Promoting Progress (1 of 2)

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.

The following is the first in a series of excerpts from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase full-price ebooks, paperback, or hardcovers on Amazon.

Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:

The last 30 years have seen by far the greatest material progress in human history. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, dozens of nations have moved from desperate poverty into middle-income status, and billions of people have been elevated out of poverty. Even Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced real material progress during this period.

As I documented in the first book in this series, From Poverty to Progress, this progress can be measured across dozens of different domains: economic growth, declining poverty, increasing life spans, declining infant mortality, improved sanitation, increasing literacy, longer schooling, declining slums, increasing nutrition, a decline in wars and violent conflicts, and increasing happiness. These trends are seen in the vast majority of nations throughout the world.

Despite this progress, those who enjoy the greatest benefits of that progress are anxious and worried about the future. Over the last ten years in wealthy Western nations, there has been a noticeable increase in pessimism about both our current situation and our long-term future. Ironically, the very people who have most benefited from progress, college-educated professionals in Western nations, have become the most pessimistic of any group.

Just as disturbingly, material progress appears to be stalling in many industrialized Western nations. As of 2022, the European economy has essentially not recovered from the economic recession of 2007. This 15-year period of essentially zero economic growth is longer than the Great Depression of the 1930s. In addition, Canada has seen virtually no economic growth since 2011.

Japan, once the Asian nation that most embodied economic dynamism, has seen very little growth since 1995. Moreover, future economic prospects in Canada, Japan and Europe do not look any better than the recent past.

Among Western nations, the United States is one of the few that has experienced robust economic growth over the last ten years. Unfortunately, recent trends as of 2022 suggest that stagnant economic growth may be spreading to the United States. Many of the causes of the apparent recession in 2022 are related to short-term factors, such as the Covid lockdowns and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But more systemic factors are also in play.

Neither the ideological Left nor the ideological Right offer any real solutions to our current problems. Perhaps most discouraging is the fact that much of the political leadership in the West has given up on the idea of progress or completely misunderstood where it comes from. Political movements that should be promoting progress are failing to do so because of incorrect assumptions.

Many leaders on the traditional Left, for example European Social Democrats and the Democratic party in the United States, believe that progress can only come from ever-increasing government social programs to redistribute income or regulation to control corporations. With near-zero economic growth, however, this entire model is unsustainable because it relies on constantly increasing tax revenues.

The only true accomplishment of the traditional Left has been an ever-expanding central government that achieves fewer and fewer results. As of 2020, most wealthy Western nations have government expenditures that reach or exceed 50% of their total GDP. The French government accounts for 62% of the country’s GDP, Italy spends 57%, Germany 51%, and the UK 50% of their respective GDPs. Even the government in the supposedly free-market United States is now spending 46% of GDP, while Japan is at 47%. Only Ireland at 29% and Switzerland at 36% have governments that spend substantially below 50% (IMF).

The traditional Left has abandoned the idea of material progress based on economic growth. They appear to believe that ever-expanding social programs to redistribute income and regulations to constrain corporations will create a better society. The traditional Left claims that things are bad, but doing more of the same will solve the problem. Failures of government redistribution in the past breed skepticism about the concept of progress and undermine confidence in the efficacy of government.

More radical ideologies on the Left are typically hostile to the idea of progress. This includes Democratic Socialists, Greens, and Critical theorists (more commonly known as “the Woke”). Many of these ideologues believe that progress is the cause of our problems, so most Leftists deliberately seek to restrain it. They believe that progress is:

• Inherently unfair because the benefits of progress are unequally distributed

• A destructive force on the natural environment

• Immoral because it is based purely on material goods

• Immoral because it relies to a large extent on self-interested decision-making by individuals

• Immoral because it further solidifies the power of the oppressors over the oppressed.

Greens believe that material progress leads to ecological collapse and cling to fanciful ideas that renewable energy and organic food will make all the difference. Critical theorists see every idea, institution, and practice as a system of oppression for people of color and other underrepresented minorities. Democratic Socialists believe in an oxymoron. You cannot radically concentrate power in the hands of a centralized government and nonetheless maintain democracy. In such circumstances, centralized power will ultimately overcome democratic governance.

Everywhere in the Western world we see the traditional Left being replaced by an anti-progress Left-wing. This means that traditional Left policies that unintentionally undermined progress are being replaced by Left-wing policies that deliberately undermine progress, particularly in the fields of energy, housing, agriculture, and the centralization of government.

Ideologies on the Right offer no real alternative, because conservatives are no more positive about the concept of progress. As Josef Schumpeter has noted, material progress works through a process of “creative destruction.” As new technologies and organizations are created, they drive old technologies and organizations to extinction. This destruction affects many of the very institutions and values that conservatives hold dear.

For this reason, ideologies of the Right are skeptical of progress. They believe that the most important recent trends have been a decline of moral values, the relentless expansion of government, and the decline in religious observance, patriotism, and traditional institutions.

Most importantly, the Right has no alternative policy solutions. I believe that Conservatism is best summarized by the famous William F. Buckley Jr. quote: “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history yelling ‘Stop’…” Many conservatives see Progress as a constant decline in moral standards and traditional institutions. Most conservatives look back with a rosy nostalgia at a past that, upon examination, was far less rosy than conservatives imagine.

While conservatives are correct that some change is bad, it is not true that all change is bad. The fundamental problem with Conservatism as a worldview is that it has no means to separate good change from bad change. More sophisticated conservatives, such as Edmund Burke, believed in cautious reform. But reform to what end? Reform by what means? How do conservatives know whether a specific reform is good or bad?

In practice, this has meant that conservatives oppose whatever proposal the Left has to offer at any given time. This has resulted in the Left ever so slowly winning victories, and the Right caving in to each of the arguments that had previously been made by the Left. The result is a conservative base that is bitter, skeptical of progress, and willing to follow less-than-reputable leaders.

Though conservatives (and also libertarians) oppose the practices of the Left, neither offers a coherent alternative. Supporters of both world views seem resigned to constant political defeat and focus on rallying their base during elections. Once in power, they do little to fundamentally change anything. They are opposed to everything the Left does, but they make few fundamental policy reforms once they win elections.

The entire history of material progress over the last two centuries that I documented in the first book in this series, From Poverty to Progress, invalidates much of the conservative viewpoint. If the world had stayed the same in 1820, as conservatives at that time believed was necessary, virtually all of mankind would be living in absolute poverty, living much shorter lives, eating less food, being educated less than one year per person, and experiencing a life of sheer physical drudgery.

The combination of hostility to progress from the Left-wing, misunderstanding of the causes of progress by the traditional Left, and skepticism of progress from the Right have undermined our collective belief in and understanding of progress. Despite what ideologues claim, it is not progress that is the problem. It is our politics, ideology, and government policy.

Unfortunately, these anti-progress viewpoints on both the Left and Right are magnified enormously by the media, social media, and interest groups. Whereas these institutions once tended towards the political center, they are now all affiliated with the ideological Left or the ideological Right. Their ideological viewpoints have corrupted the original purpose of the institutions that they dominate.

All of these institutions have learned that the best way to motivate people is with fear and hate towards the other side. To generate more revenue, viewership, votes, and political power, they have adopted a business model based on negativity and intransigence. These business models further undermine belief in progress.

Whereas politics was once constrained largely to elections and governance, it has now permeated all aspects of society. As the political parties have polarized between Left and Right, so has our society. Even families and once non-political institutions have been torn apart by ideological division. It is becoming increasingly hard for Americans to unite on any basic principles.

Some claim that all these problems prove that progress does not exist or that progress is a bad thing. At best, they claim that progress is now a thing of the past, which is no longer relevant to our current situation. The implication is that our current problems are just too large in scale to be solved by traditional methods.

I believe that the skeptics of progress are wrong, both factually and morally. Our current problems are not caused by any negative effects of progress. They are driven by politics, ideology, and failed government policies.

Progress is the single most important trend of the last century. Today, the material standard of living of humanity is far higher than it has ever been. This is not something that we should take for granted. Problems exist, just as they have always existed, but they are now less severe than ever. And the number of our problems is fewer than ever. It is merely our perceptions that magnify current problems into unsolvable crises.

Rather than abandon the concept of progress, we must learn from the ways our ancestors built progress in the first place. Our ancestors overcame problems far more difficult and complex than ours, and they did so with a much smaller base of technology and scientific knowledge. Most importantly, our ancestors gave us a toolkit for promoting progress that is still effective today, if we just give it a chance.

The fundamental 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.

The next excerpt is here.

The above was the first in a series of excerpts from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase full-price ebooks, paperback, or hardcovers on Amazon.

Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series: