What is Progress?

And why we need to talk about it.

Risk & Progress explores risk, human progress, and your potential. My mission is to educate, inspire, and invest in concepts that promote a better future for all. Subscriptions are free. Paid subscribers gain access to the full archive and Pathways of Progress.

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Many assume that progress is a function of time. We expect that tomorrow our incomes will be higher, more diseases will be cured, and microchips will be more powerful than they are today. This assumption is dangerous. The progress that humanity has thus far achieved could be a fleeting efflorescence, and it’s happened before. Europeans in the Middle Ages lived amongst the ruins of Roman cities, they pillaged stones from the Colosseum, and stood by as the aqueducts that once delivered water to a thriving civilization ran dry. For generations, the past was more prosperous than the present, and there was no expectation of progress tomorrow.

If it happened before, it can happen again. There is a chance, probably larger than most are willing to admit, that our descendants could end up living in the overgrown canyons of 21st-century cities. This may sound alarmist, but there is good reason to remain vigilant. Human progress is not guaranteed; it must be earned, cultivated, and sustained. Progress flourishes only under specific conditions and, absent those conditions, may stall or even reverse. We are seeing worrying signs that the progress of the industrial era may be sputtering today.

Defining Progress

I realize that I have used the word “progress” a few times already, but I haven’t defined what I mean. Here I turn to the simplest and most expansive definition employed in Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen’s seminal article in The Atlantic entitled “We Need a New Science of Progress.” They define progress as “the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.” By this definition, progress is the total of all cumulative advances in knowledge that humans have acquired and retained over thousands of generations. These advances include simple discoveries, such as which kinds of wild berries are safe to eat, to the knowledge required to etch the latest microelectronics. It also encompasses the invention of modern social and political institutions.

We may also think of progress as the expansion of individual opportunity and human capability. Every person who does not die of a preventable disease has a greater opportunity to live, to experience, and to contribute to that shared human knowledge base. Every child who goes to school and learns basic literacy and numeracy has windows of opportunity opened to him or her that otherwise would not be. Consider this: as a consequence of progress, every household linked to the internet has access to more knowledge than entire libraries had just a few decades ago. Anyone, anywhere, can become an expert in anything. That’s an opportunity our ancestors couldn’t have imagined.

In Pathways of Progress, I aim to understand human progress from the first principles of physics, beginning from the fundamentals and working upward. This analysis takes us through not only the history of human civilization and life on Earth, but also back to the very inception of the universe, beginning with the “Big Bang.” I illustrate how all “progress” is a function of knowledge and energy. The more we have of both, the brighter the future will be.

Knowledge is a means to an end. Through knowledge, maternal death during childbirth, once a fairly common occurrence, is now rare, and newborn children are far more likely to reach adulthood. Our accumulation of knowledge, from germ theory to the concept of inoculation, to modern mRNA vaccination, has eradicated entire diseases, including the scourge of smallpox, once a leading killer of our species. Through knowledge, we have also become wealthier. In much of the world today, low-income families live lives of relative luxury compared to the kings or queens of bygone centuries. Even the poorest have proper sanitation, lighting at night, and affordable yet comfortable clothing. This is not to disparage the plight of today’s disenfranchised but to recognize relative improvement over time, achieved only with energy and knowledge.

Why Progress?

So why do we need to talk about progress now? Collison and Cowen’s article sparked a groundswell that properly framed a movement that was stirring online. For years, I enjoyed studying the confluence of political science, technology, and history, theorizing how we could learn from the past to inform a better future. However, I lacked the terminology to precisely define what exactly I was studying, but there it was, neatly defined in Collison and Cowen’s article: progress. Finally armed with the proper framing, I must agree with Collison and Cowen that progress is woefully understudied and misunderstood. There are no degrees, certificates, or formal fields of education designed to deepen our understanding of progress, what may threaten it, or how to sustain it. This fact should be alarming in itself.

Nonetheless, the “Progress Studies” movement is developing organically online. Educators, economists, political wonks, and yes, some with no formal training or credentials whatsoever, are connecting with a shared purpose. That purpose is to understand the origins of human progress and, armed with this knowledge, to figure out how to engineer the conditions that give rise to progress in more parts of the world, spreading and sustaining human advancement into the 22nd Century.

Indeed, humanity has reached a pivotal point in its history. While the Homo Sapien species has walked this Earth for several hundred thousand years, most of our “progress” has occurred only in the last few hundred. Some say that we have entered a “time of perils” where humanity possesses the technological capability to destroy the very planet we inhabit and depend on, but still lacks the moral and economic development required to fully safeguard it. On the flipside, however, this means the “progress studies” movement is stirring at an auspicious time; we now have just enough progress behind us that we can retrospectively study the factors that gave rise to it.

The people alive today are also early enough such that, armed with this knowledge, we have “extraordinary altruistic leverage” to find ways to sustain progress. The goal, as Collison and Cowen put it:

“It would consider the problem as broadly as possible. It would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.”

The above graph from Our World in Data illustrates what is at stake. It charts estimated global GDP over the last 2000 years, a sliver of human existence. The pronounced explosion at the end is us, a mere blink of an eye in the human experience. Yet, in that brief moment, food output soared, famines became more infrequent and less severe, literacy became commonplace, life expectancy surged, and material wealth exploded as extreme poverty plunged. We seek to understand and defend this exponential improvement in the human condition.

Risk & Progress

It was on the heels of that short article in The Atlantic that I launched the Risk & Progress newsletter. The goal of Risk & Progress is simple: to compile everything written on the topic of progress, including risks to human progress, and synthesize this knowledge in one location, while making it readable and accessible for non-academics. That last part is crucial because, should these ideas, concepts, and lessons be locked in an ivory tower or obscured behind a thicket of academic terminology, they will be of little use to the public or policymakers.

Remember, progress is not inevitable; it does not march steadily in one direction or arise spontaneously. Progress requires specific economic, social, and political conditions. This also means, however, that we are in control; progress is a choice, and in this fact, I am comforted. The question is, do enough of us recognize the value and importance of progress to do so? Join me in Pathways of Progress as we explore the history and origins of progress, contemporary challenges, and how to best solve them.

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Next in this series:

Human Progress in 9 Charts