“ROP can play a pivotal role in movement building. You can scout talented youngsters, like a kid in rural Ireland who cares a lot about the ideas of progress and growth. Right now, she might go into management consulting because she doesn’t realize the other paths available to her–when she could become an intellectual entrepreneur and change the world. You can make that real for these kids and create a path. ROP could be the talent incubator, bringing people in. WIP is the place where we present these ideas to 100K people, and then IFP takes the now popularized idea and makes it public policy agenda and ultimately law, but ROP is acting as the engine, building the next generation of talent.”
The Roots of
Progress
Creating the talent
to power a flourishing progress movement
The Roots of Progress is a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.
Why study progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.
We need a new philosophy of progress. In order to make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust.
We need a new way forward. We need a systematic study of progress, so we can understand what is needed to keep progress going. We also need to advocate for progress. We need a progress movement that both explains and champions these ideas and puts forth a vision that inspires us to build.
Fellowship
The Roots of Progress Fellowship is a career accelerator program to empower intellectual entrepreneurs for progress.
Our goal is to empower writers who want to make a career out of explaining progress to a large, general audience. Ultimately, we will help these intellectuals achieve two ambitious goals:
- Be able to sustain themselves as full-time progress intellectuals after this 2–4 year program, by developing a personal brand and sources of revenue to support their work, and
- Write a book or create an equivalent, thematically unified body of work (e.g., a series of essays or blog posts, a scripted podcast series, or a multi-episode documentary) that brings an important topic in progress studies to a general audience.
This is a strategy for the age of online media. In the Internet age, the writer is the brand, and the best writers are going independent. Instead of hiring staff researchers to write under our brand, The Roots of Progress helps writers build individual brands. Because these writers are independent, they’ll have the intellectual freedom to say what they think, without toeing a party line: we want to foster a culture of debate within the broad principles of progress, humanism, and agency that are the core of the progress movement. This is a high-leverage play: we invest in people for a limited time and their work pays dividends for progress (and for themselves) for years to come.
What people are saying
Meet our 2023 Blog-Building fellows.
The inaugural cohort of 20 fellows runs from
September 15th to November 17th.
Meet the fellows
September 15th to November 17th.
Team
Jason Crawford
Founder & PresidentJason is recognized as a leading thinker in the progress movement. He started writing about progress in 2017. He has written for the MIT Technology Review and given interviews as a spokesman for the movement to BBC and Vox. He has more than 10,000 newsletter subscribers and over 27,000 Twitter followers. Vox named him to their “Future Perfect 50” list alongside Will MacAskill, Jennifer Doudna, and Max Tegmark. He has received grants for his work from the Mercatus Center and Open Philanthropy. He’s currently writing a book, The Grand Challenge, a historical narrative dramatizing progress as a story of problems and solutions—showing how difficult life used to be and how technology and industry came to the rescue. It makes the case for progress, standing in opposition to enviro-pessimism and “degrowth,” and lays the foundation for the new philosophy of progress we so desperately need.
Heike Larson
VP of ProgramsHeike is an executive with 25+ years of strategy, product development, talent development, sales and marketing experience across industries. She honed her business skills in 8 years at global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she also led recruiting of top talent for the Chicago and German offices. After getting her pilot’s license, she joined Cirrus Aircraft as a flying sales person and quickly took over the Western US sales team for the fast-growing company. In the decade prior to joining ROP, Heike became immersed in the challenge of bringing better education to US children, leading the growth of a network of Montessori schools across the US, and then heading up the team of writers and storytellers that establishing ed-tech company Mystery Science as the leading K-5 science curriculum in the US. Growing up in divided Germany, during her frequent visits to the impoverished East, Heike experienced how progress and abundance are not guaranteed; she is excited to create a new generation of intellectual entrepreneurs to build a flourishing progress movement.
Advisors
Intellectuals benefit from mentorship and guidance from others. In the progress movement, we’re fortunate to have a strong group of established writers as well as leaders of new and existing organizations.
For the Roots of Progress blog-building fellowship, we’re excited to share an impressive group of advisors who will share their career journeys with program participants and provide guidance on key areas of work in progress studies that aspiring progress intellectuals could tackle.
Tyler Cowen
Chairman, Mercatus Center
Allison Duettmann
President & CEO, Foresight Institute
Bret Kugelmass
Founder & CEO, Last Energy
Johan Norberg
Author, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
Steven Pinker
Author, Enlightenment Now
Virginia Postrel
Author, The Future and Its Enemies
Alec Stapp
Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Institute for Progress
Derek Thompson
Journalist & Staff Writer, The Atlantic
Alex Trembath
Deputy Director, The Breakthrough Institute
Marian Tupy
Author, Superabundance
Tamara Winter
Commissioning Editor, Stripe Press
Fellowship Sponsors
The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive is a program organized and funded by The Roots of Progress, a 501(c)(3) public educational charity, with funding from a group of individual and organizational donors. To support this and other programs, visit our support page.
We also are grateful for our Progress Blog-Building Intensive program sponsors who enable us to offer this program free of charge:
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