“For hundreds of thousands of years, human history played out without any rapid, marked advance in material living standards,” wrote NY Times journalist Ezra Klein in the introduction to his recent podcast, We Know Shockingly Little About What Makes Humanity Prosper. “And then, suddenly, in just the past few hundred years, everything changed: Humanity achieved a truly mind-boggling amount of progress in the evolutionary blink of an eye. In the early 21st century, we are all living in the world that progress bequeathed. And yet we understand shockingly little about what drives that progress in the first place. That’s important because, at least according to some metrics, progress seems to be slowing down.”
Klein’s podcast guest was Irish entrepreneur Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of the financial services company Stripe, one of the world’s most profitable and highest valued startups. Collison is very interested in the long history of human progress, and has been a leading advocate for the formation of a new discipline of Progress Studies.
In the podcast, Klein and Collison discussed a number of topics on the history and current state of human progress. But I’d like to focus my summary of the podcast on three key questions:What is progress?; why is progress slowing down?; and do we need a new discipline of Progress Studies?
What is progress?
“When you say progress here, what are you actually talking about?,” asked Klein. “Is it just shorthand for economic growth or G.D.P.?” Collison answered that there’s no conclusive definition of progress. It might be best to have a broad intuition about what progress is rather than attempt to define it super precisely.
“For, me it is something along the lines of our success in realizing a liberal, pluralistic and prosperous society, and a sense among people that their offspring can and probably will do better than they themselves have, and that more broadly, the future will be better than the past, and that we’re at least making incremental progress towards embodying values and morals that we collectively think we can be proud of.”
He added that you have to judge periods of progress relative to the baseline that preceded them. For example, 18th century Britain was clearly not some ideal society. But, compared to the 16th century, “the ideals and ideas of natural rights and religious tolerance and so on - they were somewhat better embodied by the 18th century than they had just a couple of centuries previously.” Similarly the 1930s were far from perfect in the US, “but assessed relative to the society of 1830, I think it compares relatively favorably. And I think it’s not a coincidence that Adam Smith - his first book [The Theory of Moral Sentiments] of course, - was on ethics and morals and trying to instill better general ideals and behaviors across a society. And maybe after that, he then argued for and laid many of the foundations [in The Wealth of Nations] of what we would recognize as modern economics. So I don’t think it’s perfect. But on average, I think the correlation is positive.”
Why is progress slowing down?
Collison and science writer Michael Nielsen published Science is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck, a November, 2018 article in The Atlantic. They wrote that “Today, there are more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before. On the surface, this is encouraging. But for all this increase in effort, are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress?”
Collison explained that there are two possible reasons why scientific progress has slowed down over the past few decades despite the fact that the number of scientists, the amount we’re spending, and the output of papers and journals being produced have all increased by a factor of 20x to 100x between 1950 and 2010.
One possibility is that progress is harder because we’re running out of low-hanging fruit, which is evident by comparing the first half of the 20th century with the second half. The first half saw major fundamental breakthroughs in physics, such as quantum mechanics and relativity. While the second half saw fewer physics breakthroughs, there were major advances in biology, - e.g., the discovery of DNA, and the sequencing of the human genome, - as well as the creation of the new fields of computer sciences and information technologies. There may not have been a major slowdown in absolute terms, but if you look at progress on a per-capita basis, we would have had to discover many more important things in order to compensate for the large increase in investments in the second half of the 20th century.
“Or the other possibility is, somehow, we’re doing it suboptimally,” added Collison. “Something changed, and we were pursuing this process of discovery more effectively in the past, and presumably, for inadvertent reasons, something went wrong, and now, we’re just less efficient at it.”
Similar questions have been raised about technological innovations in general. Given the pace of technological change, we tend to think of our age as the most innovative ever. But over the past few decades, a number of economists have argued that our increasing R&D efforts are yielding decreasing returns.
“We have smartphones and supercomputers, big data and nanotechnologies, gene therapy and stem-cell transplants,” wrote The Economist in a January, 2012 article. Governments, universities and firms together spend around $1.4 trillion a year on R&D, more than ever before.” But, perhaps these don’t quite compare with modern sanitation, electricity, cars, planes, the telephone, and antibiotics. These innovations, first developed in the late 19th and early 20th century, have long been transforming the lives of billions.
In a September, 2012 paper, Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon questioned the generally accepted assumption that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. He wrote that the slow growth we’ve been experiencing in the US and other advanced economies may not be cyclical, but rather evidence that long-term economic growth may be hitting a wall of diminishing returns. There was little growth before 1800, and there might conceivable be little growth in the future.
But we must also keep in mind that it takes considerable time, - often many decades, - to translate the benefits of technological innovations into increased productivity and economic growth. The Industrial Revolution started around the 1760s, but the rapid growth, productivity benefits, and rising per-capita incomes that it led to happened over a century later, - between roughly 1870 and 1970. Perhaps that will be the case with the internet, AI, genomics, and other major innovations being deployed in the 21st century.
Do we need a new discipline of Progress Studies?
In a July, 2019 article in The Atlantic, Collison and George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen argued that “Humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better,” and that to do so We Need a New Science of Progress.
“Progress itself is understudied,” they said. “By progress, we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of Progress Studies.”
Across history, transformative discoveries emerged in relatively small geographic pockets of innovation, such as Greece in ancient history, parts of China and the Muslim world in the middle ages, Florence during the Renaissance, Northern England in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and Silicon Valley in the second half of the 20th century.
Why did innovation flourish in these places? What do they have in common? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than in Japan or Boston? These are the kinds of questions that progress studies would investigate. While current research across various disciplines touches on these topics, it does so in a highly fragmented fashion that doesn’t directly address some of the most important and practical questions.
“Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.”
Toward the end of the podcast, Klein observed that while people have been generally excited about the innovative products and services they now have access to, many don’t feel that life has gotten better at a macro level. “It’s not like you can look around and say, well, I got this computer in my pocket, and everything else is going great, too. It’s like, I got this computer in my pocket, and what it keeps telling me is that everything is going to hell.”
Collison said that he agreed “on the central importance of making sure that improvements in the standard of living are actually broadly realized across the society. That, too, I think, could serve as a manifesto for some of these Progress Studies ideas.”
“And my contention would be that, both from a moral standpoint, but maybe more importantly from kind of a political-economy standpoint, what will matter is whether, on an absolute basis, people feel like they are realizing opportunities, their lives are improving, that things are getting better, that their kids will be in a better situation.”
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