money to endow a society where discussions could be held about how empirical science could prove the truths of Christianity. Although there was much activity, there were fewer accomplishments, and in 1726 Jonathan Swift mocked the Royal Academy's lack of practical achievements in Gulliver's Travels.

However, the religious culture of England became the driving force behind important elements of progress, empiricism and capitalism. In his study History of the Idea of Progress Robert Nisbet says, "the rise and spread through intellectual England of Puritanism in the seventeenth century is the preeminent intellectual event of the century." The link between science and religion was strong, especially with scientists like Isaac Newton. Nisbet emphasised two ideas of progress. The first, from the Greeks, involves the flourishing of the arts and sciences. The second, the idea of millenarianism and spiritual fulfilment. Nisbet thought the Puritans brought those two ideas together for the first time, so that "Progress in the arts and sciences is held to be at once a sign of the golden age of the spirit on earth and a cause of that immanence." Calvin's emphaisis on sacred knowledge was expanding to secular knowledge. Puritans gave that knowledge millenarian importance

The industrial revolution

In the prologued peace after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the gains of the industrial revolution, improvements in agricultural yield, began to take hold, and there followed a century of economic growth, liberalism, and burgeoning democracy. According to HumanProgress.org, " Between 1820 and 1914, real or inflation-adjusted GDP per person rose by 127 percent in Western Europe. In Great Britain, for example, life expectancy at birth rose from 41 years 1818 to 53 years in 1914. In Sweden, the improvement was even more dramatic, with life expectancy rising from 39 years in 1814 to 58 years in 1914."

Many thinkers advocated for progress at this time, building on the radical and empirical ideas of the eighteenth century, an era when knowledge was codified, such as in Linaaeus's taxonomy, The French and English dictionaries and the Encyclopédie were written, and explorations were undertaken by Cook. In 1795 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind by Condorcet was published. Condorcet argued that the growth of empirical knowledge would lead to more freedom, affluence, and compassion. Other eighteenth century rationalists who were important in this area include the moral philosopher and economistAdam Smith and the radical and utilitarian William Godwin. Godwin's wife Mary Wollstonecraft advocated for feminism in 1792 with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Later in the nineteenth century John Stuart Mill, with the help and influence of Harriet Taylor published The Subjection of Women and advocated for legal equality between the sexes. Mill also developed and codified the system of utilitarianism, which had been established by Jeremy Bentham, advocated for the use of contraception, and argued in favour of improving education.

The digital revolution

Systematic approaches to the study of progress arguably began with Julian Simon in the 1980s. Simon challenged widely-held concerns that overpopulation was causing resource shortages. Instead, he argued that population growth increased economic and material abundance. In the 1990s, statistician Hans Rosling developed sophisticated quantitative methods to illustrate trends showing improvements to human welfare, particularly in human health. Both were widely considered optimists.

More recently, influential contributions have come from a variety of disciplines and professions. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker wrote ‘Enlightenment Now’, where he explicitly and empirically detailed progress in human health, wealth, violence, technology and entertainment observed since the Enlightenment:

‘What is progress? One might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable. In fact, it’s one of the easier questions to answer. Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.’

Advocates of progress studies argues that these trends must not be taken for granted. In the last hundred-and-fifty to two-hundred years, unprecedented improvements have taken place in life expectancy, literacy, child mortality, and poverty. But the exceptional period of economic growth from 1870-1970 was an outlier in human history. As Paul Krugman said in 1996, "By any reasonable standard, the change in how America lived between 1918 and 1957 was immensely greater than the change between 1957 and the present."

A key theory informing the development of progress studies is the stagnation thesis. Stagnationists like economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have warned that rapid recent advances in software, the 'world of bits', have obscured a slowdown in scientific discovery and technological innovation outside of digital life, the ‘world of atoms’. Pinker, Cowen and Thiel warn that both a cohesive philosophy and deliberate effort is necessary to address the decline and build a more abundant future.

Ideas

One focus of the progress community is developing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. Modern conceptions of progress incorporate the uneven and imperfect nature of human progress. As Isiah Berlin wrote:

any study of society shows that every solution creates a new situation which breeds its own new needs and problems, new demands. The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for—greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society; but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by the very solutions of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements—and so on, forever—and unpredictably.

However, today the progress studies movement also wants to counteract pessimism about progress. On issues like the environment, standards of living, wealth, health or happiness, many believe that the future will be worse than the past. According to Our World in Data, "More than 9 out of 10 people do not think that the world is getting better." Progress studies instead advocates optimism for the future, as well as identifying clear reasons for optimism to spread.

This matters to progress studies because too much emphasis on the negative side effects of change can jeopardise future progress. Historically, it is “striking how unevenly distributed progress has been”.. This shows that progress does not happen automatically, nor does it advance in a linear fashion. Rather, progress is the result of intentional effort by motivated people and organizations who see “progress as a moral imperative” (22). To develop a new philosophy of progress, the progress community asks foundational questions. These include: what is progress? Why does progress take so long, and how can it happen faster? What kinds of individuals and organizations have, and can, deliver progress?

A strong philosophical influence on the progress community is the stagnation hypothesis. Tyler Cowen argued that, while America remained rich and prosperous, this wealth masked a slowdown in the rate of innovation in science and technology since World War 2, eroding overall American welfare:

'When I look back at the last decade, I think the following: There are some very wealthy people, but a lot of their incomes are from financial innovations that do not translate to gains for the average American citizen.'

In his more recent book Stubborn Attachments, Cowen has refined these claims. He emphasizes the moral imperative of economic growth, which raises standards of living and welfare. Broad-based innovation that is accessible to regular individuals is crucial to have broad-based economic growth.

Peter Thiel has offered similar analysis, quipping “we wanted flying cars, but all we got was 140 characters” (24). Thiel emphasizes the important role of intent, meaning, and vision in driving innovation that improves society, which he contrasts with self-interested digital companies dominating Silicon Valley.

The progress community similarly emphasizes the importance of technological innovation and scientific insight that improves human society and welfare. While wealth creation is important, a single-minded pursuit of individual wealth does not incentivize innovation that drives progress for all. Science and technology are engines of human welfare and economic growth only if they attempt to solve important problems and create useful products for society.

Accordingly, the progress community dedicates time towards identifying a desirable vision of the future. They seek to promote constructive actions that drive progress, generate broad-based enthusiasm about progress initiatives, and identify when initiatives have gone wrong. The progress community advocates technological development in the name of collective societal welfare and advancement. Jason Crawford has said, "Progress is anything that helps human beings live better lives: longer, happier, healthier, in mind, body, and spirit."

Progress studies also advocates for ecomodernism, which argues that "humans can protect nature and improve human wellbeing by decoupling human development from environmental impacts." The ecomodernist manifesto states that:

Human civilization can flourish for centuries and millennia on energy delivered from a closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle, or from hydrogen-deuterium fusion. With proper management, humans are at no risk of lacking sufficient agricultural land for food.

Alongside this, ecomodernism sees many risks to the environment, such as climate change, ocean acidification, and ozone depletion. By decoupling human progress from environmental impact, environmental damage can be improved. One example is through the use of cities. The manifesto states, "cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impacts." Improving human lives and mitigating environmental damage are both technical challenges and both rely on increased amounts of energy production and that the energy produced is clean and renewable. "In the long run, next-generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion represent the most plausible pathways toward the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature."

Growth

The progress studies movement often emphasises that the two sides of progress, technology and moral, scientific and cultural, economic and political, are interdependent. In Stubborn Attachements, Tyler Cowen wrote:

...growth alleviates misery, improves happiness and opportunity, and lengthens lives. Wealthier societies have better living standards, better medicines, and offer greater personal autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun.

Cowen acknowledges that GDP is imperfect and proposes the idea of Wealth Plus, which takes into account leisure, household production, and environmental amenities.

Applications

Metascience

Progress studies is interested in the ways that science funding and culture can affect what gets researched. Eric Gilliam has written,

The importance of grant-funding panels in science cannot be overstated. Every year in the US, tens of billions of dollars of scientific grant-funding get allocated based on the whims of these panels. The opinions of panels have a massive influence over what can and cannot get researched.

Gilliam cites a paper by Fang, Bowen, and Casadevall to show that "within the top fifth of scores for awarded grants, panelist scores were a weak signal of performance at best." Gilliam believes that "The grant funding community needs to come up with better ways to decide between proposals that are decidedly in the top tier, but not exactly in the top 2%."

Progress studies is also interested in issues of metascience, and the way that changing scientific culture and procedure could improve scientific outcomes. Saloni Dattani has praised the initiative by Cortex, a neuroscience journal, to change the way they review papers.

So what they plan to do is have people submit their papers to the central system where reviewers review the paper and then after that it gets sent to a different neuroscience journal. That seems like a great way to do it. Not just because you are kind of avoiding the publication bias issue, but also because it means you only have to submit your paper to a journal once and then it just gets connected to the journals. Whereas currently it's the journals themselves who are trying to find reviewers and doing it very badly because each of them don't have that many connections. They can't really track how much time people have to review papers. It's just a very strange system. So having the central platform which is connected to loads of different researchers would be a huge benefit.

Dattani has written about the need for these sorts of reforms because "even good papers that are eventually published can be stuck in limbo for years before they eventually see the light of day."

Dattani argues that "a growing bottleneck and backlog." She says the future of scientific publishing must go beyond journals.

Whether we like it or not, research is already, easily and increasingly, published outside of journals, and so are reviews. Reforming peer review, therefore, should mean working with the way science is shared in public, not ignoring it.

Paul Niehaus & Heidi Williams have argued that scientific practise could be improved with institutional support to amplify top-performers' work, and with incubation grants allowing institutions to "partner with academic researchers in trying to integrate research into operationalizing and scaling effective interventions."

Patrick Collinson and Michael Neilson claim that the amount of value per dollar invested in science has gone down, based on their research showing that scientists rate the quality of Nobel-prize winning discoveries as having gone down over the years.

Energy and the environment

Stagnation has been partly attributed to lack of energy by J. Storrs Hall, who notes that energy consumption flatlined in the early 1970s, before the OPEC crisis. In Where's My Flying Car, Hall wrote: "If you didn't know better, you would think the Department of Energy was established (August 4, 1977) intentionally to prevent energy use." Matt Yglesias wrote in 2021 that this "energy diet" was holding back innovation and that "we should raise our clean energy production ambitions. We don’t want to replace 100% of our current dirty energy — we want to generate vastly more energy than we are currently using and make it zero carbon." Economist Ryan Avent has explained Thiel's quip about expecting flying cars and getting 140 characters in terms of energy conumption: "The difference between the sci-fi futures people imagined a half century ago and the present as we live it—similar to the past, but we all have pocket computers—is an energy gap."

This is in contrast to the idea of degrowth, where people decrease consumption in order to protect the environment.

Housing

Progress studies tends to advocate for YIMBY policies, believeing that a shortage of housing in major cities, limits economic growth and contributes to social problems like homelessness. In Britain, John Myers & Ben Southwood & Sam Bowman have suggested a "Housing Theory of Everything", which states that a wide range of problems, such as "slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility", could be improved by fixing the housing shortage. Ezra Klein has also written about YIMBY as a part of supply-side progressivism.

Criticisms

Critics note that human progress is already the aim of many disciplines, and that progress often comes with costs, such as environmental damage.

See Also

• Supply-side progressivism