Progress Studies

"Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing." -David L. Cooperrider

Our metrics of progress have continuously abstracted: from the tangible bushels of wheat in agricultural economies (with natural physical limits), to industrial-era efficiency metrics (units/hour, machine uptime), to the nebulous productivity measures of knowledge work. Each evolution has moved us further from human-scaled, naturally bounded... See more