Notes From The Progress Studies Conference

Progress is good. As Steven Pinker has argued, most things are getting better over time. We are richer, healthier, safer, and better-educated than our ancestors. Although redistribution and social changes can make things better or worse around the edges, most of our current fortunate position comes from simple economic growth.

The United States could produce all its power by covering 2% of its land with solar panels - for comparison, we use 20% of our land for agriculture, so this would look like Nevada specializing in farming electricity somewhat less intensely than Iowa specializes in farming corn

The remaining limitation is high-density use cases; for example, a passenger jet needs to get a lot of power from a source light enough to fit on the plane. So far batteries can’t do that. The solarists are undaunted: you can use solar power to “mine” carbon from the air and convert it into fossil fuels, then use the fossil fuels on the plane. Sinc... See more