The Five Keys to Progress
An essential unifying concept for understanding human material progress.
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To implement viable policies that promote human material progress, we first must understand:
The origins of progress
The causes of progress
How progress works in our daily lives.
In this article, I will give a quick explanation of the first two points. You can read an expanded version here.
I believe that the Five Keys to Progress is an essential unifying concept for understanding human material progress. They are critical because they are the necessary preconditions for a society changing from a state of poverty to a state of 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 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 providing policy solutions and practices that can work.
The following is an excerpt from my book From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. You can purchase discounted copies of my book at my website, or pay full prize at Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
To transition from poverty to progress, a society needs to acquire the following preconditions:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Click the links above to go into more detail on each of the keys.
Each of the Five Keys to Progress is necessary for a society to transition from a state of poverty to a state of progress, but none are sufficient by themselves.
The Five Keys to Progress enabled humanity to move from “slow change with no benefits to the masses” to progress that benefitted mankind. Once a society acquires the five keys, it can escape the poverty trap imposed by geography, demographics, and elite domination. The masses can begin to enjoy a long-term increase in their standard of living. Indeed, human history itself can be viewed as a vast evolutionary process that led to the accidental discovery of the Five Keys to Progress.
As long as the five keys remain in effect, a society can solve an extraordinary number of problems. The result, in the long run, is widely-shared prosperity.
Once a society acquires the Five Keys to Progress, that society can transform itself into a vast, decentralized problem-solving network. Instead of people competing against each other for scarce resources such as food, status, and land, individuals can focus on solving each other’s problems at scale by cooperation.
Individuals quickly find that it is better to focus on solving each other’s problems at scale in the marketplace rather than exclusively focusing on their own individual problems. Individuals can magnify their problem-solving abilities by forming new organizations that enable people to cooperate on a larger scale. They have the incentive and the desire to innovate technologies, skills, and organizations as well as copying those that show positive results.
I believe that the degree to which peoples have enjoyed progress in history (and to a certain extent today) is largely determined by long-term 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 keys were either completely missing or were very underdeveloped.
In the distant past, a few Commercial societies in Northwest Europe acquired the first four keys, creating sufficient conditions for progress to occur before the Industrial Revolution. When one of those societies, Britain, added the fifth key, it created sufficient conditions for the widespread progress of the modern era.
As more and more societies copied those five keys, progress spread to new societies over time. First, it spread to other parts of Northwest Europe, then to North America, then to Germany and parts of Southwest Europe, and then to Japan. For a while after that, progress seemed to stop spreading.
More recently, progress has spread to most of Eastern Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Over the last 20 years, significant progress has even been achieved in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Now that you understand the causes of progress, let’s go on to discussing How Progress Works…
See also related articles:
More details on the causes of Progress (i.e. the Five Keys)
How Progress Works once the Five Keys to Progress are established
Commercial societies, the first type of society to create progress for the masses.
The above is an excerpt from my book From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. You can purchase discounted copies of my book at my website, or pay full prize at Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
Your book is excellent. I’m currently reading your second book, Promoting Progress.
I actually read Mokyr’s book, A Culture of Growth, shortly before I discovered your work on Substack. I also have read all of Thomas Sowell’s books, many of which support your general thesis, especially your analysis of free peasants, geography and free trade. I would also add that my favorite historian, Will Durant, supports your take on decentralized city-states.
After reading your first book, From Poverty to Progress, in which you identify the 5 keys to progress or five preconditions necessary for a society to transition from a state of poverty to self-sustaining progress, I can now clearly see that you have distilled the process of civilization to its essential ingredients.
As I read your second book, I am struck by its profound significance. The phrase that popped into my head was “wise and salutary neglect”, which was first coined by Edmund Burke in his speech to parliament in 1775. This I believe is what you are after. Like Burke you are advocating a more lenient approach to self-governing units, much smaller in terms of population compared to our larger states (and even our medium size ones). A marketplace of ideas on a range of products and services that was the original idea of federalism and local politics.
Tocqueville believed that equality was the defining social idea of his era and saw the U.S. as the most advanced example of equality in action. He was impressed by the social mobility and the absence of a rigid, traditional class system like those in Europe.
He praised several aspects of American life that he believed contributed to the success of its democracy:
Voluntary Associations: Americans constantly form civil associations (religious, commercial, moral, etc.), which he saw as a vital counterbalance to individual isolation and a way to address common problems outside of government control.
Religion and Morality: Tocqueville noted the robust separation of church and state but also that religion played a central, positive role in American culture and in providing the moral precepts necessary for a self-governing society.
Self-Government and Rule of Law: He was impressed by the American tradition of self-governance, stemming from New England townships, and the respect for order and legality during the American Revolution.
Superiority of Women: He famously attributed the singular prosperity and strength of the American people mainly "to the superiority of their women," in how they understood and embraced distinct but respected societal roles.
Despite his admiration, Tocqueville expressed significant concerns about inherent dangers within the democratic experiment:
Tyranny of the Majority: He warned that the greatest danger to American democracy was the "tyranny of the majority," where the majority could compromise the rights and freedoms of individuals and minorities.
Excessive Individualism and Materialism: He worried that a society of individuals could become atomized, focused purely on self-interest and material well-being, leading citizens to "sever himself from the mass of his fellows" and leave society to itself. This preoccupation could lead to political apathy, allowing a centralized, soft despotism to emerge.
Slavery and Native American Mistreatment: Tocqueville was horrified by the cruelty and paradox of a freedom-loving nation embracing slavery and mistreating Native Americans, predicting the latter's eventual extinction.
Your work is reminiscent of his seminal work Democracy in America. In fact, Tocqueville was prescient. Your work, I can only hope, will be a reminder of his warnings and become a blueprint for the way forward—a return perhaps to wise and salutary neglect.
Excellent!