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Progress studies

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Progress studies is an intellectual movement focused on "figuring out why progress happens and how to make it happen faster." The term "progress studies" was coined in a 2019 article for The Atlantic, entitled "We Need a New Science of Progress" by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison.[1][2]

Apollo 11 Saturn V lifting off on July 16, 1969. Economist Tyler Cowen believes that the period of American growth prior to the 70s (including government prioritization of space exploration) was due to exploiting "low-hanging fruit" in terms of technology and labor.

The movement examines progress in standards of living through the lens of science, technology, economics, history, philosophy and culture. It includes work on the definition and measurement of progress, as well as policies and programs aimed at improving the rate of technological innovation.[3]

Ideas within the new research program

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Progress studies blogger Jason Crawford has said, "Progress is anything that helps human beings live better lives: longer, happier, healthier, in mind, body, and spirit."[4] According to Our World in Data, "More than 9 out of 10 people do not think that the world is getting better."[5] This is despite the considerable progress made along metrics such as poverty and health over the past century.[6][7] Progress studies advocates optimism for the future,[8] in contrast with movements such as Extinction Rebellion.

Following publication of the key article, Cowen and Collison were hosted by Mark Zuckerberg for a podcast.[9] Around the same time, Jason Crawford committed full-time to his popular blog "The Roots of Progress", calling for "a clearer understanding of the nature of progress, its causes, its value and importance, how we can manage its costs and risks, and ultimately how we can accelerate progress while ensuring that it is beneficial to humanity."[10] Elsewhere, the online magazine Works in Progress was established by Sam Bowman, Saloni Dattani, Ben Southwood and Nick Whitaker in 2020, "dedicated to sharing new and underrated ideas to improve the world".[11] The publication was later purchased by Stripe Press in 2022.[12] Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney founded the 'Institute for Progress' think tank in 2021, a "non-partisan research and advocacy organization dedicated to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity's future."[13]

The emerging field has influenced broader political discourse, notably in the United States of America. In response to Cowen and Collison's article New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote, "The questions animating progress studies aren't mere academic exercises; they are central to understanding how we can bring about a better future for all."[14] In a subsequent article about supply-side progressivism, Klein wrote that progressive politics "requires a movement that takes innovation as seriously as it takes affordability."[15]

Growth

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The progress studies movement often emphasizes that the two sides of progress, technology and moral, scientific and cultural, economic and political, are interdependent. In "Stubborn Attachments", Tyler Cowen wrote:

[...] growth alleviates misery, improves happiness and opportunity, and lengthens lives. Wealthier societies have better living standards, better medicines, and offer greater personal autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun.[16]

Cowen acknowledges that GDP is imperfect and proposes the idea of Wealth Plus, which takes into account leisure, household production, and environmental amenities.[17]

The great stagnation

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Advocates of progress studies argue that these trends must not be taken for granted. In the last hundred-and-fifty to two-hundred years, unprecedented improvements have taken place in life expectancy, literacy, child mortality, and poverty.[18] But the exceptional period of economic growth from 1870-1970 was an outlier in human history. As Paul Krugman said in 1996, "By any reasonable standard, the change in how America lived between 1918 and 1957 was immensely greater than the change between 1957 and the present."[19]

A key theory informing the development of progress studies is the stagnation thesis. Stagnationists like economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have warned that rapid recent advances in software, the 'world of bits', have obscured a slowdown in scientific discovery and technological innovation outside of digital life, the 'world of atoms'. Pinker, Cowen and Thiel warn that both a cohesive philosophy and deliberate effort is necessary to address the decline and build a more abundant future.

A strong philosophical influence on the progress community is the stagnation hypothesis. Tyler Cowen argued that, while America remained rich and prosperous, this wealth masked a slowdown in the rate of innovation in science and technology since World War 2, eroding overall American welfare.

Inequality

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This matters to progress studies because too much emphasis on the negative side effects of change can jeopardize future progress. Historically, it is "striking how unevenly distributed progress has been".[20] This shows that progress does not happen automatically, nor does it advance linearly. Rather, progress is the result of intentional effort by motivated people and organizations who see "progress as a moral imperative" (22). To develop a new philosophy of progress, the progress community asks foundational questions. These include: what is progress? Why does progress take so long, and how can it happen faster? What kinds of individuals and organizations have, and can, deliver progress?

"When I look back at the last decade, I think the following: There are some very wealthy people, but a lot of their incomes are from financial innovations that do not translate to gains for the average American citizen."[21]

In his more recent book Stubborn Attachments, Cowen has refined these claims. He emphasizes the moral imperative of economic growth, which raises standards of living and welfare. Broad-based innovation that is accessible to regular individuals is crucial to have broad-based economic growth.[22]

Health and longevity

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A relatively large healthy adult population is necessary to maintain economic growth.[23] Recent advances in this area include a malaria vaccine, shown in a pilot run in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi to have the potential to reduce 13% of childhood deaths.[24] Vaccines that largely help people in developing countries are difficult to fund, and Saloni Dattani, Rachel Glennerster, and Siddhartha Haria write that using financial structures such as the advance market commitment could have sped up the development of this vaccine, which can potentially save 600,000 lives a year.[25]

Two-thirds of human deaths are due to aging-related causes.[26] Some scientists posit that human aging may be related to loss of epigenetic information, and potentially slowed.[27] Human lifespan in developed countries has increased without as much of an increase in healthspan, and by one estimate, allowing older adults to remain healthy and part of the workforce could save as much as half the American federal budget.[28][27] Longevity research includes increasing individual healthspan, as well as addressing causes of death and life quality deterioration such as pandemics and dementia.[29]

Ecomodernism

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Progress studies also advocate for ecomodernism, which argues that "humans can protect nature and improve human wellbeing by decoupling human development from environmental impacts."[30] The ecomodernist manifesto states that:

Human civilization can flourish for centuries and millennia on energy delivered from a closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle, or from hydrogen-deuterium fusion. With proper management, humans are at no risk of lacking sufficient agricultural land for food.[31]

Alongside this, ecomodernism sees many risks to the environment, such as climate change, ocean acidification, and ozone depletion. By decoupling human progress from environmental impact, environmental damage can be improved. One example lies in the use of cities. The manifesto states, "cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impacts." Improving human lives and mitigating environmental damage are both technical challenges and both rely on increased amounts of energy production and that the energy produced is clean and renewable. "In the long run, next-generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion represent the most plausible pathways toward the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature."[32]

On the other hand, critics note that human progress often comes with costs, such as environmental damage.[33]

Applications

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Metascience

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Improving processes and outcomes of scientific research is one area of focus within progress studies. While the number of research dollars,[34] scientists,[35] papers,[36][37] and patents[38] have been increasing over the years, the degree of innovation has been decreasing by some measures of patent quality[38] and recent Nobel prizes.[34][39] Factors such as a decline in the availability of open-access scientific publications and peer review turnaround for papers,[40] may be contributing to the decline. Other researchers report that peer review scoring is not an accurate way of predicting which grants will be the most productive.[41]

Science writer and researcher (and Works in Progress cofounder) Saloni Dattani advocates for governments and international organizations to foster more widespread collection of public health data across different countries,[42] the testing of more interventions in parallel during randomized controlled trials,[42] recruiting industry experts to contribute to scientific endeavors,[42] reforming the peer review process,[43] and greater data transparency from scientists[40] Economists Heidi Williams and Paul Niehaus have argued that scientific practise could be improved with institutional support to amplify top-performers' work, and with incubation grants allowing institutions to "partner with academic researchers in trying to integrate research into operationalizing and scaling effective interventions."[44]

In response to the replication crisis, Spencer Greenberg and his team at Clearer Thinking have been replicating psychology studies published in prestigious journals since 2022.[45]

Energy and the environment

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Proponents of progress studies tend to be supportive of building energy infrastructure,[46] particularly for renewables like nuclear, wind, and solar, believing that energy abundance encourages economic growth and human progress.[47] This is in contrast to the idea of degrowth,[48][49] where people decrease consumption to protect the environment.

Stagnation has been partly attributed to lack of energy by J. Storrs Hall, who notes that energy consumption flatlined in the early 1970s, before the OPEC crisis.[50] Matt Yglesias wrote in 2021 that this "energy diet" was holding back innovation and that "we want to generate vastly more energy than we are currently using and make it zero carbon."[46] Economist Ryan Avent explains: "The difference between the sci-fi futures people imagined a half-century ago and the present as we live it — similar to the past, but we all have pocket computers — is an energy gap."[51]

Housing

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Proponents of progress studies tend to be aligned with YIMBY policies, believing that a shortage of housing in major cities limits economic growth.[52] In Britain, former hedge fund manager and British YIMBY leader John Myers, along with policy analysts Ben Southwood and Sam Bowman, have suggested a "Housing Theory of Everything", which states that a wide range of problems – "slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility" – could be improved by fixing the housing shortage.[53][54] Ezra Klein has also written about YIMBY as a part of supply-side progressivism.[55]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Collison, Patrick; Cowen, Tyler (July 30, 2019). "We Need a New Science of Progress", The Atlantic
  2. ^ Piper, Kelsey (2022-02-11). "To make progress, we need to study it". Vox. Retrieved 2024-01-01.
  3. ^ Cowen, Tyler; Collison, Patrick. "We Need a New Science of Progress". The Atlantic. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  4. ^ Kelsey, Piper (25 September 2021). "How Does Progress Happen". Vox.com. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  5. ^ Roser, Max (13 November 2023). "The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it". Our World in Data.
  6. ^ Bakewell, Sarah (2018-03-02). "Steven Pinker Continues to See the Glass Half Full". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-01-19.
  7. ^ Chotiner, Isaac (2018-02-20). "Is the World Actually Getting ... Better?". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 2024-01-19.
  8. ^ Crawford, Jason (20 September 2022). "WE NEED A NEW PHILOSOPHY OF PROGRESS". Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  9. ^ Zuckerberg, Mark (25 November 2019). "A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen". Facebook.
  10. ^ Crawford, Jason (23 August 2021). "The Roots of Progress is now a nonprofit organization". The Roots of Progress. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  11. ^ "Works In Progress, 'About'".
  12. ^ Progress, Works in (2022-09-05). "Works in Progress is now part of Stripe". Retrieved 2024-01-08.
  13. ^ "Caleb Watney and Alec Stapp, co-CEOs of the Institute for Progress, named Future Perfect 50 finalists - Vox". 29 November 2023. Retrieved 2024-01-08.
  14. ^ Klein, Ezra (27 September 2022). "We Know Shockingly Little About What Makes Humanity Prosper". The New York Times. New York Times. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  15. ^ Klein, Ezra (19 September 2021). "The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting". The New York Times. New York Times. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  16. ^ Cowen, Tyler (2018). Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals. Stripe Press. p. 33.
  17. ^ Cowen, Tyler (2018). Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals. Stripe Press. p. 30.
  18. ^ Lovely, Garrison. "Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?". BBC.com. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  19. ^ Krugman, Paul. "Wonders of technology not so wondrous". Retrieved 4 June 2023.
  20. ^ Cowen, Tyler; Collison, Patrick. "We Need a New Science of Progress". The Atlantic. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  21. ^ Cowen, Tyler (2011). The Great Stagnation How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. Dutton.
  22. ^ Cowen, Tyler (2018). Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals. Stripe Press.
  23. ^ Romanni, Raiany (March 29, 2023). "Want to live to 150? The world needs more humans. - The Boston Globe". BostonGlobe.com. Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  24. ^ Wallace-Wells, David (2024-01-03). "Opinion | Millions Die of Malaria With Miracle Drugs at Hand". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  25. ^ "Why we didn't get a malaria vaccine sooner - Works in Progress". Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  26. ^ Dattani, Saloni; Spooner, Fiona; Ritchie, Hannah; Roser, Max (2023-12-28). "Causes of Death". Our World in Data. Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  27. ^ a b Romanni, Raiany (March 29, 2023). "Want to live to 150? The world needs more humans. - The Boston Globe". BostonGlobe.com. Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  28. ^ Gleckman, Howard. "The Federal Government Will Spend Half Its Budget On Older Adults In Ten Years". Forbes. Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  29. ^ "Should we engineer ourselves out of aging?". ABC Religion & Ethics. 2021-08-02. Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  30. ^ Breakthrough Institute. "Ecomodernism".
  31. ^ "An Ecomodernist Manifesto - English". Breakthrough Institute. Retrieved 21 June 2023.
  32. ^ "An Ecomodernist Manifesto - English". Breakthrough Institute. Retrieved 21 June 2023.
  33. ^ Dea, Shannon; McCormick, Ted (11 August 2019). "Can 'progress studies' contribute to knowledge? History suggests caution". The Conversation. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  34. ^ a b Collison, Patrick; Nielsen, Michael (2018-11-16). "Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2024-01-08.
  35. ^ Baumberg, Jeremy J. (2018-05-15). The Secret Life of Science. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-8930-3.
  36. ^ Bornmann, Lutz; Mutz, Rüdiger (2015). "Growth rates of modern science: A bibliometric analysis based on the number of publications and cited references". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 66 (11): 2215–2222. arXiv:1402.4578. doi:10.1002/asi.23329. ISSN 2330-1643. Retrieved 2024-01-26.
  37. ^ "Global scientific output doubles every nine years : News blog". Retrieved 2024-01-26.
  38. ^ a b Kelly, Bryan; Papanikolaou, Dimitris; Seru, Amit; Taddy, Matt (2021-09-01). "Measuring Technological Innovation over the Long Run". American Economic Review: Insights. 3 (3): 303–320. doi:10.1257/aeri.20190499. Retrieved 2024-01-26.
  39. ^ Cowen, Tyler; Southwood, Ben (2019-08-05), Is the Rate of Scientific Progress Slowing Down?, Rochester, NY, doi:10.2139/ssrn.3822691, SSRN 3822691, retrieved 2024-01-26{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  40. ^ a b Dixon-Luinenburg, Miranda (2022-10-20). "Scientific progress is at risk of slowing down. Saloni Dattani is making sure it doesn't". Vox. Retrieved 2024-01-26.
  41. ^ Fang, Ferric; Bowen, Anthony; Casadevall, Arturo (Feb 16, 2016). "Research: NIH peer review percentile scores are poorly predictive of grant productivity". eLife. 5. doi:10.7554/eLife.13323. PMC 4769156. PMID 26880623.
  42. ^ a b c Dattani, Saloni. "The Pandemic Uncovered Ways to Speed Up Science". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2024-01-26.
  43. ^ Dattani, Saloni. "Real peer review has never been tried". Works in Progress. Retrieved 11 July 2023.
  44. ^ Williams, Heidi; Niehaus, Paul. "Developing the science of science". Works in Progress. Retrieved 11 July 2023.
  45. ^ Samuel, Sigal (2022-12-06). "Lots of bad science still gets published. Here's how we can change that". Vox. Retrieved 2024-01-26.
  46. ^ a b Yglesias, Matthew (October 7, 2021). "The case for more energy". Slow Boring. Archived from the original on 2022-04-21. Retrieved 2022-06-03.
  47. ^ "The Case for Energy Abundance (SSIR)". Retrieved 2024-01-24.
  48. ^ Doshi, Tilak. "Is "Degrowth" The New Green Growth?". Forbes. Retrieved 2024-01-08.
  49. ^ Stevens, Jessi Jezewska (2024-01-12). "The Relentless Growth of Degrowth Economics". Foreign Policy. Retrieved 2024-01-08.
  50. ^ Storrs Hall, J. (2017). "Where's My Flying Car". Physics Today. 70 (6): 80. Bibcode:2017PhT....70f...8D. doi:10.1063/PT.3.3568.
  51. ^ Avent, Ryan (8 July 2021). "Was coal the low-hanging fruit?". The Bellows. Retrieved 4 June 2023.
  52. ^ Piper, Kelsey (2022-02-11). "To make progress, we need to study it". Vox. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  53. ^ Myers, John; Bowman, Sam; Southwood, Ben. "The HousingTheory of Everying". Works in Progress. Retrieved 30 May 2023.
  54. ^ "The housing shortage affects everything - The Atlantic". The Atlantic. 18 February 2023. Retrieved 2024-01-22.
  55. ^ Klein, Ezra (11 February 2021). "California is Making Liberals Squirm". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 July 2023.
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