The Rebirth of Progress Studies
Or why the world changed in 2019
This is the second post of what I anticipate to be an extended series of posts on the field of Progress Studies. In my previous article in my series on Progress Studies, I defined Progress Studies and showed how its “pre-history” goes back as least as far as the Enlightenment. I also claimed that as the social sciences diversified and professionalized in the 19th Century and 20th Century, much of its early work got forgotten.
If you have not read that article yet, I would recommend reading it first. In this article, I want to raise awareness about an important article that gave the field a reboot in 2019.
This article is part of my ongoing series on Progress Studies. You can read more on the topic in the following posts:
The Rebirth of Progress Studies (this article)
Progress Studies 2.0
Progress Studies got a reboot (or was it a rebranding?) with the publication of We Need a New Science of Progress: Humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen in The Atlantic Magazine July 30, 2019. Since the publication of that article a small group of Progress researchers have emerged. Most of them have Substack columns that I would recommend subscribing to.
I will start with several direct quotes from the original article:
“For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies…
Whether viewed in terms of large or small improvements, progress matters a lot…
These kinds of examples [Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, Northern England in late 18th and early 19th Century, Silicon Valley] show that there can be ecosystems that are better at generating progress than others, perhaps by orders of magnitude. But what do they have in common? Just how productive can a cultural ecosystem be? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? Can we deliberately engineer the conditions most hospitable to this kind of advancement or effectively tweak the systems that surround us today?
This is exactly what Progress Studies would investigate. It would consider the problem as broadly as possible. It would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future…
Plenty of existing scholarship touches on these topics, but it takes place in a highly fragmented fashion and fails to directly confront some of the most important practical questions…
When we consider other major determinants of progress, we see insufficient engagement with the central questions... Organizations as varied as Y Combinator, MIT’s Radiation Lab, and ARPA have astonishing track records in catalyzing progress far beyond their confines. While research exists on all of these fronts, we’re underinvesting considerably. These examples collectively indicate that one of our highest priorities should be figuring out interventions that increase the efficacy, productivity, and innovative capacity of human organizations…
In a world with Progress Studies, academic departments and degree programs would not necessarily have to be reorganized. That’s probably going to be costly and time-consuming. Instead, a new focus on progress would be more comparable to a school of thought that would prompt a decentralized shift in priorities among academics, philanthropists, and funding agencies. Over time, we’d like to see communities, journals, and conferences devoted to these questions…
An important distinction between our proposed Progress Studies and a lot of existing scholarship is that mere comprehension is not the goal. When anthropologists look at scientists, they’re trying to understand the species. But when viewed through the lens of Progress Studies, the implicit question is how scientists (or funders or evaluators of scientists) should be acting... In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand…
If we look to history, the organization of intellectual fields, as generally recognized realms of effort and funding, has mattered a great deal… Our point, quite simply, is that this process has yet to reach a natural end, and that a more focused, explicit study of progress itself should be one of the next steps.”
<Standing ovation>
Unlike many articles that I have read about progress, I can find very little to object to in the content. My only complaint is that the article defines a long-term goal without describing a road map for how to get there. Given that this article was written for a magazine with a very general audience, I don’t think that the authors could have done otherwise. I see this article as more of a Mission Statement than an Action Plan (to use corporate lingo).
The goal of the rest of my series on Progress Studies is to fill in the blanks on how to accomplish these lofty goals. How do we create a new academic field that makes real contributions to understanding and promoting progress without the benefit of formal university departments that previous generations had?
Given my background in academia, history, and technological innovation, I believe that I have unique qualifications for describing a road map for how to implement the ambitious goals of this article.
In the comments, I would love to hear from other people who consider themselves to be Progress researchers. What do you think? Did I get something wrong?
This article is part of my ongoing series on Progress Studies. You can read more on the topic in the following posts:
The Rebirth of Progress Studies (this article)
I've been enjoying these posts about progress studies Michael! One question I have for you: How do you see the role of education within progress studies? As you quoted from the article, progress researchers tend to have a prescriptive focus to their work. But how would you describe those that are trying to teach progress? I ask since this is the focus of a lot of my work. I don't necessarily offer prescriptive takes, but I try to understand a lot of history, technology, science, and innovation through the lens of progress in the hopes of educating.