{"id":546,"date":"2019-09-07T20:22:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-07T20:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rootsofprogress.org\/?p=546"},"modified":"2024-06-18T03:24:04","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T03:24:04","slug":"progress-studies-as-a-moral-imperative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rootsofprogress.org\/progress-studies-as-a-moral-imperative\/","title":{"rendered":"Progress studies as a moral imperative"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison recently published an article<\/a> in The Atlantic<\/em> calling for a new discipline of \u201cprogress studies\u201d. It met with an enthusiastic response from many people and has galvanized a small movement, which now has a Slack group<\/a> and last Wednesday held its first meetup (hosted at Founders Fund). I was the speaker and gave a talk on the history of steel (recording coming soon). I concluded with some thoughts on progress studies, why it\u2019s crucially important, what I\u2019m doing about it\u2014and how you can help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why progress needs to be studied<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Progress is real and important. As I wrote in a previous post<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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50,000 years ago, our ancestors lived at the mercy of nature. They had stone tools, and the use of fire<\/a>\u2014and not much else. They had no agriculture: they survived by hunting and foraging. They had no medicine. They had small boats to travel short distances on water, but on land they had to walk, and anything they took had to be carried. They had language, but no writing. Of course, they had no science. And they had only the tribe to protect them: no police, no courts, no law. In short, their lives were characterized by abject poverty, superstition born of ignorance, and constant tribal warfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have come a very long way. We live in buildings, not caves. We are surrounded by mass-manufactured products made of steel, glass and plastic. We extract vast sums of energy buried in the ground and we make it do our bidding. We have all the food we could want\u2014so abundant and delicious that we have to restrain ourselves from eating too much. We have antibiotics and laser surgery. We zip around the world at hundreds (and maybe soon thousands<\/a>) of miles an hour. We can communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime, instantly. And all of this is made possible by a vast and rapidly expanding scientific knowledge of the world. Further, we live in relative peace and freedom, made possible by governments that maintain law & order\u2014and the institutions of democracy and republicanism that keep those governments in check. In short, compared to our prehistoric ancestors, we are smart, rich and free<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

These charts from \u201cOur World in Data\u201d show the story quantitatively:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To understand these facts, and to care about human life and happiness, is to see progress as a moral imperative<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But progress is not automatic or inevitable. For most of human history, very little of it happened. Almost all our progress has been made in the last 500 years\u2014even though we\u2019ve had writing for 5,000 years and language for 50,000. Seen this way, we are fantastically wealthy relative to where we were even a hundred years ago\u2014and by implication, we are desperately poor<\/em> compared to where we can<\/em> be a hundred years from now, if<\/em> we keep this going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, even the idea of progress<\/a> isn\u2019t natural. It\u2019s relatively new. To make progress we need to believe that it is possible and desirable. In contrast, most of history has consisted of static societies where no one believed that anything would, could, or should<\/em> change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further, we know from history that progress is not even monotonic: it can be slowed, stopped, reversed or lost. Science, art, and government all suffered and declined during the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire. China famously destroyed its own naval capacity in the 1400s. And closer to home, some including Robert Gordon<\/a> and Peter Thiel<\/a> argue that innovation in the US has stagnated in the last 50 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if progress is a moral imperative, it is also a moral imperative to understand its causes, so that we can protect them and reinforce them. We need to ask three questions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n