Progress Studies

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

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?

Hi Patrick and Noah -- if you don't mind two cents from a humanist, I think there's a key concern that needs to be addressed: whether "progress studies" can be broad enough to include competing definitions of progress. And if not, then whether it should form a scholarly agenda.

"Futurism tells us more about the present than the future" --@mattwridley nails it

My current favorite theory about what's gone wrong since the 1970s is that we stopped innovating to maximize performance and started optimizing for energy (and resource) efficiency. Imagine all the cool shit we're gonna build once we have abundant sources of clean energy...

(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...

In 2010, people still thought the main application of mobile was coupons. @yishan set them straight.