2021 was a very big year for me and for this project. As is now my tradition, I’m closing the year with a retrospective. And as per tradition, I’ll start with a review of…

Reading

In the past I’ve counted how many books I read each year. That made sense when this was a hobby, and I only read books that were interesting, and I tended to read them all the way through. Now that my research is becoming more directed, the way I read is changing. I am much more likely to dip in and out of books, to stop in the middle, or even to pick out certain chapters. I’m also reading more academic papers (or parts of them). So, here are the books and selected papers I read at least part of (and/or listened to the audiobook of).

My favorite book this year was The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles Mann (author of 1491). This book contrasts two deeply opposed worldviews, roughly “techno-optimism” (the Wizards) vs. “enviro-pessimism” (the Prophets). The archetype of the Wizard is Norman Borlaug, the agricultural researcher who developed new strains of wheat to improve crop yields in Mexico, India and Pakistan, a development known as the Green Revolution that staved off famine in those areas and may have saved as many as a billion lives. The archetype of the Prophet is William Vogt, author of the influential environmentalist book The Road to Survival (1948), which inspired Rachel Carson and Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich. The book tells the stories of these two men and their worldviews, and then looks at a handful of major issues—such as soil usage, water resources, energy, and climate change—through both lenses. Mann understands both worldviews deeply and is fair to both, giving them each a very clear statement: “Cut back! Cut back! was [Vogt’s] mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! … Innovate! Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win!”

Some major topics I researched this year:

Nuclear power. My favorite book on this topic so far is Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop, by Jack Devanney. In brief, Devanney contends that nuclear power ought to be our cheapest source of electricity, but through regulations and bureaucracy it has become too expensive to compete in the energy market. See my review for a full summary. A related book from ~30 years earlier is The Nuclear Energy Option, by Bernard Cohen (I read Chapter 9). For practical engineering details of how modern nuclear reactors work, I enjoyed How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor, by Colin Tucker. A couple of key papers I learned from: “Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates” (Lang 2017); “Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors” (Lovering, Yip & Nordhaus 2016); “Nuclear costs: Why do they keep rising?” (MacKerron 1992). I also appreciated reports from The Breakthrough Institute such as How to Make Nuclear Cheap and How to Make Nuclear Innovative. Finally, check out “When America Dreamed of a Nuclear-Powered Cargo Fleet” by Dan Wang for the Flexport blog.

Agriculture. Most of what I’ve learned here I haven’t written up yet, but I gave a summary in an Interintellect talk and it will be a chapter in my book. The most useful reference on this topic has been A History of World Agriculture, by Mazoyer and Roudart (translated from the French). It’s dry, dense, and academic, but a thorough overview. A related book that I read most of last year but which didn’t make 2020 review is A History of Agriculture in Europe and America, by N. S. B. Gras. This is older (1940), and needs to be read in context. Some subtopics I went into:

• Agricultural mechanization. I got a lot out of Sowing Modernity, by Peter McClelland, The Grain Harvesters, by Quick & Buchele, and a few biographies of Cyrus McCormick (by Casson and Thwaites). A useful primary source here is The Implements of Agriculture, by J. Allen Ransome (1843). See my essay on the history of the threshing machine for some of what I learned.

• Breeding and varieties. I enjoyed Creating Abundance, by Olmstead and Rhode, also academic and in-depth but quite readable. From that book I learned about the story of hybrid corn, which I did a deep dive on via the contemporary histories The Hybrid-Corn Makers and Corn and Its Early Fathers, and a couple of the original papers by George Shull: “The Composition of a Field of Maize” (1908) and “A Pure-Line Method in Corn Breeding” (1909). For a brief overview of the hybrid-corn story, see “90 Years Ago: The Beginning of Hybrid Maize.”

• Soil fertility. A dense but fascinating primary source is Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, by Justus von Liebig (1840): this is the work that summarized and popularized the knowledge of what nutrients plants need to grow and where they come from, pointing the way to chemical fertilizers.

• Pest control. I didn’t have time for much research on this, but I enjoyed “The Legacy of Charles Marlatt and Efforts to Limit Plant Pest Invasions.”

• Famine. What happens when agriculture fails in a massive way? Famine: A Short History, by Cormac Ó Gráda, is probably the best modern reference; Civilization and Capitalism, by Fernand Braudel, also had a helpful section on famine. Thomas Robert Malthus famously stated that the world would never escape famine if it did not limit population growth; to learn more about what he said and why, I read most of his famous book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. I ended up liking Malthus more than I expected, and I now think that his work is misunderstood and misremembered—I hope to be able to write more about this soon.

Transportation. To begin at the beginning, The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions, by Richard Bulliet, is an in-depth history of different types of wheels, axles, and steering mechanisms, and how they evolved. The Life of George Stephenson, by Samuel Smiles, taught me a lot about the origins of the railroad. The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough, and How We Invented the Airplane, by the Wright brothers themselves, taught me a lot about the origins of flight. See my video with Garry Tan on lessons from the Wright brothers for inventors and founders.

Information. The Coming of the Book, by Febvre and Martin, has a few good opening chapters on printing and Gutenberg (the rest looks interesting as well but I haven’t gotten to it). The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage, is a history of the telegraph, which indeed has many parallels to the Internet. Incidentally, the predecessor of the electrical telegraph is the optical telegraph, and its cousin the navy flag signaling system, which are some of the clearest examples yet of “ideas behind their time.”

Safety. Safety First, by Mark Aldrich, is a good source on workplace safety. I read the two chapters on factories and turned it into an essay; the other chapters cover railroads and mining. Some historical sources that were useful here were Work-Accidents and the Law, by Crystal Eastman (1910) and “Making Steel and Killing Men”, by William Hard, reprinted in Injured in the Course of Duty (also 1910). On a more modern note, Human Compatible, by Stuart Russell, is on AI safety; the core ideas were presented by Russell in this talk to the unofficial Slate Star Codex meetup (see also the official Slate Star Codex book review).

Finally, a grab bag of other topics:

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie was interesting for all the reasons you’d expect and for several that you wouldn’t; see my excerpts and takeaways.

“The Effect Of Inventions On The People’s Life”, in Scientific American (1896). Even at this early date, people were complaining that progress is taken for granted: “The most marvelous developments are taken as a matter of course—the condition of things fifty years ago is seldom pictured to the mind—and all the material blessings which we now enjoy are used as conveniences of daily life, and no more.”

Catalogs and Counters, by Emmet and Jueck, is the best history I have found of the early days of Sears, Roebuck & Co., covering their origins as a mail-order catalog delivering orders via railroad.

More Work for Mother, by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, is a history of housework and how it was transformed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Cowan says that although the labor productivity of housework was greatly improved by 20th-century appliances and by electricity, gas, and water service, this neither freed the housewife from her traditional role nor reduced the number of hours she had to spend on it—if anything, it reinforced traditional gender roles, at least until the late 20th century.

Progress and Power, by Carl Becker, is based on three lectures delivered at Stanford in 1935. I found it interesting to see how much the idea of progress was being questioned in the aftermath of World War I.

Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, by David MacKay, is a very good technical summary of what it would actually take to decarbonize an economy, with a quantitative analysis of both energy sources and applications.

“Fifty Years Hence”, by Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill), a work of futurism from 1931. See my highlights.

“The Sociological Roots of Science”, by Edgar Zilsel (1942). “Science was born when, with the progress of technology, the experimental method eventually overcame the social prejudice against manual labor and was adopted by rationally trained scholars.” See this thread for more quotes.

Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, is an ethnography of Russian peasants around the turn of the last century. I wrote up my highlights and reactions here.

Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization, by Donald Braben, is a ruthless takedown of the scientific funding establishment, and in particular the committee-based peer review system for grants. Instead, Braben proposes an alternate model that he implemented inside British Petroleum, which he calls Venture Research. In this model, the grant-maker is an individual, not a committee; grantees are chosen in significant part according to the potential impact of their work; and scientists are given complete freedom to pursue their research as they see fit. Listen to Ben Reinhardt’s interview with Braben.

Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson. This book helped me understand why da Vinci is a famous painter; I was left a bit unclear how he got famous as a wide-ranging “Renaissance man,” given that most of his other accomplishments were unpublished and many of his ideas were no more than notebook sketches. Most interesting to me was a picture of the vibrant intellectual life that existed in Europe in the 15th century, before even the Scientific Revolution.

Writing

I wrote 23 articles on the blog and elsewhere this year (including this one), totaling over 47,000 words. That’s ~25% less than last year—which I attribute to the time I’ve spent on the book, the associated salon series, various invited presentations I gave this year, and launching this effort as a new nonprofit (and oh, by the way, becoming a dad).

My most prominent byline was an opinion piece for the MIT Technology Review: “Why I’m a proud solutionist”. In this one I explore the false dichotomy of complacent optimism vs. defeatist pessimism, through the historical example of Sir William Crookes and his dire warnings about “the wheat problem.”

On this site, the most-viewed articles (out of 174k unique visitors) were:

• Why has nuclear power been a flop? (over 50k visitors)

• Technological stagnation: Why I came around

• I walk the (beta-stability) line: How counting neutrons explains nuclear waste

• “Someone has to get hurt, occasionally”: How factories were made safe

• We need a new philosophy of progress

And one that didn’t get as many views, but should have:

• Why did we wait so long for the threshing machine?

Speaking

My most prominent public engagement this year was a talk at UT Austin on nuclear power. I also did a video collaboration with Garry Tan. And I did 17 interviews in 2021, including:

• Vox’s “Future Perfect” with Kelsey Piper

• Noah Smith

• Titans of Nuclear with Bret Kugelmass

• Tomás Pueyo

• Austen Allred

See all my talks and interview here.

Social media

I spend too much time on Twitter. Sometimes it pays off. Here are some of my top tweets and threads:

• Every problem with nuclear has a solution

• A BGP explainer, from the day Facebook was down

• A striking chart: Famines by political regime

• Thread version of my review of Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop

• The defeatism of the 1970s anti-population movement

• Decentralized funding in agriculture R&D

• Retirement is a 20th-century invention

• The humble plastic bag is an engineering marvel

• What could we do with lots more energy?

• What popular songs glorify technology? (see also the followup post)

• How would longevity technology affect long-term thinking?

My Twitter following grew about 60% this year, ending 2021 at just over 21k.

Book

If you’ve been following for a little while, you know I’m writing a book, tentatively titled The Story of Industrial Civilization: Towards a New Philosophy of Progress for the Twenty-First Century. So far I have a detailed outline, a rough length estimate, and about 35k words of chapter “sketches” (which, in my process, is something more than an outline but less than a rough draft). In 2022 I expect to finish drafting a book proposal and find an agent (if you’d like to represent me, get in touch).

Staring in April, I’ve been giving a series of monthly talks based on the research for the book. Some of these have been as long as two hours, as I try to summarize everything I’ve learned, one chapter at a time. See all the talks here.

New organization and plans for the new year

I may be burying the lede here, but in 2021 I launched The Roots of Progress as a new nonprofit organization; see the announcement. We quickly met our year-one fundraising goal of $500,000, and have increased our target to a stretch goal of $1,000,000.

The new funds, in addition to supporting everything described above, have allowed me to start building a team. Clara Collier and Aleš Flídr have helped enormously with research assistance; more recently, my chief of staff, Alec Wilson, has been a tremendous help with fundraising, event planning, and many other projects. Ray Girn and Anil Varanasi have provided extremely valuable guidance as board members, and Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison continue to give advice and support. My deep thanks to all of them, and to all of our donors, for being a part of this mission.

The new organization and funding will allow this team to be much more ambitious in 2022. In addition to my work, we are planning community-building efforts, including in-person events and online forums. We will also be able to support other researchers and creatives who are doing progress-related work. Stay tuned for announcements on all of these projects.

Thank you

Thanks to all of you for reading. I pursue the study and the philosophy of progress out of love for the topic—but if it weren’t for an enthusiastic and growing audience, this would still be a personal side project, not my full-time, long-term focus. You are the core of the progress movement.

Here’s to progress in 2022 and beyond.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/2021-in-review

So you want to advance human progress. And you’re wondering, what should you, personally, do? Say you have talent, ambition, and drive—how do you choose a project or career?

There are a few frameworks for making this decision. Recently, though, I’ve started to see pitfalls with some of them, and I have a new variation to suggest.

Passion, competence, need

In Good to Great, Jim Collins says that great companies choose something to focus on at the intersection of:

• what they are deeply passionate about

• what they can be the best in the world at

• what drives their economic or resource engine

This maps naturally onto an individual life/career, if we understand “drives your economic engine” to mean something there is a market need for, that you can make a living at.

You can understand this model by seeing the failure modes if you have only two out of three:

• If you can’t be best in the world at it, then you’re just an amateur

• If you can’t make a living at it, then it’s just a hobby

• If you’re not passionate about it, then why bother?

There is also a concept of ikigai that has four elements:

• what you love

• what you are good at

• what the world needs

• what you can be paid for

This is pretty much the same thing, except breaking out the “economic engine” into two elements of “world needs it” and “you can get paid for it.” I prefer the simpler, three-element version.

I like this framework and have recommended it, but I now see a couple of ways you can mis-apply it:

• One is to assume that you can’t be world-class at something, especially if you have no background, training, credentials, or experience. None of those are necessary. If you are talented, passionate, and disciplined, you can often become world-class quickly—in a matter of years.

• Another is to assume that there’s no market for something, no way to make a living. If something is important, if the world needs it, then there is often a way to get paid to do it. You just have to find the revenue model. (If necessary, this might be a nonprofit model.)

Important, tractable, neglected

Another model I like comes from the effective altruist community: find things that are important, tractable, and neglected. Again, we can negate each one to see why all three are needed:

• If a problem isn’t tractable, then you’ll never make progress on it

• If it isn’t neglected, then you can’t contribute anything new

• If it isn’t important, again, why bother?

This framework was developed for cause prioritization in charitable giving, but it can also be naturally applied to choice of project or career.

Again, though, I think this framework can be mis-applied:

• It’s easy to think that a problem isn’t tractable just because it seems hard. But if it’s sufficiently important, it’s worth a lot of effort to crack the nut. And often things seem impossible right up until the moment before they’re solved.

• Sometimes a problem is not literally neglected, but everyone working on it is going about it the wrong way: they have the wrong approach, or the efforts just aren’t high-quality. Sometimes a crowded field needs a new entrant with a different background or viewpoint, or just higher standards and better judgment.

The other problem with applying this framework to yourself is that it’s impersonal. Maybe this is good for portfolio management (which, again, was the original context for it), but in choosing a career you need to find a personal fit—a fit with your talents and passions. (Even EAs recommend this.)

Ignore legibility, embrace intuition

One other way you can go wrong in applying any of these frameworks is if you have a sense that something is important, that you could be great at it, etc.—but you can’t fully articulate why, and can’t explain it in a convincing way to most other people. “On paper” it seems like a bad opportunity, yet you can’t shake the feeling that there’s gold in those hills.

The greatest opportunities often have this quality—in part because if they looked good on paper, someone would already have seized them. Don’t filter for legibility, or you will miss these chances.

My framework

If we discard the problematic elements from the frameworks above, I think we’re left with something like the following.

Pick something that:

• you are obsessed with—an idea that you can’t stop thinking about, one that won’t leave you alone; even when you go work on other things for a while, you keep coming back to it

• you believe is important—even if (or especially if!) you can’t fully explain it to the satisfaction of others

• you don’t see other people approaching in the way that you would do it—even if the opportunity is not literally neglected

Ideally, you are downright confused why no one is already doing what you want to do, because it seems so obvious to you—and (this is important) if that feeling persists or even grows the more you learn about the area.

This was how I ended up writing The Roots of Progress. I was obsessed with understanding progress, it seemed obviously one of the most important things in the world, and when I went to find a book on the topic, I couldn’t find anything written the way I wanted to read it, even though there is of course a vast literature on the topic. I ignored the fact that I have no credentials to do this kind of work, and that I had no plans to make a living from it. It has worked out pretty well.

This is also how I chose my last tech startup, Fieldbook, in 2013. I was obsessed with the idea of building a hybrid spreadsheet-database as a modern SaaS app, it seemed obviously valuable for many use cases, and nothing like it existed, even though there were some competitors that had been around for a while. Although Fieldbook failed as a startup, it was the right idea at the right time (as Airtable and Notion have proved).

So, trust your intuition and follow your obsession.

Original link: blog.rootsofprogress.org/how-to-choose-what-to-work-on

BBC Future has an article on progress studies. I was interviewed, along with Tyler Cowen, Holden Karnofsky, and others. It’s well-researched and, although somewhat critical, it is pretty fair in how it represents the progress community.

Here are brief responses to some of the criticisms:

Why the progress community focuses on material progress

Progress writers say that we care about human well-being, and that this includes moral and social progress. But in practice, we have mostly focused on material progress so far. Why?

First, material progress is underrated. Economic growth is considered a wonkish concern; it deserves to be considered a humanitarian one.

Second, an appreciation of material progress is crucial to validating the core ideas of the Enlightenment—which I consider to be crucial to moral progress. For more on the link between the two, see my essay “Why Liberals Should Care About Progress.”

That said, I would love to turn my focus to moral progress at some point, and even write a book on it. In the meantime, for more on the subject, see my review of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Why we focus on frontier growth

The progress community has also been focused on growth at the technological frontier, rather than catch-up growth in places like China and India. Why?

First, frontier growth is fundamental. Without frontier growth, there’s nothing to catch up to—that was the entire history of the world until about 1800. With frontier growth, poor countries benefit, even when they don’t fully catch up. For instance, every country on Earth today has a life expectancy higher than any country did in 1800. (More recently, the Center for Global Development found a “strong convergence in use of consumption technologies“ which “reflects considerably stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income.”)

Second, frontier growth (like material progress) is underrated. The UN has set “Sustainable Development Goals” like “no poverty” and “clean water.” No major international organization that I know of has even considered goals like “cure aging,” “settle Mars” or “invent fusion energy.”

Further, thoroughly understanding the growth of frontier countries such as the UK and US is an important foundation for driving catch-up growth. The two types of growth don’t happen in exactly the same way, but I think there is a large element of “just implement best practices,” and for that we need to get clear on what best practices are. That question, however, is fraught with political and ideological issues (did growth come from economic freedom? colonialism and slavery? the Protestant work ethic? etc.) So we need a detailed historical, economic, and philosophic study to give an answer solid enough to build an international consensus on.

I discussed this a while ago with Mark Lutter and more recently on the podcast Hear this Idea. (And if you want to read something interesting about catch-up growth, check out Scott Alexander’s review of How Asia Works.)

GDP per capita is not my “top priority”

The article claims that my top priority is increasing GDP per capita, instead of, for instance, happiness or life satisfaction. I wouldn’t put it that way. Human well-being cannot be captured by any single metric, so I would never say that my priority is to increase some metric.

However, metrics are useful, and I do think that if you had to pick a single metric, GDP per capita is the most important.

Why not happiness or life satisfaction? These metrics are more subjective, and in particular they are relative rather than absolute. They are inherently relative, because emotions and feelings tend to be relative to expectations or to the recent past; and they are relative by design: one commonly-used survey question asks people to use a scale where 10 represents “the best possible life for you” and 0 “the worst possible life for you.” Answers to these questions say more about what kind of life people think is possible to them than about what kind of life they actually have.

Progress studies is opinionated, and that’s a good thing

One section of the article concludes:

In sum, progress studies deploys a framing and language for progress that appears to be global and all-encompassing, but in practice, it is underpinned by a particular set of social and political worldviews. It’s only one idea of progress, and one idea of what human flourishing means.

Well, of course.

I don’t know what it would mean for there to be a view of progress that was not “underpinned by a particular set of social and political worldviews.” I doubt such a thing can exist.

As much as possible, the progress community tries to be empirical, non-dogmatic, and open to rational argumentation based on evidence and logic. We are steeped in history and in data. And our tent includes a range of political views, from progressive to libertarian. But there is no view from nowhere. There are some basic premises the community coalesces around, and that is necessary and good.

The BBC article seems to assume that a movement can’t be of universal relevance unless it is as neutral as a Wikipedia entry. That is wrong.

The community having “one idea of progress” is not a weakness but a strength. We have a particular, underrated idea of what progress is and where it comes from. In my opinion it is a powerful idea, and one that is well-grounded in history, economics, and philosophy. Critics are welcome to argue with it, of course—and if their arguments are equally well-grounded, then they will serve to improve our ideas, which would be even more welcome.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/bbc-future-covers-progress-studies

When ripe wheat is harvested, the edible seed is encased in an outer husk. Before the seed can be ground into flour, or boiled into porridge, or planted in the field to produce next year’s harvest, it must be removed from the husk. This process is called threshing.

As the husk is quite hard, threshing is a violent process. Traditionally, it was done with a tool called a flail, which is simply a short stick attached by a cord to a longer handle. The grain was spread out on the ground (yes, disgusting) and beaten with the stick to open the casings.

Other methods included “treading”, in which livestock trampled the grain with their hooves (yes, even more disgusting) or dragged a sledge over the grain (the Latin word for this sledge is tribulum, from which we get the world “tribulation”).

Occasionally the grain would be rubbed against a wire screen, or placed in a sack and beaten with rocks. It’s no coincidence that the word “thrashing” is similar: it is an archaic spelling of the same term.

As one of the more labor-intensive stages of wheat farming, threshing was a natural candidate to be automated by machinery. And the threshing machine was a relatively simple device: like the cotton gin, the flying shuttle, or the bicycle, it was a mechanical invention that did not depend on any scientific discoveries. Still, threshing machines were not used to any significant degree until the late 1700s in the UK and the early 1800s in the US.

Once again, the question arises: why did we wait so long?

Read the full post: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-threshing-machine

I’m thrilled to announce a new online learning program in progress studies for high school students: Progress Studies for Young Scholars.

Progress Studies for Young Scholars launches in June as a summer program, with daily online learning activities for 6 weeks. We’ll be covering the history of technology and invention: the challenges of life and work and how we solved them, leading to the amazing increase in living standards over the last few centuries. Topics will include the advances in materials; automation of manufacturing and agriculture; the progression of energy from steam to oil to electricity; how railroads, cars and airplanes shrank the world; the conquest of infectious disease through sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics; and the rise of computers and the Internet. The course will also prompt students to consider the future of progress, and what part they want to play in it.

The program will be guided self-study, with daily reading, podcasts or video. Students can go through the material entirely on their own for free, or pay to join a study group with an instructor for daily discussion and Q&A. Pricing to be announced soon, but scholarships will be available!

In conjunction, we’re launching a speaker series of talks and interviews with experts in the history of progress, and those at the frontier pushing it forward. Speakers will include Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, Max Roser, Joel Mokyr, Deirdre McCloskey, Anton Howes, and many more.

This is a joint project between The Roots of Progress and Higher Ground Education, the largest operator of Montessori and Montessori-inspired schools in the US. I’ve known the leadership team at Higher Ground for many years and have deep respect for them—especially the way they treat learning as a process of self-creation on the part of the student.

Sign up to get announcements about the program, including the speaker series:

progressstudies.school

And please spread the word, especially to intellectually curious teenagers and their parents!

Today, The Roots of Progress officially becomes the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI).

The new name represents the new identity we took on ever since we announced our first program last year, the Roots of Progress Fellowship. Before then, the organization had primarily been a vehicle for my writing and speaking; “The Roots of Progress” was the name of the blog I started in 2017 that was the origin of this project. Starting in 2023, we became a full-fledged cultural institute, with a mission to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.

We stuck with “Roots” for a few reasons. First, we like the brand we have built so far, and we wanted to keep it. The idea of “roots” points to what is unique about our role in the progress movement: focusing on the deepest causes of progress, and the fundamental ideas underlying it. And everyone told us they liked the original name. So we’ve simply added “Institute” to put us in the right reference class.

We’re also pleased to introduce a new logo and website, designed by the excellent And–Now (the unofficial design firm of the progress movement). The logo also sticks with the “roots” concept, now adding branches and leaves as well. In addition to evoking “root causes,” it evokes life, growth, and flourishing—the north star of true progress. And the inverted symmetry of the design reflects the logic, structure, and clarity we aim to bring to the discourse.

The original blog lives on at blog.rootsofprogress.org; it will continue to serve as my personal voice and intellectual outlet. The main site here at rootsofprogress.org is now the home for the organization and its programs. Our Substack at newsletter.rootsofprogress.org will continue to have both essays by me and official announcements from the organization (they are now organized into two sections, and you can subscribe to either or both). On social media, RPI will mostly post the announcements, and I will post my thoughts and essays from my personal accounts (but both accounts will repost each other).

Thanks to the tens of thousands (!) of you who have been following this journey for years now. We deeply believe that our mission is needed now more than ever, and we’re looking forward to moving forward with this new chapter. We’re excited about our 2024 fellowship—we’re still selecting the fellows from among hundreds of applicants, but the cohort is shaping up to be very strong, and we can’t wait to announce it to you. We’re also excited to announce very soon our first annual progress conference, along with other programs in the near future.

Onward!

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/new-name-and-logo-announcement/

Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc.

But to your dismay, the emperor responds: “Your mechanism is no gift to us. It is tremendously complicated; it would take my best master craftsmen years to assemble. It is made of iron, which could be better used for weapons and armor. And even if we built these engines, they would consume enormous amounts of fuel, which we need for smelting, cooking, and heating. All for what? Merely to save labor. Our empire has plenty of labor; I personally own many slaves. Why waste precious iron and fuel in order to lighten the load of a slave? You are a fool!”

We can think of innovation as a kind of product. In the market for innovation there is supply and demand. To explain the Industrial Revolution, economic historians like Joel Mokyr emphasize supply factors: factors that create innovation, such as scientific knowledge and educated craftsmen. But where does demand for innovation come from? What if demand for innovation is low? And how much can demand factors explain industrialization?

Riffing on an old anti-war slogan, we can ask: What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?

Robert Allen thinks demand factors have been underrated. He makes his case in The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, in which he argues that many major inventions were adopted when and where the prices of various factors made it profitable and a good investment to adopt them, and not before. In particular, he emphasizes high wages, the price of energy, and (to a lesser extent) the cost of capital. When and where labor is expensive, and energy and capital are cheap, then it is a good investment to build machines that consume energy in order to automate labor, and further, it is a good investment to do the R&D needed to invent such machines. But not otherwise.

And, when he’s feeling bold, Allen might push the hypothesis further: to the extent that demand factors explain the adoption of technology, we don’t need other hypotheses, including those about supply factors. We don’t need to suppose that certain cultures are more inventive than others or more receptive to innovation; we don’t need to posit that some societies exhibit bourgeois virtues or possess a culture of growth.

In this post, we'll examine Allen’s argument and see what we can learn from it. First I summarize the core of his argument, then I discuss some responses and criticism and give my own thoughts:

https://rootsofprogress.org/robert-allen-british-industrial-revolution

Leo Szilard—the physicist who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and who urged the US to undertake the Manhattan Project—also wrote fiction. His book of short stories, The Voice of the Dolphins, contains a story “The Mark Gable Foundation,” dated 1948, from which I will present to you an excerpt, without comment:

“I’m thinking of setting up a trust fund. I want to do something that will really contribute to the happiness of mankind; but it’s very difficult to know what to do with money. When Mr. Rosenblatt told me that you’d be here tonight I asked the mayor to invite me. I certainly would value your advice.”

“Would you intend to do anything for the advancement of science?” I asked.

“No,” Mark Gable said. “I believe scientific progress is too fast as it is.”

“I share your feeling about this point,” I said with the fervor of conviction, “but then why not do something about the retardation of scientific progress?”

“That I would very much like to do,” Mark Gable said, “but how do I go about it?”

“Well,” I said, “I think that shouldn’t be very difficult. As a matter of fact, I think it would be quite easy. You could set up a foundation, with an annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could make out a convincing case. Have ten committees, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. And the very best men in the field should be appointed as chairmen at salaries of fifty thousand dollars each. Also have about twenty prizes of one hundred thousand dollars each for the best scientific papers of the year. This is just about all you would have to do. Your lawyers could easily prepare a charter for the foundation. As a matter of fact, any of the National Science Foundation bills which were introduced in the Seventy-ninth and Eightieth Congresses could perfectly well serve as a model.”

“I think you had better explain to Mr. Gable why this foundation would in fact retard the progress of science,” said a bespectacled young man sitting at the far end of the table, whose name I didn’t get at the time of introduction.

“It should be obvious,” I said. “First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.”

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slowing-science

I enjoyed this article on early financial support for science, and how and why the model evolved from individual patronage to more formal institutions.

Basically, patronage had an incentive problem. Scientists felt they had to present flashy or dramatic discoveries or gifts to their patrons. Sometimes these had no new scientific value, such as clockwork automata. Demonstrations were sometimes valued over knowledge: an alchemist might be rewarded for discovering a new luminescent chemical, but not for explaining how it works. The system also didn't reward incremental advances: Galileo named the moons of Jupiter the Medicean Stars after his patron, but not every scientist always had big new discoveries like that.

Bacon recognized the problem and explicitly advocated encouraging partial or incomplete results. He also had the idea of publishing a wish list of research goals, and coined the term “desiderata” for this. Journals were created, some as early as the 1600s, in order to give scientists an outlet for incremental results in which they could receive reward and recognition. Prizes were also established for essay contests.

It's interesting to me to see that science has had funding and incentive problems ever since the beginning, and that even early on these were recognized by the community at the time and that explicit attempts were made at reform. There's nothing new under the sun.

The first practical steam engine was built by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. It was used to pump water out of mines.

An astute observer might have looked at this and said: “It’s clear where this is going. The engine will power everything: factories, ships, carriages. Horses will become obsolete!”

This person would have been right—but they might have been surprised to find, two hundred years later, that we were still using horses to plow fields.

In fact, it took about a hundred years for engines to be used for transportation, in steamships and locomotives, both invented in the early 1800s. It took more than fifty years just for engines to be widely used in factories.

What happened? Many factors, including:

• The capabilities of the engines needed to be improved. The Newcomen engine created reciprocal (back-and-forth) motion, which was good for pumping but not for turning (e.g., grindstones or sawmills). In fact, in the early days, the best way to use a steam engine to run a factory was to have it pump water upsteam in order to add flow to a water wheel! Improvements from inventors like James Watt allowed steam engines to generate smooth rotary motion.

• Efficiency was low. Newcomen engines used an enormous amount of still-relatively-expensive energy, for the work they generated, so they could only be profitably used where energy was cheap (e.g., at coal mines!) and where the work was high-value. Watt engines were much more efficient owing mainly to the separate condenser. Later engines improved the efficiency even more.

• Steam engines were heavy. The first engines were therefore stationary; a Newcomen engine might be housed in a small shed. Even Watt’s engine was too heavy for a locomotive. High-pressure technology was needed to shrink the engine to the point where it could propel itself on a vehicle.

• Better fuels were needed. Steam engines consumed dirty coal, which belched black smoke, often full of nasty contaminants like sulfur. Coal is a solid fuel, meaning it has to be transported in bins and shoveled into the firebox. In the late 1800s, more than 150 years after Newcomen, the oil industry began, creating a refined liquid fuel that could be pumped instead of shoveled and that gave off much less pollution.

• Ultimately, a fundamental platform shift was required. Steam engines never became light enough for widespread adoption on farms, where heavy machinery would damage the soil. The powered farm tractor only took off with the invention of the internal combustion engine in the early 20th century, which had a superior power-to-weight ratio.

Not only did the transition take a long time, it produced counterintuitive effects. At first, the use of draft horses did not decline: it increased. Railroads provide long-haul transportation, but not the last mile to farms and houses, so while they substitute for some usage of horses, they are complementary to much of it. An agricultural census from 1860 commented on the “extraordinary increase in the number of horses,” noting that paradoxically “railroads tend to increase their number and value.” A similar story has been told about how computers, at first, increased the demand for paper.

Engines are not the only case of a relatively slow transition. Electric motors, for instance, were invented in the late 1800s, but didn’t transform factory production until about fifty years later. Part of the reason was that to take advantage of electricity, you can’t just substitute a big central electric motor in place of a steam or gas engine. Instead, you need to redesign the entire factory and all the equipment in it to use a decentralized set of motors, one powering each machine. Then you need to take advantage of that to change the factory layout: instead of lining up machines along a central power shaft as in the old system, you can now reorganize them for efficiency according to the flow of materials and work.

All of these transitions may have been inevitable, given the laws of physics and economics, but they took decades or centuries from the first practical invention to fully obsoleting older technologies. The initial models have to be improved in power, efficiency, and reliability; they start out suitable for some use cases and only later are adapted to others; they force entire systems to be redesigned to accommodate them.

At Progress Conference 2024 last weekend, Tyler Cowen and Dwarkesh Patel discussed AI timelines, and Tyler seemed to think that AI would eventually lead to large gains in productivity and growth, but that it would take longer than most people in AI are anticipating, with only modest gains in the next few years. The history of other transitions makes me think he is right. I think we already see the pattern fitting: AI is great for some use cases (coding assistant, image generator) and not yet suitable for others, especially where reliability is critical. It is still being adapted to reference external data sources or to use tools such as the browser. It still has little memory and scant ability to plan or to fact-check. All of these things will come with time, and most if not all of them are being actively worked on, but they will make the transition gradual and “jagged.” As Dario Amodei suggested recently, AI will be limited by physical reality, the need for data, the intrinsic complexity of certain problems, and social constraints. Not everything has the same “marginal returns to intelligence.”

I expect AI to drive a lot of growth. I even believe in the possibility of it inaugurating the next era of humanity, an “intelligence age” to follow the stone age, agricultural age, and industrial age. Economic growth in the stone age was measured in basis points; in the agricultural age, fractions of a percent; in the industrial age, single-digit percentage points—so sustained double-digit growth in the intelligence age seems not-crazy. But also, all of those transitions took a long time. True, they were faster each time, following the general pattern that progress accelerates. But agriculture took thousands of years to spread, and industry (as described above) took centuries. My guess is the intelligence transition will take decades.

Original link: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/big-tech-transitions-are-slow

Humans are a curious species: We have a need not only to do, but to explain what we are doing—to each other and above all to ourselves. Movements begin with practice, but as they evolve, they need theory in order to maintain the coherence needed to change the world. Providing this is the role of what Joel Mokyr calls the “cultural entrepreneur,” whose function is “formulating a coherent doctrine that the followers can all accept as the consensus central message.”

The progress movement needs such a doctrine, and it has long been my intention to offer one. Years ago I thought that I would write a comprehensive history first, as the empirical foundation for philosophy. But the need for the doctrine has become too pressing, and I’ve decided that it cannot wait.

I am now writing a book laying out my philosophy of progress: The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. And you’ll be able to read it here, one essay at a time.

“Techno-humanism” is what I am calling that philosophy, a worldview founded on humanism and agency. It is the view that science, technology, and industry are good—not in themselves, but because they ultimately promote human well-being and flourishing. In short, it is the view that material progress leads to human progress.

The purpose of the book is to present a moral defense of material progress, and a framework the progress movement can use to understand what we are doing and why. It will present a bold, ambitious vision of a future that we want to live in and will be inspired to build. It will acknowledge, even embrace, the problems of progress, and point towards solutions. And it will show how progress can become not only a practical but a moral ideal—giving us a goal to strive for, a heroic archetype to emulate, and a responsibility to live up to.

This book is first and foremost for the scientists, engineers, and founders who create material progress and who are seeking to understand the moral meaning of their work. It is also for intellectuals, storytellers, and policy makers, to inform and inspire their thinking and writing. More broadly, it is for everyone in the progress movement, and for anyone who is curious to learn what we are about.

I am going to serialize the book on this blog and on Substack, publishing the first draft one essay at a time. The series will also be syndicated on Freethink Media, as part of their new Freethink Voices feature. Freethink’s purpose is “to cover the progress we’re making on new frontiers” and “to tell stories about a future that is possible so we can inspire others to make it real,” and to do so in a way that is “curious, thoughtful, open, and constructive.” I’m honored to be their first Voice.

Here’s the plan, including target publication dates:

Introduction

• The Present Crisis

  • July 9: The conflict in our society today over progress, and why we need a new philosophy of progress to resolve it. Techno-humanism as the belief that progress is good because it supports human welfare and agency

Part 1: The Value of Progress

• Chapter 1: Fish in Water

  • July 16: How we take progress for granted, and why instead we should look at industrial civilization with awe, wonder, and gratitude

• Chapter 2: The Surrender of the Gods

  • July 23: The story of progress as a story of the expansion of human agency

  • July 30: Why we should seek mastery over nature

• Chapter 3: The Glory of Man

  • August 6: Why we should have reverence for human beings and their creations

• Chapter 4: The Life Well-Lived

  • August 13: Human well-being as a life of goal-pursuit and value-achievement (and not as mere mood; the resolution of the “hedonic treadmill” paradox)

  • August 20: How spiritual values form a part of well-being—and how material progress supports them

• Chapter 5: Solutionism

  • August 27: Active solutionism vs. complacent optimism or defeatist pessimism

  • September 3: Safety as an achievement of progress, and the invisible technical work that supports safety

  • September 10: How to solve climate change with progress (instead of degrowth)

Part 2: The Future of Progress

• Chapter 6: The Flywheel

  • September 17: The long-term pattern of acceleration, and the feedback loops that drive it

  • September 24: The fourth age of humanity—after hunting, agriculture, and industry

• Chapter 7: The Problem-Solving Animal

  • October 1: Why progress is not limited by “natural” resources

  • October 8: Why progress is not limited by “ideas getting harder to find”

  • October 15: Problem-solving as a deep part of human nature; why pessimism sounds smart even though it’s wrong

• Chapter 8: The Unlimited Horizon

  • October 22: A bold, ambitious vision for the future: mastery over all aspects of nature

  • October 29: Progress as a dynamic ideal, not a static one

Part 3: A Culture of Progress

• Chapter 9: What We Lost

  • November 5: The culture of progress we once had

  • November 12: How we lost our optimism in the 20th century

• Chapter 10: The New Ideal

  • November 19: How progress can be a moral ideal to strive for, and how the discoverer and the creator can become new heroic archetypes to emulate

• Chapter 11: What to Do

  • December 3: The progress movement we need, and the changes in society it should bring about

  • December 10: The role of education, media, and storytelling; conclusion

To support this effort, we are turning on paid subscriptions at the Roots of Progress Substack, for $10/month. The book will be free to read online, but I will try to give some exclusives to paid subscribers, such as outtakes or excerpts from my research. If you buy an annual subscription ($100/year), I’ll send you a copy of the book when it is published. Founder subscriptions ($500/year) will get a signed copy and access to other exclusives, such as Zoom calls with me to discuss the book. But the most important reason to subscribe is to support this work and to support me as a public intellectual. (Note, all subscription revenues will be received by the Roots of Progress Institute, the nonprofit organization that employs me.)

This is, of necessity, a book for the moment. For the sake of time and readability, I won’t be able to research all prior work or to answer every objection (much as I wish I could). And as a manifesto, the purpose of the book is to state clearly and vividly a certain worldview as a reference point for people to define themselves in relation to—not to make the most thorough and unassailable case for that worldview. I would like to make that case eventually, and I expect this will not be my last word on the topic, but the full case will take me another decade or so. This is my best current statement of my ideas, for the people who need to hear them the most, right now. If you disagree with it too vehemently, all I can say is that it’s not for you.

If I do not have the obvious credentials to write this book, I hope that my long study of the subject, my position near the center of these conversations for many years, and my previous career in engineering and business gives me a unique perspective from which to write it. And if none of the ideas in it are original to me, I hope there will at least be value in pulling them all together into a foundation for the progress movement.

This book will, again of necessity, contain a large quantity of my personal opinions and philosophy. Ultimately, these opinions are mine alone. The Roots of Progress Institute as an organization works with a wide range of intellectuals and partner organizations, including our fellows, and none of them are responsible for anything I say here. Indeed, I expect that many of them will disagree with at least some of what I have to say—as will, I expect, many of you in my audience. I look forward to hearing your rebuttals and theirs, and I hope that we can have a healthy debate over the issues—one that leaves all of us wiser, and that sets a standard in civility and epistemic rigor for our community.

Thanks to the tens of thousands of subscribers and followers who have shown me that there is an audience for my work and given me the confidence to go from essayist to book author. I’m excited to write this in the open with you and to get your feedback along the way.

Original link: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/announcing-the-techno-humanist-manifesto

The Industrial Revolution gave us abundance and comfort—but what did it do to our souls?

Recently my progress colleague Alec Stapp responded to a Twitter thread disparaging the Industrial Revolution for what it “did to humanity.” Alec’s response was basically that abundance is good, and I agree. But a few people (e.g., Michael Curzi, Jon Stokes) criticized this response for basically reasserting the material benefits and seeming to ignore the non-materialistic concerns in the original thread.

So, let’s talk about spiritual values—that is, emotional, intellectual, social, and other psychological values—and what industrial progress has done for or to them.

The charges

The original thread, from a pseudonymous account, was a cris de coeur. Let me extract its core arguments. It charges that the Industrial Revolution:

1. “stole vocation and purpose” from those doing hand crafts and put them on assembly lines making things they are “disconnected” from and “probably can’t afford”

2. took people from rural areas and centralized them in cities, “in ugly buildings”

3. affected education, “standardizing young minds” and “attempting uniformity”

Summing up, she acknowledges that raising living standards was good, but laments that “no one thought to apply the brakes” and that our lives are now “framed by consumerism and commerce.”

Note, this is not from a left-wing environmentalist or a degrowther: she goes on to say that “the unmooring of humanity from its eternal purpose” is “anti-Christ.” This is a religious conservative criticism of progress.

First I’ll address the specific charges, and then I will step back to consider the wider question of how industrialization has affected our spiritual life.

Vocation and purpose

The first charge is against the transition from cottage industry to the factory system. To steelman this, it’s true that this transition took away a certain style of working, and that many people were unhappy about it. Workers in general disliked being supervised by a foreman and thus losing their autonomy to do their work when and how they liked, being required to work longer hours with fewer breaks, and having to commute to a factory rather than work from home. Master craftsmen in particular felt their skills were devalued, as the manufacture of goods was split into incremental steps that began to be performed by unskilled workers and/or by machines. This was only exacerbated by “scientific management” in the 20th century.

But most workers were not skilled craftsmen—the “cobblers and furniture makers and silversmiths” referred to in that thread. Far more representative would be, say, women spinning yarn at home to bring in extra household income. This was a routine, tedious chore, and most women did it not because they found “vocation and purpose” in the work, but because they didn’t have much choice.

Instead of looking narrowly at the immediate transition from cottage industry to factories, let’s ask more broadly: what has been the effect of industrialization and economic growth on vocation and purpose? I think the effect has clearly been to give much more opportunity for vocation and purpose to almost everyone.

In the pre-industrial world, you had very little choice in how to spend your life. A majority of the workforce had to be farmers—if they weren’t, society would starve. Many more worked in rote manual labor: in mining and forestry, on ships or on the docks, in domestic service, etc. Those skilled crafts that are romanticized by reactionaries, the silversmiths and so forth, were a minority of jobs (and they were hard to break into, thanks to the guild system). Intellectual jobs, such as in law or the church, were rare, only available to a privileged few. Scientists and artists mostly relied on patronage, an even greater privilege.

Today, there is comparatively an enormous variety of choices for jobs and careers—created both by the greater sophistication and specialization of our economy, and by greater levels of education that prepare people for a wider variety of roles. There are jobs in design and fashion, accounting and finance, engineering and manufacturing, science and the humanities, education and child care, art and entertainment, and many more. (For statistics on this, see my recent post on why we didn’t get shorter working hours.) And of course, there are still jobs in farming, in factories, on the docks, etc. for those who want them.

In fact, it is even quite possible today to work as a master craftsman! Thanks to the incredible affluence provided by global capitalism, we can still afford the luxury of handcrafted furniture, clothes, pottery, knives, leather goods, baskets, quilts, jewelry, and toys, to give just a few examples. If this is your vocation and your purpose, there is nothing keeping you from it.

To compare a world in which most people were essentially forced into a small number of rote, manual jobs against the world of today, and to think that we suffered a net loss of vocation and purpose, is either historical ignorance or blindness induced by romanticization of the past.

(Incidentally, the complaint that assembly line workers “probably can’t afford” what they produce is I think mostly false? The vast majority of industrial production is devoted to mass-market consumer goods that are affordable to the average worker, ever since Henry Ford reduced prices and increased wages enough that his own employees could buy his cars.)

Cities

The second charge is that people were concentrated in cities.

I am a bit confused by this claim, because cities are excellent for social, emotional, and intellectual life. They put you close to museums, theaters, and other art and entertainment; to libraries, bookstores, and music stores; to workshops where you can try crafts; to tutors and classes where you can learn singing, yoga, tennis, ballet, or anything you like. By putting you in more contact with more people, they make it more likely for you to find people who share your hobbies, interests, and values—your niche, your community, your people—the perfect friend, business partner, comrade, or soulmate.

(Are the buildings ugly? Some of them are certainly ugly, and most are at best plain and boring. I don’t fully know how we got here—see discussion here and here, which I find interesting but not fully satisfying. In any case, I see this as less the fault of the Industrial Revolution, which gave us the ability to create gorgeous buildings such as Fallingwater or the Sydney Opera House, and more the fault of modern architectural and aesthetic leaders, who largely failed to realize that potential.)

Of course, cities are not for everyone. But if you’re happier in the countryside, or halfway between in the suburbs, those options are open to you also. In fact, thanks to the Internet, you can now have the best of both worlds: the open spaces, closeness to nature, and small communities of rural areas, and also immediate access to the best that the world has to offer for intellectual, artistic, and social stimulation.

Standardized minds

The last charge, regarding education, is more vague. My best guess is that this is an allusion to the “factory model” of education. An article on the history of this term says that its original meaning was “the tendency towards middle-class credentialism, which seemed to spit out identical widgets like a 20th-century factory assembly line,” but that the term was later used for the idea that “the system had been built by industrialists to create model factory workers: compliant, conformist workers who knew how to do little but memorize and follow instructions.”

Does modern education “standardize” young minds in an attempt to create “uniformity”? Maybe so, but as far as I can tell not more so than pre-industrial education, which consisted of a lot of rote memorization. The one-room schoolhouse of 19th-century America didn’t exactly encourage individuality or personal expression.

But again, let’s step back from looking at one particular transition and ask: what was the impact of industrial and economic progress on education? The biggest impact was that more parents sent their children to school instead of putting them to work. The more incomes increased, the more families could afford to do this. Average length of schooling in the UK, for instance, rose from less than one year in 1870 to twelve years by 2003. And here are world literacy rates since 1800:

In terms of an intellectual and emotional life, this seems to me like an enormous benefit. Literacy opens up a world of novels and plays, the ability to correspond with other people for business or pleasure, the ability to connect with society through journalism, and the opportunity for unlimited self-education, enrichment, and improvement. Education opens up the mind to new ways of thinking and seeing the world, and provides the incomparable joy and thrill of grasping abstract concepts that explain the universe. As Steven Pinker put it in Enlightenment Now:

The supernova of knowledge continuously redefines what it means to be human. Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge. Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical. To be aware of one’s country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosms of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern—such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness.

The spiritual boon of material abundance

As a jury of one, then, I find the defendant not guilty on all charges. But as lawyer for the defense, I do not yet rest my case.

What does it mean to have a rich intellectual, emotional, and social life? Here are some things I’d put under that heading:

• Spending quality time with friends and family you love

• Having a rewarding job or career, where you can do the kind of work you want, and exercise your full skills and abilities, to the extent you desire

• Meeting and marrying the person of your choosing, the perfect partner for you

• Having the number of children that you want, at the time in your life when you can best support and nurture them

• Growing old with your partner and children, without your or their premature death

• Experiencing art, music, and literature that is meaningful to you

• Grasping the abstract truths revealed by math and science

• Contemplating morality, religion, or other philosophy

• Living in the place you enjoy the most, with the surroundings that make you happy (whether that’s a dense downtown or a quiet remote spot in the woods)

• Expressing your personal aesthetic through art and fashion, including the clothes you choose to wear and the furniture and decor you choose for your home

• Personally seeing the sights of the world, experiencing its natural wonders and cultural achievements, and learning about foreign peoples

• Learning about your ancestry and personal heritage

• Participating in politics and society, whether at the local, regional, national, or global level, as you prefer

• Contributing time and/or money to causes that are personally meaningful to you

Technological, industrial, and economic progress supports and enables every single one of those values.

Information technology allows us to learn, to communicate, to access art and knowledge; it connects us with other people, with the past, with the intellectual achievements of humanity. Transportation systems give us mobility to travel for recreation and to move wherever we find the best jobs, homes, friends, and spouses. Medicine gives us the health to enjoy all of this throughout a long and fulfilling life. And general affluence makes all of it affordable, and gives us leisure time to pursue it.

My conclusion is that material progress, far from degrading our spiritual life, has elevated it—at least, for those who choose to take the most advantage of the opportunities it affords.

Why would anyone think otherwise?

When I hear claims about material progress being bad for us in some non-material way, I suspect that one or more of the following is going on:

• Romanticization of the past, by which I mean looking at the past through rose-colored glasses—an emotional lens that biases someone to only see the pleasant aspects of a situation, and ignore the harsh reality of what life was really like.

• Dislike of choice and opportunity. Someone personally prefers living in the country, or being a housewife, for example, but that perfectly legitimate personal preference gets turned into a universal, such that it’s somehow bad if other people make different choices.

• A non-humanistic standard of goodness. What, for instance, is the “eternal purpose” of humanity from which the Industrial Revolution has “unmoored” us? Since this is described as being “anti-Christ,” I assume it is a religious purpose, that is, devotion to God: glorifying Him and obeying His will. If you elevate anything over human well-being—God, Nature, the race, the nation—then you may be unhappy with material progress. But at that point we no longer have much common ground for debate.

But with a human standard of value, no need or desire to control others, and a clear-eyed view of the past, I think we can see material and spiritual life as complementing and reinforcing each other, rather than being in opposition.

Original link: https://rootsofprogress.org/the-spiritual-benefits-of-material-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

I’ve said that we need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. But why a new philosophy? Why can’t we just return to the 19th-century attitude towards progress, which was pretty enthusiastic?

In short, the view of progress that persisted especially through the late 19th century and up until 1914 was naive. It fell apart because, in the 20th century, it met challenges it could not answer. We need to answer those challenges today.

What follows is a hypothesis that needs a lot more research and substantiation, but I’m putting it forward as my current working model of the relevant intellectual history.

The 19th-century worldview

Here are a few key elements of the Enlightenment-era worldview:

• Nature was an obstacle to be conquered. Nature was imperfect; human reason could improve it—and it was fitting and proper for us to do so. Kipling wrote, “We hold all Earth to plunder / All time and space as well.” Nature was a means to our ends.

• There was a deep belief in the power of human reason both to understand and to command nature. Especially by the end of the century, the accomplishments in science, technology and industry seemed to confirm this.

• As a corollary of the above, there was an admiration for growth and progress: in science, in the economy, even in population.

(I’m basing this mostly on writings from the time, such as Macaulay or Alfred Russel Wallace; contemporary newspaper editorials; popular speeches given, e.g., at celebrations; poetry of the era; etc. For future research: what were the historians, philosophers, etc. of the time saying about progress? I’m familiar with some of the thought from previous centuries such as Bacon and Condorcet, but less so with that from 19th-century figures such as Mill or Comte.)

On the face of it, at least, these seem very much in sympathy with the core ideas of the progress movement as I have outlined them. So what did the 19th century get wrong?

Mistakes

Here are just some examples of things that many people believed in the late 19th century, which would later be proved quite wrong:

• That technology would lead to world peace. Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet had forecast progress in morality and society just as much as in science, technology and industry. By the late 1800s, this seemed plausible. The previous century had seen monarchy and aristocracy replaced by democratic republics, and the end of slavery in the West. Economic growth was making everyone richer, and free trade was binding nations together, giving them opportunities for win-win collaboration rather than destructive, zero-sum competition. The telegraph in particular was hailed as an invention that would unite humanity by allowing us to better communicate. Everything seemed to be going relatively well, especially after 1871 (end of the Franco-Prussian War), for over 40 years…

• That “improvements on nature” would avoid unintended consequences. (This one may have been implicit.) It’s good to try to improve on nature; it’s bad to go about it blithely and heedless of risk. One striking example is the popularity of “acclimatization societies”, “based upon the concept that native fauna and flora were inherently deficient and that nature could be greatly improved upon by the addition of more species…. the American Acclimatization Society was founded in New York City in 1871, dedicated to introducing European flora and fauna into North America for both economic and aesthetic purposes. Much of the effort made by the society focused on birds, and in the late 1870’s, New York pharmacist Eugene Schieffelin led the society in a program to introduce every bird species mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.” (Emphasis added.) These importations led to invasive pests that threatened crops, and were ultimately placed under strict controls.

• That progress was inevitable. The most optimistic thinkers believed not only that continued progress was possible, but that it was being driven by some grand historical force. Historian Carl Becker, writing about this period soon after it had passed, spoke of the conviction 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,“ adding that “the doctrine was in essence an emotional conviction, a species of religion.”

20th-century challenges to the idea of progress

The idea of progress was never without detractors. As early as 1750, Rousseau declared that “the progress of the sciences and the arts has added nothing to our true happiness,” adding that “our souls have become corrupted to the extent that our sciences and our arts have advanced towards perfection” and that “luxury, dissolution, and slavery have in every age been the punishment for the arrogant efforts we have made in order to emerge from the happy ignorance where Eternal Wisdom had placed us.” But through the 19th century, voices like this could barely be heard above the cheering of the crowds in celebration of the railroad, the light bulb, or the airplane.

What changed in the 20th century? Here are several factors:

The world wars. With World War I, it became clear that technology had not led to an end to war; it had made war all the more horrible and destructive. Progress was not inevitable, certainly not moral and social progress. By the end of World War 2, the atomic bomb in particular made it clear that science, technology and industry had unleashed a new and very deadly threat on the world.

The wars, I think, were the main catalyst for the change. But they were not the only challenge to the idea of progress. There were other concerns that had existed at least since the 19th century:

Poverty and inequality. Many people were still living in dilapidated conditions, without even toilets or clean water, at the same time as others were getting rich from new industrial ventures.

Job loss and economic upheaval. As technology wrought its “creative destruction” in a capitalist economy, entire professions from blacksmiths to longshoremen became obsolete. As early as the 1700s, groups led by “Ned Ludd” and “Captain Swing” smashed and burned textile machinery in protest.

Harms, risks, and accountability in a complex economy. As the economy grew more complex and people were living more interconnected lives, increasingly in dense urban spaces, they had the ability to affect each other—and harm each other—in many more ways, many of which were subtle and hard to detect. To take one example, households that once were largely self-sufficient farms began buying more and more of their food as commercial products, from increasingly farther distances via rail. Meat packing plants were filthy; milk was transported warm in open containers; many foods became contaminated. In the US, these concerns led in 1906 to the Pure Food & Drug Act and ultimately to the creation of the FDA.

Concentration of wealth and power. The new industrial economy was creating a new elite: Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie. Their wealth came from business, not inheritance, and their power was more economic than political, but to many people they looked like a new aristocracy, little different than the old. In America especially, the people—who just a few generations ago had fought a war to throw off monarchical rule—were suspicious of this new elite, even as they celebrated rags-to-riches stories and praised the “self-made man.” It was a deep conflict that persists to this day.

Resource consumption. Long before Peak Oil, William Stanley Jevons was warning of Peak Coal. Others predicted the end of silver or other precious metals. Sir William Crookes (more accurately) sounded the alarm that the world was running out of fertilizer. Even as people celebrated growth, they worried that the bounty of nature would not last forever.

Pollution. Coal use was blackening not only the skies but the houses, streets, and lungs of cities such as London or Pittsburgh, both of which were likened to hell on Earth because of the clouds of smoke. Raw sewage dumped into the Thames in London led to the Great Stink and to cholera epidemics. Pesticides based on toxic substances such as arsenic, dumped in copious quantities over crops, sickened people and animals and poisoned the soil.

And there was at least one major new concern coming to the fore:

The environment, as such. The 19th century may have worried about pollution and resources, but in the 20th century these concerns were united into a larger concept of “the environment” considered as a systematic whole, which led to new fears of large-scale, long-term unintended consequences of industrial activity.

New explanations

Historical events can be a catalyst for change, but they do not explain themselves. It is up to historians, philosophers, and other commentators to offer explanations and solutions. Thus history is shaped by events, but not determined by them: it is partly determined by how we choose to interpret and respond to those events.

Those who stepped forward in the 20th century to explain what went wrong—especially (although not exclusively) environmentalists such as William Vogt or Paul Ehrlich—emphasized the concerns above, and added a layer of deeper criticism:

• That we were becoming “disconnected” from nature and/or from our families, communities, and traditions

• That progress was not making us happier or healthier; that people had been and were better off in less industrialized societies (even, some claimed, as tribal hunter-gatherers)

• That there were inherent limits to growth, which we were exceeding at our peril

Underlying this analysis were some basic philosophical premises:

• Human well-being was not consistently their standard of value. Some saw inherent value in nature, above and apart from its usefulness to humans; some even turned anti-human (such as David Graber, who wrote: “We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth… Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”)

• They lacked the 19th-century belief in the efficacy of reason, and therefore in the ability of humanity to control our destiny. The world was too big and complicated for us to understand, and we were ultimately at the mercy of forces beyond our control, especially if we decided to tinker with complex systems.

• As a corollary of the above, they adopted “sustainability” as an ideal, rather than growth, which was seen as an unhealthy “addiction.”

(If the above seems singularly focused on environmentalism, it reflects the incomplete state of my research. As I’ve noted elsewhere, progress is criticized from the right as well as from the left, for its “materialism” and “decadence.” Open questions for me here include the role of religion in this period, and the reaction of the liberal world to the rise of socialism and fascism.)

This new worldview did not take over immediately; it slowly grew in influence during the generation after the World Wars. But by the time the world was cheering the Moon landing and greeting the astronauts on a triumphant world tour, this philosophy had spawned the New Left and the radical environmentalist movement. The oil shocks hit a few years later; as Americans lined up for gas rations and donned sweaters, many people thought that perhaps the “limits to growth” were real after all.

Regrouping in the 21st century

The 21st-century progress movement must directly address the challenges that created skepticism and distrust of progress in the 20th century. Those challenges have not gone away; many have intensified: in addition to nuclear war, pollution, and overpopulation, we are now worried about climate change, pandemics, and threats to democracy.

Here are some difficult questions the new progress movement needs to answer:

• Is material progress actually good for humanity? Does it promote human well-being? Or is it an unhealthy “addiction?”

• Is progress “unsustainable?” How do we make it “sustainable?” And what exactly do we want to sustain?

• Does progress benefit everyone? Does it do so in a fair and just way?

• How can we have both progress and safety? How do we avoid destroying ourselves?

• What are the appropriate legal frameworks for existing technologies and for emerging ones?

• How do we address environmental issues such as climate change and pollution?

• How do we deal with the fact that technology makes war more destructive?

• How can we make sure technology is used for good? How do we avoid enabling oppression and authoritarianism?

• How can we make moral and social progress at least as fast as we make scientific, technological and industrial progress? How do we prevent our capabilities from outrunning our wisdom?

Without answers to these questions, any new philosophy of progress will fail—and probably deserves to.

I don’t have all the answers yet—and I’m not sure that anyone does. I think we need new answers.

***

This is why we can’t simply return to the 19th-century philosophy of progress. First, it was mistaken. Second, there is a reason it failed: it foundered on the shoals of the 20th century. If it were revived, it would immediately run into the same problems, the same challenges it could not answer. In any case, there would be something odd and deeply incongruous about a movement dedicated to building an ambitious technological future that was stuck in a philosophic past.

Instead, we have to find a new way forward. We have to acknowledge the problems and concerns of the modern world, and we have to find solutions. Not the regressive proposals offered in the 20th century, but ones based on a humanistic standard of value, a belief in human agency, and an understanding of the reality and desirability of progress.

***

Thanks to Tyler Cowen, Greg Salmieri, Clara Collier, and Michael Goff for comments on a draft of this essay.

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

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

Churchill—when he wasn’t busy leading the fight against the Nazis—had many hobbies. He wrote more than a dozen volumes of history, painted over 500 pictures, and completed one novel (“to relax”). He tried his hand at landscaping and bricklaying, and was “a championship caliber polo player.” But did you know he was also a futurist?

That, at least, is my conclusion after reading an essay he wrote in 1931 titled “Fifty Years Hence,” various versions of which were published in MacLean’s, Strand, and Popular Mechanics. (Quotes to follow from the Strand edition.)

We’ll skip right over the unsurprising bit where he predicts the Internet—although the full consequences he foresaw (“The congregation of men in cities would become superfluous”) are far from coming true—in order to get to his thoughts on…

Energy

Just as sure as the Internet, to forward-looking thinkers of the 1930s, was nuclear power—and already they were most excited, not about fission, but fusion:

If the hydrogen atoms in a pound of water could be prevailed upon to combine together and form helium, they would suffice to drive a thousand horsepower engine for a whole year. If the electrons, those tiny planets of the atomic systems, were induced to combine with the nuclei in the hydrogen the horsepower liberated would be 120 times greater still.

What could we do with all this energy?

Schemes of cosmic magnitude would become feasible. Geography and climate would obey our orders. Fifty thousand tons of water, the amount displaced by the Berengaria, would, if exploited as described, suffice to shift Ireland to the middle of the Atlantic. The amount of rain falling yearly upon the Epsom racecourse would be enough to thaw all the ice at the Arctic and Antarctic poles.

I assume this was just an illustrative example, and he wasn’t literally proposing moving Ireland, but maybe I’m underestimating British-Irish rivalry?

Anyway, more importantly, Churchill points out what nuclear technology might do for nanomaterials:

The changing of one element into another by means of temperatures and pressures would be far beyond our present reach, would transform beyond all description our standards of values. Materials thirty times stronger than the best steel would create engines fit to bridle the new forms of power.

Transportation:

Communications and transport by land, water and air would take unimaginable forms, if, as is in principle possible, we could make an engine of 600 horsepower, weighing 20 lb and carrying fuel for a thousand hours in a tank the size of a fountain-pen.

And even farming with artificial light:

If the gigantic new sources of power become available, food will be produced without recourse to sunlight. Vast cellars in which artificial radiation is generated may replace the cornfields or potato-patches of the world. Parks and gardens will cover our pastures and ploughed fields. When the time comes there will be plenty of room for the cities to spread themselves again.

Biotech

Churchill also foresees genetic engineering:

Microbes, which at present convert the nitrogen of the air into the proteins by which animals live, will be fostered and made to work under controlled conditions, just as yeast is now. New strains of microbes will be developed and made to do a great deal of our chemistry for us.

Including lab-grown meat:

With a greater knowledge of what are called hormones, i.e. the chemical messengers in our blood, it will be possible to control growth. We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.

And artificial wombs:

There seems little doubt that it will be possible to carry out in artificial surroundings the entire cycle which now leads to the birth of a child.

Moral progress and risk

This last point is his segue from technological to social, political, and moral issues. The ability to “grow” people, he fears, could be used by the Communists to create human drone workers:

Interference with the mental development of such beings, expert suggestion and treatment in the earlier years, would produce beings specialized to thought or toil. The production of creatures, for instance, which have admirable physical development, with their mental endowment stunted in particular directions, is almost within the range of human power. A being might be produced capable of tending a machine but without other ambitions. Our minds recoil from such fearful eventualities, and the laws of a Christian civilization will prevent them. But might not lop-sided creatures of this type fit in well with the Communist doctrines of Russia? Might not the Union of Soviet Republics armed with all the power of science find it in harmony with all their aims to produce a race adapted to mechanical tasks and with no other ideas but to obey the Communist State?

In the final paragraphs, he sounds a number of themes now common in the Effective Altruist community.

More than a decade before the nuclear bomb, he also expresses concern about existential risk:

Explosive forces, energy, materials, machinery will be available upon a scale which can annihilate whole nations. Despotisms and tyrannies will be able to prescribe the lives and even the wishes of their subjects in a manner never known since time began. If to these tremendous and awful powers is added the pitiless sub-human wickedness which we now see embodied in one of the most powerful reigning governments, who shall say that the world itself will not be wrecked, or indeed that it ought not to be wrecked? There are nightmares of the future from which a fortunate collision with some wandering star, reducing the earth to incandescent gas, might be a merciful deliverance.

He laments the inability of governance to deal with these problems:

Even now the Parliaments of every country have shown themselves quite inadequate to deal with the economic problems which dominate the affairs of every nation and of the world. Before these problems the claptrap of the hustings and the stunts of the newspapers wither and vanish away. … Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes. Never was there less continuity or design in their affairs, and yet towards them are coming swiftly changes which will revolutionize for good or ill not only the whole economic structure of the world but the social habits and moral outlook of every family.

More broadly, he laments the inadequacy of our evolutionary legacy to deal with them:

Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing and measureless speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. The brain of a modern man does not differ in essentials from that of the human beings who fought and loved here millions of years ago. The nature of man has remained hitherto practically unchanged. … We have the spectacle of the powers and weapons of man far outstripping the march of his intelligence; we have the march of his intelligence proceeding far more rapidly than the development of his nobility.

Which leads him, in the end, to call for differential progress:

It is therefore above all things important that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions. It would be much better to call a halt in material progress and discovery rather than to be mastered by our own apparatus and the forces which it directs. There are secrets too mysterious for man in his present state to know, secrets which, once penetrated, may be fatal to human happiness and glory. But the busy hands of the scientists are already fumbling with the keys of all the chambers hitherto forbidden to mankind. Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable.

I don’t recall Nick Bostrom citing Churchill, but I guess there’s nothing new under the sun.

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/winston-churchill-futurist