Progress Studies

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

Progress is mostly about what does not happen. Progress means a 92-year-old who did not die today, a boy who was not robbed on his way to school, a 12-year girl who is not married to a 30-year old man, etc. What did not happen does not make the news. The best parts of civilization don’t get headlined.

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