The Rise of Progress Studies: How a New Field Could Change the Future
Understanding the ideas behind a bold new discipline focused on the material standard of living of entire sociei.
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Across the world, a quiet intellectual movement is taking shape—one that asks a deceptively simple question:
how did humanity create progress, and how can we keep it going?
At a time when pessimism dominates headlines and faith in the future seems to be fading, a growing network of thinkers, writers, and researchers is reviving the study of progress itself. Their goal is nothing less than to understand the roots of human advancement—and to ensure that the upward arc of history continues.
This is the first post of an extended series of posts on the field of Progress Studies. You view a list of all of the articles in this series at the bottom of this article.
What Is Progress Studies?
I believe that the best definition of Progress Studies is “the systematic study of history, both recent and ancient, to develop policies and practices that maintain and, if possible, accelerate human material progress.”
The concept of “Progress Studies” was first popularized by economists Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison in a 2019 article in The Atlantic. Cowen and Collison called for a new field devoted to understanding the causes of progress.
But the roots of the idea stretch far deeper—through centuries of scholarship in history, economics, geography, and political science. Progress Studies brings these threads together into a single, interdisciplinary framework focused not just on explaining progress, but on learning how to preserve and extend it.
The Four Goals of Progress Studies
The goals of the Progress Studies are to:
Promote an awareness and understanding of human material progress as one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Study the history of material progress to identify the origins and causes of progress and how progress works in our daily lives. In particular, Progress Studies looks for common patterns and trends across nations, eras, industries, technologies, institutions that enable us to identify causes of material progress.
Apply that knowledge to develop theories, policies, and practices that promote future progress.
Build coalitions to implement those policies and practices in the real world.
Together, these goals distinguish Progress Studies from traditional disciplines. Economists may measure growth, historians may describe change, and political scientists may debate governance—but Progress Studies focuses on how and why all of these forces combine to create lasting material improvement for ordinary people.
How Progress Studies Differs from History
Progress Studies is not just another branch of economics or history. Its central question is practical: what worked in the past and what might work in the present and future? It looks beyond ideology to the mechanisms that actually produce prosperity—how innovation systems evolve, how knowledge spreads, how institutions enable experimentation, and how cooperation and competition interact to push societies forward.
Progress Studies borrows from multiple disciplines but maintains a clear focus: to discover the repeatable patterns that make sustained improvement possible. The aim is not simply to describe progress after the fact but to develop frameworks that help us create more of it.
Unlike the more general field of history, Progress Studies researchers do not study history for its own sake. Historians love to go into great detail about individual persons or events. Like journalists, historians focus on the “Who”, “What”, “When,” and “Where” of history. While journalists focus on what happened yesterday, historians focus on everything that preceded yesterday. Progress Studies researchers typically like to stay at a higher level of detail.
Unlike most historians, Progress Studies researchers have an agenda. Progress researchers would agree with the famous quote by Karl Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Of course, the change Progress Studies researchers want is very different from the change that Karl Marx wanted, but it is change nonetheless.
Unlike Karl Marx, Progress Studies researchers do not have an ideological agenda (or at least they should not). In particular, Progress Studies researchers want to identify patterns and trends in history that point to causes (the “How” and the “Why”). And hopefully, understanding causality enables humans to “tweek the knobs” of change to lead to human material progress.
So Progress Studies is an academic field of inquiry as well as a pragmatic field that directly relates to public policy, business practices, and engineering. In addition, the field has real applications to politics.
Progress Studies is an applied social science
In this way, Progress Studies is more akin to a social science, but it is more of an applied social science.
Social scientists often use history as “raw data,” but then they marshall that raw data into theories and models that help us to understand human societies better. Those theories focus on what is important, while pushing less important factors to the background. Most importantly, theories seek to identify causal variables.
Because Progress Studies focuses on human material progress, Progress Studies researchers tend to focus on the history of economics, technology, and business.
One might call Progress Studies a collection of applied histories:
Applied Economic History
Applied History of Technology
Applied Business History
Why Now?
The timing for Progress Studies could not be more critical. Despite unprecedented material abundance, pessimism about the future is widespread. Many people have forgotten that progress is not automatic—it must be understood, nurtured, and defended.
When societies stop believing in progress, they stop investing in it. Innovation slows, institutions ossify, and confidence in the future erodes. By studying the conditions that created the modern world, we can better recognize the warning signs of stagnation—and chart a path forward.
Where is this series headed?
This article is part of my ongoing series on Progress Studies. You can read more on the topic in the following posts:
What is Progress Studies? (this post)
Before Progress Studies: The Hidden History of Humanity’s Greatest Idea (this is intro article to my series on Pre-History of Progress Studies)
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?
FYI: I just updated this article to include links to articles that I have written on the topics listed above. I think that it really improves the article for new subscribers.
Should have done that before posting, but I guess that you live and learn. : (
This series is valuable in that, as Marx famously pointed out (and later, Lenski), the material causes of social change are the primary drivers of human-cultural evolution, not metaphysical, supernatural forces as pre-modern, pre-liberal mythic culture and religion held.
But, it is also important to study evolutionary psychology and brain science (McGilchrist) to complete the picture of how humans evolved to seek meaning and purpose (intense social cooperation as a survival strategy). The classic critique of materialism, including Marxism, is that by ignoring meaning, purpose and spirituality evil and sin will flourish and high social trust and cooperation diminish.
This AI scientist, futurist and (western) Aro/tantric Buddhist explains the problem of materialist progress, meaning and high social trust:
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history