Speaking

When I was little, I loved a series of books called The Magic Treehouse. In every story, the protagonists, Jack and Annie, were whisked away to a faraway land — usually somewhere in the past. Their adventures were thrilling, and I became fascinated by history.

Now I’ve learned much more about the past. It turns out that books like Thanksgiving on Thursday, Mummies in the Morning, and Tonight on the Titanic leave out key details about what everyday life used to be like. So if anyone knows the author Mary Pope Osborne, please pass along my ideas for more representative stories: Teatime with Typhoid Fever; Evenings without Electricity (or Running Water, or Central Heating); Strenuous, 14-Hour Days of Manual Labor at Sunrise.

Despite what The Magic Treehouse might have you believe, the past was a miserable time for most people by our current standards. Life expectancy was a fraction of what it is today, the average diet was bland and unvaried, workdays were long and grueling, knowledge about health and hygiene was sparse.

Around the mid-1800s, things began to change. Fast. In his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert Gordon describes the period from 1870-1970 as “The Special Century.” This era saw revolutions in virtually every facet of life across industrialized nations: transportation, communication, food, clothes, shopping, homes, work, health.

This growth was unprecedented in all of human history. Since pre-20th century life was such a primitive and uncomfortable baseline, these improvements amounted to an almost incomprehensible increase in the standard of living. And since our understanding of many subjects was so basic, it was possible for a torrent of revolutionary discoveries to be unleashed. These were low-hanging fruits of progress, and they were plucked with great speed and in great quantities.

This era of rapid, transformative growth sets the scene for the first of two ideas I’d like to share with you today. It’s a concept known as the Stagnation Hypothesis, and it explains how and why progress has slowed since the Special Century. The second big idea is what we ought to do about this stagnation. Studying the salient questions prompted by this slowdown and figuring out how we can jumpstart our stalling growth are the goals of a new field of study called progress studies.

In 2013, entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel famously commented on the disappointing state of recent technological progress. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Of course, there has been some progress since 1970 — it just hasn’t been as broad or as life-changing as the previous decades. The Special Century upended every aspect of how we lived, while more recent growth has been narrowly concentrated in entertainment, communication, and information — industries powered by the invention of the Internet.

Growth in other areas has slowed from an all-out sprint to more of a casual stroll. Modern improvements in healthcare, for example, should not be diminished, but they are far from the nearly 30 years of life expectancy that were added during the Special Century. Let’s face it, a time traveler from the mid-1900s would be disappointed by 2022. They’d enter a present-day home and find it looks quite familiar; they’d get a job and learn that the 40-hour workweek, which was a standard in 1940, remains the norm; they’d watch the news and realize it’s been 50 years since we last set foot on the moon.

This lackluster progress can’t be explained by a lack of effort. Researchers and innovators are just as hardworking and creative as they used to be — in fact, we’re investing more resources than ever into their work. We can see here that the amount of scientific funding and the number of PhDs and publications are all growing exponentially.

Unfortunately, however, the output from this investment is not growing at the same rate; when asked to rank the importance of discoveries in their fields over time, top scientists produced fairly flat results.

Productivity trends across health care, electronics, and agriculture show a similar pattern.

The fact is, it’s getting more difficult to innovate.

We’re using more inputs to achieve constant — sometimes even less — progress. An economist would say we’re seeing diminishing marginal returns. In everyday language, we’re getting less bang for our buck.

There are a few explanations for why this is. Our culture and our political and economic systems may not be as conducive to growth as they used to be. But equally important is the fact that in every field of study, the frontier of knowledge is as far out as it’s ever been. Yet humans are born with an utter lack of knowledge, a mind that’s a tabula rasa, and this means that aspiring innovators who want to push the boundaries of today’s knowledge stock must spend increasing amounts of time and effort just getting to the frontier.

Legendary physicist Paul Dirac called the 1920s a time when “even second-rate physicists could make first-rate discoveries.” The field was positively bursting with insights to be made. Now it might be the case that even first-rate physicists struggle to make second-rate discoveries since it takes decades to learn the foundational topics that bring them to the knowledge frontier. With all the low-hanging fruit picked, we have to expend more resources climbing to higher branches just to reap the same bushel of progress.

The economist Benjamin Jones laid out this argument more formally — and with fewer fruit analogies — in a 2009 research paper titled “The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man.’” Jones analyzed data to show that society is trying to cope with the expanding knowledge frontier using three main strategies: we’re spending more time in school, we’re becoming more specialized, and we’re relying more on collaboration. Unfortunately, each of these has limitations.

Education is crucial, but more time spent in schools means less time spent applying what we learn. More education is also not a sustainable solution — what happens when it takes a lifetime to reach the knowledge frontier for a particular topic? Isaac Newton famously said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” But what if the giants’ shoulders become too high for future generations to climb?

Increased specialization isn’t ideal either. Being deeply specialized makes it nearly impossible to switch careers or fields of study, and it limits convergent thinking since specialists cannot readily draw on ideas from multiple domains.

And while more collaboration sounds positive, it’s also indicative of the growing limits of what a single, motivated creator can accomplish. What’s more, collaboration is often the result of a fortuitous chance encounter between individuals with complementary skills. Do we really want to rely on fortune to determine our ability to make meaningful progress? I love stories of serendipitous breakthroughs as much as anyone else — Alexander Fleming’s famous accidental discovery of penicillin, for example — but I’d certainly prefer to live in a world in which luck plays less of a role in deciding whether we’re able to find cures to diseases or invent new breakthrough technologies.

So we find ourselves in the present, with progress becoming increasingly difficult and our instinctive responses proving insufficient. Needless to say, this is problematic. We’re facing significant, even existential, challenges as a species, from climate change to poverty to disease. Life expectancies in many nations have seen unprecedented drops, some even before the pandemic. And many predict that millennials will be the first generation in recent memory that will grow up to be worse off than their parents.

This is a good point to pause and take a deep breath. I promise this marks the end of the gloomy facts and figures. See, I’m actually quite hopeful despite the challenges. The growing difficulty of reaching and extending the knowledge frontier presents an incredible opportunity for humanity. It has exposed the fact that we’ve invested frightfully little time, money, and focus towards the systematic study of human progress.

A new field called progress studies attempts to remedy this. Progress studies is a cross-cutting domain that employs lessons from history, economics, politics, and more niche areas such as organizational studies.

What distinguishes progress studies from these related fields is that it is prescriptive and not just descriptive. Economists and historians do an excellent job explaining how and why our world looks and works the way it does, but progress studies goes one step further and uses these insights to recommend tangible actions for maximizing development. It’s no wonder, then, that the difference between progress studies and the fields it draws upon has been compared to the distinction between medicine versus biology and anatomy. Prescription versus description. Our ability to create progress is experiencing a malaise, and we can’t cure it with more explanation. What we need is a treatment, an intervention, a dose of carefully prescribed reform to start being well again.

Progress studies is important because we can no longer afford to wait around for progress to arise naturally and spontaneously. There are numerous historical examples of fantastically productive societies — Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, and, more recently, Silicon Valley — but we tend to think of these as exogenous events. They just happen to happen. But what if we could make them happen? What if we could plan and strategize and engineer these types of societies? Progress studies offers the chance to do just that, by providing a framework for us to study and experiment with how our communities are educated, funded, supported, and organized.

Although it's in its early days, progress studies already has much to say about addressing the Great Stagnation. It suggests we can make improvements that fall into two broad categories: our culture, and our institutions and systems.

In terms of culture, our society needs to overhaul how we think about progress. First of all, we must recognize that it is possible to deliberately create progress. Great ideas don’t have to fall from the sky like the apocryphal apple that hit Newton on the head. Innovation isn’t some fickle lightbulb that randomly blinks on above a lucky genius’s head — it’s an outcome for which we can strategically optimize. If we regard progress as arbitrary or unachievable, we risk becoming a cynical society with a zero-sum mindset. If there’s no progress to be made, then my gain must be your loss and vice versa. But when we understand that we have agency, that we can shape our future and not let it shape us, when we adopt the positive-sum mindset that centuries of invention have shown to be true since the Enlightenment, we become doers and builders and creators. And then my gain is your gain and everyone else’s gain. Societies that believe they can make progress and societies that don’t are both usually right.

We also must address the growing backlash against progress. There are those who contend it does more harm than good, pointing to negative repercussions like climate change or technology’s pernicious impacts on our privacy and mental health. These are significant, alarming drawbacks. But this is no reason to shun progress. Imagine if the first Neolithic humans rejected fire as too dangerous the first time they got burned! Where progress instigates problems, it also offers solutions. Carbon credits, advanced renewables, geoengineering, lab-grown meat — the innovative answers to climate change are exciting beyond belief, as long as we’re able to effectively implement them.

The dark sides of progress merely provide another reason to study it closely. Technologies such as general AI or advanced bioengineering have the potential to reshape our world, but whether they change it for better or for worse depends on our preparation for their arrival. Studying progress — both our past successes and mistakes — will help us anticipate unexpected consequences so that we don’t get burned again.

And then we have our institutions. Many crucial systems were good enough to support historical progress but are now insufficient. In a period of stasis, it’s worth asking ourselves: “if we could rebuild from the ground up, would we design our institutions to be exactly as they are now?” If the answer is no, then we ought to proactively make those improvements.

Let’s scrutinize our education system to determine if it’s properly promoting the modern outcomes we care about. Most universities are fundamentally unchanged since the early 1900s. Tyler Cowen, a professor and one of the pioneers of progress studies, has advocated for more experimentation in higher ed by, for example, considering alternatives to the current tenure system. We can also explore novel classroom structures, devise curricula that nurture creativity, and ensure all educators are compensated with both the salaries and prestige they deserve so that the best and brightest are drawn to teaching.

Let’s review current funding mechanisms to ensure capital flows towards the most promising endeavors. The private sector is notorious for underinvesting in risky, long-term projects, even those with high upside, which presents challenges for startups in areas like renewables and energy storage. Meanwhile, public funding for research is woefully understudied. Patrick Collison, another early proponent of progress studies, points out that traditional government funding schemes seem to be less successful than alternative grant systems since they don’t focus enough on research autonomy and risk-taking.

Let’s weigh the costs and benefits of current regulations and consider novel pieces of legislation to promote progress. Are we properly incentivizing R&D? Are all of our laws up-to-date, or is our regulatory state burdened with red tape that prevents us from seizing new opportunities or responding to emergencies such as COVID?

Changes to our institutions are often contentious, so let me be clear — I’m not advocating for any specific proposals. I’m advocating for exploration.

I’m advocating for humility, open-mindedness, and courage. Humility to acknowledge that our current institutions may be suboptimal, open-mindedness to consider alternatives, and courage to experiment with these alternatives to see if they might work better. Progress studies is not about promoting particular answers — it’s about fighting for these important questions to be asked in the first place and given the attention they deserve.

Improving our ability to generate progress and cope with expanding knowledge frontiers will benefit everyone, but it also requires everyone’s support. Policymakers, educators, business leaders, students, parents — everyone has a role to play in reshaping our society so that we can innovate on how we innovate. Deepening our understanding of progress studies will make us all more informed citizens and more conscientious champions of growth. And, at the very least, it will make us all more appreciative beneficiaries of the fruits of human progress we often take for granted.