What is Progress Studies?
Sketching out an emerging field of inquiry
This is the first post of what I anticipate to be an extended series of posts on the field of Progress Studies. My guess is that most of you have never heard of the term, Progress Studies, so I am going to start with a very broad overview of the topic in this post.
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)
Progress Studies is an emerging field of intellectual inquiry that we all should be familiar with. Let me start off by defining the goals of the field in progressively more detailed ways.
A short definition
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 goals of Progress studies are to:
Promote an awareness and understanding of progress.
Understand the origins and causes of progress.
Apply that knowledge to develop policies and practices that promote future progress.
Build a coalition to implement those policies in the real world.
A longer definition
Progress studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that:
Promotes an awareness of progress:
Evidence that progress exists (my take on the subject)
Impact of progress on our daily lives (same link as above)
Promotes an understanding of progress:
Develops policies and practices that promote future progress:
Builds a coalition to implement those policies in the real world. This will mostly be within government, but the policies and practices are likely to have an important impact on private and non-profit organizations (my take).
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 not history
Unlike the more general field of history, Progress 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 researchers typically like to stay at a higher level of detail.
Unlike most historians, Progress 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 researchers want is very different from the change that Karl Marx wanted, but it is change nonetheless.
Unlike Karl Marx, Progress researchers do not have an ideological agenda (or at least they should not). In particular, Progress 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.
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 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
When did Progress Studies start?
The answer to the question of “When did Progress Studies start?” can be answered in one of two ways. The correct answer is that it is a field of inquiry that goes back centuries and seeks to understand how the material world changes for the better. Though one can find antecedents in Greek, Roman, and Medieval philosophy, I think that the field really got started during the Enlightenment.
It was during the Enlightenment that many thinkers sought to systematically analyze history to develop policies and practices that would make the immediate future better for humanity. One concept that I think has been particularly useful in studying history methodically is the concept of society type, which I discuss in detail in the linked article.
Early thinkers on the subject widely believed that human societies naturally progressed from simple to complex. This created a very linear view of human history. This way of thinking is sometimes called the “unilineal evolution of societies.”
For example, most Enlightenment thinkers believed that all societies started as Hunter-Gatherers, then at some point transitioned into Herding societies, and then at a later date, they transitioned into Agricultural societies.
Adam Smith (whose statue is shown above) and some thinkers within the Scottish Enlightenment added a fourth type of society, Commercial societies, to explain the transition going on at that time. Adam Smith thought that all societies would transition through all the other society types until they inevitably transitioned into modern Commercial societies. In fact, Adam Smith's classic work, The Wealth of Nations, came directly out of his desire to understand how Commercial societies function.
Later in 19th Century, thinkers such as Henry Home, Edward Burnett Taylor, Lewis Henry Morgan developed more complex versions of the theory. In the 20th Century, Julian Seward and Gerhard Lenski further developed the concept. At one time, Society Type was a dominant paradigm in anthropology and sociology, but it has lost favor within those fields.
During the 19th and 20th Century, this systematic study of history branched out into many different academic disciplines. Many of these fields became social sciences, each with its own theories, terminologies, and methodologies:
History
Philosophy
Economics
Economic History
Anthropology
Paleontology
Sociology
Geography, at least as it relates to human history
Psychology
Development economics
many more
Unfortunately, in the process of diversifying and professionalizing, the field lost much of its original goal. The goal of understanding began to trump the original goal of changing the world for the better. Objectivity won out over usefulness. In addition, the concept of society type fell out of favor, and few academics even understand what it means. Just as bad, many academics are hostile to the concept of “progress.”
If I were to trace all the above, this would be a massive post, so I will not do so. I will, however, frequently mention work by previous generations in my other posts.
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.
It is an excellent article. I suggest that you read it (or reread it) now. When the article was published, I was heads down doing the research for my first book, so I completely missed it. I only read the article a few years later.
Full disclosure: Tyler Cowen gave me a $10,000 Emergent Venture grant to help me get my career as a Progress researcher started. That grant came with no strings attached, so he is in no way “pulling the strings” on my writing.
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.
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:
What is Progress Studies? (this post)
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. : (
Indeed, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen article allowed me to crystallize and describe what it is that I am interested in. No doubt that article has an impact on many others.
Is there any formal coursework for “Progress studies” out there?