Progress Is Making Progress

The pro-progress movement is gaining momentum across the political spectrum

Happy Sunday before Tax Day! Take a break from filing and read about the budding movement that may get the world back on track. And if you’re in Loveland, CO, on Thursday May 4, 5.30pm, mark your calendar for my talk “Thinking Morally Right or Wrong About Entitlements” (more to come). Cheers!

In these times of seeming societal malaise with the U.S. taken hostage by big-government, individual rights violating progressivism on the left and big-government individual rights violating populism and nationalism on the right, it may be hard to maintain a positive outlook. One area of hope is the increasing interest in the causes of human progress, abundance and flourishing—and what we can do to speed it up.

We may trace the modern progress movement back to Julian Simon’s seminal 1981 book The Ultimate Resource, which challenged the conventional wisdom on population growth, raw-material scarcity and resource consumption. Simon argued the more human minds (the ultimate resource), the better. And as long as minds remain free to innovate—and markets are allowed to respond to innovation with minimal government interference—energy will never be scarce and natural resources will never run out.

In subsequent decades, Simon’s work has had a dedicated but small following. Until relatively recently, his achievements were overshadowed by the neo-Malthusian zeitgeist of the past 50 years: environmental catastrophizing about nuclear Armageddon, acid rain (remember that one?), and in successive order global cooling, global warming, and most recently climate change (which conveniently covers both cooling and warming, in case one or the other doesn’t live up to the hype).

However, over the past decade or so, a pro-progress, pro-abundance, pro-human flourishing movement has quietly picked up steam, spearheaded by writers and thinkers who are trying to answer the question why progress, at least in most Western countries, has slowed to a trickle over the past 50 years—and what to do about it. Books such as Johan Norberg’s Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (2016), Hans Rosling’s Factfulness (2018), Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (2018), and J. Storrs Hall’s Where is My Flying Car (2018) defend and champion human progress in the Enlightenment tradition, while criticizing the world view of the Malthusian establishment. In 2019, Patrick Collison, co-founder of the payment platform Stripe, and George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen published an article in The Atlantic arguing We Need a New Science of Progress. Since then, an interconnected network of individuals, publications and organizations has mushroomed, studying different aspects of progress. It doesn’t appear to have reached academic status yet—which perhaps is for the best given the widespread hostility to human progress in many areas of academia. Here’s a sample of pro-progress players in no particular order indicating that a movement is afoot (let me know in the comments what/who you think I’ve missed):

• Roots of Progress: Jason Crawford and his team study the history of progress aiming to define a philosophy of progress that may guide us going forward

• The Center for Industrial Progress (modestly) seeks to bring about a new industrial revolution. Headed by Alex Epstein, author of Fossil Future and the Energy Talking Points substack

• The Cato Institute’s HumanProgress.org run by Marian Tupy contains a wealth of pro-progress information. Marian, together with Gale Pooley, is also the author of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet (2022)

• Progress Studies for Young Scholars, a joint venture between the aforementioned Roots of Progress and Higher Ground Education, offers an online program in the history of technology for high school students

• James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute writes the Faster, Please! substack: “If you think generating faster technological progress and faster long-term economic growth are the keys to a more prosperous and resilient humanity, then ‘Faster, Please!’ is for you”

Somewhat promising, a few people and organizations on the political left are starting to take an interest in (the lack of) human progress, abundance and flourishing, although not yet being solidly in the pro-progress camp:

• The Institute For Progress , a think tank with progressive roots founded by Alex Stapp and Caleb Whatney is aiming to accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress

• Ezra Klein of the New York Times has covered the slowing of human progress over the past few months. See here, here, and here.

• The Breakthrough Institute’s Build Nuclear Now campaign is a refreshingly pro-progress initiative promoting nuclear energy as a requirement for solving alleged climate change challenges

• Left-leaning economics writer Noah Smith criticizes our inability to build in his substack article The Build-Nothing Country

Finally, Discourse Magazine recently ran a series of articles covering an array of pro-progress related topics under the headline The Abundance Agenda.

The survival of the movement is obviously by no means guaranteed. One requirement for future success is a broader understanding of the philosophical roots of the anti-progress forces impacting society. Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Center makes a valiant attempt in his The Permanent Problem substack article The Anti-Promethean Backlash, but ultimately doesn’t reach deep enough. However, Robert Tracinski, in Prometheus Unbound, his contribution to the Discourse Magazine series mentioned above, does get to the heart of the matter. In my opinion, Robert’s article is a must read if you’re a champion of human progress, abundance, and flourishing. It may challenge deeply held beliefs, but you will come away with a better appreciation of the worldview powering the enemies of civilization—and better armed for the battle ahead.