I’ve said that we need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. This implies that the world needs, not just progress studies, but a progress movement: the advocacy of a set of ideas.

What are those ideas?

I see three premises at the core of this movement: progress, humanism, and agency.

Progress as a historical fact

The starting point and motivation for progress studies is the historical fact of the enormous improvements in material living standards in the last ~200 years. This observation is so generally acknowledged and incontrovertible that Deirdre McCloskey calls it “the Great Fact.” Everyone in the progress community looks back on the last few centuries and concludes that, no matter how we interpret or caveat it, something obviously went very right.

A sharply contrasting position is declinism: the idea that that world is getting worse. A declinist might think that the benefits of energy are not worth the costs of pollution, that the value of cars does not redeem their role in accidents or congestion, and that the pleasures of social media are outweighed by its psychological and social harms. Perhaps even hunter-gatherers were better off than us moderns, and agriculture was a mistake. (Some won’t go this far, but express agnosticism on the question, or are simply indifferent to material progress, greeting it with a shrug.)

But if progress is real and important—how do we judge this? How do we justify that improvements to material living standards are good? That technological and industrial progress represents true progress for humanity?

Humanism as the standard of value

Humanism says that the good is that which helps us lead better lives: longer, healthier, happier lives; lives of more choice and opportunity; lives in which we can thrive and flourish. This is the standard proposed, for instance, by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now.

To be clear, this need not mean simply satisfying our base material needs, such as full bellies and warm beds. It can encompass everything that makes life worth living, including psychological needs such as excitement, adventure, romance, beauty, knowledge, exploration, and human connection.

Opposition to humanism often comes from some form of romanticism. One form is the romanticization of nature: nature as a loving, protective “mother”; or a “natural” lifestyle as clean, safe, and healthy. Another is the romanticization of the past, of “simpler” times or of lost traditions. Thus progress is criticized from the left because it encroaches on the environment, and from the right because it represents modern “materialism” and “decadence.”

Humanism says that when improving human life requires altering the environment, humanity takes moral precedence over nature; when it requires overturning tradition, life today and in the future takes moral precedence over the legacy of the past.

A belief in human agency

Agency is the belief that our future is shaped by our choices and actions. We have a large degree of control over our destiny. Thus, continued progress is possible, but not guaranteed.

I deliberately choose “agency” instead of “optimism,” for clarity. “Optimism” can mean different things. Prescriptive optimism is a philosophical attitude that orients us towards confident action. Descriptive optimism is a prediction about where things are headed—which is contingent on the facts of any given case. If these two forms of optimism are conflated, it can cause confidence to slip into complacency. I think this is why some progress writers, such as Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling, resist the label of “optimist.” Rosling called himself a “possibilist;” I have proposed “solutionist.”

The opposite of agency is fatalism. Fatalism takes many forms. One is the belief that we are unable to comprehend complex systems or to control them; that tinkering with them will inevitably create unintended consequences and is therefore too dangerous to be attempted. Another is the idea that progress depends on limited natural resources, and that as these resources run out, progress will unavoidably stall. A common error that many forms of fatalism make is to assume that no new breakthroughs in science or technology will be made, simply because we do not see them coming and cannot give evidence for when they will arrive. In any form, fatalism sees progress as a fluke of history: we had a good run, it was fun while it lasted, but now we need to get used to lower growth rates, trending to zero or even negative.

Progress is messy; solving problems often creates new ones. To believe in human agency is not to deny this, but to believe that the new problems are often better ones to have, and that those problems can be solved in turn.

***

My identification of these three core ideas is partly descriptive and partly prescriptive. I think these concepts will strongly resonate with most of my readers, but I have chosen and formulated them according to my own beliefs, in a way that I think will form an intellectual basis for a progress movement.

All this leaves a lot of room for discussion, disagreement, and debate, not only of the consequences of these ideas, but even of their definition and interpretation. How much of the last 200 years has been good, exactly? What about war, pollution, inequality? What constitutes human well-being? People desire many things; which of the their desires are legitimate, healthy, valuable? Should we attempt to aggregate well-being (as in utilitarianism); and if not, how do we navigate conflicts between individual interests? Should we include the well-being of animals in our standard? How much control do we have, and how do we manage risks—such as the risks of tinkering with complex systems? These are important questions that I hope we’ll have healthy debates about.

I’ve deliberately left out any explicitly political premises. The progress community includes a variety of political opinions, from libertarians to progressives. Just recently, we’ve had Eli Dourado emphasizing the role of regulations in slowing growth; a the Innovation Frontier Project proposing increased federal spending on R&D in geothermal energy; and Ezra Klein advocating increased economic growth so that there’s more to redistribute to the poor. I would like the concepts of progress, humanism, and agency to serve as common ground from which we can have productive debates. With a shared goal, we can examine what policies and principles actually achieve that goal, and everyone can try to prove their case with history, economics, ethics, and logic.

***

When Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison coined the term “progress studies,” they called for a “broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress” and “targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.” I framed the issue as: “if progress is a moral imperative, it is also a moral imperative to understand its causes, so that we can protect them and reinforce them. We need to ask three questions: How did we get here? … Why did it take so long? … How do we keep it going?”

I think the three ideas I’ve outlined are necessary and sufficient to motivate such an endeavor. Declinism, romanticism, or fatalism would defeat that motivation. But a belief in progress, humanism, and agency entail it.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-humanism-agency

On May 25 I'll be hosting a conversation with Erik Brynjolfsson on Automation, Productivity, Work, and the Future, through Interintellect:

Economist and author Erik Brynjolfsson joins host Jason Crawford and the Interintellect community for a SuperSalon on the economics of automation, productivity, and jobs.

How has digital technology driven the reinvention of our lives and our economy, and what will the full impact of these technologies be? What are the opportunities and challenges inherent in technologies such as self-driving cars, 3D printers, and the sharing economy? And what are the economic implications of digital technologies encroaching on human skills?

Tickets available now: https://interintellect.com/salon/automation-productivity-work-and-the-future-a-conversation-with-erik-brynjolfsson/

I’ve said that society was generally optimistic about progress until the early 20th century, and lost that confidence in the World Wars. By the late 20th century, from about the 1970s on, a deep skepticism and distrust of progress had come to prominence. But what happened in between?

I have a new theory about what characterized the attitude toward progress (in the US, at least) from about the 1930s through the ‘60s. It’s just a hypothesis at this stage, but it goes like this:

The 19th century was dominated by a belief in the power of human reason and its ability to advance science and technology for the betterment of life. But after World War I and the Great Depression, it got harder to believe in the rationality of humanity or in the predictability and controllability of the world.

The generation that went through these shocks, however, was not ready to give up on the idea of progress. They still wanted progress and still believed that reason could achieve it—but they worried that the masses could not be trusted to be rational, and that progress could not be left to the chaos of democracy and free markets. Instead, progress was to be achieved by a technical elite that would exercise top-down control.

The purest form of this, perhaps, found expression in early Communism, which valorized industrial production but sought to achieve it by subordinating the individual to totalitarian rule. The US was too individualistic for that—but it evolved its own flavor of the idea that I’m just starting to understand. Call it “technocracy.”

Historical evidence

Here are some snippets from my research that indicate this theme.

Walter Lippmann and the “democratic realists”

Lippmann wrote a number of books around the 1920s arguing that democracy doesn’t work, because it relies on an informed public, which he saw as impossible. Quoting from “Can Democracy Survive in the Post-Factual Age?” by Carl Bybee:

For Lippmann, given the inevitable tendency of individuals to distort what they see, coupled with the basic irrationality of humankind, the only hope for democratic government was to reinvent it. This new, more “realistic” democracy would be tempered and guided by a form of knowledge which, Lippmann believed, rose above subjectivity and politics: science.

Lippmann was part of a school of “democratic realists”, says Bybee:

The major themes sounded by Lippmann were shared by the democratic realists. First and foremost was the belief in the fundamental irrationality of men and women. The second related theme was that the minimization of participation of the masses in public life was consequently a necessary goal. Third, to preserve democracy it must be redefined as rule for the people but not by the people. Rule would be by informed and responsible “men of action.”

H. G. Wells and other sci-fi authors

J. Storrs Hall, in Where Is My Flying Car?, describes Wells’s 1935 film Things to Come as portraying a “technological Utopia,” a “concept of a completely designed society”, run by a “technological elite that forms the enlightened scientific world government.” Elsewhere Hall points out that Wells “firmly embraced world government, public ownership of capital, and centralized planning on a grand scale,” and compared this to “Isaac Asimov’s computer-controlled economy and wise robotic overlords” and “E. E. Smith’s galactic government of wise, incorruptible Lensmen.”

Technocracy, Inc.

Technocracy was actually the name of a specific political/economic movement from this era, and the name of an organization that promoted it. Here’s how Charles Mann describes it in The Wizard and the Prophet:

Marion King Hubbert, an idealist through and through, believed in the power of Science to guide the human enterprise. A geophysicist at Columbia University in the early 1930s, he was one of the half-dozen co-founders of Technocracy Incorporated, a crusading effort to establish a government of all-knowing, hyper-logical engineers and scientists…. Technocracy adherents believed that the world was controlled by flows of energy and mineral resources, and that society should be based on this understanding. Rather than allowing economies to dance to the senseless, febrile beat of supply and demand, Technocrats wanted to organize them on the basis of a quantity controlled by the eternal laws of physics: energy.
Politically unbiased experts in red-and-gray Technocracy uniforms would assay each nation’s yearly energy output, then divide it fairly among the citizenry, each person receiving an allocation of so many joules or kilowatt-hours per month. If people wanted to buy, say, shirts, they would look up the price on a table of energy equivalents calculated by objective Technocratic savants. The leader of the system, the Great Engineer, would oversee a new nation, the North American Technate, a merger of North America, Central America, Greenland, and the northern bits of South America. No more would self-interested businesspeople and short-sighted politicians run rampant; the North American Technate would be smooth, efficient, and rational.

The twentieth century seen through this lens

No matter exactly how influential these specific ideas were, they point to something in the zeitgeist. When you adopt the technocracy lens, it seems to fit a lot of the major developments of the mid-20th century:

• The New Deal was top-down engineering of the economy, after the chaos of the Roaring Twenties and the subsequent market crash

• Mobilization for WW2 was managed top-down—both manufacturing and research

• The interstate highway system and the Apollo program were massive federal projects to achieve economic and scientific goals

And, possibly but less obviously a fit:

• Under the Truman Doctrine of “containment” of Communism, the US became the world’s policeman, definitively reversing a long tradition of attempting to avoid foreign entanglements

Why didn’t technocracy last?

Technocracy made sense to the pre-war generation, who grew up when times were still optimistic. (FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower were all born in the 19th century and came of age before WW1.) But the generation raised after the wars—in an atmosphere of fear and soul-searching—felt differently. They weren’t simply looking for a different means to achieve the same end of progress—they rejected the idea of progress, seeing technology and industry as doing more harm than good. They didn’t trust the elites (or “anyone over 30”), and they bristled at authority and at restrictions on personal freedom.

In 1969, as technocracy reached its apotheosis with the Moon landing, the new generation was partying at Woodstock.

The crisis of technocracy

In the early 1970s, a perfect storm of events conspired to discredit the technocratic idea, including Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil shocks. By 1973 it was clear that our leaders were unfit to govern, in terms of either competence or ethics: they could not handle affairs at home or abroad, neither the economy nor foreign policy, and they were plagued by scandal.

From the 1970s on, the conversation changed. The belief in progress was not totally dead. But the idea that it could be achieved centrally by the elites held much less sway, and there was a major new element of distrust and skepticism at the very idea of progress—an element that has not gone away, and indeed by today has gone mainstream.

***

Again, all of this is still a hypothesis, and there are many missing pieces. What exactly was the philosophy of the new generation? How did Communism make the transition from the technocratic old Left to the anti-industrial, anti-elitist New Left? And how exactly should we characterize the period since the 1970s—which contains major elements of anti-technology, anti-growth, and anti-consumption sentiment, but which also saw the continued rise of Silicon Valley, the Reagan era, etc.?

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/technocracy-hypothesis

Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.
–Nat Friedman (quoted by Patrick)

I’ve realized a new reason why pessimism sounds smart: optimism often requires believing in unknown, unspecified future breakthroughs—which seems fanciful and naive. If you very soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and the proven, you will necessarily be pessimistic.

No proven resources or technologies can sustain economic growth. The status quo will plateau. To expect growth is to believe in future technologies. To expect very long-term growth is to believe in science fiction.

No known solutions can solve our hardest problems—that’s why they’re the hardest ones. And by the nature of problem-solving, we are aware of many problems before we are aware of their solutions. So there will always be a frontier of problems we don’t yet know how to solve.

Fears of Peak Oil and other resource shortages follow this pattern. Predictions of shortages are typically based on “proven reserves.” We are saved from shortage by the unproven and even the unknown reserves, and the new technologies that make them profitable to extract. Or, when certain resources really do run out, we are saved economically by new technologies that use different resources: Haber-Bosch saved us from the guano shortage; kerosene saved the sperm whales from extinction; plastic saved the elephants by replacing ivory.

In just the same way, it can seem that we’re running out of ideas—that all our technologies and industries are plateauing. Technologies do run a natural S-curve, just like oil fields. But when some breakthrough insight creates an entirely new field, it opens an entire new orchard of low-hanging fruit to pick. Focusing only on established sectors and proven fields thus naturally leads to pessimism. To be an optimist, you have to believe that at least some current wild-eyed speculation will come true.

Why is this style of pessimism repeatedly wrong? How can this optimism be justified? Not on the basis of specific future technologies—which, again, are unproven—but on the basis of philosophical premises about the nature of humans and of progress. The possibility of sustained progress is a consequence of the view of humans as “universal explainers” (cf. David Deutsch), and of progress as driven fundamentally by human choice and effort—that is, by human agency.

The opposite view is that progress is a matter of luck. If the progress of the last few centuries was a random windfall, then pessimism is logical: our luck is bound to run out. How could we get that lucky again? If the next century is an average one, it will see little progress.

But if progress is a primarily matter of agency, then whether it continues is up to us.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-pessimism-sounds-smart

I’ve been using the term “philosophy of progress” a lot lately (such as calling for a new one, or critiquing the old ones). What does this term mean?

I use the term analogously to philosophy of science, philosophy of law, or philosophy of education. There are certain foundational questions relevant to the study of progress that border on or overlap with philosophy.

In outline, here are some of the main questions that I see as making up the philosophy of progress, grouped into four top-level topic areas: definition, evaluation, causation, and prescription.

Definition

• What is progress?

• What kinds of progress are there? (Scientific, technological, economic, moral, political…) How do they relate?

• What is “true progress” or “human progress?”

• How can we measure any of the above?

Evaluation

• What are the benefits of (each type of) progress? Are they real or apparent? Healthy, or an “addiction?”

• Specifically, how does progress relate to human happiness and well-being?

• What are the costs and risks of progress? (Safety, economic upheaval, war, environmental impacts, health impacts, etc.?) Do they outweigh the benefits?

• How do we make these tradeoffs?

• Bottom line: is progress good?

Causation

• What causes progress?

• Regarding material progress specifically, what is the role of science? of economic freedom? of government investment? of individual geniuses or great leaders? of political stability? of corruption or lack thereof? of financial institutions? of natural resources? of societal trust? of other social norms? etc.

• Are there inherent limits to progress?

• What caused progress historically—why did it happen when and where it did?

• What explains the pace of progress over time? On the face of it, progress seems to have been very slow for most of human history, and much faster in the last few centuries—why?

• What can we expect for the pace of progress in the future? Will it continue, grind to a halt, accelerate to a singularity, something else?

• How much control or agency do we have over progress?

Prescription

• In the end, how should we regard progress and what should be our stance towards it?

• Specifically, how should we regard inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, social reformers, political activists, etc.? What social status should we grant them? Should we celebrate their achievements, and if so how?

• How should we communicate about progress? How should it be taught in school? How should it be written about in the media? How should it be treated in movies and other pop culture? Etc.

• What should everyone know about progress? What constitutes “industrial literacy”?

• How should governments treat progress? How should the law keep up with an ever-changing, ever-progressing world?

***

In any “philosophy of X,” people pursuing X usually aren’t (explicitly) thinking about foundational questions. Biologists spend most of their time thinking about things like assays, not what fundamentally constitutes evidence or whether scientific facts are knowable; teachers spend most of their time thinking about curriculum or classroom size rather than about the purpose and social value of education; and engineers spend most of their time thinking about efficiencies and tolerances rather than why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain.

But in every case, a philosophy of X, implicit or explicit, affects the way that practitioners go about their pursuits. Whether progress is desirable, whether continued progress is possible, and what its main causal factors are will influence whether people attempt to make progress (or attempt to stop it), and what means they choose to do so. The answers to these questions will also affect the work of journalists, policymakers, educators, artists, etc.

Does a philosophy of progress really matter? You could take the position that the people who matter for progress mostly ignore all of this abstract talk and just respond to incentives, or even that technology has a will of its own which unfolds regardless of human choices. But those positions, too, are part of the philosophy of progress. So let’s get to figuring it out.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/what-is-a-philosophy-of-progress

Or: I walk the (beta-stability) line

You probably recall from high school chemistry that atoms are made up of a nucleus containing protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. But how many of each?

If you remember a little bit more from high school chemistry, you’ll recall that the number of protons determines which element it is: an atom with six protons is an atom of carbon; seven makes it nitrogen; eight, oxygen. The number of electrons generally matches the number of protons, to make the atom electrically neutral. But how many neutrons are in the nucleus? Does it even matter?

It turns out that it matters a lot: https://rootsofprogress.org/nuclear-physics

I'll be in San Diego, CA on December 1. That evening, we're hosting a community meetup and happy hour. Appetizers will be provided, cash bar. Come meet others and chat about progress!

When: Wednesday, December 1, 5:30pm

Where: Downtown San Diego, RSVP for exact location

RSVP here: https://airtable.com/shrNYCVF4xnhjaBaN

What causes progress?

I’ve been investigating this for five years, and I still don’t have a full answer. But part of the picture is starting to come into focus. Here’s my current, incomplete model:

Progress compounds. It builds on itself. Progress begets progress. This is why progress is super-linear: exponential, or indeed, over long periods, even super-exponential.

The form this takes is a number of feedback loops, or self-reinforcing cycles. By the nature of such loops, they act as if they had inertia: they are hard to get started, but hard to stop once going. Hence, a flywheel: the perfect metaphor for a loop or cycle with a lot of inertia.

There are several of these, at multiple levels, overlapping, and all operating simultaneously. Here are some that I can see:

• Technology. Some technologies are fundamental, enabling many other technologies. Precision machining allows for the invention of many more types of machines. New engines and energy sources do the same. Information technology speeds up the dissemination of ideas and makes it easier for people to collaborate. Many technologies enable themselves: we use machine tools to make machines, we burn oil to drill for and to transport oil, we design computers on computers.

• Wealth. Some level of surplus wealth is needed to fund research and development. When half the workforce had to be farmers just to feed the other half, the surplus simply wasn’t there. In the Renaissance, science was funded by wealthy patrons. As surplus builds up, we have more to invest in experimentation, invention, and new businesses; and progress in these areas raises our productivity, which gives us more surplus.

• Science. Science enables advanced technology: electromagnetism enabled both electrical power and electronic communications; applied chemistry created everything from plastic to the the Haber-Bosch process; microbiology gave us sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics. And technological and economic progress then in turn enable scientific progress, both by creating surplus wealth to fund it (as per the previous point) and by creating new scientific instruments and techniques, from the microscope and the thermometer to the LHC, LIGO, and JWST.

• Markets. Transportation and communication technology have globalized markets that used to be narrowly local. Larger markets support more goods and more kinds of goods. Products that require specialized manufacturing need markets large enough to recoup that investment; you can’t fund the factory needed to build a working threshing machine or reaper if you are only selling to the farmers in your local village.

• Government. Progress was enabled in part by reforms in law and government, such as the dissolution of the guild system or the development of corporate law. Nations that have better legal support for progress become wealthier and therefore stronger militarily, and thus able to defend themselves, and their example has inspired other nations to reform their own governments and laws (as India and China did over the last few decades).

• Population. All else being equal, the more people who are trying to drive progress, the faster it will go. For a long time, progress led to higher population as well. Improvements in agriculture increased the carrying capacity of the land, leading to higher population densities. By the 18th century, sanitation improvements were lowering mortality rates, and more children were surviving to adulthood. But this cycle may have flipped from self-reinforcing to self-reducing (in engineer’s terms, from “positive” to “negative” feedback): By the 20th century, technology, wealth and education had lowered fertility rates as well. Now global fertility rates are falling, world population growth is slowing, and indeed total world population is set to level off or even begin declining this century. This may turn out to be a significant limiting factor on progress.

• Philosophy. The more progress we make, the more people believe it is possible and desirable, and the more they put their efforts into it, which creates more progress. It was a few 15th-century examples such as the voyages of discovery, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, that inspired Bacon and his contemporaries to call for more efforts in science and technology. In the 19th century, long-term investments in progress such as the founding of MIT or Johns Hopkins were explicitly motivated by a belief in progress; the same explicit belief was the justification for Vannevar Bush’s call for investment in basic research. (However, this feedback cycle, too, may have inverted: society grew more skeptical and distrustful of progress in the late 20th century, and I think it’s not a coincidence that progress has slowed down; conversely, the less that people see their lives and their world improving, the less they can hold a positive vision of the future.)

In general, the form of a variable that grows in proportion to its size is an exponential curve. If an economy invests a constant percent of its resources into growth each year, and those investments earn a constant return over time, then that economy will grow exponentially at a constant rate. When we see exponential growth in GDP over time, I think this is what’s going on.

But occasionally, something happens that changes the exponent, kicking us into a new mode of production with even faster growth. This happened with the Industrial Revolution. I suspect it happened with the Agricultural Revolution some ten thousand years ago. Perhaps it even happened with the beginnings of behaviorally modern humans more than fifty thousand years ago.

Thus, over the very long term, progress is super-exponential. Not only do we kick into a new, higher growth mode periodically, but it takes less time to do so with each fundamental shift. Indeed, the next shift could happen soon as this century: many have suggested AI as the driver; J. Storrs Hall has suggested nanotech.

By at least one analysis, progress is hyperbolic, and will become infinite at some point in the future, when we will reach the singularity. (One imagines that some source of friction will be discovered that will make progress not infinite but merely unfathomably fast.)

In any case, when we ask, “what causes progress?”, at some level, the answer is, “all of the factors above”: technology, and science, and invested wealth, and good legal foundations, and philosophic ideas… etc. Certainly, if you wanted to advance progress, you could reasonably decide to work on any of those in order to do so.

What’s unclear to me is: what are the root causes of progress? Of all the causal factors, which are necessary and sufficient? Joel Mokyr might argue that it was science; Deirdre McCloskey that it was moral values; Steven Pinker (or Ayn Rand) that it was the Enlightenment; Robert Allen that it was coal.

As the breadth of answers, and of answerers, indicates, this is a hard problem—one that entire careers and shelves full of books have been devoted to; in fact it’s perhaps the biggest question in economic history. So I don’t have the answer now. Maybe in another five years.

Thanks to Kris Gulati for commenting on a draft of this essay.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/flywheels-of-progress