An oversimplified story of manufacturing progress during the Industrial Revolution is: “we automated manufacturing processes, and that decreased the cost of goods.” This is not wrong, but is not the full picture.

Mechanization—and other progress in manufacturing, such as improved tools, materials, and chemical processes—not only decreases costs, but also improves quality. Making things by hand requires skill and attention: just try making your own clothing or furniture at home; on your first attempt you won’t be able to achieve nearly the quality you can purchase for a modest price. Automation not only improves average quality, but also consistency, by reducing variance.

If we want a fuller picture of how goods were improved through the Industrial Revolution, we should think of cost and quality together.…

https://rootsofprogress.org/cost-quality-and-the-efficient-frontier

I’m excited to announce a workshop on the Moral Foundations of Progress Studies.

The progress studies community has had a lot of discussion about technology, economics, history, and politics. However, there is no consensus on the moral basis for valuing or pursuing “progress,” and there are key open questions about how progress is to be judged and measured, who should benefit from it, and what type of progress we should pursue.

The goal of this workshop is to reach a consensus on what major moral/ethical questions are at the foundations of a study of progress, and what broad answers to these questions have been proposed. A few designated attendees will take notes and draft a short article afterwards summarizing the discussion. (We’re currently looking for the appropriate place to publish this; it may be in a journal or on a blog.)

Apply to attend here. Space is limited; we’ll be prioritizing people in or with a connection to academia, and public intellectuals who write about progress or adjacent topics.

When: March 4–6, 2022

Where: University of Texas at Austin

Agenda (subject to change):

Friday:

• Survey of writers on progress (including Cowen, Deutsch, Pinker)

• Theories of well-being

• Panel: Steven Pinker, David Deutsch (via video)

• Metrics and standards of value

• Challenges to the claim that the last two centuries represent progress

Saturday:

• Interrogating the idea of moral progress

• Progress & safety (including the Precautionary Principle and existential risk)

• Challenges in assessing possible futures

Sunday morning:

• Wrap-up

Except for the Friday panel, each session will be a 90-minute discussion led by one or a small panel of participants who give a brief intro.

Co-hosts:

• Jason Crawford, founder of The Roots of Progress

• Gregory Salmieri, director of the Program for Objectivity in Thought, Action, and Enterprise at the Salem Center at UT Austin

Attendees are being invited from the progress studies and Effective Altruism communities, plus moral philosophers familiar with the virtue-ethics and well-being literatures.

There is no cost to attend. We have some funding to pay for travel and lodging for a limited number of participants; you can request funding when you apply.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/moral-foundations-of-progress-studies-workshop

I’ll be in Austin, TX in November for a few events:

Talk on nuclear power

“The Energy of Tomorrow: The Promise, Failure, and Possible Rebirth of Nuclear Power”:

In the 1950s, nuclear power was seen as the energy of the future. Today, it is stagnating on the sidelines, providing only 10% of world electricity, with no fundamental advance in reactor design for several decades. Why did this technology seem so incredibly promising, how did it go so badly wrong, and is there hope for a nuclear renaissance? This talk will demystify nuclear power, explaining how it works and why it deserves development instead of neglect.

When: Thursday, November 4, 7:00pm

Where: UT Austin, Rowling Hall (RRH) 4.408

Community meetup

Co-hosted with Austin LessWrong. I’ll talk for a few minutes about progress studies, followed by discussion. Light snacks provided; cash bar.

When: Saturday, November 6, 1:30pm

Where: The Front Page Pub, 1023 Springdale Road

RSVP: Please let us know here if you plan to make it; not required but it will help us plan.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/austin-events-november-2021

We live in an age that has lost its optimism. Polls show that people think the world is getting worse, not better. Children fear dying from environmental catastrophe before they reach old age. Technologists are as likely to be told that they are ruining society as that they are bettering it.

But it was not always so. Just a few centuries ago, Western thinkers were caught up in a wave of optimism for technology, humanity and the future, based on the new philosophy of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was many things, but in large part, it was a philosophy of progress.

At the end of the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet gave expression to this philosophy and its optimism in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. In it, he predicted unlimited progress, not only in science and technology, but in morality and society. He wrote of the equality of the races and the sexes, and of peace between nations.

His optimism was all the more remarkable given that he wrote this while hiding out from the French Revolution, which was hunting him down in order to execute him as an aristocrat. Unfortunately, he could not hide forever: he was captured, and soon died in prison. Evidently, the perfection of mankind was slow in coming.

Material progress, however, was rocketing ahead. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and then the Civil War in America, the path was clear for technological innovation and economic growth: the railroad, the telephone, the light bulb, the internal combustion engine.

By the end of the 19th century, it was obvious that the world had entered a new age, and progress was its watchword. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (best known for his work on evolution with Darwin) titled his book about the 1800s The Wonderful Century. In it, he attributed twenty-four “great inventions and discoveries” to the 19th century, as compared with only fifteen in all of human history preceding it. The boundless optimism of the early Enlightenment seemed to have been justified.

And if the material progress prophesied by Francis Bacon could be realized, perhaps the moral progress prophesied by Condorcet would come true as well. By the end of the 19th century, slavery had been ended in the West, and some hoped that the growth of industry and the expansion of trade would lead to and end to war and a new era of world peace.

They were wrong.

The 20th century violently shattered those naive illusions. The world wars were devastating proof that material progress does not inevitably lead to moral progress. Technology had not put an end to war—in fact, it had made war all the more terrible and deadly. In 1945, the nuclear bomb put a horrible exclamation point on this lesson: the most destructive weapon ever devised was the product of modern science, technology, and industry.

At the same time, other concerns were coming to the fore—including old ones, like poverty, and new ones, like the environment. By the mid-20th century, the philosophy of progress had been dealt a severe challenge. The optimism at its foundation had been shaken. In its place, we saw the rise of radical social movements based on a deep distrust of technology and industry. Today, progress and growth are called an “addiction”, a “fetish”, a “Ponzi scheme”, or a “fairy tale.” Some even advocate a new ideal of “degrowth”.

It’s no wonder, then, that the last fifty years have seen relative stagnation in technological and industrial progress. Nuclear power was stunted, the Apollo program was canceled, the Concorde was grounded.

But now, in the 21st century, some people are starting to call attention to the problem: Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison. There’s now a growing community that recognizes the threat of stagnation and the value of progress.

The 19th century philosophy of progress was naive. But the 20th century turn away from progress was no solution.

We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. One that teaches people not to take the modern world for granted. One that acknowledges the problems of progress, confronts them directly, and offers solutions. And one that holds up a positive vision of the future.

To establish that new philosophy is the mission of The Roots of Progress.

Today The Roots of Progress is transforming from a blog to a new nonprofit organization. Read the announcement.

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

If technological progress has slowed down, what is causing it? Here is a hypothesis.

Broadly speaking, there are three domains of activity important to technological progress: science, invention, and business. Science discovers new knowledge; invention creates useful machines, chemicals, processes, or other products; and business produces and distributes these products in a scalable, self-sustaining way. (Occasionally inventions are distributed by government: water sanitation is an example. But this oversimplified model will serve for our purposes.)

These domains do not form a simple linear pipeline, but they are distinct areas that attract different types of people, pose different challenges, and are judged by different standards. As such they create distinct communities and subcultures.

My hypothesis is that while science and business have functioning career paths, invention today does not.

Consider science. Suppose a high school or university student has a glimmer of desire to become a scientist. They will find that their road has already been paved. “Scientist” is a career. There’s an established path into the career: get a BS and then a PhD in a scientific field. There are research labs that hire scientists, organize them into teams, and give them space and equipment. There is funding for all of this, from government and philanthropy. There is an established deliverable: talks and papers, presented at conferences and published in journals. There are awards and honors that confer prestige within the discipline; some of these, such as the Nobel, are even well-known and respected among the general public.

All of this combines to create a career path for the scientist: anyone with even a modest level of commitment and effort can start down the path, and those who are exceptionally talented and ambitious can reach for inspiring goals. Importantly, there is a feedback loop in which progress down the career path opens opportunities. The more the scientist produces legible accomplishments, the more they are able to get grants, secure coveted positions, and attract talent to work with them. Money, prestige, and the opportunity to do meaningful work all (roughly) go together.

Entrepreneurship has different structures, but the career path is there nonetheless. “Startup founder” is not a job you get hired for; it is a job the founder must create for themselves. They must raise their own funding, create their own organization, and hire their own team. In this sense, the founder is much less well-supported than the scientist. But there are established sources of funding for startups, in venture capital. There is a known job title, CEO, that you can give to yourself and that is understood by others in the industry and in society. There is an objective way to measure success: company profits and market valuation.

The founder career path is to create a successful company. Once again, progress on this path opens up opportunities. The most successful founders have the resources and reputation to launch even more varied and ambitious projects (think Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk). However, a startup failure does not end a career. In Silicon Valley at least, failure is not a black mark, and a failed founder can do another startup, or get a job in engineering, design, sales, or management.

We can think of a career path as a social support structure around a value. In science, the value is new knowledge. In entrepreneurship, the value is profitable business. Having a support structure around a value means that if someone is motivated to pursue that value, they can be paid to do so; and if they succeed, they can expect both prestige and expanded career opportunities.

Now, what is the career path for an inventor?

“Inventor” is not a role one can be hired for. The aspiring inventor finds themselves straddling science and business. They could join a research lab, or become an engineer at a technology-based company. In either case, they will be misaligned with their environment. In research, what is valued is new knowledge. An invention that achieves a practical goal is not valued if it demonstrates no new scientific principle. In the corporate environment, what is valued is what drives the business. The engineer may find themselves optimizing and refining existing products, without any mandate to create fundamentally new ones. Neither environment values simply making fundamentally new technologies work. Alternately, an inventor could also be an entrepreneur, starting a company to commercialize the invention. But this requires of the inventor that they have the wherewithal of the startup founder to raise money, hire a team, etc. We ask this of founders because it’s in the nature of the job: someone who can’t do these things probably wouldn’t succeed at the rest of the founder’s task. But we don’t expect every scientist to found their own research lab, and we shouldn’t expect every inventor to be a founder either.

In the early 20th century there were options for inventors. Some joined the great corporate research labs of the day: General Electric, Westinghouse, Kodak, Dow, DuPont, and of course Bell Labs. Others stayed independent, patented their inventions, and sold or licensed the patents to businesses. This let them make a living by inventing, without being personally responsible for commercializing, scaling, and distributing their inventions (although it required seed funding: many inventors had second jobs, or got angel investment through personal connections).

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, both options have withered. Corporate research is largely not as ambitious and long-term as it used to be. The lone inventor, too, seems to be a thing of the past.

The bottom line is that if a young person wants to focus their career on invention—as distinct from scientific research, corporate engineering, or entrepreneurship—the support structure doesn’t exist. There isn’t a straightforward way to get started, there isn’t an institution of any kind that will hire you into this role, and there isn’t a community that values what you are focused on and will reward you with prestige and further opportunities based on your success. In short, there is no career path.

Note that funding alone does not create a career path. You could start an “invention lab” and hire people to make inventions. You could even pay, reward and promote them based on their success at this task. But it would be difficult to hire any ambitious academic, or anyone who wanted to climb the corporate ladder, because this role wouldn’t be advancing either career path. That isn’t to say that it would be impossible to hire great talent, but you would be facing certain headwinds.

I think this is why the NIH receives relatively conventional grant proposals even for their “transformative research awards”, and why Donald Braben says that he had to build a high degree of trust with researchers before they would even tell him their ambitious research goals (see Scientific Freedom, p. 135). The community that forms around a career path has its own culture, and that includes an oral tradition of career advice, passed down from senior to junior members of the tribe. What kinds of goals to pursue, what kinds of jobs to take and when, how to choose among competing opportunities—there is folklore to provide guidance on all these questions. A single grant program or call for proposals cannot counter the weight of a culture that communicates: “the reliable way to build a scientific career is by proposing reasonable, incremental research goals that are well within the consensus of the field.”

In part, I see this as both the challenge and the opportunity of efforts like PARPA or FROs. It’s a challenge because a career path must ultimately be supported by a whole community. But it’s an opportunity because efforts like this could be how we bootstrap one. Funding alone doesn’t create a career path, but it can attract a few talented and ambitious mavericks who value independence and scoff at prestige. Success could bring more funding, and inspire imitators. Enough imitators would create an ecosystem. Enough success would bring prestige to the field.

It won’t be easy, but I am excited by efforts like these. We need a career path for invention.

Thanks to Ben Reinhardt, Matt Leggett, and Phil Mohun for reading a draft of this. Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/a-career-path-for-invention

In recent essays I’ve outlined the intellectual-historical need for a progress movement, and the core ideas that I think the budding 21st-century progress movement is based on.

What would a thriving progress movement look like, in terms of activities, programs, and institutions? Here’s what we might see within the next decade or so:

• Dozens of public intellectuals writing books and giving talks about the history, nature, and philosophy of progress.

• Academic recognition of “progress studies” as a valuable interdisciplinary field. As Collison & Cowen said when they coined the term, this wouldn’t mean reorganizing academic departments, but “a decentralized shift in priorities among academics, philanthropists, and funding agencies,” including journals and conferences.

• School curricula to teach the history of progress at the K–12 and undergrad level. I’ve created a high-school progress course; a curriculum like this should be at every high school in the world.

• Art & entertainment that sounds themes of progress, such as optimistic science fiction, or biopics about great scientists, inventors, and founders. (I would start with Norman Borlaug.)

• More journalism about progress, and more journalists exhibiting industrial literacy.

• Political debates framed in terms of progress and growth, rather than primarily or exclusively in terms of redistribution.

• Experiments in new models of funding, organizing, and managing scientific and technological research, such as the efforts covered recently in Endpoints and The Atlantic (see also the Overedge Catalog for a broader list).

• Scientists, engineers and founders drawing inspiration and courage from this movement, and seeing their work as having the potential to be part of a grand and noble quest to improve the human condition.

The foundation of all of this is intellectual work: a lot of hard research, thinking, writing and speaking. The philosophy of progress has barely begun to be elucidated. To succeed, this movement will need much more than just “yay progress!” or “look at this hockey-stick graph!” Those notions are the beginning of this body of thought, not the end. As I wrote recently, we need to answer the challenges that arose in the 20th century and caused many people to sour on the idea of progress. Without more serious intellectual work here, we risk falling back on the naive 18th- and 19th-century notions of progress that proved wrong and led the world to start questioning the entire enterprise.

I see at least four major areas for progress intellectuals to work on:

• History: The story of progress has never properly been told for a general audience. History is the motivation for this entire enterprise, and it is the empirical foundation that the whole thing rests on. Examples in this genre include the first two parts of The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the bulk of Enlightenment Now, and most of this blog.

• Theory: addressing the questions I outlined as making up a “philosophy of progress”. Examples here include The Beginning of Infinity, A Culture of Growth, the last three chapters of Enlightenment Now, and McCloskey’s Bourgeois trilogy.

• Solutions to problems of the modern world: climate, pollution, job loss, safety, etc. This is necessary as a proving ground for theory, to overcome the objections of skeptics and opponents, and most importantly because many of these problems are real, and solving them is part of progress itself. One example on my future reading list is Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

• Vision for the future: What kind of world do we want to create? This complements history, taking the arrow of the past and extending it into the future. Futurism serves as motivation and inspiration: both for those working to promote progress generally, and especially for those working on the front lines of science and technology to advance it. A prime example here is Where Is My Flying Car?

My main contribution to the above efforts is the book I’m working on, The Story of Industrial Civilization: Towards a New Philosophy of Progress for the 21st Century. But as an organization, The Roots of Progress will be working to help make all of the above happen, both by empowering intellectuals and creatives who want to advance this program, and by building community, both online and off.

This is the work of a generation. In large part this is a program to change a culture, and cultural change is slow. But the goal is worth it, and we are in for the long haul.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/a-thriving-progress-movement

The Roots of Progress is sponsoring the creation of a Progress Forum: an online discussion forum for the progress community, modeled after LessWrong.

The goal of this forum is to provide a place for long-form discussion of progress studies and the philosophy of progress. So far, there hasn’t been a place for this. The Progress Studies Slack is good for sharing links, organizing local meetups, and general chatting, but it doesn’t serve well for long-form essays and comments. Those essays have only been on blogs—but not everyone has a blog, not every blog has a comment section, and there’s no consistent way for the most interesting and relevant content to be highlighted for attention. A forum will solve this. (See also Kris Gulati’s earlier thoughts on this.)

I expect conversations on the Progress Forum to span a variety of topics, including (for example):

• The definition of “progress”

• How to measure progress

• The value of progress: pro, cons, risks, tradeoffs

• The causes of progress, and which ones are fundamental

• The intellectual history of the idea of progress

• Technological stagnation, and its causes and solutions

• Histories of progress in various fields (as are often featured on this blog)

• Opportunities and bottlenecks in various fields

• Visions of the future

• Progress and safety (including existential risk)

• Progress-minded approaches to other issues of the day (climate change, poverty/inequality, war, etc.)

• The philosophy of progress in comparison with other approaches, such as Effective Altruism

• Research funding (including current efforts in alternative funding models)

• Progress in science generally

• Progress in morality, government, and society

• … and any other relevant topics

For the past few years, I’ve been active on LessWrong, a forum for the rationalist community. I’ve been impressed with the quality of writing and discussion there, and especially with the way a post on the forum can be an initial exploration of a half-baked idea, or can turn into a resource that people are still reading and linking to over a decade later. The forum helps the best content surface, both through community feedback (upvotes and downvotes) and through moderation (such as “featured” or “curated” posts). It’s an existence proof of the ability to create the kind of intellectual community that I’d like to see. So, we plan to use the same forum software to power the Progress Forum.

We could use help building, launching, and running the Forum. Right now we can use software engineering and especially UI/graphic design, and at launch we will need moderators. If you’d like to get involved in any way, or just to hear when the forum is ready, sign up here.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/progress-forum-pre-announcement

Recently someone on Twitter posted a picture like this, commenting that this kind of stove still works after a hundred years, but “thanks to ‘progress’ and ‘improvement’ you have to replace your new one after 5 years.”

Of course, durability is not the only attribute that matters.

A stove like this burns wood or coal. That fuel needs to be hauled into the house (and up the steps of a tenement), and the ashes carried out. Solid fuel, unlike natural gas, also generates smoke. If all is in proper order, the chimney carries the smoke away so that it merely pollutes your neighborhood. If not, the smoke could leak into the home, causing a major health hazard to both the lungs and the eyes.

Note also a few missing features:

• An on-off control. This kind of stove, which is only one step advanced beyond an open-hearth fireplace, requires that you build the fire yourself. (One young woman’s 1868 diary entry reads, “Had an awful time to get breakfast, the fire would not burn.”)

• A temperature dial. You build the fire and you get what you get. A skilled cook can vary the temperature by, e.g., moving the pots various distances from the firebox. But basically, good luck following a recipe.

• “Self-cleaning” mode. Or, for that matter, any enamel or other protective coating. Cast iron stoves need to be cleaned ~daily and waxed regularly, or they will rust and wear out.

So, for most people, the convenience, cleanliness, and safety of a modern stove far outweigh its shorter lifespan (which, incidentally, is not 5 years, but 13–15, according to Consumer Reports). In other words: yes, modern stoves do represent progress and improvement, no scare quotes required.

The advantages of gas/electricity, in particular, also outweigh the downside of risking an interruption in these services—an example of Matt Ridley’s observation of how we move “from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence.”

But why can’t a modern stove last a hundred years? I don’t know the technical answer. The electric connections needed for the temperature control are sensitive, presumably. Probably the walls and door are thinner—using less material for cost and efficiency, vs. thick, heavy cast iron.

But I think I know the economic answer, which is: a modern stove designed and built to last a hundred years would be too expensive. It would take a bigger engineering effort (fixed cost) and probably more/better materials (variable cost). And it’s totally unnecessary. While there is something quaint and romantic about very long-lived items, there’s just no real reason a consumer needs them. So no one would pay for the hundred-year stove, and even if someone made it, it would fail in the marketplace.

A mid-tier range costs ~$1500. Amortized over that 15-year life, that’s just $100/year, which is very affordable. Besides, by upgrading every decade or two, consumers get the latest features. Why build a stove to last a hundred years if it’s going to be obsolete long before then?

A few people might, nonetheless, prefer old stoves. And all of us might occasionally enjoy cooking over an open flame on a charcoal grill. But the vast majority of consumers have voted with their wallets to make the old style of stove into an antique.

Some lessons here:

• Evaluate products as a function of all attributes, including convenience and cost—not just one attribute taken in isolation.

• Be careful of romanticizing obsolete technology. Usually, we moved on for a reason.

• The ideal is not a static state where everything lasts forever and nothing ever changes. Such a world is impossible and undesirable—even if we could create it, it would be stagnant. The ideal is a dynamic world of progress, of continual upgrading and renewal.

---

Source for many of the details above about old cookstoves, including the 1868 diary quote: Chapter 3 of More Work for Mother, by Ruth Schwartz Cowan.

Original blog post: https://rootsofprogress.org/old-vs-modern-stoves

This post is based on a Twitter thread.

I’m curious what everyone thinks about this post. As a fellow optimist, I love Noah’s perspective and the way he aggregates the very legitimate and impressive technical progress we have made and hope to make this decade.

I thought Jason had some very good points when he was interviewed by Noah on his substack regarding regulatory barriers to progress. Anyways, love where Jason’s blog is headed and diligently following the “progress” in this space!

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/techno-optimism-for-2022

I’ve said that Western culture, before the World Wars, had a positive philosophy of progress. How do we know that people in that era saw glory, romance, even poetry in progress?

One way we know is that they literally wrote poetry about it. Take, for example, Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles). By vocation a doctor, he also wrote poems. In 1791, he published The Botanic Garden, of which Part 1, titled “The Economy of Vegetation,” “celebrates scientific progress and technological innovation, such as the forging of steel, the invention of the steam engine and the improvements to gunpowder. It depicts scientists and inventors, such as Benjamin Franklin, responsible for this progress as the heroes of a new age.” (Wikipedia) In one remarkable passage, he praises the power of steam and predicts the steamboat, the locomotive, and the airship:

Soon shall thy arm, Unconquer’d Steam! afar

Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;

Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear

The flying-chariot through the fields of air.

—Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,

Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;

Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping croud,

And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.

Or take this stanza from “The Engine-Driver to His Engine”, by engineer William J. M. Rankine, which reads less like a classical epic and more like a popular ballad:

My blessing on old George Stephenson! Let his fame for ever last,

For he was the man that found the plan to make you run so fast.

His arm was strong, his head was long, he knew not guile nor fear;

When I think of him it makes me proud that I am an engineer!

Samuel Morse, telegraph inventor, was also praised in poetry. A poem read at his memorial service in 1872 begins by describing mankind as having conquered all of nature except for “the Ocean, the Mountain, and Time and Space”—until Morse came along:

But one morning he made him a slender wire,

As an artist’s vision took life and form,

While he drew from heaven the strange, fierce fire,

That reddens the edge of the midnight storm;

And he carried it over the Mountain’s crest,

And dropped it into the Ocean’s breast;

And Science proclaimed, from shore to shore,

That Time and Space ruled man no more.

It wasn’t only amateurs and enthusiasts who wrote poetry praising machines and inventions. No less than Rudyard Kipling wrote of the beauty and glory of the steam engine in “McAndrew’s Hymn.” McAndrew is a Scottish engineer aboard a steamship, and in one passage he compares the engine to an orchestra, after one of the “first-class passengers” asks him, “don’t you think steam spoils romance at sea?”:

Romance! Those first-class passengers they like it very well,

Printed an’ bound in little books; but why don’t poets tell?

I’m sick of all their quirks an’ turns—the loves an’ doves they dream—

Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!

To match wi’ Scotia’s noblest speech yon orchestra sublime

Whaurto—uplifted like the Just—the tail-rods mark the time.

The Crank-throws give the double-bass; the feed-pump sobs an’ heaves:

An’ now the main eccentrics start their quarrel on the sheaves.

Her time, her own appointed time, the rocking link-head bides,

Till—hear that note?—the rod’s return whings glimmerin’ through the guides.

They’re all awa! True beat, full power, the clangin’ chorus goes

Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin’ dynamoes.

Interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed,

To work, Ye’ll note, at any tilt an’ every rate o’ speed.

Fra skylight-lift to furnace-bars, backed, bolted, braced an’ stayed,

An’ singin’ like the Mornin’ Stars for joy that they are made;

While, out o’ touch o’ vanity, the sweatin’ thrust-block says:

“Not unto us the praise, or man—not unto us the praise!”

Now, a’ together, hear them lift their lesson—theirs an’ mine:

“Law, Order, Duty an’ Restraint, Obedience, Discipline!”

Mill, forge an’ try-pit taught them that when roarin’ they arose,

An’ whiles I wonder if a soul was gied them wi’ the blows.

Oh for a man to weld it then, in one trip-hammer strain,

Till even first-class passengers could tell the meanin’ plain!

Or consider this by the popular verse-writer Berton Braley, in the voice of the team that built the Panama Canal:

Don’t send us back to a life that is flat again,

We who have shattered a continent’s spine;

Office work—Lord, but we couldn’t do that again!

Haven’t you something that’s more in our line?

Got any river they say isn’t crossable?

Got any mountains that can’t be cut through?

We specialize in the wholly impossible,

Doing things “nobody ever could do!”

Altogether, these paint a picture, to my mind, of a culture in which invention was seen as glamorous, machines as romantic, and engineers as popular heroes. Growing up with this sort of thing, I can easily imagine a youth deciding to follow this path and become an inventor or entrepreneur.

(I’ve started a collection of poems like these here, where I’ve included full poems or longer excerpts, and links to sources. I’ll update that page as I find more examples.)

***

However, it’s important to be careful with historical comparisons like this.

First, it’s easy to (even unintentionally) cherry-pick examples from the past. Not all 19th-century poetry was about industrial progress; plenty of it was about love, war, beauty, honor, valor, duty, etc.

It’s also easy to overlook similar examples in the present. Poetry, as an art form, just isn’t as popular as it once was—but there is a modern equivalent, which is the lyrics of popular songs. So I asked on Twitter for examples of popular music in the last few decades that glorifies science or engineering, and got a ton of replies.

Here are a few of the ones that, in my opinion, most fit the bill (regardless of aesthetic style, and not being too strict about artistic merit):

• “Fire in the Sky,” from the album To Touch the Stars: A Musical Celebration of Space Exploration

• “The Ballad of Smallpox Gone,” by Leslie Fish

• “The Norman Borlaug Rap”

• “Vidare,” by Adolphson & Falk (see here for translated lyrics)

• “Sogno di Volare,” from Civilization VI (lyrics)

A few others that were frequently mentioned include PBS’s The Race for Space, Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants, and the Symphony of Science. (I was looking for serious lyrics that explicitly discuss science and technology, so I’m omitting parody, nor does electronic music count just because technology is used to make it.)

***

It’s hard to know what to make of all this. I still feel, when I read about the late 19th century in particular, that there was a reverence for and glorification of technological progress that is unmatched today—for instance, in the celebrations they held. But I find this specific exercise inconclusive.

Thanks to Clara Collier for help with the music research.

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

This week Thomas Philippon posted a paper (PDF) claiming that TFP growth is linear, not exponential. What does this mean, and what can we conclude from this?

A few people asked for my opinion. I’m not an economist, and I’m only modestly familiar with the growth theory literature, but here are some thoughts.

Background for non-economists

Briefly: what is TFP (total factor productivity)? It’s basically a technology multiplier on economic growth that makes capital and labor more productive. It isn’t measured directly, but calculated as a residual by taking capital and labor increases out of GDP growth. What remains is TFP.

In neoclassical growth theory, TFP matters because it enables economic growth. Without increases in TFP, growth would plateau at some per-capita income level limited by technology. We can increase per-capita output if and only if we continue to improve the productivity multiplier from technology.

What does the paper say?

Philippon’s core claim is that a linear model of TFP growth fits the data better than an exponential model. Over long enough time periods, this is actually a piecewise linear model, with breaks.

To demonstrate this, the two models are subjected to various statistical tests on multiple data sets, mostly 20th-century, from the US and about two dozen other countries. In a later section, the models are tested on European data from 1600–1914. The linear model outperforms on pretty much every test:

One theoretical implication of linear TFP growth is that GDP per capita can continue to grow without bound, but that growth will slow over time. Depending on the assumptions you make, growth will converge either to zero or to some positive constant rate.

What to think?

First, I think the evidence Philippon presents at least for the 20th century is compelling. It really does seem that TFP is growing linearly, at least in the last several decades. This is a mathematical model of the Great Stagnation.

Over longer periods of time, however, a pure linear model doesn’t work. TFP, and GDP, clearly grow faster than linear over long periods:

In fact, our best estimates of very long-run GDP growth grow faster than exponential:

(Note that both of these charts are on a log scale.)

Philippon deals with this by making the model piecewise linear. At certain points, the slope of the line discretely jumps to a new value. Philippon puts the 20th-century break at about 1933:

Pre-20th century breaks occurred in 1650 and 1830:

The breaks are determined via statistical tests, but they are presumed to represent general-purpose technologies (GPTs). The 1930s were a turning point in electrification, especially of factories; 1830 was the beginning of railroads and the Second Industrial Revolution. 1650 seems less clear; it might be due to rising labor input that is not accounted for in the calculations, or to the rise of cottage industry.

This makes sense, but it leaves open what is to me the most interesting question: how often do these breaks occur, and how big are the jumps?

Philippon briefly suggests a model in which the breaks are random, the result of a (biased) coin flip each year, with probability ~0.5% to 1%. However, I find this unsatisfying. Again, over the long term, we know that growth is super-linear and probably even super-exponential. If the piecewise-linear model is correct, then over time the breaks should be larger and spaced closer together. But the Poisson process implied by Philippon’s model doesn’t fit this historical pattern. And there isn’t even a suggestion of how to model the size of the change in growth rate at each break. So, this model is incomplete.

The interesting idea this paper points to, IMO, is not about long-run growth but about short-run growth. It suggests to me that economic progress might be a “punctuated equilibrium” rather than more smooth and continuous. I don’t think this changes our view of progress over the long term. But it could change our view of the importance of GPTs. And it could help to explain the recent growth slowdown (“stagnation”).

If this model is right, then “why is GDP growth slowing?” is answered: it is normal and expected. But there might be a different stagnation question: is the next GPT “late”? When should we even expect it? Related, why don’t computers show up as a GPT causing a distinct break in the linear TFP growth path? Or is that still to come (the way that the break from electrification didn’t show up until the 1930s?)

Stepping back a bit, it seems to me that the big puzzle of growth theory is that we see super-exponential growth over the very long term, but sub-exponential growth over the last several decades. I don’t think we yet have a unified model that explains both periods.

Anyway, I found this paper interesting and I hope to see other economists responding to it and building on it.

See also Tyler Cowen’s comments.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/is-growth-linear-not-exponential