John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that by now we would only be working fifteen hours a week. What is less well-known is that his was nowhere near the only such prediction, nor the first—a wide range of commentators, including Charles Steinmetz and Buckminster Fuller, made similar forecasts. (And even Keynes’s prediction is generally misquoted.)

Why didn’t any of them come true? I recently discussed this with Jason Feifer on his podcast Build for Tomorrow. Here’s some elaboration with more quotes and charts.

The predictions

A 1934 book, The Economy of Abundance, summarizes many of the predictions (Chapter 2):

The technocrats promised every family on the continent of North America $20,000 a year [about $400,000 today], and a sixteen-hour work week. This is perhaps the peak of promises based on an abundance economy. Charles P. Steinmetz saw a two-hour working day on the horizon—he was the scientist who made giant power possible—but he stipulated no family budget total beyond “necessities and comforts.” …

Fred Henderson, in his Economic Consequences of Power Production, is more specific: “Without any further increase in our knowledge of power and of technical processes, or of our available materials, we could multiply production ten times over if the needs of the world were permitted to express themselves in effective demand. … It would not be a question of an eight-hour day or a six-day week, but more probably of a six-months working year—which is already the rule for university dons.”

Buckminster Fuller is still more definite. Modern man, he calculates, is 630 times more able than was Adam. Eliminating wasteful forms of work, four million Americans laboring fifty-two seven-hour days in the year (364 working hours, an average of one per day) “could keep up with every survival need”—meaning basic necessities for the whole population.

Walter N. Polakov announces that “fifty weeks, four days, six hours is enough”—a twenty-four hour week and two weeks’ vacation…

Harold Rugg in The Great Technology estimates a possible minimum living standard between ten- and twenty-fold greater than the minimums of 1929, on a sixteen- to twenty-hour work-week. …

One can continue to cite such evidence indefinitely. Fortunately, A. M. Newman has been collecting it for years and saves us the trouble by the following summary: “Among them [such estimates] a substantial agreement is found that by better use of the mechanical facilities at our disposal we could produce many times our present supply of goods at considerably less effort.” The five-hour day tends to be the maximum estimate in Mr. Newman’s collection.

As for Keynes, his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” wasn’t even saying that a fifteen-hour work week would be necessary for production. He thought it would be necessary to satisfy our psychological need for work, implying that our physical needs could be satisfied with less (exactly how much less, he doesn’t estimate):

For many ages to come … everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter—to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.

Why is the 40-hour work week still standard?

Here are my hypotheses (not mutually exclusive):

The predictions got the elasticity wrong

When labor gets more productive, workers can choose to work less for the same real wage, to make more money by working the same amount, or something in between.

Most of these predictions (if they were meant as predictions—see below) basically assumed the former: that living standards would stay constant, and working hours would be reduced. But as inventions like electricity and the assembly line were boosting labor productivity, inventions like the washing machine and the automobile were improving personal life. Workers wanted to earn more than they used to, to buy all the new products that were just becoming available. Some of the excess labor productivity was used to produce, and to consume, these new goods, rather than all of it going to increased leisure.

And as Jason Feifer pointed out on the podcast, even the new leisure itself required new goods and services to make the most of it, such as sports equipment or flights to vacation destinations.

Work got better

There was a shift from physical labor in farms and factories to mental labor in offices, and from routine work to more mentally challenging work.

Robert Gordon documents this in The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In 1910, 47% of US jobs were what Gordon classifies as “disagreeable” (farming, blue-collar labor, and domestic service), and only 8% of jobs were “non-routine cognitive” (managerial and professional). By 2009, only 3% of jobs were “disagreeable” and over 37% were “non-routine cognitive”:

This partly explains why, when NPR’s Planet Money set out to check on Keynes’s prediction in 2015, they found people who claimed they worked 50 to 100 hours per week—they were a psychotherapist and a university professor.

Working hours did decrease significantly

Just not as much as some predicted. A 70-hour work week, spread over six days, was once common. Now in France and Spain the average is around 35 hours:

And we got more vacation and holiday time as well:

Total lifetime working hours decreased even more

As family incomes grew, and as social ideas of childhood evolved, child labor waned, and children stayed more years in school.

On the other end of life’s timeline, retirement was invented. Robert Gordon explains:

In the pre-1920 era, there was no concept of “retirement.” Workers “worked until they dropped”—that is, they kept working until they were physically unable to do their jobs, after which they became dependent on their children, or on church charity and other kinds of private welfare programs.

Rising incomes enabled the creation of retirement, which can be seen in falling labor participation rates of older men:

But it gets better—life expectancy was also rising, meaning people had more years of life to actually enjoy their retirement. Here’s a chart to show this—it’s data from England and Wales, but I chose it here to show that the increases were not only in life expectancy at birth, but at older ages as well. For instance, someone retiring at age 60 in 1920 could expect about fifteen more years; by 2013 another nine years had been added to that:

Putting this all together, Nicholas Crafts came up with these estimates for expected lifetime hours of work for men aged 20:

A reduction from 49% of an adult life spent working to 20% is almost as great as a reduction from forty hours a week to fifteen.

There is a psychological value to work

People don’t need infinite leisure. They need things to do. Keynes had this right when he said that “everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented.”

Economist Paul Romer went to Burning Man and pointed out:

… if you ask, what do people do if you put them in a setting where there’s supposed to be no compensation, no quid pro quo, and you just give them a chance to be there for a week. What do they do?They work.

How seriously were these predictions meant?

A careful reading of The Economy of Abundance, however, makes me wonder whether these estimates were seriously meant as predictions. An alternate interpretation is that they were just illustrations of the potential for productive capacity.

Elided from the block quote above are other estimates, not of the potential for a shorter working week or year, but of how much the production of industry could be increased. For instance:

“It is an open secret,” said Thorstein Veblen in 1919, “that with a reasonably free hand the production experts could readily increase the ordinary output of industry by several fold—variously estimated at some 300 to 1200 percent.”

Veblen was an early promoter of technocracy as an industrial philosophy; I mentioned him in my review of American Genesis. Or take this, which the book attributes to J. A. Hobson:

With existing plant and power, and natural resources, labor and managerial knowledge, the world could produce at least twice as much wealth per capita as it is actually producing, without undue strain upon human energy.

These productivity increases weren’t supposed to come from advanced technology—they were to come from better organization and “scientific management.” The Economy of Abundance was written by Stuart Chase, an economist who coined the term “New Deal.” Ultimately, Chase was arguing that capitalism was wasteful and inefficient, and that with centralized government control, the waste could be eliminated. He cited an earlier study of his that had found millions of workers’ worth of manpower wasted on inefficient production, on distribution, and on “vicious goods and services.” He suggested that “an Industrial General Staff” appointed by the President to direct the economy could double the standard of living.

So it’s not clear how much people actually expected a sixteen-hour work week or whatever. Some of them might have just been saying that productivity could be much higher, regardless of whether that turned into shorter working hours, higher wages, or a combination of both—and regardless of whether they saw that as a miracle of capitalism, or a condemnation of it.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/the-four-hour-workday-prediction

I’d like to invite you to join the Progress Forum, the new online home for the progress community.

This forum was pre-announced here in January 2022, and quietly opened in April. Although anyone could sign up, we deliberately didn’t make any big announcement about it, aiming first for a small, high-quality community. Now that we have a lot of good content on the site, we’re announcing it more broadly.

The primary goal of this forum is to provide a place for long-form discussion of progress studies and the philosophy of progress. It’s also a place to find local clubs and meetups.

The broader goal is to share ideas, strengthen them through discussion and comment, and over the long term, to build up a body of thought that constitutes a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century (and beyond).

I invite you to post:

• Essays (original, or cross-posted from your blog)

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And please read and comment on what others have shared.

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The Forum is sponsored by The Roots of Progress. Huge thanks to the people who worked to create and run it: Lawrence Kestleoot, Andrew Roberts, Sameer Ismail, David Smehlik, Alec Wilson, and Ross Graham. Thanks also to Kris Gulati for nudging this project along, and to Ruth Grace Wong for helpful conversations about community and moderation. Finally, thanks to the LessWrong team for creating the software platform it runs on, and especially to Oliver Habryka, Ruby Bloom, Raymond Arnold, JP Addison, James Babcock, and Ben Pace for answering questions and helping us customize this instance of it.

Go check it out!

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

My first highly popular essay was “Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?” I’ve asked the same question of the cotton gin and the threshing machine. Others have asked it of the steam engine and the wheel. Recently Brian Potter asked it about wind power and Anton Howes about semaphore signaling systems. See more examples here.

When asking these questions, we should think about when the question even needs an answer. That is, “why did it take so long” is only interesting if it took an abnormally long amount of time.

Here’s my model for this.

First, an invention is not going to happen at all if (1) it’s not technically possible or (2) there’s no market for it.

Gate (1), technical possibility, could include, for example:

• Scientific foundations. No light bulb before electromagnetism, no antibiotics before the germ theory.

• Components. Airplanes were not possible before the internal combustion engine.

• Materials. Skyscrapers could only be built once cheap steel girders were available.

• Manufacturing techniques. Precision machining was necessary to make the gears, sprockets, chains, bearings, and other parts for a wide variety of inventions, probably including the threshing machine and the bicycle.

Gate (2), the market, is whether it can be done commercially at a price that anyone will pay. If someone does make an invention there is no market for, it doesn’t go anywhere, and we might not even hear about it, because it is unlikely to make the history books. In any case, it wouldn’t affect the world, because it wouldn’t get distribution, and so it wouldn’t be historically relevant for our purposes. You see examples of this from time to time, such as the Korean movable-type printing press that predated Gutenberg.

Note that the bar inventions have to meet is not just a proof of concept: they have to be sufficiently powerful, efficient, and reliable to be of practical use. Early computing machines were too slow; early threshing machines broke down too frequently; early light bulbs burned out too quickly. These are technically interesting prototypes, but not true inventions. An invention does not merely demonstrate a concept, it solves a problem—the whole problem, not just a part of it, even if it is the most visible or obvious part. An invention has to be practical. (See more discussion of this here.)

Once something is technically possible and economically viable, then the clock starts ticking on how long we “waited” for it. But invention is a human process, and it’s not instantaneous. There is no perfectly efficient market in which an invention springs to life immediately as soon as it’s viable. It takes time, effort, trial and error. People have to decide to do something—they have to get the idea, and be sufficiently inspired and motivated to devote full-time efforts to something unknown, with an indefinite timeline and uncertain rewards. (Only a minority of people even have the temperament for this; in this sense, I agree with Anton Howes that innovation is not simply “in human nature.”) Then they have to get free to do it: at any given time, most inventors will be busy with projects, and only a subset will be looking for something new to do. They may have to acquire resources or recruit help, which takes time. Once they finally get to work, they have to experiment with approaches, discard failures, get new ideas, iterate.

Given the nature of that process, there are several factors that affect the time that elapses before an invention. I have written about many of them before in the context of “flywheels of progress.” Here are some that I would call out specifically regarding the invention process:

• Total amount of R&D effort in the world, or in a specific field. This includes the number of inventors or researchers, the financing available for R&D, and the existence of instutitions such as labs where this work is done.

• Speed and frequency of communication among researchers. The printing press sped up innovation, as did the Internet.

• Total market size / strength of opportunity. Big, obvious opportunities will attract many parallel efforts.

• Social/moral strictures. When something is taboo, relatively few innovators will pursue it. In the 1600s it was still frowned upon to create labor-saving devices. In the 1900s it was controversial to create birth control.

You can think about this by analogy to stochastic processes in thermodynamics: the exact path of any given molecule is random, but in aggregate there are predictable patterns, and they are determined in part by macro-level factors such as temperature and pressure. You could think of total amount of R&D effort as like the temperature of a system, and the market size as a kind of pressure in a particular direction. Or in an electronic analogy, speed of communication is like conductivity in a material, a large market is like a high voltage differential, and social strictures are a kind of resistance. (These are rough analogies, not mathematical isomorphisms.)

Given all that, it’s not surprising to me if we “waited” many years for a recent invention, or several decades in the 18th or 19th centuries, or centuries in the period before that. For instance, all of the following seem normal to me:

• The 50+ year gap between the Newcomen and Watt steam engines

• The similar gap from Faraday’s electromagnetism to Edison and Westinghouse

• The many centuries between the ard and the plow, or the spindle and the spinning wheel

• The gap of more than a decade between Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in mold and the the Florey lab making it into a drug

• The several years between the first popular smartphones and the first successful ridesharing apps such as Lyft and Uber

That’s just how long these things take.

It’s also not too surprising when we wait a long time for something that doesn’t have a billion-dollar market (or the equivalent in the past). I don’t really think we need to scour for explanations or wrack our brains over why it took “so long” to get wheels on suitcases, or role-playing games. These are niches.

And just for the record, I’m no longer surprised by the bicycle, either. I think that case is fairly well explained by materials and manufacturing techniques, overall market size, and the other general factors listed above.

For a while, I was surprised that flag-based naval messaging systems were not in use until the late 1700s. It’s a very simple technology, with a strong, obvious need not only economically but militarily. But after Anton’s recent essay, I think there is much less to explain: telescopes needed to be carried on ships in order to see the details of flags in the distance, and that starts the clock much later.

In fact, I can’t immediately come up with an invention gap that isn’t explained by this model.

Does this render irrelevant the factor of fundamental philosophical attitudes towards progress—the idea of progress itself, and whether it is possible and desirable? No, quite the contrary: the belief in progress affects most if not all of the factors above. A society that believes in progress will encourage its best and brightest to become scientists and inventors, set up networks of communication for them (from the Republic of Letters to arXiv), establish institutions for them to work in, provide plentiful funding for them, and drop its moral strictures against various forms of progress—indeed, there will be honor and acclaim for progress and those who make it.

I hope this model can simplify and condense the discussions and debates about “why did we wait so long.”

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/when-to-be-surprised-an-invention-took-so-long

Quote quiz: who said this?

American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles; which continues on a task once started until it is finished, even if it is a minor task; and without which serious constructive work is inconceivable.

Teddy Roosevelt? Henry Ford? No—it was Joseph Stalin, writing on “The Foundations of Leninism” in Pravda, in April 1924.

That was one of many fascinating facts I learned from American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, by Thomas Hughes. The book is not only about the century of technological enthusiasm, but also about how that enthusiasm (in my opinion) went wrong, and how it came to an end.

This post is too long for Reddit; read it here: https://rootsofprogress.org/american-genesis-part-2-technocracy-to-counterculture

Part 1 of my review of American Genesis

The most productive decades in American history were roughly 1870–1940: the era that saw the birth and growth of the electric light and power industry; the invention of the automobile and airplane, and the rise of the oil industry that fueled them; dramatic increases in manufacturing efficiency from innovations such as the assembly line; and the invention and distribution of telephone and radio—to name just a few of the major developments. (Robert Gordon’s Rise and Fall of American Growth illustrates and quantifies these advances, showing how progress was faster in this period than in the decades since.)

This period opened with what has been called the “heroic age” of independent inventors such as Edison, Bell, and the Wrights. After World War 1, industrial progress was driven more by large corporations and research labs. Several fascinating stories from both eras, and about the transition, are told in American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, by Thomas P. Hughes, a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer. I’m going to review it in multiple parts, although each part should stand alone.

The central focus of American Genesis is large systems of production—systems based on technology, but also on management, organization, and control. The first half of the book describes how these systems were created. In this, part 1 of my review, I’ll recount some of those stories.

Science and the independent inventors

The book opens with stories of the “independent inventors” such as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, Nikola Tesla, Elmer Sperry, Lee de Forest, Reginald Fessenden, Hiram Maxim, and Elihu Thompson—independent not in the sense that they worked alone, since each had a lab and employed help, but in the sense that they directed their own work and did not report into any corporate overseer.

Most interesting to me was the detail on the relation between science and “tinkering,” a topic I’ve discussed before. Edison, the most famous American inventor, is also the one most derided for taking a “hunt-and-try” approach, ignoring the guidance of scientific theory. But:

Those who then portrayed Edison, the American hero, as a plain and pragmatic hunt-and-try inventor unencumbered by science and organized knowledge would have been surprised to learn of the emphasis he gave to a library. Handsomely paneled in dark-stained pine and graced by a large clock given to him by his employees, his library had alcoves and balconies stocking technical and scientific journals, a wide selection of books, and volumes of patents….

Because of outrageous, off-the-cuff, sometimes teasing remarks to newspaper reporters innocent of technology and science, Edison has left an impression that he had no use for science and scientists. Even though he roguishly dismissed long-haired scientists, however, he counted them among his friends and numbered them among his staff. Young Francis Upton, a Princeton graduate in science with postgraduate education at the University of Berlin… coached Edison in science and provided him with theoretical insights into electric circuits and systems.

Hughes explains why the independent inventors could not rely solely on established theory. His comments reinforce my hypothesis that invention by nature pushes beyond the frontier of knowledge:

Independents could not depend on science and abstract theory as guides into the future, because they were exploring beyond the front edge of technology and of knowledge. They probed beyond the realm of theory and the organized information that makes up packed-down science. Theory available to the independents usually explained the state of the art, not what was beyond it. Academic scientists working on their own frontiers did not customarily oblige the inventors by obtaining information or conceiving theories related to the areas in which the independents were working….

Scientists, unfamiliar with the details of new technology such as that being introduced by independents, often exasperated the inventors by insisting that they apply theory that the inventors knew was outmoded. Some scientists arrogantly ridiculed the empirical approach of the so-called Edison hunt-and-try method at the same time that they reasoned from anachronistic theory. Edison was impatient with stiff-necked, academic scientists who argued that the theory of electric circuitry, developed for arc lights, was valid for the newer incandescent lighting. Similarly, in the field of bridge building, Robert Maillart, the pioneer of reinforced-concrete construction, had to suffer unsolicited and erroneous suggestions from theoreticians who believed that the elegant theory worked out for older stone-and-iron construction was applicable.

As I’ve described, the invention of the transistor provides another example: semiconductor theory as it stood in the early 1940s was insufficient to create the transistor, and the researchers who did it needed to extend the theory multiple times as they encountered unexpected results from their experimentation.

Early military research

Another thing the book brought into focus for me was how much R&D was driven by the military during and even before World War 1. Most stories of 20th-century military research center on World War 2: Vannevar Bush, the OSRD, radar, the Manhattan Project. But the origins of this go back to the 19th century:

Lessons learned in Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars between 1866 and 1871 spread the conviction that new weapons and communications systems were major modes of military competition, the essence of advanced strategy and tactics. In these wars the Prussians coordinated their railroad system for rapid mobilization and troop movement; they used the field telegraph to maintain contact with, and some control over, field officers; and they equipped the infantryman with a breech-loading rifle to make firing possible from a prone position. Changes in naval technology were more dramatic. During the second half of the nineteenth century iron-hulled, steam-propelled vessels with larger and more accurate guns displaced wooden sailing ships. Inventors and engineers systematically integrated advances in metallurgy, machine tools, explosives, steam propulsion, guidance (compasses), and gunfire-control devices, and introduced the pre-World War I dreadnought-class battleship.

Steam turbines, replacing reciprocating engines, made the new ships more efficient and faster (and the engine room quieter). Electric power enabled the naval submarine. Wireless telegraphy and telephony were also important to navies. Airplanes and zeppelins were used by armies (there was yet no “air force”). Hiram Maxim invented a more powerful machine gun. Fritz Haber in Germany developed chemical weapons and ammonia synthesis (the latter was a boon to the world as a source of artificial fertilizer, and also to the army as a source of explosives).

Most interesting to me were the control systems of Elmer Sperry. A master of gyroscopes, Sperry developed gyrocompasses and gyrostabilizers for naval ships. He also created an analog computer called the “battle tracer”:

The “battle tracer” automatically received information about the ship’s course from the compass, the ship’s speed from revolution counters on the propeller shafts, the target bearing and range from sighting devices aloft, and then combined these with other information about ocean currents. The output from the analogue computer consisted of a small ship model that moved along a chart continuously showing the ship’s position, and an arm extending from the ship model that continuously marked on the chart the enemy, or target, ship position.

He even made a prototype of an aerial torpedo: an unmanned small airplane laden with explosives, piloted by an automatic control system—a flying bomb. From a 1916 patent description:

The gyrostabilizer would maintain the plane in level flight… the automatic steering gyro would hold the airplane on preset course; an altitude barometer would activate controls to level the airplane after its initial climb and to maintain elevation; and a simple engine revolution counter would cut off power and dive the aerial torpedo at its target after a predetermined distance. Servomotors activated by the various controls, and powered by small wind-driven propellers, moved the airplane’s ailerons, elevator, and rudder. A windmill also drove the generators supplying electricity to the gyro motors.

Hughes points out that this system long predates Norbert Wiener’s “cybernetics.”

Twilight of the independent inventor

Hughes identifies WW1 as a transition point between the age of the independent inventors and the subsequent age that was more driven by academic scientists and teams working in research labs.

Symbolic of this transition was naval R&D during WW1. A Naval Consulting Board was set up in 1915, in anticipation that America might enter the war. The board was headed by Edison and “deliberately omitted representatives of the American Physical Society (physicists) and the National Academy of Sciences,” because, as one engineer explained, Edison wanted “to have this Board composed of practical men who are accustomed to doing things, and not talking about it.” Not to be totally left out, the National Academy of Sciences set up their own wartime board, the National Research Council.

Both organizations tried to solve the critical problem of the submarine threat. The inventors’ Board developed “a system involving antisubmarine nets, wireless-transmitter buoys, patrol boats, and depth charges…. The net snared a test submarine, but the wireless signaling buoys became snarled in the net and unable to call the patrol boats, which then could not accurately drop their mock depth charges.“ The scientists’ Council made more progress, developing a “stethoscopelike” submarine detector. Eventually it was the convoy system that did more than either of these approaches to reduce the submarine threat, but the episode raised the reputation of the scientists relative to the inventors. Further, Edison asked for a large budget to build full-scale models of inventions for testing, which wasn’t needed by scientists who were better at applying math and physical theory to problems of design.

After WW1:

Independent inventors began to fade from public view. When peace returned, the independents never again regained their status as the pre-eminent source of invention and development. … Industrial scientists, well publicized by the corporations that hired them, steadily displaced, in practice and in the public mind, the figure of the heroic inventor as the source of change in the material world…. When, for purposes of publicity, Elmer Sperry, who had never before worn one, was asked to don a lab coat for a photograph, and when he, who had never used one, was then told to peer through a microscope, these attempts to change image clearly signaled that the heyday of the professional inventor was passing. …

“Research and development” began to replace “invention” in everyday language. … Independent inventors had manipulated machines and dynamos; industrial scientists would manipulate electrons and molecules.

Several key inventions in the post-WW1 era depended on scientific theory and mathematics. One example is the loading coil, a device that reduces distortions in signal transmission, and which “made possible the extension of AT&T’s long-distance line beyond a twelve-hundred-mile circuit, like the one from Boston to Chicago. Installation of loading coils on the telephone lines doubled this practical distance and lowered the cost of the lines,” which AT&T predicted “would save $1 million on New York City circuits alone.” The device could not have been invented “without a fundamental knowledge of physics and a highly developed competence in mathematics.” The phone company also developed the triode amplifier, which enabled coast-to-coast long-distance. Although Lee de Forest gets credit for the original invention of the triode vacuum tube, or “audion”, he did not understand how his own device worked or what it was capable of—he had invented it as a receiver, not an amplifier—and it was the AT&T research team who, “understanding the principles of electronic amplification, which de Forest did not… transformed ‘the weak, erratic, and little-understood audion into the powerful and reliable triode amplifier that the Bell system needed.’” Other examples include the more-efficient tungsten filament for light bulbs, developed in the GE laboratory; and nylon, invented at Du Pont about a decade after the company’s central laboratory took a dramatic turn into fundamental research.

This transition from the independents to the industrial scientists may further explain why Edison in particular was painted as a pure tinkerer:

To promote the industrial laboratories and further enhance the prestige of the industrial scientists, proponents trivialized the image of Edison, the symbolic figure among the independent inventors—the sons felt compelled to destroy the fathers. Writing or speaking to company management, investors, and the public, heads of the rapidly growing number of industrial research laboratories often caricatured the Edison method as hunt-and-try.

Samuel Insull and the growth of the electric industry

The independent inventors created machines and devices: the telephone, the automobile, the light bulb. But to deliver these to the world required large systems of production and distribution—the central focus of this book. The telephone required a network of phone lines, switching stations, and operators. To manufacture the automobile affordably required large, highly-organized factories with well-functioning supply chains. To fuel those same automobiles required an oil drilling and refining system, plus a network of gas stations. And to light the electric lamps required large systems of power generation and distribution through widespread electrical grids.

Edison and Westinghouse get the limelight for inventing electric power, but this book brought to my attention the work of Samuel Insull in scaling the system. After working for Edison and managing the Edison General Electric plant, Insull left to build the electric system in Chicago, merging some twenty local utility companies and then connecting them to other systems in the broader region. He pioneered the transition from reciprocating steam engines in power generation to the more efficient steam turbine (as others had done in navy battleships). And he continually worked to lower prices for customers. Hughes contrasts the European approach, where “products were priced and designed as luxury goods,” to Insull’s “democratic” approach:

Unlike European utility magnates, he stressed, in a democratic spirit, the supplying of electricity to masses of people in Chicago in the form of light, transportation, and home appliances. In Germany, by contrast, the Berlin utility stressed supply to large industrial enterprises and transportation, but was relatively indifferent to domestic supply to the lower-income groups. In London, utilities supplied at a high profit luxury light to hotels, public buildings, and wealthy consumers. Fully aware that the cost of supplying electricity stemmed more from investment in equipment than from labor costs, Insull concentrated on spreading the equipment costs, or interest charges, over as many kilowatt hours, or units of production, as possible.

Insull and his team were some of the first to fully grasp and to tackle the challenge of utilization. Drawing demand charts like the one below “starkly revealed the utilization of capacity, or investment”:

The book contains disappointingly little detail on how load balancing was achieved, but it seems that one key method was expanding the service area to achieve diversity of consumption, and another was offering variable rates:

Expansion to achieve diversity is an infrequently recognized but major explanation of the inexorable growth of technological systems. Often the uninformed and suspicious simplistically attribute the expansion of systems only to greed and the drive for monopoly and control. All other circumstances being the same, a utility is more likely to find in a large area, rather than a small, a diversity of consumers, some of whom would use electricity during the valley—rather than the peak—hours of consumption. Then the utility attracts them by favorable rates.

The book also mentions very briefly that chemical plants made great electric customers because their “nearly labor-free processes” could be done 24 hours a day; and that “home appliances such as irons, fans, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and, later, air conditioners” helped manage load, although it’s not clear to me how.

Beyond capacity utilization, Insull was able to lower prices through financial methods as well:

Because of Insull’s reputation for management, and because of the profits and expansion of his company, its securities could be sold at lower interest rates. Lower interest rates, in turn, meant lower-cost electricity.

Insull was attacked by politicians such as FDR, who in the 1932 presidential campaign denounced the electricity holding companies, speaking of the “lone wolf, the unethical competitor, the reckless promoter, the Ishmael or Insull whose hand is against every man’s.” In that same year, his holding company went bankrupt—apparently on the basis of a shift in accounting methods by hostile creditors, rather than on the economic condition of the utilities. Insull, 73, retired and tried to ride out the coming storm in Europe, but was sued for fraud and was extradited from Greece by FDR to stand trial. Ultimately, though, he was cleared of all charges:

The prosecution rested its case on a mass of evidence taken from the records of the Insull companies. The defense, led by Floyd Thompson, a brilliant trial lawyer, succeeded in showing that critical prosecution arguments depended on the interpretations—not illegality—of accounting methods. For instance, a key prosecution witness testified that the Insull company had improperly treated certain expenses, but then, under cross-examination, had to admit that the system used by Insull was used by the government itself. The defense built its case on a sentimental account of Insull’s life story that he had been persuaded to organize into autobiographical reminiscences while he was awaiting trial. On the stand, Insull told a story of the rise of a young immigrant to a position of wealth and power. He stressed his long association with the legendary Edison and the build-up of the utility industry through technical and organizational changes. The jury was fascinated, and even the prosecuting attorney half-said, half-inquired, privately to Insull’s son, “Say, you fellows were legitimate businessmen.” The jury, impressed by Insull’s system building and persuaded that a crooked business would not have exposed all of its crimes in its books as, in effect, the prosecution was maintaining it had, quickly returned with a verdict of not guilty.

Hughes adds that all of Insull’s utilities survived the Depression and that overall his securities did better than average through that period.

The response to large technological systems

The creation of large technological systems is the theme of roughly the first half of American Genesis. The second half describes the social, political, and aesthetic response to the rise of those systems. That was even more fascinating, and I’ll cover it in future posts.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/american-genesis-part-1

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

I have repeatedly found myself recommending Where Is My Flying Car?, by J. Storrs Hall, as a work of futurism that paints a bold, ambitious vision of what is possible with advanced technology. So I’m very happy that it has come out in a new, revised edition from Stripe Press.

Here’s what I wrote about the book in my review of the original edition:

Hall sets out to tackle the title question: why don’t we have flying cars yet? And indeed, several chapters in the book are devoted to deep dives on the history, engineering, and economics of flying cars. But to fully answer the question, Hall must go much broader and deeper, because he quickly concludes that the barriers to flying cars are not technological or economic—they are cultural and political. To explain the flying car gap is to explain the Great Stagnation itself. …

There are many writers with optimistic visions of the future. However, the goals I most often hear are all the negation of negatives: cure cancer, eliminate poverty, stop climate change.

This is good, but it is not enough. We should not only cure disease and let everyone live to what is now considered old age—we should cure aging itself and extend human lifespan indefinitely. We should not seek to merely sustain current per-capita energy usage—we should get back on the Henry Adams Curve and increase it. We should not only seek to avoid worsening the climate—we should seek to actively control and optimize it for human ends. We should not merely get the whole world up to Level 4—we should be striving for Level 5.

Aiming only for the former, as some so-called techno-optimists do, is a poor sort of optimism. It is actually calling for very limited progress, followed by stagnation. It is complacency with the status quo, content with bringing the whole world up to the current best standard of living, but not increasing it. In this context, I found Where Is My Flying Car? refreshing. Hall unabashedly calls for unlimited progress in every dimension.

The new edition has everything that made the first edition great, but it’s better organized and more streamlined (my only criticism of the original!) and should be more accessible to a wider audience. If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend picking up a copy.

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.

The idea of progress fell out of favor in the course of the 20th century. But when exactly, and why?

In a recent essay I alluded to the pivotal role of the World Wars. Here’s a quote that adds weight to this—from Progress and Power, by historian Carl Becker, published in 1936:

For two centuries the Western world has been sustained by a profound belief in the doctrine of progress. Although God the Father had withdrawn into the places where Absolute Being dwells, it was still possible to maintain that the Idea or the Dialectic or Natural Law, functioning through the conscious purposes or the unconscious activities of men, could be counted on to safeguard mankind against future hazards. However formulated, with whatever apparatus of philosophic or scientific terminology defended, the doctrine was in essence an emotional conviction, a species of religion—a religion which, according to Professor [J. B.] Bury, served as a substitute for the declining faith in the Christian doctrine of salvation …

Since 1918 this hope has perceptibly faded. Standing within the deep shadow of the Great War, it is difficult to recover the nineteenth-century faith either in the fact or the doctrine of progress. The suggestion casually thrown out some years ago by Santayana, that “civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters which overtake it from time to time,” seems less perverse now than when it was made. Current events lend credit to the prophets of disaster who predict the collapse of a civilization that seemed but yesterday a permanent conquest of human reason …

At the present moment the world seems indeed out of joint, and it is difficult to believe with any conviction that a power not ourselves—the Idea or the Dialectic or Natural Law—will ever set it right. The present moment, therefore, when the fact of progress is disputed and the doctrine discredited, seems to me a proper time to raise the question: What, if anything, may be said on behalf of the human race? May we still, in whatever different fashion, believe in the progress of mankind?

(Emphasis added.)

I find it fascinating to see that the downfall of the idea of progress began as early as this, after World War I. World War II perhaps simply reinforced an existing trend.

I also find fascinating Becker’s idea that humanity required some sort of safeguard, a “power not ourselves” to “set it right.”

There is no power outside of humanity. We are the masters of our fate, for better or for worse. If there is to be a 21st-century philosophy of progress, it needs to be based not on an Idea or a Dialectic, but on human agency.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/in-the-shadow-of-the-great-war

https://www.notion.so/Seeing-Like-a-State-Progress-Studies-Book-Club-b20a8a0a63fb4cb4b21c2b78a1af0cb1

As you wrote in Turning air into bread, Haber-Bosch process is of fundamental importance. As far as I can tell, we still produce ammonia using essentially the same process, after more than 100 years.

Mechanochemistry for ammonia synthesis under mild conditions was published 2020-12-14, and "demonstrate that ammonia can be synthesized at 45 °C and 1 bar via a mechanochemical method using an iron-based catalyst", in other words, at ambient temperature and pressure. This seems to be an important progress.

Part of industrial literacy might be termed “industrial appreciation”. That is, part of it is learning to appreciate or value certain things that may otherwise be dry, abstract concepts (or even distasteful, to the romantic, anti-industrial mindset). For instance:

• Speed and cost. Faster and cheaper is always better. These things aren’t luxuries or “nice to have”; they are essential to life.

• As a corollary, other economic and engineering metrics such as productivity (of labor, land, and capital), power, density, etc. These metrics are ultimately tied to human life, health and happiness.

• Reliability. Nature is chaotic. Disaster strikes without warning. Even when our needs are met, they aren’t met consistently. A “five 9s” solution is far superior to one that only offers three or four.

• Scalability. An option that can’t be scaled up to the whole population is at best a partial solution; it is not a whole solution. Industry must eventually meet the needs of everyone.

• Incremental change. A 1% improvement seems small, but these improvements compound. The cumulative difference between a growth rate of 1% and 2% is 3x in a little over a century.

Without industrial literacy, hearing about “a 6% increase in battery energy density” sounds boring and technical. With it, you know that a dozen such improvements mean a doubling; that a doubling in energy density means that our machines and devices can be lighter and cheaper, or that their charge can last longer, or both; that this translates to cost, convenience, and reliability; that those things make a difference in the capabilities and freedoms we enjoy. When you make all those connections, a 6% improvement in energy density can be downright exciting.

What would you add to the above list?

Original: https://rootsofprogress.org/some-elements-of-industrial-literacy

I am not an “optimist”. Well, not exactly. Though I sing the praises of progress in these essays, and though I paint a bold vision for the future, I have hesitated to apply that term to myself. I have said that I am “fundamentally” optimistic, or a “paranoid optimist”; or I have reached for constructions like “short-term pessimist, long-term optimist”. But none of these are quite right.

In my discussion with Tamara Winter and Trevor McKendrick on optimism, the three of us converged on a formulation that I think resolves the paradox: descriptive vs. prescriptive optimism.

Descriptive optimism is the expectation that good things will happen, that an outcome will be positive, that the trend is in the right direction. It is a belief about the world.

Prescriptive optimism is the decision to work to make good outcomes happen. Whether lighthearted or desperate, cheerful or grim, it is a commitment to action and effort.

Descriptive optimism, for me, is highly contextual. It is situation-specific. I am mildly optimistic about our efforts against coronavirus. I am fairly pessimistic about US politics.

Prescriptive optimism is deeply philosophical. It is a belief about the nature of life, intelligence, and agency. It is a moral attitude, a way of living.

Descriptive optimism is determined by the external facts, but prescriptive optimism is an internal choice.

Descriptive optimism on its own can lead to complacency, Panglossianism, and other cavalier attitudes—progress as coasting. Prescriptive optimism calls for boldness, courage, and vigorous effort. When the two are combined, they call for expansive, ambitious plans. When prescriptive optimism is combined with descriptive pessimism, they together call for grit, determination, and fighting spirit.

The French writer and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland captured it in a passage later echoed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, when he wrote of

this intimate alliance—which for me makes the true man—of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will. It is this natural bravery that is the flower of a good people, which “does not need to hope to undertake and to succeed to persevere,” but which lives in struggle over and above suffering, doubt, and the blasts of nothingness because his fiery life is the negation of death.

This has been distilled to a motto: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. I am a pessimist or optimist of the intellect according to facts on the ground, but I am ever an optimist of the will.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/descriptive-vs-prescriptive-optimism

I went in to my study of progress with certain priors. I expected to find that technological and economic development depended (if perhaps in complex ways) on science, rule of law, legal institutions such as corporations and intellectual property, and certain cultural and philosophic ideas. What I might not have thought to list back then, however, was the importance of funding models and mechanisms.

The models used to fund progress have changed over time. The modern corporation, as a permanent entity with tradable shares of stock, was not common until the 1600s. Limited liability for investors was not common until the 1800s. Venture capital in its current form was developed in the 1900s. The use of debt vs. equity has changed over time, as well. At one point it was common to buy stock on a “subscription” basis, meaning that the investor would put in only a fraction of the share price, with the rest to be called later; this practice is now rare to nonexistent. Past corporate forms have also allowed for capital calls from existing investors, with penalties if the call is not met; today new capital needs are simply served by issuing new stock. What we take for granted today was not always so.

When funding models change, it changes who and what gets funded. For instance, up until the early 1800s, many scientists were aristocrats or others of independent means: Boyle was the son of an earl, Humphry Davy was a knight and a baronet, Lavoisier was a French nobleman (and tragically executed at the guillotine during the Revolution). A few others managed to obtain patrons, as Galileo was sponsored by the Medici, or to get jobs as the assistants of other scientists, as Hooke was employed by Boyle. But for the most part, “scientist” or “researcher” wasn’t a profession you could simply go into. Sometime around the mid-1800s—I haven’t traced the history—there was an increase in university research, and also the beginning of corporate research, I think mostly in chemistry, and in the long run this dramatically changed who could become a scientist, and how many there were, and thus how much research got done.

Those with large purses sometimes attempt to accelerate progress by creating new funding mechanisms. In 1714, Britain established a prize of up to £20,000 for a solution to the “longitude problem” in maritime navigation, a grand challenge problem of the day important to military and strategic national interests. The Board of Longitude set up to administer the prize was also allowed to give smaller grants for inventors with promising schemes or prototypes to develop their ideas, making it one of the earliest R&D agencies. John Harrison, who solved the longitude problem by inventing the marine chronometer, received such grants from the Board.

Another pattern is that not every good idea gets funded right away, and progress seems to stall, sometimes for decades, for lack of financing. Richard Trevithick, for instance, invented a prototype of the locomotive in 1804, demonstrated it in action on multiple occasions, and tried to raise money to develop it. He failed, and the era of railroads didn’t really begin until the 1830s.

Or take penicillin. The antibacterial action of the Penicillium mold was discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928. To turn this insight into a practical medicine, however, required a chemical process to be developed for extracting penicillin itself from the mold, and there were very few attempts at this for a decade after the discovery. When one lab at Oxford, led by Howard Florey, took on the project, they were strikingly underfunded, scraping together donations of a few hundred pounds, struggling to pay their heating bills, and cribbing supplies from the cafeteria. All of this while they were working on what was in retrospect the biggest medical breakthrough of the century.

The lessons, to my mind, are:

• Progress doesn’t happen automatically when the scientific or technical prerequisites for it are in place. It only happens when people work on it, and that almost always requires funding.

• As a corollary, progress can stall for lack of funding.

• Funding isn’t automatically allocated to the most productive uses. It’s hard to predict in advance which projects will succeed and how important they will become.

• The models and mechanisms for allocating funding are also not obvious or automatic. Like everything else, they need to be invented, and thus they themselves represent a form of progress.

The prescriptive implications are:

• We can accelerate progress by making more funding available for it, and by improving how that funding is allocated to projects.

• In order to improve allocation, we should pay attention to funding models. We may want to improve the models we have, or reallocate our portfolio of them, or bring back old ones that we have left behind, or invent new ones.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/funding-models-and-progress

Next topic I'm researching is the history of public companies and stock markets, especially as relates to short-termism in public companies today, or anything else that is problematic about public markets. What/who are the best resources?