Progress Studies

Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast. Imagine that the evolution of your life or our culture is like a pregnancy: It needs to reach its full term. Just as a child isn’t ready to be born after five months of gestation, the New Earth we’re creat

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anyone who prioritizes the wellbeing of the “future of humanity” in the abstract over the dignity and care of individuals in the present cannot claim that they truly care about people

once we had machines to do labor, we could afford to stop treating humans like machines.

do you ever find it weird that as a culture we decided that “progress” just means advancement in technology and numbers on a spreadsheet, and that things like moral advancement, human joy, positive relationships, fulfillment, psychological development, and purpose don’t count?

Malthus was wrong. We make MORE food than ever with LESS land than ever. Because we have one inexhaustible resource— Human ingenuity.

Governments sporadically got things spectacularly wrong. In 1865, the rail and horse-drawn carriage lobbies in the U.K. drummed up enough outrage to pass the Locomotive Act, whose most notable feature was an absurd requirement that a man walk in front of any self-propelled vehicle waving a red flag and blowing a horn. It stunted the U.K. automobile... See more