Progress

Should we just accept that things take longer, cost more, and where the hell are the flying cars?

There are many components of progress; economic, technological, scientific, cultural, organizational, living standards, and health. To name a few.

There is no broad-based field of study on progress. More surprising is the small amount of people that are focused on speeding it up. Even talking about it.

“We’re consuming ourselves not because the fixation on progress is inevitably self-destructive beyond a certain threshold, but because material progress has objectively stalled while we remain collectively in denial about this fact.” - Peter Thiel

The idea that progress has stalled or stagnated implies that we have a unified measure of what progress is, we don’t.

I keep examples of fast vs. slow progress in the world.

Resources on progress.

The Great Stagnation - The quintessential book on the subject. The book that started a very large internet debate, and my fascination with the topic.
Where is my flying car? - We were promised flying cars. Instead we got tiktok, snapchat, and uber eats. What happened? “What starts as an exploration of the technical limitations of building flying cars evolves into an examination of the global economic stagnation that started in the 1970s. From the failure to adopt nuclear energy and the suppression of cold fusion and nanotechnology to the rise of a counterculture hostile to progress, Hall recounts how our collective ambitions for the future were derailed, with devastating consequences for global wealth creation and distribution”
The Decadent Society - what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing— how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think. Peter Thiel writes a great summary and oped here
What Drives Progress & How to Accelerate it - A great discussion with Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Roots of Progress - A fantastic set of resources: essays, interviews, newsletter, and community dedicated to the pursuit of understanding Progress.
Innovation, is it Accelerating or Decelerating - Marc Andreessen and Peter Theil have what could be defined as the most important debate of our time.
Reflection on Studying Human Flourishing and Progress - “Increasing human flourishing and reaching our fullest human potential will be achieved when we’re able to reach a rigorous multidisciplinary consensus on what drives progress, understand how people and nations escape poverty, and what the main barriers to social mobility consist of.”
Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison wrote a piece making the case We Need a New Science of Progress.
Is ‘Progress’ good for humanity - an attempt to rethink the narrative of economic development.
Mark Perry’s Chart of the Century an insight into what parts of our economy see great improvements from technological progress and what parts don’t. Government intervention is a hot topic.
Work in Progress a magazine style digital publication. The work The Housing theory of everything offers a unique POV on how and why housing plays such a major role to the progress our society makes.
Science is getting less bang for it’s buck - Despite vast increases in time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong ?
Has Technology Progress Stalled - “In his view, much of what passes for “progress” is in truth more like “distraction”. As he puts it, “the iPhone that distracts us from our environment also distracts us from the ways our environment is unchanging and static.” And in this culture, economy and politics of chronic self-deception, as Thiel sees it, we tell ourselves that we’re advancing because “grandma gets an iPhone with a smooth surface,” but meanwhile she “gets to eat cat food because food prices have gone up.”
The puzzel of Economic Progress - “Current academic research – into the impact of new technologies, the economics of innovation, and the quality of management, for example – may be providing ever more pieces of the puzzle. But many crucial questions about economic progress remain unanswered, and others have not yet even been properly posed.”
Matt Ridley makes the case for an economics of hope, arguing that the benefits of commerce, technology, innovation, and change—what he calls a cultural evolution—will inevitably increase human prosperity.
As Shiva suggested in her article, “… economic growth hides the poverty it creates through the destruction of nature, which in turn leads to communities lacking the capacity to provide for themselves” (Shiva, 2013). “Growth” as market-liberals put it, is a euphemism of repression and mass privatization in order to enrich the affluent minorities.
Why Nations Fail - The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions. To ensure prosperity of a society, that society needs to be inclusive and promote innovation and a sapiens ability to improve their life. If we are not motivated to do so, i.e. we can be free to earn and prosper off our own inventions, than innovation and advancement will stifle and choose will ensue. A government needs to be setup to have patents, protect IP, and have laws that govern such innovation. The challenge in 2020, is that the majority of our industry is brand new “tech” and we have yet to figure out how to govern such things only 12 years after the “mobile” phone and internet revolution. We have started to understand these things more and more, and the need for such government is more prevalent.
Better Angels of our Nature - the best account for how we have made progress over our existence in reducing violence. Humans fight wars to this day, comparatively speaking, we are passive and peaceful.
WTF Happened in 1971 - it would seem thta something profoundly changed in the 1970s, particularly in 1971.
The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs since the Wheel - “Why did it take so long to invent the wheelbarrow? Have we hit peak innovation? What our list reveals about imagination, optimism, and the nature of progress “
5 Examples of Progress Building Cities in short amounts of time.
The Economics of Innovation - a great collection of reading on the sujet put together by Matt Clancy
Progress Studies Reading List - collection of books, papers, and blogs on the subjet matter curated by Daniel Mamay.
History of progress in a tweet

Other information.

The decline in progress is best captured by the decline in interest rates.

Interest rate, is a measure of how productive our capital is. The more productive people are, they won’t lend out money. The less productive, the more they will lend it out (seeking others who are productive). If there is too much money, chasing too few ideas, you get lower rates.

Total Factor Productivity Growth - is another great proxy for explaining this decline.

Summary & Conclusion

Every generation has more than the last. We have yet to go backwards with our technological progress.

Our current state of abundance is the product of advancements made in the Enlightment, the Industrial, and Digital revolutions.

Any debate on progress, is by definition, a sign of the progress we’ve made. We have made so much, we now have time to debate our progress.

Any future progress we make will be from the consumption of more materials and energy, not less.

The cost of progress is great. It is the greatest price people pay. It is the greatest price other animals pay. It is the greatest price our world pays. We must consume materials, energy, and time to make progress.

Progress requires experiments. Running experiments means we’re likely to get things wrong. It means we are likely to waste materials, energy, and time. There is no progress without this process.

Everything we have, your life included, is the result of the progress people made before us. It is a result of some form of technology we invented.

It doesn’t matter if you believe in the great stagnation hypothesis or not.

Yes, Tyler Cowen was right, The Great Stagnation is real. We are not changing our physical world as much as before.

The part everyone misses is best summarized by Marc Perry is the Chart of the Century. All physical technology and innovation in our lives is regulated by governments.

They have regulated it so much, that building physical things is now the most difficult it’s ever been. All for the narrative of climate change and equality.

Digital and Software innovation….is not a lack of progress, it’s an enabler of future physical progress. Physical progress is not the only progress. To achieve great physical progress achievements, we first need improvements in our knowledge, or scientific testing techniques, our math, our theoretical physics, and our ability to compute.