I’m explaining my thoughts on progress to friends and family more often recently. I’m not that concise. I keep sending some links afterwards. So I wanted to put together a list of my favorite writing about progress. These are some of the essays that have most influenced my thinking.
1: The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. - Our World in Data by Max Roser. My top recommendation and possibly the link I share the most. Also an example of how compressing the best ideas is hard.
2: Why do we need a NEW philosophy of progress? by Jason Crawford. I find myself sharing this frequently when someone says “but what about ---”
3: Progress Is a Policy Choice | IFP by Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney. You get the gist. One of the best taglines in progress studies.
4: The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress by John Myers, Sam Bowman, and Ben Southwood. Illustrates my slippery slope from interest in housing economics into progress studies.
5: What Do You Do With an Idea? by Packy McCormick. I’m not sure this idea is correct but it’s probably the best and most accessible synthesis of why stagnation happened and what can be done about it — also, this essay, inspired by the Progress Conference 2024 is a great example of the value of convening/events.
6: Technological stagnation: Why I came around by Jason Crawford. A solid primer on “the great stagnation” and the case for each side. Not everyone has bumped into WTF Happened In 1971?
7: Climate optimism of the will by Noah Smith. I happened to read this at a time I was deep in modeling the costs of the energy transition. This is a big part of Why I’m not worried about climate change — but we still need to “fight and win”.
8: Why pessimism sounds smart by Jason Crawford. I share this when I get into a meta-argument about whether optimism is realistic or not.
9: Can growth continue? by Jason Crawford. “Now, that’s a problem for another time. But note that in five minutes we’ve gone from worrying about overpopulation to underpopulation. That’s because we’ve traded a scarcity mindset, where growth is limited by resources, for an abundance mindset, where it is limited only by our ingenuity.”
10: We Need a New Science of Progress - The Atlantic by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen. An essay that started a movement (though of course many people were working on these questions already).