Understanding the causes of modern material progress

I believe that the Five Keys to Progress is an essential unifying concept for understanding progress.

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In previous excerpts from my book, I made the case that we live in a world of progress, and that progress plays an important role in making all of our material lives better. In this excerpt, I explain what caused this progress to take place and how it works today.

First, I will quickly outline the concept of Five Keys to Progress, and then explain why they are important. Then I will go into more detail on each of the five keys.

I believe that the Five Keys to Progress is an essential unifying concept for understanding 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.

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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:

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Let’s Dismiss Some Common Fallacies

First, let’s dismiss some commonly held views about the causes of our current progress.

This progress did not come from the government. While governments do play some role in progress, particularly in education, infrastructure and basic health care, it is not a dominant one. And as we will see later, throughout history governments have done far more to hinder progress than they have done to promote it. Governments may redistribute the benefits of progress, but they do not create it.

Nor has political activism played a major role in progress. Certainly, political movements to overthrow authoritarian regimes that hinder progress have played an important role. But they do so by removing obstacles to progress, not by actually creating progress. And once basic liberties and democratic governance are established, the benefits of political activism with respect to promoting progress rapidly diminish.

Nor can we see any political leaders who have played important roles in this progress. Certainly, some political leaders have made their nations a better place, but their impact overseas is usually quite limited. Leaders primarily promote progress by enabling other people to create progress.

We cannot point to any pieces of legislation or the establishment of new programs that played an important role in promoting progress. Certainly, some legislation or programs in individual nations have helped, but the metrics are too widely dispersed across the world and legislation has been too diverse between nations to account for much of the change.

Nor has redistribution, in general, played an important role in progress. Wealth must be created before the benefits can be redistributed. If progress does not exist, then there is not much to redistribute. The people participating in progress have done far more to benefit individuals than any redistribution that they might receive.

All of the political factors mentioned above can play a role in breaking down barriers to progress, but they must rely on other factors to deliver progress. Rather than flowing down from politics and government, progress bubbles up from society.

Progress Is An Evolutionary Process

Progress is an evolutionary process. Evolutionary processes are not controlled or directed by any government, organization, person or groups or God.

Progress is the outcome of millions of small-scale decisions made by individuals who were trying to solve short-term local problems. Few of them were trying to make the world a better place. Few were even thinking about the world as a whole. Few of these people were involved in politics or government.

I will go into much greater detail in later chapters, but I want to expand your view of the “causes” of progress. Because progress is an evolutionary process, its causation is tricky to define. It is a bit like debating the cause of life on Earth (another evolutionary process). There are many “causes” that interact with others in very complex ways.

I believe that this complexity is part of the reason why previous researchers have not discovered the Five Keys to Progress earlier.

When viewed from a very high level, evolutionary processes require two things:

1. Necessary pre-conditions that enable lower-level factors to come into existence and survive and change over time. There are often many different pre-conditions that must come together to create the “Goldilocks conditions.” At any time, the pre-conditions can disappear and the entire evolutionary process collapses.

2. Specific mechanics that explain how that evolution takes place. This usually consists of multiple mechanics that interact with each other in complex ways.

This chapter is about the necessary pre-conditions for a society to transition from a state of poverty to a state of progress. The next chapter is about the mechanics of how progress actually works.

Introducing the Five Keys to Progress

So let’s reiterate the Five Keys to Progress. To transition from poverty to progress, a society needs to acquire the following preconditions:

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.

In subsequent excerpts, I will 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.

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.

Given the positive impact on so many different continents and cultures, there is every reason to believe that progress can spread through the entire world. Maintaining as much of those five keys as possible in as many different nations as possible is critical for preserving progress in wealthy nations and increasing progress in developing nations.

The Five Keys to Progress enabled humanity to move from “slow change with no direction” 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.

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: