Progress Studies

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

(1) New Working Paper: the fundamental driver of growth in modern economies, Total Factor Productivity (TFP), is linear, not exponential. This is a paper I did not expect to write...

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 metric... See more

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

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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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?