My 10-year anniversary in Progress Studies
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January 2025 marks the 10-year anniversary of my research and writing about Progress Studies. If you do not know what Progress Studies is, you can read about it right here.
I wanted to use this anniversary as an opportunity to explain how I got into this field of intellectual inquiry. In some ways, Progress Studies is the culmination of my entire intellectual career, which has taken many twists and turns.
I was a History major in university, and I have had a lifelong passion for reading books on the topic. My focus has been on the economic and political history of Europe and the United States.
Reading history and trying to explain long-term historical trends has been a passion of mine for my entire adult life.I got a PhD in Political Science and Public Policy from Brown University, and I was a professor in the topic for four years. This gives me a deep background in politics, government, and policy.
I ran for state-level elected office in 1998 (and almost won), so I understand politics and elections.
Finally, I settled in for a 20+ year career in the Digital Technology field, first as a Technical writer and then as a User Experience Designer.
This gave me deep insights into how technology is implemented in the real world. I worked for Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Verizon, and a number of smaller technology companies.
During this time, I continued reading about history and public policy in my sparse free time.
Then something happened in January 2015 that totally changed my life…
This article is part of my ongoing series on Progress Studies. You can read more on the topic in the following posts:
You might also want to read my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
Back in 2015, I was working as a User Experience Designer (which means I design the software that the developers implement; kind of like an Architect for a house). In the annual company meeting, the CEO said, “We have to figure out how to get more innovative!” with great passion. And then, like a typical CEO, he never mentioned the topic again for the rest of his career at the company.
I guess I took the challenge far more seriously than even our CEO did. His declaration got me thinking, “Hmm, how does a corporation get more innovative?” And more broadly, “How does a society get more innovative, and what can government policy do to promote this?”
It was then that I decided to focus my “fun reading” on a specific topic: what I later decided to call “Progress” because it seemed to be the best word to describe what I was studying.
At first, I focused narrowly on recent innovations – computers, the Internet, and mobile devices. I read many books about technology, innovation, and business practices. Some were useful; many were little more than corporate fads. The more useful books, however, focussed on topics seemingly unrelated to technological innovation.
It did not take me too long to realize that the topic was pretty light-weight intellectually, but occasionally, the books would mention earlier technological innovations like the railroad, the printing press, and textile mills. These brief mentions triggered all the memories of the reading that I had done in the previous decades. I started to broaden my scope of reading into economic history and the history of technology. Each book opened up more passages.
Since I had a strong background in public policy, I shifted to what government policies can do to promote innovativeness. After a bit of reading on the topic, I decided that while government plays a role, innovativeness comes from society. So I shifted the focus to understanding why some societies were more innovative and grew faster than others.
I gradually expanded my reading to include new topics:
History
Technologies and Innovation
Innovation and Diffusion theory
Biology and evolutionary theory
Paleontology
Anthropology
Sociology
Economics and economic history
Culture and cultural evolution
Geography
Psychology
Brain science
Network theory
Complexity theory
Engineering,
Urban studies
Philosophy and plenty of other topics.
I am hardly an expert in many of these topics, but I believe that I have a solid understanding of each of them. This enables me to see connections between technology and innovation and those other fields.
I realized that this research project was quickly growing into a Frankenstein’s monster. I had problems remembering more than the main points of books that I read. I realized that I needed to take careful notes while reading each book.
Since I was reading mainly digital books, I copied and pasted key passages into a separate Word document. Note: you can read the book summaries that I wrote as part of my research notes on The Ratchet of Technology, an online library of book summaries. For new users, this page is a good place to start.
And then after finishing each book, I decided to write what I learned from each book. These short essays formed the backbone of my first book: From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement.
I particularly focused my reading on big theoretical books that tried to give answers to big questions like:
Why did Europe get rich first?
Why did Britain industrialize first?
Why the West prospered long before other regions?
What enabled developing nations to suddenly experience long-term economic growth?
Each book tended to present one key factor to answer the question. I came away from each book excited that I had unlocked a key part of the mystery, but each time I then remembered how persuasive other theories were as well.
I began to think systematically about falsifying each theory with specific examples from history. This was relatively easy as I had spent four decades reading history.
Towards a theory of human material progress
I decided that I wanted to invent my own “Prosperity theory,” as I originally called it.
I realized that a mono-causal explanation is just not plausible (i.e. one cause to explain why societies transform from poverty into progress). If it was only one causal factor, someone far smarter than me would have figured the answer out a long time ago.
But I also did not want a long list of 20-30 causes as some books do. I needed to find a useful “Goldilocks” between one cause and 20-30 causes that helped us understand the origins and causes of human material progress.
I needed a theory that:
Was more useful than all existing theories at explaining the key questions listed above.
Can explain why the virtually all human history had no material progress
Can also explain why an entire society can transform from that state of poverty to a state of long-term material progress within one typical person’s lifetime.
Start with a solid basis of factors that originated before humanity evolved (so I knew that there were no deeper causes)
Explained variations in economic development among:
All human societies in history from the present to pre-history.
All regions of the world (not just the most advanced)
and explained variation within societies at least somewhat.
Orders the causes as they developed in real history
Limit the number of causes to the 2-6 that were most important so it was memorable and useful.
Can explain the origin of these 2-6 causes (i.e. what caused the cause).
Is historically accurate enough to be used as a teaching aid for history
Balances between being too simplistic or getting too lost in the details
Leads to useful solutions to current problems
Had as little new terminology or complicated academic terminology as possible.
Uses a simple, widely available dependent variable (i.e., what is to be explained or the “result”)
I used Angus Maddison’s outstanding database of estimated per capita GDP as the dependent variable .Makes sure that all the causes cannot be easily derived from the others (so they were truly separate causes).
My theory coalesces
In the end, I came up with the Five Keys to Progress and How Progress Works as my theory for how a society transforms from a state of enduring poverty to a state of progress (long-term economic growth). And I connected my theory to Big History, which is the most compelling explanation of change:
Before the evolution of modern humans
Most of human history
What was missing from Big History was a compelling theory for how modern material progress emerged from billions of years of change with no progress from the fundamental constraints of:
Geography
Energy (including food, which is a form of energy)
Evolution, which is the most compelling theory for how those forces above changed over time via:
via biological evolution via natural selection and sexual selection,
as well as more recent cultural evolution
Modern material progress is the outcome of a long evolutionary process that grew out of those four factors. For virtually all of our history, humans were controlled by the same natural factors that all other animals were controlled by. But our human ability to:
copy what worked for other humans gradually enabled us to overcome these natural constraints.
But those human behaviors were clearly present long before material progress got going, so something fundamental must have changed. My most important intellectual breakthrough were the twin concepts of the Five Keys to Progress and How Progress Works
Writing my first book
Until my retirement in 2020, most of my time has been spent reading books/articles and taking notes about each of them. Some of these books inspired me to write a few pages of content related to the topic. Over time, I have developed about 1000 pages of notes that are gradually coalescing into a new perspective on history, technology, and progress – one that might be of interest to others.
In March 2020, I was able to retire early and devote myself full-time to writing and researching progress. The timing was very odd, as I quit on a Friday and the Covid lockdowns started on the very next Monday! I then spent the next two months trying to figure out my overall theory and the basic structure of the book.
I knew that there was no way a traditional publisher would pick up my book, so I decided to self-publish via Amazon. Realistically, unless you are a celebrity or an established writer, it does not make sense to go through a traditional book publisher. You can just hire your own editors, book layout specialists, and cover designers.
Self-publishing was a great decision as I could have wasted years finding a publisher and then being forced to write the book that they wanted, not what I wanted. Plus the publishing company would have owned the property rights and taken a huge cut in the book sales.
Typically, an author makes about $1 per book sold, but I make roughly $6 per book sold (and I can control the pricing and distribution). Plus an author can update the content of the e-book anytime you want, so it takes the pressure off getting it perfect the first time.
Writing my first book was amazingly easy. I took all the notes that I had written over the past five years and assembled them into a logical order. Once I settled on the concepts of the Five Keys to Progress and How Progress Works and the book's basic structure, I wrote the bulk of the first draft of my first book in about five months.
I started actually writing the book in May 2020. I wrote for two months and then took two months to enjoy my first summer as a retiree. I then restarted in September and finished the first draft by November 2020. Then I immediately started writing my second two books while I went through the pre-production process of my first book.
The hardest parts were:
Creating the graphics
Getting recommendations (or “blurbs”) from noted thinkers
Shepherding the book through the process of:
Editing
Layout of the printed version of the book
Cover design
Figuring out the audio-video technology in my sound stage
Recording the audiobook.
The book was not officially published until April 2022. There were some frustrating moments, but it was really rewarding to learn how to do all these new tasks.
Anyway, I think that I have gone on long enough for one article.
Until next time…
This article is part of my ongoing series on Progress Studies. You can read more on the topic in the following posts:
You might also want to read my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
Congratulations! I recently finished reading your first book and enjoyed it very much. The Five Keys to Progress is a useful model for understanding the world
Your 4th Key to Progress; " High value-added export industries" is perhaps the one that is least intuitive of the 5 that you have discovered or recognized. Thinking about it a little more, it strikes me as having two related aspects:
1) somewhat related to the idea from Bastiat (or was it Ricardo?) that you have to have been able to produce something to have something of value to offer to the market so you can buy the produce of others, or as John Tamny phases it, "production [aka supply] comes first".
2) it is part of the cross sharing of innovations necessary to truly advance progress [even though I might prefer your original phrase “Prosperity theory.” ]
Looking forward to your posts for 2025, even if I don't have time to read or respond to everyone.