This is a compendium of readings on “
progress studies
,” or essays and books which generally make the case for technological innovation, dynamism, economic growth, and abundance. I will update this list as additional material of relevance is brought to my attention.
[Last update: 10/11/22]
Recent Essays
- Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a16z.com, October 16, 2023.
- Will Rinehart, “The Abundance Agenda,” The Exformation Newsletter, October 15, 2022.
- Sarah Constantin, “Unblocking Abundance: A Model for Activism,” Rough Diamonds, October 10, 2022.
- Derek Thompson, “The Forgotten Stage of Human Progress,” The Atlantic, May 11, 2022.
- Adam Thierer, “Where is ‘Progress Studies’ Going?” Progress Forum, April 23, 2022.
- Katherine Boyle, “The Case for American Seriousness,” Common Sense, April 18, 2022.
- William Rinehart, “Vetocracy, the Costs of Vetos and Inaction,” Center for Growth & Opportunity at Utah State University, March 24, 2022.
- James Pethokoukis, “Forget about Left Wing and Right Wing. How about an Up Wing America?” Faster Please, March 23, 2022.
- John W. Lettieri & Kenan Fikri, “The Case for Economic Dynamism and Why it Matters for the American Worker,” Economic Innovation Group, March 2022.
- Adam Kovacevich, “Saying YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) to “Civic Innovation,” Chamber of Progress, March 21, 2022.
- Eli Dourado, “Remove Barriers to Productivity,” City Journal, March 18, 2022.
- “A Case for Innovation and Optimism,” (A conversation with Jason Crawford), Discourse, March 2, 2022.
- Noah Smith, “A New Industrialist Roundup,” Noahpinion, February 3, 2022.
- James Pethokoukis, “When Will the Next Big Thing Arrive?” Faster Please, February 3, 2022.
- Alec Stapp & Caleb Watney, “
Progress is a Policy Choice
,” Institute for Progress, January 20, 2022.
- Adam Thierer, “
How to Get the Future We Were Promised
,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
- Katherine Boyle, “
Building American Dynamism
,” Future, January 14, 2022.
- Derek Thompson, “
A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems
,” The Atlantic, January 12, 2022.
- Jason Crawford, “Progress, Humanism, Agency: An Intellectual Core for the Progress Movement,” Roots of Progress, January 11, 2022.
- Adam Thierer, “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
- Matthew Yglesias, “The Case for More Energy,” October 7, 2021.
- Jason Crawford, “
We need a new philosophy of progress
,” The Roots of Progress, August 23, 2021.
- Gale Pooley & Marian L. Tupy, “The Simon Abundance Index 2021,” Human Progress, April 22, 2021.
- Noah Smith, “
Techno-optimism for the 2020s
,” December 3, 2020.
- Ezra Klein, “
Why We Can’t Build
,” Vox, April 22, 2020.
- Marc Andreesen, “
It’s Time to Build
,” Future, April 18, 2020.
- Eli Dourado, “
How do we move the needle on progress
?” September 26, 2019.
- José Luis Ricón, “
About the ‘Progress’ in Progress Studies
” September 6, 2019.
- Will Rinehart, “
Progress Studies: Some Initial Thoughts
,” August 30, 2019.
- Adam Thierer, “
Is There a Science of Progress
?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
- Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, “
We Need a New Science of Progress
,” The Atlantic, July 30, 2019.
- Tyler Cowen, “
The Case for the Longer Term
,” Cato Unbound, January 9, 2019.
- Vinod Khosla, “
We Need Large Innovations
,” Medium, January 1, 2018.
- Adam Thierer, “
How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity
,” Medium, November 19, 2018.
- Chelsea Follett, “Utopianism: One of the Biggest Obstacles to Progress,” Human Progress, August15, 2018.
- Eli Dourado, “
How Technological Innovation Can Massively Reduce the Cost of Living
,” PlainText, January 29, 2016.
Continue reading →
Over at the American Institute for Economic Research blog, I recently posted two new essays discussing increasing threats to innovation and discussing how to counter them. The first is on “The Radicalization of Modern Tech Criticism,” and the second discusses, “How To Defend a Culture of Innovation During the Technopanic.”
“Technology critics have always been with us, and they have sometimes helped temper society’s occasional irrational exuberance about certain innovations,” I note in the opening of the first essay. The problem is that the “technology critics sometimes go much too far and overlook the importance of finding new and better ways of satisfying both basic and complex human needs and wants.” I continue on to highlight the growing “technopanic” rhetoric we sometimes hear today, including various claims that “it’s OK to be a Luddite” and push for a “degrowth movement” that would slow the wheels of progress. That would be a disaster for humanity because, as I note in concluding that first essay:
Through ongoing trial-and-error tool building, we discover new and better ways of satisfying human needs and wants to better our lives and the lives of those around us. Human flourishing is dependent upon our collective willingness to embrace and defend the creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation that produces the wisdom and growth that propel us forward. By contrast, today’s neo-Luddite tech critics suggest that we should just be content with the tools of the past and slow down the pace of technological innovation to supposedly save us from any number of dystopian futures they predict. If they succeed, it will leave us in a true dystopia that will foreclose the entrepreneurialism and innovation opportunities that are paramount to raising the standard of living for billions of people across the world.
In the second essay, I make an attempt to sketch out a more robust vision and set of principles to counter the tech critics. Continue reading →
I wanted to draw your attention to yet another spectacular speech by Maureen K. Ohlhausen, a Commissioner with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). I have written here before about Commissioner Ohlhausen’s outstanding speeches, but this latest one might be her best yet.
On Tuesday, Ohlhausen was speaking at U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation day-long event on “The Internet of Everything: Data, Networks and Opportunities.” The conference featured various keynote speakers and panels discussing, “the many ways that data and Internet connectiviting is changing the face of business and society.” (It was my honor to also be invited to deliver an address to the crowd that day.)
As with many of her other recent addresses, Commissioner Ohlhausen stressed why it is so important that policymakers “approach new technologies and new business models with regulatory humility.” Building on the work of the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, who won a Nobel prize in part for his work explaining the limits of our knowledge to plan societies and economies, Ohlhausen argues that: Continue reading →
What follows is a response to Michael Sacasas, who recently posted an interesting short essay on his blog The Frailest Thing, entitled, “10 Points of Unsolicited Advice for Tech Writers.” As with everything Michael writes, it is very much worth reading and offers a great deal of useful advice about how to be a more thoughtful tech writer. Even though I occasionally find myself disagreeing with Michael’s perspectives, I always learn a great deal from his writing and appreciate the tone and approach he uses in all his work. Anyway, you’ll need to bounce over to his site and read his essay first before my response will make sense.
Michael:
Lots of good advice here. I think tech scholars and pundits of all dispositions would be wise to follow your recommendations. But let me offer some friendly pushback on points #2 & #10, because I spend much of my time thinking and writing about those very things.
In those two recommendations you say that those who write about technology “[should] not cite apparent historical parallels to contemporary concerns about technology as if they invalidated those concerns. That people before us experienced similar problems does not mean that they magically cease being problems today.” And you also warn “That people eventually acclimate to changes precipitated by the advent of a new technology does not prove that the changes were inconsequential or benign.”
I think these two recommendations are born of a certain frustration with the tenor of much modern technology writing; the sort of Pollyanna-ish writing that too casually dismisses legitimate concerns about the technological disruptions and usually ends with the insulting phrase, “just get over it.” Such writing and punditry is rarely helpful, and you and others have rightly pointed out the deficiencies in that approach.
That being said, I believe it would be highly unfortunate to dismiss any inquiry into the nature of individual and societal acclimation to technological change. Because adaptation obviously does happen! Certainly there must be much we can learn from it. In particular, what I hope to better understand is the process by which we humans have again and again figured out how to assimilate new technologies into their lives despite how much those technologies “unsettled” well-established personal, social, cultural, and legal norms. Continue reading →
Loyal readers know of my generally bullish, optimistic outlook regarding the Internet’s impact on society, economy, and even politics. On that last front, columnist Peggy Noonan has a nice piece in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Internet Helps Us Get Serious.” Serious about politics and political rhetoric, she means. Speaking about how politicians are addressing the current fiscal crisis in the U.S., Noonan argues:
One way to change minds about the current crisis is through information. We all know this, and we all know about the marvelous changes in technology that allow for the spreading of messages that are not necessarily popular with gatekeepers and establishments. But there’s something new happening in the realm of political communication that must be noted. Speeches are back. They have been rescued and restored as a political force by the Internet.
She then makes the point that I always stress when debating Net pessimists: You have to measure progress against the yardstick of the past and ask yourself if we really better off in a world of information scarcity. Noonan does that beautifully when she notes: Continue reading →
Over at the Brain Pickings blog, Maria Popova has posted an amazing 1972 documentary based on Alvin Toffler’s famous 1970 book, Future Shock. The documentary, like the book, focuses on many of the themes we hear Internet optimists and pessimists debating all the time today: “information overload,” excessive consumerism, artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology, cryonics, the nature of humanity and how technology impacts it, etc, etc. Again, all the same stuff people are still fighting about today.
Popova correctly notes that “The film, darkly dystopian and oozing techno-paranoia, is a valuable reminder that… societies have always feared new technology but ultimately adapted to it.” Indeed, at one point in the film we hear, “The future has burst upon us… [but] is technology always desirable?” And that’s just in reference to the (now-obsolete) supersonic jet transport, or Concorde! “Changes bombard our nervous systems, clamoring for decisions. New values, new technologies, flood into our lives… Escape from change in today’s society become more and more impossible. But change itself is out of control.” Geez.. how did we make it past 1972!
The documentary is narrated by Orson Welles, which makes it even more fun. Welles had a presence that just made everything seem larger than life, and his voice-of-God narration here really added a nice touch to this film.
It’s an absolutely great find. Here’s the first 10-minute segment from the documentary. Watch all five segments over at
Brain Pickings.
http://www.youtube.com/v/6Ghzomm15yE&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3
I really enjoyed this editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal by sci-fi novelist Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, among many other books. Card engages in some interesting soul searching about the impact of the Net and digital technology on our lives, economy, and culture. He concludes his essay by noting that:
We’re still the same human beings we always were. Consumers still act like consumers; people still search for love and friendship. But the Internet has freed us from the boundaries of distance and many of the risks of embarrassment in social interactions. This re-sorted geography has brought its own pitfalls and forced us to create new rules of etiquette.
But just as I have no desire to give up cars, trains and planes to return to the hay-eating, vet-needing, poop-generating, one-horsepower horse, I don’t want to go back to pre-Google research, pre-Amazon shopping, pre-blog newsmedia, or the loneliness of villages limited by geography.
Quite right. Card is expressing the sort of “pragmatic optimism” I’ve written about here before in my essays about the ongoing battle between Internet optimists and pessimists. I’ve tried to articulate a sort of middle ground position in this debate that embraces the amazing technological changes at work in today’s Information Age but does so with a healthy dose of humility and appreciation for the disruptive impact and pace of that change. As I’ve noted before, we need to think about how to mitigate the negative impacts associated with technological change without adopting the paranoid tone or Luddite-ish recommendations of the pessimists. Read Card’s entire essay to get a better feel for how we can begin to think in that way.
As I continue to do research for what will become a chapter-length version of my old essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society,” I am reading or re-reading some old books that have touched upon these debates through the years. Earlier this week, after an event over at ITIF, my friend Rob Atkinson reminded me that he had discussed some of these issues in his 2004 book, The Past and Future of America’s Economy. Specifically, in Chapter 6, “The New Economy and Its Discontents,” Rob showed how “American history is rife with resistance to change,” as he recounts some of the heated battles over previous industrial / technological revolutions. I really loved this bit on page 201:
This conflict between stability and progress, security and prosperity, dynamism and stasis, has led to the creation of a major political fault line in American politics. On one side are those who welcome the future and look at the New Economy as largely positive. On the other are those who resist change and see only the risks of new technologies and the New Economy. As a result, a political divide is emerging between preservationists who want to hold onto the past and modernizers who recognize that new times require new means.
I like those “Preservationists” vs. “Modernizers” descriptors, and I like the fact that Rob also uses the “dynamism and stasis” paradigm, which he borrowed from Virginia Postrel, who contrasted those conflicting worldviews in her 1998 book,
The Future and Its Enemies. As I noted in my essay about “Two Schools of Internet Pessimism,” I think that “dynamist vs. stasis” model — more than anything else I’ve read before or since — best explains the chasm that separates competing schools of thinking about the Internet’s impact on culture, economy, and society. Continue reading →
Information overload is a hot topic these days. I’ve really enjoyed recent essays by Aaron Saenz (“Are We Too Plugged In? Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds”), Michael Sacasas (“Technology Sabbaths and Other Strategies for the Digitized World“), and Peggy Noonan (“Information Overload is Nothing New“) discussing this concern in a thoughtful way. Thoughtful discussion about this issue is sometimes hard to find because, as I’ve noted here before, information overload is a subject that bitterly divides Internet optimists and pessimists. The pessimists tend to overplay the issue and discuss it in apocalyptic terms. The optimists, by contrast, often dismiss the concern out of hand. Certainly there must be some reasonable middle ground on this issue, no?
There is, and some of it can be found in a fine new book,
Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers. Powers, a former staff writer for the Washington Post
, is a gifted storyteller and his walk though the history of philosophy and technology makes this slender volume an enjoyable, quick read. He begins by reminding us that:
whenever new devices have emerged, they’ve presented the kinds of challenges we face today — busyness, information overload, that sense of life being out of control. These challenges were as real two millennia ago as they are today, and throughout history, people have been grappling with them and looking for creative ways to manage life in the crowd. (p. 5)
His key insight is that humans
can adapt to new technology, but it takes time, patience, humility, and a little effort. “The key is to strike a balance,” he says, between “the call of the crowd” and the “need for time and space apart” from it. (p. 4) The problem we face today is that all the pressure is on us to be what he calls “Digital Maximalists.” That is, many of us are increasingly out to maximize the time spent in front of various digital “screens” whether we have made the determination that is really in our best interest or not. It has just gradually happened, Powers argues, because “The goal is no longer to be ‘in touch’ but to erase the possibility of ever being out of touch.” (p. 15)
Continue reading →
Of the many tech policy-related books I’ve read in recent years, I can’t recall ever being quite so torn over one of them as much as I have been about Jaron Lanier‘s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. There were moments while I was reading through it when I was thinking, “Yes, quite right!,” and other times when I was muttering to myself, “Oh God, no!”
The book is bound to evoke such strong emotions since Lanier doesn’t mix words about what he believes is the increasingly negative impact of the Internet and digital technologies on our lives, culture, and economy. In this sense, Lanier fits squarely in the pessimist camp on the Internet optimists vs. pessimists spectrum. (I outlined the intellectual battle lines between these two camps my essay, “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”) But Lanier is no techno-troglodyte. Generally speaking, his pessimism isn’t as hysterical in tone or Luddite-ish in its prescriptions as the tracts of some other pessimists. And as a respected Internet visionary, a gifted computer scientist, an expert on virtual reality, and a master wordsmith, the concerns Lanier articulates here deserve to be taken seriously— even if one ultimately does not share his lugubrious worldview.
On the very first page of the book, Lanier hits on three interrelated concerns that other Net pessimists have articulated in the past:
- Loss of individuality & concerns about “mob” behavior (Lanier: “these words will mostly be read by nonpersons–automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals.”)
- Dangers of anonymity (Lanier: “Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies.”)
- “Sharecropper” concern that a small handful of capitalists are getting rich off the backs of free labor (Lanier: “Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.”)
Again, others have tread this ground before, and it’s strange that Lanier doesn’t bother mentioning any of them. Neil Postman, Mark Helprin, Andrew Keen, and Lee Siegel have all railed against the online “mob mentality” and argued it can be at least partially traced to anonymous online communications and interactions. And it was Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, who has been the most eloquent in articulating the “sharecropper” concern, which Lanier now extends with his “lords of the computing clouds” notion. [More on that towards the end.] Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.