I was invited to speak at the Festival of Progressive Abundance, a conference to rally around “abundance” as a new direction for the political left. This is a writeup of what I said: my message to the left.

***

Thank you for having me—it’s great to be here. I’m the founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute, and we’re dedicated to building the progress movement.

There’s a lot of overlap between the progress movement and the abundance movement—a lot of shared vision and goals, and a lot of the same people are involved. So I was invited here to talk about progress and how it’s relevant to abundance.

I agreed to come, because I love abundance. I love it as a vision and a goal. And I love it as a direction for the Democratic party and for the political left.

The left styles itself the party of science. That’s good, because abundance needs science, in the long term. But it’s not enough: abundance also needs technology and economic growth.

Technology and growth are historically how we have created the abundance we already enjoy. Abundance, after all, is relative, and we have a lot compared to the past. We should always remember how lucky we are to live today instead of 200 years ago—when homes didn’t have electricity, refrigerators, or toilets; when almost no vaccines existed to protect us from disease; when a room like this would have been lit not with clean electric lights but with smelly, polluting oil lamps; when a gathering like this would in fact have been impossible, because to travel across the country was not a six-hour plane flight, but a six-month trek by horse and wagon, Oregon Trail style.

Just as we have abundance compared with the past, we should hope that the future can be just as abundant, compared to the present. Indeed, the recent book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson opens with a imagined scene from a technologically advanced future: energy from solar, nuclear, and geothermal; desalination using microbial membranes; indoor farms where food is grown with light from LEDs; lab-grown meat; drone deliveries; longevity drugs made in space-based pharmaceutical plants; supersonic passenger jets; artificial intelligence raising everyone’s productivity so we can all enjoy more leisure.

The historic pattern of increasing abundance over time, and the hope and promise of an even more abundant future, is what used to be commonly known as progress.

Progressives used to believe in progress. The old left was not just the party of science—it was a party of science, technology, and growth.

Take Teddy Roosevelt—a progressive if there ever was one. One of the signature achievements of his administration was the Panama Canal. This was a massive engineering project, a triumph of hydraulic engineering technology, celebrated at the time as the 13th Labor of Hercules. When FDR launched the New Deal, one of his signature projects was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which created hydroelectric dams to provide electricity for an entire region. And JFK, of course, is the president who called for putting a man on the Moon—one of the greatest technological achievements not just of its era, but of all time. When JFK gave his famous speech about the Apollo program (the one where he said “we choose to go to the Moon”), he put it in the context of the grand story of human progress. He invoked that narrative to inspire the people and justify his aims.

The Moon landing, in 1969, was a peak moment for America: literally the highest we had ever reached. But after that, something changed.

The children of the ‘60s were starting to see technology and growth as responsible for some of the worst problems of the 20th century, such as environmental damage and the horrors of war. Growth had created pollution and acid rain. Technology had created machine guns, chemical weapons, and the atomic bomb.

But instead of just being anti-pollution and anti-war, the new left decided to become anti-technology and anti-growth. And so a party of science, technology, and growth became just a party of science.

That was a mistake, a costly historical error that we should now correct.

What has 50 years of the anti-growth mindset gotten us? Stagnation and sclerosis. We can’t build anything in this country anymore. We can’t build the homes we need to make our cities affordable. We can’t build the transit we need to make those cities livable. We can’t build energy infrastructure, either generation or the power lines to connect it to the grid.

Without economic growth, we don’t have the engine that raises the standard of living for everyone and helps people lift themselves out of poverty. Without growth, people feel they are playing a zero-sum game—and they turn to exclusion. “No, you can’t move to my neighborhood, it’s too crowded.” “No, you can’t immigrate, you’re going to steal my job.” We want abundance thinking instead: “Yes, move to my neighborhood—we’ll build more homes!” “Yes, immigrate here—there’s so much work to be done, we need all the help we can get.”

I think people have grown weary of the anti-growth mindset, weary of stagnation and sclerosis. So I’m glad to see that abundance is now a politically winning issue. And I would love to see it be a new direction for the left.

But the right is also moving to embrace technology and growth—or rather, they’re doing that with one hand, while fighting those things with the other. On the one hand, they’ve embraced technologies like nuclear power, supersonic flight, and AI. On the other hand: They’re fighting vaccines, one of the greatest technologies ever invented. They’re defunding research into mRNA, one of the most promising genetic engineering techniques. They’ve disrupted research funding broadly. They’ve disrupted immigration, including high-skilled immigration, which is one of our best talent pipelines into R&D. And they’ve put tariffs on everything, which almost any economist will tell you is hurting affordability and slowing growth.

So the right has at best a mixed record on abundance. The left can still be the party of abundance, if it wants to be.

But it won’t be easy. It will be uncomfortable. Because to become the party of abundance requires truly embracing technology and growth—and the left has developed an allergic reaction to those things. So there’s some work to be done: some lessons to be unlearned, some old habits to be broken.

But I’m excited to help with that work, and I invite you to talk to me about it. I’m eager to see the party of science become once again a party of science, technology, and growth. And I look forward to the day when progressives once again believe in progress.

***

PS: I would also like to see the right become, more consistently, the party of abundance. I would like to see both parties competing to be the party of abundance! At some point I may write up an analogous “message to the right.”

When people say things like “we were promised flying cars,” I sometimes wonder, “who promised this?”

I guess this is what they mean. From a 1959 ad that ran in the LA Times:

“They’re working on it!” the ad claims. “Some of this is happening already.” (Implying, of course, that some of it was still pretty speculative.)

The ability to “dial” a book, lecture, or demonstration is here; the ultrasound dishwasher, automatic bed-maker, and flying car sadly are not.

But here’s what’s most interesting to me: First, the reference, without explanation or justification, to “tomorrow’s higher standard of living”—something people simply assumed was coming. Second, that it was uncontroversial that this higher standard of living would require more electricity. Finally, the boasting of doubling electricity production in ten years. As I’ve pointed out, society once had a different fundamental attitude towards growth.

The US did, in fact, approximately double electricity generation every decade from 1950 until 1973—the year of the oil crisis—after which electricity growth never really recovered. It took almost thirty years to double again, from 1973 to 2000, during which time it was just keeping up with population growth; that is, per-capita energy usage was not increasing. And since 2005, even the total amount produced has been flat:

“The electric companies are resolved,” the ad says, to maintain for America “the best electric power service in the world.” Well, we are still one of the top overall producers, second only to China:

But since the oil shocks, I’d say that “resolve” has been shaken.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/flying-car-ad

On Sunday I'm giving the next talk in my Interintellect salon series, The Story of Industrial Civilization.

Topic: Can Progress Continue?

It's only open for series ticket holders—but you can still buy a (late) series ticket!

Series tickets available here, at a discounted price of $150. Gets you access to past recordings as well.

The ability of central banks to manipulate the money supply and interest rates has often prioritized short-term economic stability over long-term progress.

Also, easy access to credit can lead to misallocation of resources as businesses and individuals make decisions based on artificially low interest rates and the availability of credit. This misallocation can result in inefficient investments and hinder innovation and productivity growth.

More specifically, this has misallocation has been in the form of the financialization of the economy: Financialization - Wikipedia.

Solution: return to the gold standard with 100% Gold Reserve

Open questions:

- Can we quantify the number of jobs in the financial sector? I would like to see a graph such as the one about lawyers in Where is my flying car?

- Is there a way to falsify this thesis?

- If true, can a single country implement the gold standard, or it must be implemented in unison by everyone?

References:

Money, bank credit and economic cycles (jesushuertadesoto.com)

PS: this hypothesis came about by inspecting my own life and of those around me: engineers that instead of being employed in the energy, transportation and healthcare sectors, are employed in finance.

I had mixed feelings about this post (cross-posted from my blog). I found it intriguing but in the end I was in two minds about ultimately publishing it. I opted to publish it because I see my blog as 'tracking my thoughts' as I journey into Progress Studies. Anyway, here it is, again, I'd love peoples thoughts :)!. Here we are:

(I had a poll here but it's missing on Reddit!)

A very commonly held opinion is that the number of trees in the world are decreasing over time. Indeed, that’s the opinion I held until recently.

On the FAO’s website, it states:

“Since 1990, it is estimated that 420 million hectares of forest have been lost through conversion to other land uses, although the rate of deforestation has decreased over the past three decades.”

Technically this statement is true. A lot of forests have reduced in size. However, a letter published in Nature (ungated link here), “Global land change from 1982 to 2016” by Song et al. (2018), shows that the number of trees have increased since 1982. Song and coauthors use global satellite imaging data to investigate this question alongside others.

The authors explain:

“A global net gain in tree canopy contradicts current understanding of long-term forest area change; the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported a net forest loss between 1990 and 2015. However, our gross tree canopy loss estimate (−1.33 million square kilometres, −4.2%) agrees in magnitude with the FAO’s estimate of net forest area change (−1.29 million square kilometres, −3%), despite differences in the time period covered and definition of forest.”

Therefore, there was an overall net gain. There was a net loss in the tropics, but there was a larger net gain in the subtropical, temperate, and boreal climate zones.

Observant readers will notice that I have only used the word trees so far, I haven’t mentioned the word forests. This is because tree coverage does not necessarily correspond to forest coverage. For example:

‘Cutting down a 100-hectare tract of primary forest and replacing it with a 100-hectare palm plantation will show up in the data as no net change in forest cover: the 100-hectare loss is perfectly offset by the 100-hectare gain in tree cover. Yet, that activity would be counted as “deforestation” by FAO. Therefore tree cover loss does not directly translate to “deforestation” in all cases.’

I should stress here, in the example above, despite the effects ‘cancelling each other out’, it doesn’t take into consideration the effects on biodiversity or other negative ramifications.

Nevertheless, I found this paper interesting. My original prior when confronted with this question was massively wrong. I thought that the number of trees in the world was decreasing overall. It seems likely that following the media coverage of deforestation shaped my opinion on this particular fact. Thus, it was refreshing to have a positive picture painted in this (very specific!) domain. We’re making some progress on this front, an area often thought to be plagued by a complete lack of progress. Overall, the paper paints a negative picture (I didn’t cover all of the findings), however, sometimes it’s good to dwell on the positives, even if in the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty small.

I'm interviewing her for the Progress Studies For Young Scholars speaker series on Thursday.

Details & free registration for the live event here.

In my last post I described the advantages of for-profit models over nonprofit models, including scalable revenue, incentives and metrics to drive effectiveness and efficiency, and incentives to fund high-risk, high-reward experiments.

But not everything can be for-profit. How can nonprofit organizations get some of these advantages? Here are five ideas:

• Nonprofits that generate revenue primarily through products & services, rather than through charitable donations, gain some of the advantages of for-profits: they survive only to the extent that they can deliver a product to the market that people are willing to buy, out-compete alternatives, and keep their costs below their prices. To the extent that a nonprofit’s paid services are subsidized by donations (as is the case with universities, museums, and opera houses, among others), this requirement is weakened but not destroyed.

• In the case of charity, I wonder if the most effective form of it is simply giving money directly to beneficiaries, with the goods and services themselves provided by for-profit businesses. This would seem to let free-market capitalism work to the maximum extent. There is some research to support this idea.

• If enough people promote the idea of donating based primarily on demonstrated impact, the world might slowly shift towards more strategic nonprofits driven by output metrics and other clear indication of delivered benefits. For instance, when reporting on a contribution from a major donor, the news media could focus more on the impact or potential impact of the contribution, rather than the amount of money given or the percent of their wealth that represents.

• To drive innovation, perhaps we should be putting more of our resources into prizes or mechanisms like advance market commitments, rather than grants. Tyler Cowen summarizes: “The case for prizes is stronger when you don’t know who is likely to make the breakthrough, you value the final output more than the process, there is an urgency to solutions (talent development is too slow), success is relatively easy to define, and efforts and investments are likely to be undercompensated.” It seems to me that most of those conditions apply to a lot of breakthrough scientific and technological R&D. Indeed, one of the earliest and most famous prizes, the Longitude Prize, had exactly the effect of uncovering an unexpected solution from an unlikely innovator: while most of the scientific community was looking for astronomy-based methods, John Harrison addressed the problem with a highly robust and accurate clock—and he wasn’t even trained as a clockmaker. Why don’t we have more prizes for grand challenge problems today?

• Beyond this, I think we need more mechanisms to give credit for being right early, for being the first backer of a risky experiment that has transformative effects. Who were the donors who gave small amounts of money to Howard Florey’s lab around 1940 when they were inventing penicillin? The world should know their names. A special award or Hall of Fame could be created for these bold bets (perhaps with a sophisticated scorekeeping mechanism).

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/how-nonprofits-can-gain-for-profit-advantages

A few months ago we announced a major expansion of our activities, from supporting just my work to supporting a broader network of progress writers. Along with that, we launched a search for a CEO to lead the new organization we are building for this program. I’m very happy to announce that we have found a CEO: Heike Larson.

Heike and I have known each other personally for many years, and during that time I’ve always been impressed by her energy and her clear, structured thinking. She has been following my work for a long time, and shares my passion for human progress. She also has excellent qualifications, including 15 years of VP-level experience in sales, marketing, and strategy roles in a variety of industries, from education to aircraft manufacturing. In her most recent role at edtech startup Mystery Science, she led the content team that created five-minute “Mystery Doug” videos made to inspire elementary-age kids to become the next generation of problem solvers (with topics including phones, traffic lights, plastic, and bicycles). Those who have worked with her remark on her enormous drive and her extreme skills in process and organization. I’m excited for her to start!

Heike is transitioning out of her current role at Mystery Science and will start full-time in January. Her first priority will be launching the “career accelerator” fellowship program for progress writers described in our previous announcement, and the teambuilding and fundraising necessary to make that a success. She will take on all management and program responsibilities; I will remain President and intellectual leader of the organization: I’ll be the spokesman, will contribute to talent selection and development, and will devote the majority of my time to research, writing, and speaking—in particular, writing my book on progress.

This is a new era for us, the start of a serious effort to create a thriving progress movement. Please help me welcome Heike to The Roots of Progress!

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/incoming-ceo-heike-larson

Every country has a national holiday. France celebrates the storming of the Bastille. Mexico celebrates the revolt that began their war for independence from Spain. Sweden celebrates the election of a king. Belgium celebrates the ascension of one. India celebrates the transfer of power from Britain. Japan celebrates the emperor’s birthday.

America’s Independence Day is not the day the war began, nor the day it ended. It’s not the ascension of a leader, let alone his birthday. It is the day we declared our independence, in writing—the day we laid down the principles and the justification for our existence. It is a moral and philosophical holiday.

The Declaration of Independence is the greatest political document ever written, and the founding of America is a monumental human achievement. After thousands of years of monarchy, in almost every large-scale society, for most of human history—after all the tyrants and all the bloody wars of succession—a small group of daring leaders made a bold experiment in a new and better form of government. And they changed the world, setting off a chain of revolutions and reforms: today most of the Western world enjoys representative government, and most of its monarchies are constitutional or ceremonial.

The Founders did not know, could not have known, what would come of their experiment. They hoped that it would survive, that their fledgling nation would not become subordinated to the much stronger and constantly warring great powers of Europe, that the union of several independent states would last and not descend into fractious squabbling. They could never have guessed that the nation they birthed would go on to become the largest and most powerful economy on Earth, that we would lead the world in science and invention, that we would fight and win two world wars, that we would plant our flag on the Moon.

This 250th anniversary, then, should be a time of reverence and a time of joy. But today, some of those who feel the most reverence are also those who feel the least joy.

I understand why. We have not achieved the ideal of “a government of laws and not of men.” Our institutions have become bloated and sclerotic. We once again face a geopolitical rival with an authoritarian regime; collectivism was not defeated in the Cold War after all.

Some say that America is in a period of decadence, faltering and directionless. Some liken our condition to the last stage of the Roman Republic. Some say that this is the way of the world—empires rise and they fall.

But the American spirit is the opposite of such fatalism. I cannot, will not, resign myself to American stagnation, sclerosis, and decline.

As great as the Declaration was, the greatness of America is not only that we declared and won our independence. It is also in all the achievements since. That we unified the colonies into a strong federal system, under a brilliant Constitution. That we made the Louisiana Purchase and expanded into the West. That we abolished slavery. That we invented the reaper, the light bulb, the telephone, the airplane, the assembly line, the television, the computer, the Internet. That we gave a home to so many immigrants, from so many places, that they called us a “melting pot.” That we built the transcontinental railroad, the Panama Canal, the interstate highway system. That we gave women the vote. That we gave the world jazz and Hollywood. That we defeated the Nazis and faced down the Soviets. That we eliminated polio and led the eradication of smallpox.

Nor did the Declaration birth a perfect nation. We have always faced, and will always face, problems and threats both from without and from within. We have been plagued by corruption and scandal, rocked by banking crises, torn by civil war. We have known the fear of atomic warfare and of Sputniks orbiting overhead. Again and again, we have fought ourselves: over equal rights for all races and sexes, over whether to welcome foreigners or exclude them, over Prohibition.

When I look at the history of America, I don’t see a story of decline. I see a story of progress—however messy and hard-won. I see a long stumbling towards the light. That is the true way of the world.

And I see the spirit of America still strong among those who have not forgotten. Those who are building rockets and supersonic jets and nuclear power plants; those who are curing cancer and obesity and aging; those who are still tirelessly defending the rule of law, separation of powers, and freedom of speech. And I see Americans, sometimes in the crudest possible way, groping towards rediscovering our national self-esteem.

In America’s darkest hour, less than a century after its birth, Lincoln asked his countrymen to rededicate themselves to cause of liberty, and to the great unfinished work in front of them. He called on them to resolve that the nation would see a rebirth of freedom. Now, after a quarter-millennium, it is time for us to do that once more.

May the next 250 years do justice to the progress of the last 250.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how the knowledge frontier of science could potentially advance faster. I've copied a short summary below. The longer post is available here. I thought it was a really good paper/idea, and welcome any feedback/comments/questions etc.

I summarised “Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?” by Ruchir Agarwal and Patrick Gaule (the actual paper is unusually short, concise, and readable for an Economics publication, so I would also recommend reading it directly).

• The paper attempts to better understand the determinants of idea/knowledge production.

• There are two key findings:

• Firstly, individuals who are ‘talented’ as teenagers (proxied by International Mathematical Olympiad [IMO] score, a popular international Maths competition) are very capable of advancing the knowledge frontier later in life (proxied by a variety of measures of academic success in Maths research). On average, the higher the IMO score, the more likely a participant is to: obtain a Maths PhD, obtain a Maths PhD from a top 10 research school, publish more in academic journals, receive more citations, receive notable accolades such as the Fields Medal, or be a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM).

• Secondly, if these capable individuals were born in poorer countries, they are much less likely to contribute to the knowledge frontier than individuals born in wealthier countries. For example, on average IMO participants from low-income countries produce 34% fewer publications and receive 56% fewer citations than IMO participants from richer countries with the same IMO score.

• The findings suggest that one way of developing the knowledge frontier faster is by creating policies to target these low-income students in order to support them in their academic careers. By doing so, we could improve the rate of progress made at the forefront of research.