Without defining what "Progress" and "Good" are, the whole concept that there is some sort of "Progress" is meaningless. If you can define those terms, you can maybe start to study such a topic - but the definition of such terms belongs to philosophy, not science. Technological advancement could certainly studied, but what we do or don't do with it can only be "Good" or "Progressing" to some idealistic goal if we have identified those.
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.
Well I can definitely tear down this definition. “Advancement” doesn’t mean anything. What does it mean to advance culturally or organizationally without already having morality defined?
Also raising standards of living? Is that all we’re after? Slaves in slave societies had rising standards of living, did that make slavery okay?
The scary thing about an article like this is the sheer ignorance and hubris behind it. No credible philosopher will tell you that we can objectify morality, it is a provable logical fallacy. That doesn’t seem to stop people form thinking they can do it. The folks in history who thought they could do it are some of the most reprehensible people in all of human history.
I don’t know if it’s that far off. Our current notions of progress haven't allowed us to avoid our current condition of extreme indebtedness and financial insecurity and I think we're at a point where we need to reexamine these notions. I don't think the author does enough to do that.
One unclear example doesn't negate his/her argument. Even one bad example doesn't do this. And neither does arguing in bad faith (if for some reason they are doing so). The argument still stands. You can't coherently make demands about 'progress' (whatever that could even mean) without having some rational and already worked out framework for what determines 'progress' in the first place.
And the commenter is right that failing this, such talk can be dangerous because by a sleight of hand you can substitute - without argument - what is supposedly rational with whatever you simply desire at that moment in time.
The example was very clear, and although it might not negate it, it certainly undermines it. If contrived examples don't have bearing on the validity of an argument, I don't know how we are supposed to move forward in a debate.
I agree with the spirit of the parent poster, but to claim the OP is arguing slavery is okay because of raising standards of living is just as dangerous to this discussion.
I definitely wasn’t making the argument that anyone was arguing for slavery, just that notional definitions of moral progress are much more complicated than simple economic metrics. There is so much more that goes into what is “right” and “wrong” than pure economic level, at a micro or macro level.
Now you might say I’m making a straw man of their argument, but then what are they even arguing then? I can’t figure it out. What does “advancement” mean? They alluded to social sciences having various measure of human happiness is and that a “Progress Studies” department could synthesize these metrics into... what exactly? Policy proposals? A religion? Metrics of human well being assume an underlying framework of morale agreement to begin with.
You simply cannot philosophically convert an objective metric into an “ought” without making a ton of morale assumptions. You cannot prove that your morality and values are better than anyone else’s because you will infinitely regress into definitions if what “good” means.
I agree with what you are saying, just that the way you originally went about saying it by including a contrived hyperbolic example regarding slavery was a poor way to frame your position, at least in my opinion, and made your argument less likely to be received in good faith.
If an argument is not novel (it's been presented before to many people and there is decent awareness of it), is well-understood, and is valid, then someone can use poor examples to explicate the argument and those examples do nothing to undermine the argument.
This commenter's argument was just such an argument.
If the position was one you didn't agree with, would you still be defending such a hyperbolic example?
Do we agree that how you present an argument is important in how the argument is received by others?
I don't follow why an argument with "decent awareness" (whatever that could even mean) or one that is non-novel has different standards to a novel argument or one that has less awareness.
I've no doubt that the presentation of an argument is important to its reception.
Again, the validity of the argument under discussion doesn't rest on the example that was used to explicate it. The examples are separate from the argument (this isn't always the case).
He’s not saying anyone is trying to argue that slavery is ok. He’s using it as hyperbole that without a specific definition, progress can’t be measured objectively.
I'm curious about the logical fallacy that you can objectify morality. I would like to do more reading on this subject, could you direct me towards the proof for this? I'm genuinely interested.
(I'm not joking, I swear! To objectify morality you have to encode it, eh? So you're sunk before you begin: there will be moral things that can't be encoded, and encode-able things that are not moral, or cannot be proven moral nor immoral. And then you have the problem of deciding whether "objectifing morality" is itself a moral goal, n'est-ce pas? )
Increasing the standard of living for people in your country by lowering the standard of living for people living in Africa doesn't much sound like "progress for everyone",does it?
Don't tell me that increased population doesn't decrease standard of living.
A very valid point. See Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms intro:
Prosperity, however, has not come to all societies. Material consumption in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, is now well below the pre-industrial norm. Countries such as Malawi or Tanzania would be better off in material terms had they never had contact with the industrialized world and
instead continued in their preindustrial state. Modern medicine, airplanes, gasoline, computers—the whole technological cornucopia of the past two hundred years—have succeeded there in producing among the lowest material living standards ever experienced. These African societies have remained trapped in the Malthusian era, where technological advances merely produce more people and living standards are driven down to subsistence. But modern
medicine has reduced the material minimum required for subsistence to a level far below that of the Stone Age. Just as the Industrial Revolution reduced income inequalities within societies, it has increased them between societies, in a process recently labeled the Great Divergence.1 The gap in incomes between countries is of the order of 50:1. There walk the earth now both the richest people who ever lived and the poorest.
I was making a similar hypothesis. Didn't know about the data though.
Here's my argument:
I agree that capitalism is such a system that allows for expansion of wealth by means of mass production.
But as America gets rich, there were suppressed workers in China who were doing the "hard work" for Americans.
As China gets rich, the Africans are doing it for them.
So calling the American capitalism as a foolproof system that elevates "everyone" out of poverty is just plain wrong because it helps produce more poor people in other poor countries. And then the market says, more the poor people supply, less the wages.
So they're always creating population booms somewhere to sell their products as well as get cheap labour.
But the Americans have given a positive association to population boom by telling a story called population booms = economic prosperity.
So there is going to be a population boom in Africa soon. With more than 2 bn people.
"Get ready for more cheap labour!" Says the US free markets.
But once everyone is used up and educated, what then?
It's ... complicated. And there's more to the dynamic than that.
One of Clark's observations is that modernity -- not just capitalism, but technology, logistics, healthcare, interventions, etc. -- not only create poverty but make it survivable. A reason that persistant conditions of abject misery are sustained for lifetimes and generations is that they don't simply kill those affected (by disease, starvation, accidents, warfare) in a few weeks or months.
His book is part of a series edited by Joel Mokyr on economic history and progress (much of what Cowan and Collison are calling for), well worth looking at titles. Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth is another title, and more generally in 3what I'd consider a larger literature including Polanyi's The Great Transformation and Joseph Needham's work exploring what's come to be known as "the Needham question" -- why China, which developed a phenomenal set of technology and scientific knowledge, catalogued exhaustively in Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, didn't then proceed to have an industrial revolution similar to that which eventually occurred in England.
I think you're also absolutely correct to call out the claims made for capitalism -- that it elevates everyone out of poverty (the poorest billions have actually lost financial wealth in recent years), that it's an engine of creativity (many inventors died broke or broken, many inventions came from uncompensated sources, including famously the one mention of either technology or steam power in Smith's Wealth of Nations -- a boy optimising steam engine function because he wanted to play with his friends), and numerous others.
The contrast between price behaviour of rents vs. wages is very well discussed, going back to Smith, who also discusses the dynamics of poverty in economic growth and decline.
But yes: the orthodox economic theology appears to have several significant gaps with reality. Including though not limited to the behaviour of poverty under market-capitalist-property systems.
Isn’t progress quite simply, evolution? We study it so we can apply it intentionally.
The philosophical part to me is Who is this progress meant to serve? Everyone alive today? The human species as a whole? Our environment? Some greater consciousness?
It depends on how progress is defined. Technically it implies movement towards some end-state wheather it is obtainable or not. Disease outbreaks are a progression technically but in this context it is limited to positive changes.
Evolution itself doesn't neccessarily fit - while it may progress it may also stagnate or get caught in cycles. While a result may eventually dominate it is important to remember evolution has no goals - it is literal survivorship bias manifest.
As for intent I believe the answer is an unsatisfying "it depends" as who it serves and who defines meaning changes and the question becomes originally or currently?
Musket arming of minimally trained recruits may have been meant to serve aristocracy to allow fielding large armies cheaper but if it ends in them being deposed clearly it didn't serve them in the end and the purpose must change or else be abandoned.
This perfectly captures the zeitgeist and my current thinking. Globally, we need a 10x basic research expenditure increase, with specific allocation to long-term (life) grants for breakthrough investigations. Establishment of geographic concentrations or hubs of interest (eg. WallStreet proximity to fintech knowledge, DC corridor for cybersecurity experience, Boston biotech, etc). As well as radical change in nurture and support for key talent. And re-calibration of end focus on improving everyday lives and alleviating hardship.
The one feather in our cap is the distribution of new discovery. As the original research mission behind the invention of the internet, it has surpassed expectation. The black hole image at the center of the Milky Way galaxy was captured, processed and released (via twitter) in under a news cycle.
Thats the VC fallacy of believing that filling the tank with money will make the car go faster. If anything , progress in recent decades is anticorrelated with increase in funding
I dunno, sounds like a lot of words to describe a rebranding of classical economics.
Before economics became all dynamic stochastic general equilibrium matters and strategic games of imperfect information, it was about 'how does the machine work.'
That's what I was thinking while reading: the author is just describing economics while ignoring the fact that
> The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account (FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit)
I agree that we don't need a new field, but it seems also that the idea of designing progress is a fool's errand.
I like to think of it as a matter of scale. At a very low scale, a human mind designing a process can be efficient (a specific part of an assembly line, a function, etc.) As you scale, you quickly reach a point where one mind is worse than many, even if those minds are communicating mostly through such apparently low-bandwidth measures as observing the flow of money.
The physicist David Deutsch wrote a superb book about the kinds of ideas that lead to progress and those that lead to regress. It's called The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (2011). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DXR5ZC
> When anthropologists look at scientists, they’re trying to understand the species. But when viewed through the lens of Progress Studies, the implicit question is how scientists (or funders or evaluators of scientists) should be acting.
I have had a few recent exchanges with anthropologists and it doesn't seem they are interested in moralistic claims apart from defending the current academic framework. For example they were highly skeptical of science when it doesn't support the "nurture" side on the nature vs nurture debate, discarding scientific evidence as invalid using weak arguments. It was surprising to me how prevalent and an orthodoxy this is, and it seems they have contracted the relativistic disease that is prevalent in the social sciences for decades. I suppose most agree that progress is not an implied good (Plenty of comments here express that view). Pity because anthropology is IMO the most interesting social science.
As for measuring progress in science, the problem is that the vast majority of scientists are content with the current system of small unambitious steps, low risks and easy content-free papers, so you won't easily find many supporters there.
We don't need a field of study, just a new definition of the word.
Right now progress is More Jobs and More GDP. A lot of people wind up getting left out in the cold because progress jobs and GDP growth don't require helping everyone who needs it.
Maybe progress should mean ensuring every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network.
> Maybe progress should mean ensuring every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network.
I don't think that's an attainable goal, or at the very least it's not a realistic short or long term goal. There are so many other things we have to fix before that goal makes sense.
These are contentious so please don't downvote for an idea...
To start, I think a severe underlying problem America is facing is just that there isn't much community here, compared to other first world countries. How long have our families been living in the same place? Not long for most of us. I think this is causing some turmoil in the trust department.
Also, we really need to work on our regulations. We have a bad habit of legislating from the heart, but end up producing side effects that hurt us. For instance, laws preventing giving food to the homeless. Over-regulating also drives cost up for business, causing them to raise prices.
Another is minimum wage. Americans have a hard time admitting that increasing minimum wage has negative side effects, especially on small business. We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them. And before you get angry at this one, what kind of smartphone are you using? There's a reason our jobs go over seas.
Jobs that would pay very low wage wouldn't be difficult jobs, but they also wouldn't care if the person is only half mentally there. Small pay, small work, you can be promoted and given raise. A factory for instance could even build a campground with facilities. How many homeless folks would love to have that opportunity? How many more potential employers does that produce?
We should also consider decreasing the federal budget and start paying off our debt, no? I would think that's a pretty important thing to keep in mind also.
These things are needed in order to achieve a more universal happiness.
>We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them... Jobs that would pay very low wage wouldn't be difficult jobs, but they also wouldn't care if the person is only half mentally there. Small pay, small work, you can be promoted and given raise. A factory for instance could even build a campground with facilities."
Congratulations, you've just reinvented fuedalism, complete with the keep. Not trying to be flippant, but this is a perfect example of how 'rational' geeks can trivially rationalise literally anything, by ignoring context and history. Protections like minimum wage, safe working conditions, minimum work age etc didn't arise de novo. They exist (all be it in a much more limited form in the US than elsewhere in the developed world), because of repeated public outrage at the abuses their lack engendered. Repealing them to 'create jobs' as though that were in itself a nebulous good is the same logic that has prisoners in chain gangs (universally from poor, and overwhelmingly black) recreating the era of slavery in Texas.
Repeated public outrage: cars are becoming less safe.
Economist: There is a tradeoff between safety and affordability, and making cars safer means less poor people can actually afford to buy them. In turn, this makes transportation even harder for them, which in turn means they will have fewer chances to improve their lives.
Repeated public outrage: lack of minimum wage will cause more exploitation.
Economist: Minimum wage destroys job opportunities for low skilled workers, who are already heavily marginalized in society. And once they are out of the job market, it becomes even harder for them to return to it.
> Minimum wage destroys job opportunities for low skilled workers, who are already heavily marginalized in society. And once they are out of the job market, it becomes even harder for them to return to it.
That's why you create unemployment benefit, preferably in a way that does not discourage going back to work.
This way, works with starvation wages don't exist, and low-skilled workers have a chance to prepare for their next job (and even to be a bit picky). In my view this improves the job market much better than a race to the bottom in working conditions and salaries.
> That's why you create unemployment benefit, preferably in a way that does not discourage going back to work.
Alternatively you could subsidise low wage employment via a wage subsidy like the earned income tax credit. That way you get more people in work as opposed to fewer and those people develop skills and professional networks which will allow the recipients to escape low wage work in time.
I was on unemployment with the state of Michigan last year, and it was a literal nightmare. A few hours into the work day, customer service became backlogged for the entire day with a message saying "we're full" and then hang up on you. Living on the west coast meant I had to get up at 4am to catch the early call. The online portal was an absolute mess in usability and functionality, and nearly every step I took required some "fact finding" requirement, often taking several weeks to resolve. Many times my benefits were delayed, someone's up to a month. It's easily the worse system I've ever used.
Raising minimum wage has negative side effects. You can't escape this truth.
>>preferably in a way that does not discourage going back to work.
Isn't this much easier said than done? Where will you cap the unemployment benefits so people are not discouraged? How do you come up with the number? How do you plan to verify the effect of your suggested cap?
The root problem of transportation is governments favoring roads over mass transits and bicycles, making cars a requirement for living in the country as opposed to optional, not safety regulations of motor vehicles.
Is the evidence actually solid for the minimum wage thing?
My half-informed impression was that it's not–demand for labor is often surprisingly inelastic. Maybe you can go from 100 to 95 people on an assembly line, but you can't have 0.95 of a person taking orders. Also, increasing someone's salary by $1/hr only costs a few thousand dollars per year (~2000 working hours/year + payroll taxes).
The problem with paying people extremely little for "easy" work is that they don't make enough money to live. Pay in Vietnam or wherever is much lower, but so is cost of living. I don't see the point of having people work forty hours weeks when they can't afford an apartment, food, and the other basic necessities of life.
I also don't think that paying off state debt right now is a good idea. Interest rates are pretty much zero or even negative. We should instead borrow as much as possible. For example we could invest trillions into getting rid of fossil fuels in the next twenty years. That would also create many jobs.
I am not American but to me it is clear that your idea here would increase the inbalance you already got there. Namely the inbalance between private corporations and the state. Many of the problems the US has are not rooted in state action, but in the actions of companies, their lobbyists and politicians that own said companies.
So you want to reduce the only leverage any honest regular hard working citizen has? To do what? Save money?
How about taxing companies properly for starters? You are the second-biggest market in the world after all.
And another thing: if your goals are to decrease unemployment, homelessness and incarceration it is a totally valid strategy to state those goals publicly. The european givernments I lived under always do this and it doesn’t really seem to have the devastating economic consequences typical US-citizen’ always tell me it must have.
It is amazing how ingrained that corporate think is in the US and how unable people are to see that there are other things inbetween full on anarcho-capitalism and soviet style single party oligarchy.
this. From an outside point of view, I think you could solve most of the problems of the USA if you just stopped allowing corporations to influence politicians so much.
I think the obsession with billionaires and the glorification of rich people should stop. The public discourse often feels like we just need to keep rich people happy so they can shower their generosity through “created ” jobs on the rest of the population.
We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them
This statement reveals a lack of knowledge of the root causes of the homelessness epidemic. Those who are homeless for purely economic reasons are a tiny minority. More often than not homelessness is a second order effect of mental health issues compounded by breakdown in family/community. Those need to be addressed first.
Go do some volunteering and you will very quickly start to understand.
I think it is a very achievable goal in the USA, if the USA took the money to achieve those goals directly from the military budget, it would still have the largest military budget in the world. And on health, it would actually save money.
But also, I think this was not meant to be US specific. The real political challenge is trying to do it for everyone. Doing it for the US is easy.
That's a thoughtful answer, thanks. I don't agree with all of your points, but I do think of progress as something which benefits everyone, including vulnerable people too.
It's a shame the larger corporate machine wouldn't wear it, but you could, say, have a lower (or subsidised?) minimum wage for the first 2 years of business operation?
Your answer makes me assume you are well-fed, educated, and housed (you are of course well connected, since you commented on here).
From an individualist perspective, anyone without those things, but who is connected at least a little will probably want them, I would wager. Is your argument based on a belief that there are not enough natural resources to accommodate every human in theory? What do you think needs to be fixed before a higher standard of life for all humans should be considered a goal to progressively strive for?
> Is your argument based on a belief that there are not enough natural resources to accommodate every human in theory?
Not at all what I meant. I think we can accommodate a lot more people.
> What do you think needs to be fixed before a higher standard of life for all humans should be considered a goal to progressively strive for?
I'm saying that the goals needed to achieve that kind of Utopia don't look like the goals described. I think many people don't want to admit certain policy failures, but they continue on like an addiction, hamstringing genuine efforts. I'm not sure if it's attainable because so many contentious things will have to change before we can even start with the goals described (food/housing/etc.)
What kind of Utopia is it that doesn't include that every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network?
If you want that outcome to be achieved by a scientific process, you need to include those as long term goals. They may not be intermediate goals (e.g. you might need to temporarily reduce health and access to the global network for some part of the population to send them as volunteer settlers to a space colony), but if you're not measuring them and using their improvement as progress, you cannot guarantee that in the long term the scientific progress will achieve them.
Bucky Fuller calculated that we could achieve this by sometime in the 1970's, if we applied our tech and resources efficiently. ("Therein lies the rub!")
He said that we could work two hours a day, and retire after just a few years, having paid for our living expenses for the rest of one's life.
Lack of technology isn't the issue, it's human nature that's the problem.
For one thing, we measure ourselves not in absolute but relative terms. This leads us into a never-ending signalling arms race.
The old caricature of the rich tycoon putting his feet up on the desk could not be more false. Look at the most visibly successful people in society (Bezos, Musk, even Zuck) and they all work extremely hard. Why is that? They have more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime. What they can't buy is satisfaction. Therefore they must continue to work hard and continue winning.
When you look at these most extreme, but not at all alien examples of humanity, you see that Fuller's claim is absurd. Anyone who had the capability to earn enough to retire on working just a few hours a day for just a few years would never be satisfied with that.
The harsh truth of it is that the richer and more technologically capable we become, the more resources we consume without any real net benefit in wellbeing or life satisfaction.
> Lack of technology isn't the issue, it's human nature that's the problem.
That's exactly my point: We already have all the technology we need, our problems now are all psychological and spiritual.
Bucky thought that it would be enough to put the technology before the people in what he called "Design Science Revolution", but as you point out it hasn't worked so far... People don't even notice.
20-30% of the population in the developed world now produces all the food and housing for the rest of the population. With a 5% increase you could easily create an end to homelessness and malnutrition surely (particularly malnutrition since its most likely a misallocation of resources problem)
I have seen a lot of push back in various forums and whenever this link is tweeted but a lot of it seems to conflate "materials science" and "civil engineering" or "mechanical engineering." There is a very big difference between understanding historical trends--which is very important--and designing viable positive sum technology ecosystems. That being said, here are six technology historians I have found very insightful:
Donald Cardwell in "Turning Points in Western Technology"
Joel Mokyr in "Lever of Riches" and "Gifts of Athena"
Edward Hutchinson in "Cognition in the Wild"
James Utterback "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation"
David A. Mindell "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics"
Stephen B. Johnson "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs"
This stuff exists. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (broker), DARPA (demand), every company (demand) and every company's R&D division (supply). The problem is there's 7 billion people, and fully half of them are above average. The demand signalers are constantly hunting for supply, while the suppliers are constantly hunting for buyers. It takes radical amounts of cross-training to have any hope of comprehending the available possibilities.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through AntiFragile, and so scoffing at the whole idea that academic institutions or scholarly study produce or contribute to progress at all. What we need is not more academics, but the reinstatement of the apprenticeship system.
> Two characteristics of a city are systematically associated with the appearance of significant figures who grow up there: whether the city is a political or financial center, regardless of its population, and whether the city is the location of an elite university. The effect of these latter two variables is quite large. As the last column indicates, being a political or financial center increased the expected number of significant figures by 64 percent, holding everything else constant, while having an elite university increased that expected number by 184 percent.
Human Accomplishment: Charles Murray, page 369
More generally this critique ignores the second industrial revolution altogether. The U.K. shows progress outside universities is possible, as does the preceding industrious revolution, where water and wind power and the beginnings of steam happened with minimal involvement from universities but progress in chemistry and electricity generation and electrical engineering was absolutely a product of the technical university system. That’s why Germany was at the forefront of this era of rapid progress and the U.K. wasn’t despite its huge initial advantage in capital.
I guess that depends on your idea of progress. To be honest, reinstating the apprenticeship system sounds a little circular and also quite difficult to achieve, now that companies have got used to not bearing the cost of education in a lot of areas. You'd either have to regulate business massively, or shut down a lot of public education. I'd be more inclined to try something novel, like an international federated organisation dedicated to free education and open research, or something.
This is true. A PhD is very close to an apprenticeship model: study at the feet of an expert doing simple work, prove your competence (master's degree/prelims) to start working on your own account under supervision, finally submit masterwork (PhD thesis) to be counted as an expert yourself.
And yet that is the opposite of what has contributed to success. Countries can do without apprenticeships and have success. They cannot do without academia and do the same.
Even if there are useless members within the whole system can still be positive. The whole model of venture capitalism is technically very wasteful from all of the failures - but the outsized successes more than pay for the failures.
It is a common mistake in a pattern of thinking that "If I cannot understand how it works then it must be bad." By all means question and be skeptical but assuming that is an increasingly bad heuristic as specialization grows.
> Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong?
In which the authors conveniently ignore the existence of a number of disciplines, like the history of science and technology, addressing precisely the questions that they're asking.
Sorry. While partially meant as an in-joke for Robert Anton Wilson fans, I'm actually serious: the is no mention of religion or spirituality in the program outlined. To me it seems relevant (or at least interesting) both that this is a purely secular or materialist concept of progress; and that it's hardly "New".
Isn't this what philosophy in government and economics are? I took a Critical Theory course in college. We read Kant, Hagel, Marx, Marcuse and Adorno, and that's what their writing is all about— what all this we call "progress" is even progressing towards and what that means for the world, for individuals, etc.
I feel like the United States has just forsaken philosophy, especially as it relates to economics, in favour of their Chicago School theories of free markets. Now that the markets have been let to run free, and they're running towards nothing good in particular, perhaps it's time to just look back at all the literature written elsewhere on these matters.
Many free-market oriented people would disagree that we've let the free market run amok, as measured by the percentage of the economy that the government spends directly or controls through price controls.
I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction.
Glad to see someone actually comment and not just downvote haha.
> Many free-market oriented people would disagree that we've let the free market run amok, as measured by the percentage of the economy that the government spends directly or controls through price controls.
I agree with this actually. The federal government does move the pieces quite a bit and there's definitely people who think it could be even more free. Though to be fair, I'm thinking about this in relation to other countries like some in Europe, for example. In that context, I get the sense the US is more scared of regulation and in general prefers letting the market decide.
For example, plastic bags. The UK has introduced a charge on them, and is going to enforce a ban soon. In the US you see less action in this direction, and the general trend I see to fight the issue is "lets educate the population so they crate demand for alternative options".
IMO, what the UK is doing is progress— they've identified the moral obligation to take better care of the environment and through policy they're altering the market to work towards it. The US seems to prefer to "progress" according to market demand. If this idea is to be made policy, first it has to be demanded by the market. I could be wrong though ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
This is of course at a Federal level, because at a state and municipal level I do hear of more independent action taken in the US.
> I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction.
That's true. I'm not arguing for the adoption of societies modeled after the ideas of Marx, which are notoriously vague. I'm more just making the case that there's previous literature reflecting on what "progress" is, and arguing that perhaps it's not just increasing GDP without bounds.
It's literally only the tech community that thinks that "Progress itself is understudied". People who work in the humanities have been studying these topics since antiquity, and they have been desperately trying to get people in the STEM fields to listen, only to be ignored.
> there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress
The major difference between what they're saying and existing fields (history, sociology, STS, economics, urbanism) is that the authors are only talking about looking at successes, not failures. That is juvenile at best, catastrophic at worst. Studying progress without studying failure is incredibly ill-defined, because you have to start by defining progress, and you can't actually guarantee progress without studying failure and studying how to avoid failure. I'm sure we can all come together and agree on a single definition of progress, right? Seems so straightforward.
This article is embarrassingly dismissive of other fields.
The major difference between what they're saying and existing fields (history, sociology, STS, economics, urbanism) is that the authors are only talking about looking at successes, not failures. That is juvenile at best, catastrophic at worst. Studying progress without studying failure is incredibly ill-defined, because you have to start by defining progress, and you can't actually guarantee progress without studying failure and studying how to avoid failure.
You perfectly articulated what I wanted to write but couldn't find the right words. Reinventing the wheel is one thing, but reinventing it and adding corners to it is just embarrassing.
Progress is an illusion.
No such thing as progress.
According to the second law of thermodynamics things can only get worse we can only conserve what is good already before its inevitable decay.
Progress is snake oil, eternal yough, perpetual machines, ideal cities and so on : Utopias, scams, wishful thinking at best.
All this has the fear of death as a root cause.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is eventually right in the grander sense, I guess, but conditions for order to emerge from more chaotic circumstances are everywhere, even if order is temporary in the eternal sense. Stars form out of nebulae, heavy elements form out of dying stars, and heavy elements combine to make planets with metals and living things, living things engineer structures, machines, societies, etc.
Progress as we understand it seems to be baked into nature and the emergent systems we live in and are. You don't give up on life as soon as you are born because you will die one day right? Whether you're aware of it or not, your body naturally preserves the order it can, and you actually grow up before you die.
You're not allowed to say these things in tech circles or imply that a person from an older era might prefer it over ours (or god forbid that a modern person might prefer to live an older or less tech-ey lifestyle), or limits to growth...
>Of course you are allowed: you just did it here, and nobody prohibited it.
Yeah, it was a turn of phrase, didn't mean its literally banned.
You're not banned, you're just not welcome to say it, you will be treated as pariah for saying it, you will get downvoted to death, and if a discussion happens to grow around such a viewpoint, it will be in all probability marked "dead".
>What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance.
No, what I request is that people give thought to such propositions and argue with counter-arguments as opposed to facile dismissals and outrage...
Already the parent didn't make a big effort to argue, it was more like literature ("progress is an illusion"), paired with a very far-fetched conclusion from the second law of thermodynamics. On the latter, a proper counter argument was given.
You didn't argue at all yet, so it is not really a surprise that nobody gives counter-arguments.
Thankfully we are not restricted to the resources available on this spherical world as without energy from outside it we would all freeze to death in short order.
1. "progress is stealing from future generations" is not the same thing at all as "progress is limited by natural resources", even if you accept the second one is true. Our grandchildren are still better off if we make progress now, even if there is a limit at some point.
2. value in a knowledge-based economy like ours is not linked to natural resources. I can spend this afternoon on my computer either coding or playing games. The resource consumption is the same, but one generates economic value, the other doesn't. The basic assumption that all economic value arises from the consumption of natural resources is flat wrong.
