I feel like rigor is doubly important for Progress Studies because it's so directly geared towards influencing public policy. I fear a future where progress studies is just:
One very underrated invention is the automatic clothes washing machine. The amount of (wo)man-hours of labor it has saved is staggering, freeing homemakers and domestic servants from hours upon hours of tedious and strenuous work washing clothes by hand. It's no exaggeration to call it at least as important an advance for women's rights as the birth control pill and other forms of reliable contraception have been.
Very few of the inventors in the past have become extraordinarily wealthy. Jonas Salk is an example. Contrast that with modeRNA vaccines that created several billionaires during a global pandemic (much of the funding for modeRNA vaccines came from Federal government). Perhaps that is why few people see this as a example of collective success and take pride in it. Can the risk for private capital funded research to lead to winner-takes-all be denied? Can it be denied that patent law is used to stifle innovation rather than promote open competition?
Crawford: "the major discoveries and inventions that gave us our modern standard of living, "
...."Our" standard of living?....and yet many are still living in poverty; how do you intend to fix that; eg, have you heard of the Job Guarantee?
Crawford: "and about one-quarter philosophy, asking: is progress good?"
Navel gazing. Of course progress, as in good housing, food transport, basic utilities for all is obviously good and yet to be achieved. Xi seems to have it in mind with "common prosperity". Will the black ghetto in US cities still exist in a decade?
I am confident that the Progress Studies movement will not fall into one of those traps. I am, by the way, an active member. And there plenty of non-libertarians in the movement... including me.
There was so much human suffering alleviated by the last 200 years of technical/material progress that what's left is not that exciting, may be the main thing. People suffered constantly of hunger or fear of it, and seeing half or more of their children die before age five.
Material progress has brilliantly alleviated those. But for science, there will never be that great a suffering left to alleviate - unless we solve death, but that's altogether a more morally murky issue than just saving dying kids. The low hanging fruit was also the best tasting one.
In terms of alleviating suffering, priority is to provide these progress to the few regions and social strata left without them.
And we can go to mars or colonise the galaxy, there won't be as much alleviation of suffering than if we just solve the remaining poverty issue.
From that perspective, no surprise that we're less excited about science than people were hundred years ago - these guys expected their kids to die and saw them grow healthy, not hungry.
For the nuclear enthusiast: proliferation. At 2% of world energy demand, hysteria in the West at the prospect of Iran's nuclear power. Multiply that by 10 or 50 if you want nuclear to be of some use in the energy transition.
Also, the major accidents every 20 years - multiply that likewise. Yes, there won't be another Fukushima earthquake, or another collapse of the Soviet Union leading to Chernobyl. But history shows that stuff do come up. The risk modelers seem to be blind to it - as long as their paycheck depends on it, that is. But those whose paycheck depends on seeing it, see it - which is why no insurance company will ever insure a nuclear power plant - left for the taxpayer to foot.
There's too much Scarlet Letter thinking these days - if a portion of a thing, or of that thing's history, is perceived to be bad, then the whole is rotten along with it. It has tainted patriotism, which is suspect, or, at best, cheesy. It has tainted boosterism, which is considered misguided and naive if not downright propaganda. Pride itself is something to be wary of. The nation? An imperialist colonizer not worth defending. Your neighbor? An enemy, plain and simple. We are not "in this together", and if you say we are then you're probably working an angle, and I'm nobody's fool. And so it goes.
We are too quick to blame and too quick to embrace absolutes. We feel shame at our own success, and heap blame upon the success of others. If anything, we are moving away from a post scarcity utopia, and not towards it. And it's a shame.
As a kid I was spirited away to Washington DC, to cobble together mock governments, mock UNs, with other kids from across the nation. During one exercise we were divided into groups, each bestowed the resources of an extant nation without being told the names of those nations, and told to bargain, and trade. My particular group came in at the bottom of the "success" list. We were apparently the United States. Later, as representatives of Pakistan in another exercise, we negotiated trade, and peace, with Israel. During the final assembly another team lodged a complaint, saying an Islamic nation and a Jewish one could never realistically do such a thing, nevermind Egypt had long since signed a peace treaty, and there was a real world history of Israeli-Pakistani cooperation. Our youthful dreams apparently couldn't even keep up with reality, much less imagine something better.
So while I agree with the notion of prescriptive optimism, I have to wonder, is that like believing in CRISPR in a world that disbelieves in DNA? Or putting my faith in SpaceX in a world where Elon Musk is a flat earther?
Relatedly, but have you ever watched the shows about how Edwardian kitchens were a death trap, Victorian faucets a portal to veritable hell, how it's a wonder any child made it to adulthood given all the lead paint we force fed them? How on earth did we not all electrocute ourselves, after gassing ourselves, poisoning ourselves, boiling ourselves alive?
How many deaths will we tolerate at the programmed hands of self driving cars? How many losses on the way to Mars?
I almost think that as a prerequisite to utopia, we've got to stop fearing pride, have to stop expecting perfection. Have to measure ourselves against our dreams, and not our neighbors, or Europe, or China.
But how we achieve that without *becoming* a version of today's China, I do not know.
Great interview! As I was reading I would have a question in my head, and then you asked it next! Only you asked it in a much better way than my mental version :)
I hope he is successful in his endeavor, but at this point his portfolio sounds like a libertarian wet dream. Your question about the moral aspects was right on. Until community and spiritual aspects and challenges of the material progress he is seeking are addressed, true progress will be hard to come by.
I assume you read David Brooks' article yesterday.
I feel like rigor is doubly important for Progress Studies because it's so directly geared towards influencing public policy. I fear a future where progress studies is just:
A slew of libertarian-leaning adhoc hypotheses.
Or
Social psychology, but done by libertarians.
One very underrated invention is the automatic clothes washing machine. The amount of (wo)man-hours of labor it has saved is staggering, freeing homemakers and domestic servants from hours upon hours of tedious and strenuous work washing clothes by hand. It's no exaggeration to call it at least as important an advance for women's rights as the birth control pill and other forms of reliable contraception have been.
What kind of stalemate is this? https://ourworldindata.org/cancer-death-rates-are-falling-five-year-survival-rates-are-rising
Very few of the inventors in the past have become extraordinarily wealthy. Jonas Salk is an example. Contrast that with modeRNA vaccines that created several billionaires during a global pandemic (much of the funding for modeRNA vaccines came from Federal government). Perhaps that is why few people see this as a example of collective success and take pride in it. Can the risk for private capital funded research to lead to winner-takes-all be denied? Can it be denied that patent law is used to stifle innovation rather than promote open competition?
Crawford: "the major discoveries and inventions that gave us our modern standard of living, "
...."Our" standard of living?....and yet many are still living in poverty; how do you intend to fix that; eg, have you heard of the Job Guarantee?
Crawford: "and about one-quarter philosophy, asking: is progress good?"
Navel gazing. Of course progress, as in good housing, food transport, basic utilities for all is obviously good and yet to be achieved. Xi seems to have it in mind with "common prosperity". Will the black ghetto in US cities still exist in a decade?
I am confident that the Progress Studies movement will not fall into one of those traps. I am, by the way, an active member. And there plenty of non-libertarians in the movement... including me.
There was so much human suffering alleviated by the last 200 years of technical/material progress that what's left is not that exciting, may be the main thing. People suffered constantly of hunger or fear of it, and seeing half or more of their children die before age five.
Material progress has brilliantly alleviated those. But for science, there will never be that great a suffering left to alleviate - unless we solve death, but that's altogether a more morally murky issue than just saving dying kids. The low hanging fruit was also the best tasting one.
In terms of alleviating suffering, priority is to provide these progress to the few regions and social strata left without them.
And we can go to mars or colonise the galaxy, there won't be as much alleviation of suffering than if we just solve the remaining poverty issue.
From that perspective, no surprise that we're less excited about science than people were hundred years ago - these guys expected their kids to die and saw them grow healthy, not hungry.
For the nuclear enthusiast: proliferation. At 2% of world energy demand, hysteria in the West at the prospect of Iran's nuclear power. Multiply that by 10 or 50 if you want nuclear to be of some use in the energy transition.
Also, the major accidents every 20 years - multiply that likewise. Yes, there won't be another Fukushima earthquake, or another collapse of the Soviet Union leading to Chernobyl. But history shows that stuff do come up. The risk modelers seem to be blind to it - as long as their paycheck depends on it, that is. But those whose paycheck depends on seeing it, see it - which is why no insurance company will ever insure a nuclear power plant - left for the taxpayer to foot.
Solar and wind just seem more reasonable.
There's too much Scarlet Letter thinking these days - if a portion of a thing, or of that thing's history, is perceived to be bad, then the whole is rotten along with it. It has tainted patriotism, which is suspect, or, at best, cheesy. It has tainted boosterism, which is considered misguided and naive if not downright propaganda. Pride itself is something to be wary of. The nation? An imperialist colonizer not worth defending. Your neighbor? An enemy, plain and simple. We are not "in this together", and if you say we are then you're probably working an angle, and I'm nobody's fool. And so it goes.
We are too quick to blame and too quick to embrace absolutes. We feel shame at our own success, and heap blame upon the success of others. If anything, we are moving away from a post scarcity utopia, and not towards it. And it's a shame.
As a kid I was spirited away to Washington DC, to cobble together mock governments, mock UNs, with other kids from across the nation. During one exercise we were divided into groups, each bestowed the resources of an extant nation without being told the names of those nations, and told to bargain, and trade. My particular group came in at the bottom of the "success" list. We were apparently the United States. Later, as representatives of Pakistan in another exercise, we negotiated trade, and peace, with Israel. During the final assembly another team lodged a complaint, saying an Islamic nation and a Jewish one could never realistically do such a thing, nevermind Egypt had long since signed a peace treaty, and there was a real world history of Israeli-Pakistani cooperation. Our youthful dreams apparently couldn't even keep up with reality, much less imagine something better.
So while I agree with the notion of prescriptive optimism, I have to wonder, is that like believing in CRISPR in a world that disbelieves in DNA? Or putting my faith in SpaceX in a world where Elon Musk is a flat earther?
Relatedly, but have you ever watched the shows about how Edwardian kitchens were a death trap, Victorian faucets a portal to veritable hell, how it's a wonder any child made it to adulthood given all the lead paint we force fed them? How on earth did we not all electrocute ourselves, after gassing ourselves, poisoning ourselves, boiling ourselves alive?
How many deaths will we tolerate at the programmed hands of self driving cars? How many losses on the way to Mars?
I almost think that as a prerequisite to utopia, we've got to stop fearing pride, have to stop expecting perfection. Have to measure ourselves against our dreams, and not our neighbors, or Europe, or China.
But how we achieve that without *becoming* a version of today's China, I do not know.
Great interview! As I was reading I would have a question in my head, and then you asked it next! Only you asked it in a much better way than my mental version :)
I hope he is successful in his endeavor, but at this point his portfolio sounds like a libertarian wet dream. Your question about the moral aspects was right on. Until community and spiritual aspects and challenges of the material progress he is seeking are addressed, true progress will be hard to come by.
I assume you read David Brooks' article yesterday.