A Manifesto for the Progress-based Perspective

It's time for a new perspective completely separate from the Left and the Right.

Progress is humanity’s greatest achievement. It has transformed poverty into prosperity, disease into health, ignorance into education, isolation into connectedness, war and violence into peace and security, slums into housing, and servitude into freedom.

Quite frankly, progress is the single most important force to impact the material existence of humanity. We must protect it in wealthy nations and expand it in developing countries.

Progress has transformed our lives in so many positive ways, but we take it for granted, refuse to admit its existence, or even claim that it is bad. Far too many of us have become “progress deniers.”

We do not see all the progress that is around us, not because it is not there, but because we choose not to see it.

Part of the reason we cannot see the existence of progress is because we compare the problems of today to either an idea in our head about how life should be, or to nostalgic memories of how we think life used to be. But reality can never match the beautiful thoughts that the human brain can imagine. Nor can reality match the rosy nostalgia for how life supposedly used to be.

In general, among people who are skeptical of or hostile to progress, those on the Left and young people compare the problems of today with an idea in their heads about how life should be, while those on the Right and older people compare the problems of today to nostalgic but distorted memories of how they think life used to be.

To overcome these misperceptions, I wrote the From Poverty to Progress series of books. Because progress is such a fundamental achievement that shapes our lives, we must make the concept of progress a key foundation of our world view. By accepting the reality of progress and learning from the progress of the past, we can give yourself and our loved ones a better shot at living happy and successful lives.

In my book series, I argue for what I call the “Progress-based perspective.”

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Steven Pinker: “Magoon has made a valuable contribution in adding to our understanding of the facts and causes of the most important development in human history.”

Tyler Cowen: “Michael Magoon’s new book… will change your thinking about progress and its relevance to your life.”

See more praise for my From Poverty to Progress book series.

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If you are really interested in my perspective, I would recommend reading my three books:

• From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement.

• Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All.

• Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda to Uplift the Working Class and Poor (which I am publishing as paid articles on Substack)

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What is Progress?

First I must define my terms. I believe that the most useful definition of progress is “the sustained improvement in the material standard of living of a large group of people over a long period of time.” In particular, I focus on changes to the standard of living that are rapid enough and sustained enough that one person could notice positive changes within their lifetime.

You can learn more on how I define progress here.

Progress within one year that is immediately erased by a regression in the next few years does not qualify as progress. Since a generation is generally considered to be 20 years, I look for relatively uninterrupted progress for at least that length of time. One sharp downturn is not enough to invalidate a decade of progress, but a downturn that lasts for decades surely means that progress did not exist during that time.

Progress is not about enriching a small portion of society. While it is possible to apply the term to changes that exclusively benefit the rich and powerful, I am far more concerned about material progress for the vast majority of citizens.

People living in Western nations today have a level of affluence far surpassing anything ever seen on planet Earth. Even the poor in Western nations have a level of affluence that is higher than all but the richest people in 1970.

All across the world, nations are being transformed from oppressive poverty to a level of affluence that was once only possible in Western nations. Japan, South Korea, China, India, Singapore, Botswana, Chile, and Puerto Rico all transformed themselves within one generation. Even in some of the poorest nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, levels of education, health, literacy, sanitation, longevity, transportation, communication, and housing are rapidly improving.

Progress is mankind’s greatest achievement. It has transformed our lives in so many positive ways… But we take it for granted, deny its existence, or claim that it is actually bad.

The Progress-based Perspective

So what are the main points of my perspective? Throughout my From Poverty to Progress book series, I have argued for a Progress-based perspective that can be summarized in the following statements:

1. Humanity is better off now materially than it has ever been. This does not mean that there is a lack of problems; only that our problems are less numerous and less severe than in the past.

2. The progress that humanity has experienced, particularly over the last 30 years, is the single most important fact of our time. It is so important that we fully integrate it into our world view.

3. This progress is very widespread. It can be seen in metrics of economic growth, human development, freedom, slavery, poverty, agricultural production, literacy, diet, famines, sanitation, drinking water, life expectancy, neonatal mortality, disease, education, access to electricity, housing, violence, and happiness (to name just a few), and in virtually every nation.

4. Acknowledging the existence of progress is not the same as optimism toward the future. It is an empirical observation about the material conditions of today compared to the material conditions of the past. Progress in the past does not guarantee future progress, though it does make it seem likely. It also makes predictions of doom in the near term very unlikely to be true.

5. While today’s problems seem insurmountable, we must never forget that our ancestors solved far bigger problems with far fewer resources.

6. If we combine:

   1. an awareness of the progress that previous generations have passed down to us

   2. a feeling of gratitude for benefitting from their efforts

   3. a willingness to learn how they achieved that progress, and

   4. the confidence to believe that our current problems are not insurmountable, we are in a much better position to solve the problems of today.

7. We need to study history (both recent history and from long ago) to understand the necessary preconditions for progress and how progress works. To maintain progress we need to preserve and expand those things.

8. The Five Keys to Progress and an understanding of How Progress Works are critical to understanding progress. When a society acquires a sufficient amount of each of these keys, the society transforms into a vast, decentralized problem-solving network that generates progress.

9. The bulk of human history has been a desperate struggle for survival. Our material prosperity was limited by fundamental geographical constraints, particularly on food.

10. We are very fortunate that a handful of societies learned how to overcome those geographical constraints to create widespread progress. Progress started in the Commercial Societies of medieval city/states of Northern Italy and flowed to modern-day Belgium, Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Now it has expanded to most of the rest of the world.

11. Our negative perceptions of the present state of the world come not from reality, but from a feedback loop among the fields of psychology, politics, ideology, the media, and social media. These people and institutions have built business models crafted around the narrative that “things are bad, they are getting worse, and those other people are to blame.”
    This is the opposite of the Progress-based perspective. They deliberately trigger our worst psychological instincts for their own benefit. They believe that doing so will lead to a more just world, but it only breeds worry, anger, resentment, and resignation.

12. Progress comes from society, not from the government, but bad government policies can do a great deal to undermine progress (and unfortunately they have).

13. We must build a Progress movement to:

    a.     Promote an awareness and understanding of progress. This will sweep away many of the negative perceptions caused by politics, ideology, the media, and social media.

    b.     Research our history to identify policies and practices that promote progress.

    c.     Build a political movement to sweep away government policies that undermine progress.

Why Does Progress Matter?

Too many people today live in a negative feedback loop caused by cognitive biases towards pessimism and perceived threat, unrealistic views of what is possible, nostalgic memories of what life used to be like, self-imposed isolation from alternative viewpoints, and institutional self-interests that create constant crises and threats. This feedback loop creates what can only be described as an alternative reality that seems very real to people but does not exist.

I believe that the objective study of history to understand progress is a form of “therapy” for this dysfunction. We need a change of perspective to clear out the cognitive biases that make so many of us unhappy, angry, and resentful in a world full of abundance and progress.

To understand the benefits of progress, we need to shift the focus from the problems of today to the study of how our ancestors actually lived. Only by comparing today’s life to the actual lives of previous generations can we fully appreciate the progress that we have experienced today.

Once we look at actual metrics comparing today’s material circumstances to our ancestor’s circumstances, we can see that we live in a world of progress.

Even better, learning how our ancestors built progress gives us a toolkit for solving most of today’s problems. We can see that, in situations far worse than our own, our ancestors learned highly practical strategies for solving short-term local problems. And those that worked best were copied by others.

When we clear out our cognitive biases, we can see that life in the past was actually pretty terrible. It was full of people with the same dread and worry that we have today. It was also full of problems that were daily threats to survival that we do not have to deal with as often today.

We can learn that, though very real problems still exist, those problems are actually fewer in number and milder in severity than what previous generations had to deal with. And previous generations did not have all the technologies, skills, organizations, and scientific knowledge that we have today.

The good old days were never really that good. Utopias cannot exist in the real world. The world as portrayed by the media and politics is highly distorted and dangerously so.

Life Before Progress

Today’s progress is a startling transformation compared to the way humans have lived over the past 100,000 years. In the past, humanity lived in a stable state because technological innovation only occurred very rarely.

Our ancestors lived in a world where acquiring food took up the bulk of their waking hours. Entire societies were structured around the quest to acquire enough food to survive and reproduce in their local environment. This quest was so all-encompassing that little time was left to solve other problems.

In order to innovate, people needed to live in close proximity to each other, but in order to acquire food, they needed to spread out. Therefore, the need for food was the key limiting factor in the rate of innovation.

The type of food that could be acquired was highly constrained by fundamental geographical limits. In particular, the biome (i.e. dominant vegetation) that a society inhabited and its access to domesticatable plants and animals largely determined whether agriculture based upon animal-drawn plows could evolve. Other factors such as altitude, soil type, growing season, distance from rivers, and more complex societies in the Middle East placed additional constraints.

How a society acquired its food, in turn, placed powerful constraints on how rapidly the society could innovate technologies, skills, and social organizations or copy the innovations of others. Where geography made the use of animal-driven plows possible, complex Agrarian societies evolved. Where the use of animal-driven plows was not possible, humans could not evolve past less complex types of societies. Those societies had no chance of experiencing progress.

Even in geographical regions that could support Agrarian societies, two forces prevented progress. The first was that most of the food surplus went into having more babies, who then ate away much of the food surplus.

Secondly, powerful political, economic, and religious elites constructed institutions that extracted the food surplus for their own benefit. They used this extracted wealth to flaunt their social status with a lavish lifestyle, build conspicuous monuments, and construct powerful militaries capable of conquering other peoples. This extraction of wealth undermined the rate of innovation and hamstrung the potential for progress.

Because of these geographical, demographic, and political constraints, most societies of the past were trapped in poverty. There was little an individual could do other than survive and live a life almost identical to previous generations.

The Five Keys to Progress

So how did we transition from a world of poverty to a world of progress?

The single most important concept in my book series is the “Five Keys to Progress.” I believe that the Five Keys to Progress is an essential unifying concept for understanding progress. They are so critical because they are the necessary preconditions for progress, and they are actionable in today’s world. In other words, the concept not only helps to understand the world but also how to make it better.

The Five Keys to Progress enable us to cut through all of the clutter of history and modern times so that we can focus on what really matters. They enable us to answer some of history’s most difficult questions, as well as provide policy solutions and practices that can make the world a better place.

Using the concept of the Five Keys to Progress, it is easier to understand:

• The historical origins of progress

• Why progress took so long to get started

• How and why progress started in Northwest Europe

• How and why progress spread to different societies over time

• Why so many poor nations were left without progress for centuries

• Which forces threaten progress today

• What policies and practices wealthy nations need to adopt to keep their progress going

• What policies and practices developing nations need to adopt to enjoy greater progress

So what are the Five Keys to Progress? To transition from poverty to progress, a society needs to acquire:

1. A highly efficient food production and distribution system. This enables societies to overcome geographical constraints to food production so that large numbers of people can focus on solving problems other than getting enough food to eat.

2. Trade-based cities packed with a large number of free citizens possessing a wide variety of skills. These people innovate new technologies, skills, and social organizations and copy the innovations made by others.

3. Decentralized political, economic, religious, and ideological power. It is of particular importance that elites are forced into transparent, non-violent competition that undermines their ability to forcibly extract wealth from the masses. This also allows citizens to freely choose among institutions based upon how much they have to offer to each individual and society in general.

4. At least one high-value-added industry that exports to the rest of the world. This injects wealth into the city or region, accelerates economic growth and creates markets for smaller local industries and services.

5. Widespread use of fossil fuels. The incredible energy density of fossil fuels injects vast amounts of useful energy into society enabling it to solve a wide variety of problems. Without this energy, life would return to the daily struggle for survival that dominated most of human history.

Each of the Five Keys to Progress is necessary for a society to experience progress, but none are sufficient by themselves. It is only in combination that they enable humanity to deliver progress.

I believe that the degree to which societies have enjoyed progress is largely determined by long-run historical factors that go back centuries or even millennia. These factors determined the extent to which societies acquired the Five Keys to Progress. For most of human history, there was no progress, because these five key factors were either completely missing or were very underdeveloped.

How Progress Works

Once a society achieves the Five Keys to Progress, that society becomes a vast, decentralized problem-solving network. Now the day-to-day behaviors of regular human beings break the chains of the poverty trap imposed by geography, demographics, and politics.

This progress comes from a self-sustaining feedback loop among the following human behaviors:

1. Technological innovation. This includes radical innovations such as the railroad, electrical grid, computers and the internet, as well as the ongoing incremental improvement and differentiation of thousands of other existing technologies.

2. People learning new skills to support those technologies. Without these skills, technologies are not useful, a fact that is often forgotten.

3. People cooperating within organizations. Those people work together using a wide variety of skills and technologies to accomplish a common goal.

4. Competition between organizations for scarce resources. In the past, this was usually food, while now it is usually revenue. This competition forces organizations to embrace new technologies, skills, and processes to out-compete other organizations. It also forces people within the group to cooperate more closely, and enables new organizations to be founded and older organizations to fail.

5. People copying successful technologies, skills, and organizations and then modifying them to solve different problems. This enables innovations that work to spread into new companies, new sectors of the economy, and new geographical regions. This step is critical to ensure that progress is widely shared.

6. Consumption of vast amounts of useful energy. Without energy, none of this can happen. Today the vast majority of that energy comes from fossil fuels.

It is important to note that all of these behaviors have been in existence since the advent of modern humans hundreds of thousands of years ago. Humans have always invented new technologies, learned new skills, cooperated in organizations, competed as groups against other organizations, copied other humans, and consumed energy. It is quite likely that our hominid ancestors also behaved in ways that strongly resembled ours.

But until the Five Keys to Progress were acquired, the amount of change caused by these behaviors was so slow that they did not deliver progress – “the sustained improvement in the material standard of living of a large group of people over a long period of time.” They delivered long, slow change, but no progress.

How Progress Spread Across the Globe

Human history can be viewed as a vast evolutionary process that led to the accidental discovery of the Five Keys to Progress. Once these keys were discovered, they slowly and unevenly diffused throughout the world. There were six historical breakthroughs that enabled progress to accelerate and diffuse to new parts of the globe:

1. The emergence of Commercial Societies in medieval city/states of Northern Italy that combined four of the Five Keys to Progress (productive agriculture, trade-based cities, decentralized power, and exporting industries).

2. The diffusion of Commercial societies from Northern Italy to Flanders (modern-day Belgium) and then to the Netherlands and finally to Southeast England.

3. The migration of Europeans to much of the rest of the world. The migration of peoples from Britain to North America was particularly important.

4. The Industrial Revolution in Britain, which invented the fifth key to progress (widespread use of fossil fuels).

5. The Allied victory in World War II, which ended the military threats of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.

6. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. This event enabled progress to spread throughout most of the world, particularly in Asia.

Today, industrial technology enables entire societies to overcome geographical constraints that had trapped them in poverty for millennia. Entire nations and sub-national groups have transformed themselves within one generation – a stunning achievement.

Why the Left and Right have no solutions

The problem is that neither the Left nor the Right has a concept of progress that is based on real human history.

• The Left compares our present condition to an ideological vision that cannot exist,

• while the Right compares our present condition to nostalgic memories that never existed.

They are both excellent at provoking emotional reactions to mobilize supporters, but they are both bad at solving contemporary problems.

I do not believe that any existing ideology can make major contributions to maintaining progress in wealthy nations and enabling developing nations to experience greater progress. The fundamental reason is that none of them embrace human material progress as a primary goal. Far too many explicitly reject the concept of progress or are at least skeptical of it.

We need a new political perspective that is clearly differentiated from both the Left and the Right. We do not need to transform society (as the Left wants), nor do we need to preserve it in amber (as the Right wants). Instead, we need to roll back government policies that are undermining the foundations of progress.

We need a third option in the ideological center of American politics that promotes widely shared progress and understands that this progress will largely come from society, not the government. This option cannot be based on reasonable compromises between the current positions of the Right and Left. Instead, it must offer an entirely new vision of the role of government that is both pragmatic and radical.

I expand on this point in this post.

The Progress-based Reform Agenda

We need a Progress-based reform agenda focused on the following principles:

1. Promote long-term economic growth.

2. Create a prosperous working class.

3. Promote a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter the prosperous working class.

4. Focus relentlessly on results; experiment in a controlled way; do more of what works; do less of what does not work.

5. Reform the political process to make all the above possible.

I sum up goal #1 as “Promoting Progress” and goals #2 and #3 as “Promoting Upward Mobility.” I focus on goals #1, 4, and 5 in my book: Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. In my third book, Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda for Uplifting the Working Class and Poor, I focus on the second and third goals.

Promoting long-term economic growth must be the bedrock of a Progress-based reform agenda. Economic growth gives all individuals more material resources with which to solve their own personal problems and their families’ problems. Economic growth also supplies the material resources to take on improvements in education, health care, pensions, and care for the disabled, the mentally ill, and the homeless. Without economic growth, all other goals become far more difficult to accomplish because there are simply not enough resources available to achieve them.

Creating a prosperous working class is essential to ensuring that economic growth is widely shared and politically sustainable. Far too high a proportion of the benefits of our current economic growth go to the college-educated professional class. And much of that distribution is due to bad government policy.

We must implement policies that ensure that the working class receives a far greater share of the benefits of progress and that they do so by contributing to society. A prosperous working class will not achieve equality. However, in combination with economic growth, it will achieve upward mobility.

Promoting a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter that prosperous working class is also essential. With each generation, modern societies must pass on the necessary skills, habits, and values to the next generation. We cannot create a prosperous working class with no way for young people, particularly those from low-income families, to enter that class. By promoting a clear pathway into a prosperous working class, we can sustain this progress and upward mobility for generations to come.

Supporters of progress must focus relentlessly on results. A Progress-based reform agenda must never be allowed to degenerate into a dogmatic ideology that is fixated on certain policies regardless of results. While the long-term goal of promoting progress and upward mobility must be fundamental to our viewpoint, how we do so should always be determined by experimentation in the real world.

Like scientists looking for a cure for cancer or an entrepreneur trying to scale up a business, we must try many possible solutions and only scale one up once it has been proven effective by rigorous methodologies. The fundamental principles that I mentioned above will be very difficult to achieve. They will each require a great deal of experimentation with policy. Many proposed policies will fail to work, so they must be reformed or eliminated.

Supporters of progress cannot just dream up seemingly great policy solutions and then pass legislation. Instead, we must go into this project with a realization of how hard it is for government programs to achieve positive results in the real world.

Of course, this experimentation must avoid potential negative effects on society. In particular, we must respect basic human rights enshrined in the Constitution. Our experimentation must also be constrained by basic human decency, though admittedly this concept is hard to define. But these constraints still leave us a great deal of leeway for effective and ethical experimentation.

In the end, the actual results of a policy are far more important than the good intentions of those who implemented it. Only results matter, because it is results that affect people, not intentions.

Any reform agenda must also confront the problem of scarce resources. So much of our economy is now devoted to current government programs that there is no chance of finding additional revenues without serious negative economic consequences.

Rather than building up additional layers of government programs, a Progress-based reform agenda should focus on rolling back government policies that undermine the foundations of progress and upward mobility for the working class and poor. In particular, we should make energy, food, housing, education, health care, transportation, and consumer goods more abundant and affordable so that the working class and poor can afford to purchase those items on the marketplace without government subsidies.

Rolling back failed government policies will not only accelerate economic growth by reducing costs but doing so will also ensure that the benefits of that growth are widely shared. We should also decentralize government to promote the maximum possible amount of policy experimentation.

Finally, a Progress-based reform agenda must reform the political system. The American political system, which is polarized between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, leaves no space for any other perspective. Both sides are more concerned about rallying their base against the other side than about solving problems. For the good of the nation and the good of our movement, we must open up political competition to allow representation in state and federal government for ourselves and other outsiders.

Promoting Upward Mobility

The fact that long-term economic growth is the best method to help those who have less does not mean that supporters of progress should not care about the distributional outcomes. In my second book, I wrote about how developing nations can more easily experience progress, but that still leaves out a significant percentage of people in wealthy nations.

My third book is based on the concept of Upward Mobility. Upward Mobility is to the individual what Progress is to the entire society. Upward Mobility is the long-term increase in the material standard of living of an individual, while Progress is the long-term increase in the material standard of living of a large group of people.

More specifically, I believe that government programs should be based on the following:

1. Promote long-term economic growth (which is the focus of my first two books).

2. Create a prosperous working class.

3. Promote a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter the prosperous working class.

The concept of Upward Mobility is very different from the Left’s traditional focus on Equality, particularly Equality of Outcome. I believe that the goal of Equality of Outcome is:

• Unachievable

• The quest to do so will cause far more harm than good.

Unlike Equality, Upward Mobility is not zero-sum. If someone excels in their life and earns a high income, this undermines Equality, so it should be discouraged. But it enhances Upward Mobility, so it should be encouraged. But Upward Mobility is not focused on people who are already doing well and their children.

Upward Mobility is about enabling and encouraging young people to make wise life choices so they can take advantage of the progress that surrounds them to the best of their ability. In particular, the focus is on young people from poor and working-class families.

The concept of Upward Mobility is based on the following assumptions (many of these assumptions will be explained in greater detail in future articles):

1. Equality of Outcome is unachievable, while Equality of Opportunity is not enough.

2. Upward Mobility is not the same as Social Mobility. Social Mobility is about rank in income, wealth, social or educational characteristics. So by definition, if one person goes up, another person has to go down. Upward Mobility is about material standard of living, which can go up for everyone.

3. It is far easier for individuals to move up in their material standard of living if they live in a society that is experiencing Progress. In a stagnant society, Upward Mobility is a zero-sum struggle between individuals or nations. In a society experiencing progress, Upward Mobility is positive-sum. In other words. Upward Mobility by one individual helps us all.

4. Because all people indirectly benefit from the success of others, society has a vested interest in promoting Upward Mobility.

5. Living in a society that is experiencing Progress is necessary, but it is not sufficient for upward mobility for the individual. By definition, Progress is about a large percentage of people within a society, but that still potentially leaves behind a significant percentage of people. Those people typically are the poor, working class, and racial minorities.

6. An individual living in a society that is experiencing Progress must choose through their own actions to participate in the progress that surrounds them. It cannot be given to them (unless their family is rich and willing to support their children forever).

7. The abilities of a person vary greatly by genetics, family upbringing, individual values, culture, luck, and other factors, but very few of those factors make it impossible for a person to participate in the progress that surrounds them.

8. No amount of government social programs can substitute for that lack of participation. Therefore, government programs should reward and enable actions to help oneself, not unintentionally reward failure.

9. The age between 14 and 30 (which I call “youths” or “young people”) is a critical period in an individual’s life where one is required to make Life Choices about the following:

   1. Education

   2. Job Skills

   3. Criminality and violence

   4. Sexual activity and contraception

   5. Relocation to regions with greater economic opportunities

   6. Occupation and work effort in the occupation

   7. Marriage

   8. Having children and parenting

10. All youths, regardless of class, race, gender, and other demographic characteristics, are confronted with the same choices. The only exceptions are youths with very rich parents who are willing to support their children financially for their entire lives.

11. The above life choices made between the ages of 14 and 30 set young people on a “life trajectory” that determines the probability of achieving a relatively high material standard of living after age 30.

12. While there are no guarantees in life, making good life choices dramatically increases the chances of success compared to making bad life choices. No government programs can fully undo the damage to the individual and society that occurs from those bad choices.

13. Humans, particularly young people, often copy the behavior of the people around them. This means that it is far easier for youths from upper-income families to make the right choices than it is for youths from lower-income families.

14. Young people often fail to realize the full consequences of those choices so they need moral guidance from adults and institutions. We need a clear and realistic message, based on social science, that explains the importance of these life choices and how to make them correctly.

15. Many of these Life Choices also require money that young people, particularly those who come from lower-income families, do not have. Society has an incentive to not let those relatively small financial barriers lead to bad choices that affect all of society.

16. For progress to continue into future generations, a reasonable percentage of adults must have children, and we should put those children in the best possible position to promote Progress for society and Upward Mobility for themselves.

17. Though there are no guarantees in life, the government should ensure that adults who have made reasonable efforts on their own behalf should have a “living wage” regardless of their abilities.
    This creates a social contract that society makes with young people: “If you make the right choices, we will ensure that you make a living wage for you and your family.” A minimum number of right choices should include:

    1. A full-time worker in the family

    2. Marriage between the biological parents

    3. Having children

We Can Solve Today’s Problems

Progress is the most uplifting story in human history. It has transformed poverty into prosperity, disease into health, ignorance into education, isolation into connectedness, war, and violence into peace and security, slums into housing, and servitude into freedom. Quite frankly, it is the single most important force to have impacted the material existence of humanity. We must protect it in wealthy nations and expand it in developing countries.

With an awareness of the progress that previous generations have left to us, a feeling of gratitude for benefitting from their efforts, and a willingness to learn how they achieved that progress, we will be in a much better position to solve the problems of today. While today’s problems seem insurmountable, we must never forget that previous generations solved far bigger problems with far fewer resources. Knowing this, we can look forward to the future with both hope and the necessary problem-solving attitude.

My hope is that this book series helps to ramp down the current level of cynicism and replace it with a new field of inquiry for understanding which factors promote progress. Just as important, I hope to spark interest in identifying which actions people need to take to enjoy the benefits of the progress that surrounds them.

The above is a compilation of excerpts from my From Poverty to Progress book series.

You can purchase discounted copies of my book at my website, or pay full prize at Amazon.