We Need a New Science of Progress
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Given in TFA's third paragraph.
Also raising standards of living? Is that all we’re after? Slaves in slave societies had rising standards of living, did that make slavery okay?
The scary thing about an article like this is the sheer ignorance and hubris behind it. No credible philosopher will tell you that we can objectify morality, it is a provable logical fallacy. That doesn’t seem to stop people form thinking they can do it. The folks in history who thought they could do it are some of the most reprehensible people in all of human history.
I doubt anyone is making the argument slavery is okay. At least try to argue in good faith. This is a ridiculous example.
And the commenter is right that failing this, such talk can be dangerous because by a sleight of hand you can substitute - without argument - what is supposedly rational with whatever you simply desire at that moment in time.
I agree with the spirit of the parent poster, but to claim the OP is arguing slavery is okay because of raising standards of living is just as dangerous to this discussion.
This commenter's argument was just such an argument.
Do we agree that how you present an argument is important in how the argument is received by others?
I don't follow why an argument with "decent awareness" (whatever that could even mean) or one that is non-novel has different standards to a novel argument or one that has less awareness.
Again, the validity of the argument under discussion doesn't rest on the example that was used to explicate it. The examples are separate from the argument (this isn't always the case).
Now you might say I’m making a straw man of their argument, but then what are they even arguing then? I can’t figure it out. What does “advancement” mean? They alluded to social sciences having various measure of human happiness is and that a “Progress Studies” department could synthesize these metrics into... what exactly? Policy proposals? A religion? Metrics of human well being assume an underlying framework of morale agreement to begin with.
You simply cannot philosophically convert an objective metric into an “ought” without making a ton of morale assumptions. You cannot prove that your morality and values are better than anyone else’s because you will infinitely regress into definitions if what “good” means.
By pulling to the extreme, you can remove a lot of the smaller and subtler points of the argument, to get pointedly at a core issue.
Unless of course the recipient tries to (re-)introduce irrelevant aspects of the fact that you tried to be pointed...
(I'm not joking, I swear! To objectify morality you have to encode it, eh? So you're sunk before you begin: there will be moral things that can't be encoded, and encode-able things that are not moral, or cannot be proven moral nor immoral. And then you have the problem of deciding whether "objectifing morality" is itself a moral goal, n'est-ce pas? )
E.g. the Communists insist they are benefiting the Tibetans.
Or consider the native Hawaiians vs. the telescope on their sacred volcano Mauna Kea.
Without establishing the greater context "progress" is a shiboleth.
Wendell Berry has an essay, "What are People For?", that's worth reading in this connexion.
The simplest way to encounter the issue is be asking yourself, as a two-year old would, "And then what..? And then what..? And then what..?"
Don't tell me that increased population doesn't decrease standard of living.
Prosperity, however, has not come to all societies. Material consumption in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, is now well below the pre-industrial norm. Countries such as Malawi or Tanzania would be better off in material terms had they never had contact with the industrialized world and instead continued in their preindustrial state. Modern medicine, airplanes, gasoline, computers—the whole technological cornucopia of the past two hundred years—have succeeded there in producing among the lowest material living standards ever experienced. These African societies have remained trapped in the Malthusian era, where technological advances merely produce more people and living standards are driven down to subsistence. But modern medicine has reduced the material minimum required for subsistence to a level far below that of the Stone Age. Just as the Industrial Revolution reduced income inequalities within societies, it has increased them between societies, in a process recently labeled the Great Divergence.1 The gap in incomes between countries is of the order of 50:1. There walk the earth now both the richest people who ever lived and the poorest.
http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8461.pdf
More:
http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/a_farewell_to...
I was making a similar hypothesis. Didn't know about the data though.
Here's my argument:
I agree that capitalism is such a system that allows for expansion of wealth by means of mass production.
But as America gets rich, there were suppressed workers in China who were doing the "hard work" for Americans.
As China gets rich, the Africans are doing it for them.
So calling the American capitalism as a foolproof system that elevates "everyone" out of poverty is just plain wrong because it helps produce more poor people in other poor countries. And then the market says, more the poor people supply, less the wages.
So they're always creating population booms somewhere to sell their products as well as get cheap labour.
But the Americans have given a positive association to population boom by telling a story called population booms = economic prosperity.
So there is going to be a population boom in Africa soon. With more than 2 bn people.
"Get ready for more cheap labour!" Says the US free markets.
But once everyone is used up and educated, what then?
One of Clark's observations is that modernity -- not just capitalism, but technology, logistics, healthcare, interventions, etc. -- not only create poverty but make it survivable. A reason that persistant conditions of abject misery are sustained for lifetimes and generations is that they don't simply kill those affected (by disease, starvation, accidents, warfare) in a few weeks or months.
His book is part of a series edited by Joel Mokyr on economic history and progress (much of what Cowan and Collison are calling for), well worth looking at titles. Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth is another title, and more generally in 3what I'd consider a larger literature including Polanyi's The Great Transformation and Joseph Needham's work exploring what's come to be known as "the Needham question" -- why China, which developed a phenomenal set of technology and scientific knowledge, catalogued exhaustively in Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, didn't then proceed to have an industrial revolution similar to that which eventually occurred in England.
I think you're also absolutely correct to call out the claims made for capitalism -- that it elevates everyone out of poverty (the poorest billions have actually lost financial wealth in recent years), that it's an engine of creativity (many inventors died broke or broken, many inventions came from uncompensated sources, including famously the one mention of either technology or steam power in Smith's Wealth of Nations -- a boy optimising steam engine function because he wanted to play with his friends), and numerous others.
The contrast between price behaviour of rents vs. wages is very well discussed, going back to Smith, who also discusses the dynamics of poverty in economic growth and decline.
But yes: the orthodox economic theology appears to have several significant gaps with reality. Including though not limited to the behaviour of poverty under market-capitalist-property systems.
The philosophical part to me is Who is this progress meant to serve? Everyone alive today? The human species as a whole? Our environment? Some greater consciousness?
Evolution itself doesn't neccessarily fit - while it may progress it may also stagnate or get caught in cycles. While a result may eventually dominate it is important to remember evolution has no goals - it is literal survivorship bias manifest.
As for intent I believe the answer is an unsatisfying "it depends" as who it serves and who defines meaning changes and the question becomes originally or currently? Musket arming of minimally trained recruits may have been meant to serve aristocracy to allow fielding large armies cheaper but if it ends in them being deposed clearly it didn't serve them in the end and the purpose must change or else be abandoned.
Darwin proposed evolution. Mendel hypothsized genes. Crick and Watson discovered DNA's structure. Details matter.
The one feather in our cap is the distribution of new discovery. As the original research mission behind the invention of the internet, it has surpassed expectation. The black hole image at the center of the Milky Way galaxy was captured, processed and released (via twitter) in under a news cycle.
Every historian in the world would dispute that.
Before economics became all dynamic stochastic general equilibrium matters and strategic games of imperfect information, it was about 'how does the machine work.'
Not sure why we need a New Field to study that.
https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/115630161497577063...
It compares the proposed approach to WW2 Abraham Wald airplane bullet pattern analysis [1] and Survivor Bias.
[1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
> The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account (FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit)
I agree that we don't need a new field, but it seems also that the idea of designing progress is a fool's errand.
I have had a few recent exchanges with anthropologists and it doesn't seem they are interested in moralistic claims apart from defending the current academic framework. For example they were highly skeptical of science when it doesn't support the "nurture" side on the nature vs nurture debate, discarding scientific evidence as invalid using weak arguments. It was surprising to me how prevalent and an orthodoxy this is, and it seems they have contracted the relativistic disease that is prevalent in the social sciences for decades. I suppose most agree that progress is not an implied good (Plenty of comments here express that view). Pity because anthropology is IMO the most interesting social science.
As for measuring progress in science, the problem is that the vast majority of scientists are content with the current system of small unambitious steps, low risks and easy content-free papers, so you won't easily find many supporters there.
Right now progress is More Jobs and More GDP. A lot of people wind up getting left out in the cold because progress jobs and GDP growth don't require helping everyone who needs it.
Maybe progress should mean ensuring every human is healthy, fed, housed, and has access to education and the global network.
I don't think that's an attainable goal, or at the very least it's not a realistic short or long term goal. There are so many other things we have to fix before that goal makes sense.
To start, I think a severe underlying problem America is facing is just that there isn't much community here, compared to other first world countries. How long have our families been living in the same place? Not long for most of us. I think this is causing some turmoil in the trust department.
Also, we really need to work on our regulations. We have a bad habit of legislating from the heart, but end up producing side effects that hurt us. For instance, laws preventing giving food to the homeless. Over-regulating also drives cost up for business, causing them to raise prices.
Another is minimum wage. Americans have a hard time admitting that increasing minimum wage has negative side effects, especially on small business. We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them. And before you get angry at this one, what kind of smartphone are you using? There's a reason our jobs go over seas.
Jobs that would pay very low wage wouldn't be difficult jobs, but they also wouldn't care if the person is only half mentally there. Small pay, small work, you can be promoted and given raise. A factory for instance could even build a campground with facilities. How many homeless folks would love to have that opportunity? How many more potential employers does that produce?
We should also consider decreasing the federal budget and start paying off our debt, no? I would think that's a pretty important thing to keep in mind also.
These things are needed in order to achieve a more universal happiness.
Congratulations, you've just reinvented fuedalism, complete with the keep. Not trying to be flippant, but this is a perfect example of how 'rational' geeks can trivially rationalise literally anything, by ignoring context and history. Protections like minimum wage, safe working conditions, minimum work age etc didn't arise de novo. They exist (all be it in a much more limited form in the US than elsewhere in the developed world), because of repeated public outrage at the abuses their lack engendered. Repealing them to 'create jobs' as though that were in itself a nebulous good is the same logic that has prisoners in chain gangs (universally from poor, and overwhelmingly black) recreating the era of slavery in Texas.
I recommend anyone who holds this view to read at least one book written by Thomas Sowell.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Criticisms...
Repeated public outrage: cars are becoming less safe.
Economist: There is a tradeoff between safety and affordability, and making cars safer means less poor people can actually afford to buy them. In turn, this makes transportation even harder for them, which in turn means they will have fewer chances to improve their lives.
Repeated public outrage: lack of minimum wage will cause more exploitation.
Economist: Minimum wage destroys job opportunities for low skilled workers, who are already heavily marginalized in society. And once they are out of the job market, it becomes even harder for them to return to it.
That's why you create unemployment benefit, preferably in a way that does not discourage going back to work.
This way, works with starvation wages don't exist, and low-skilled workers have a chance to prepare for their next job (and even to be a bit picky). In my view this improves the job market much better than a race to the bottom in working conditions and salaries.
Alternatively you could subsidise low wage employment via a wage subsidy like the earned income tax credit. That way you get more people in work as opposed to fewer and those people develop skills and professional networks which will allow the recipients to escape low wage work in time.
Isn't this much easier said than done? Where will you cap the unemployment benefits so people are not discouraged? How do you come up with the number? How do you plan to verify the effect of your suggested cap?
Raising minimum wage has negative side effects. You can't escape this truth.
My half-informed impression was that it's not–demand for labor is often surprisingly inelastic. Maybe you can go from 100 to 95 people on an assembly line, but you can't have 0.95 of a person taking orders. Also, increasing someone's salary by $1/hr only costs a few thousand dollars per year (~2000 working hours/year + payroll taxes).
So you want to reduce the only leverage any honest regular hard working citizen has? To do what? Save money? How about taxing companies properly for starters? You are the second-biggest market in the world after all.
And another thing: if your goals are to decrease unemployment, homelessness and incarceration it is a totally valid strategy to state those goals publicly. The european givernments I lived under always do this and it doesn’t really seem to have the devastating economic consequences typical US-citizen’ always tell me it must have.
It is amazing how ingrained that corporate think is in the US and how unable people are to see that there are other things inbetween full on anarcho-capitalism and soviet style single party oligarchy.
I also don't think that paying off state debt right now is a good idea. Interest rates are pretty much zero or even negative. We should instead borrow as much as possible. For example we could invest trillions into getting rid of fossil fuels in the next twenty years. That would also create many jobs.
But also, I think this was not meant to be US specific. The real political challenge is trying to do it for everyone. Doing it for the US is easy.
This statement reveals a lack of knowledge of the root causes of the homelessness epidemic. Those who are homeless for purely economic reasons are a tiny minority. More often than not homelessness is a second order effect of mental health issues compounded by breakdown in family/community. Those need to be addressed first.
Go do some volunteering and you will very quickly start to understand.
If you can't afford to pay employees, then your business is not viable
From an individualist perspective, anyone without those things, but who is connected at least a little will probably want them, I would wager. Is your argument based on a belief that there are not enough natural resources to accommodate every human in theory? What do you think needs to be fixed before a higher standard of life for all humans should be considered a goal to progressively strive for?
Not at all what I meant. I think we can accommodate a lot more people.
> What do you think needs to be fixed before a higher standard of life for all humans should be considered a goal to progressively strive for?
I'm saying that the goals needed to achieve that kind of Utopia don't look like the goals described. I think many people don't want to admit certain policy failures, but they continue on like an addiction, hamstringing genuine efforts. I'm not sure if it's attainable because so many contentious things will have to change before we can even start with the goals described (food/housing/etc.)
If you want that outcome to be achieved by a scientific process, you need to include those as long term goals. They may not be intermediate goals (e.g. you might need to temporarily reduce health and access to the global network for some part of the population to send them as volunteer settlers to a space colony), but if you're not measuring them and using their improvement as progress, you cannot guarantee that in the long term the scientific progress will achieve them.
He said that we could work two hours a day, and retire after just a few years, having paid for our living expenses for the rest of one's life.
For one thing, we measure ourselves not in absolute but relative terms. This leads us into a never-ending signalling arms race.
The old caricature of the rich tycoon putting his feet up on the desk could not be more false. Look at the most visibly successful people in society (Bezos, Musk, even Zuck) and they all work extremely hard. Why is that? They have more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime. What they can't buy is satisfaction. Therefore they must continue to work hard and continue winning.
When you look at these most extreme, but not at all alien examples of humanity, you see that Fuller's claim is absurd. Anyone who had the capability to earn enough to retire on working just a few hours a day for just a few years would never be satisfied with that.
The harsh truth of it is that the richer and more technologically capable we become, the more resources we consume without any real net benefit in wellbeing or life satisfaction.
That's exactly my point: We already have all the technology we need, our problems now are all psychological and spiritual.
Bucky thought that it would be enough to put the technology before the people in what he called "Design Science Revolution", but as you point out it hasn't worked so far... People don't even notice.
Donald Cardwell in "Turning Points in Western Technology"
Joel Mokyr in "Lever of Riches" and "Gifts of Athena"
Edward Hutchinson in "Cognition in the Wild"
James Utterback "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation"
David A. Mindell "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics"
Stephen B. Johnson "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs"
Human Accomplishment: Charles Murray, page 369
More generally this critique ignores the second industrial revolution altogether. The U.K. shows progress outside universities is possible, as does the preceding industrious revolution, where water and wind power and the beginnings of steam happened with minimal involvement from universities but progress in chemistry and electricity generation and electrical engineering was absolutely a product of the technical university system. That’s why Germany was at the forefront of this era of rapid progress and the U.K. wasn’t despite its huge initial advantage in capital.
Even if there are useless members within the whole system can still be positive. The whole model of venture capitalism is technically very wasteful from all of the failures - but the outsized successes more than pay for the failures.
It is a common mistake in a pattern of thinking that "If I cannot understand how it works then it must be bad." By all means question and be skeptical but assuming that is an increasingly bad heuristic as specialization grows.
In which the authors conveniently ignore the existence of a number of disciplines, like the history of science and technology, addressing precisely the questions that they're asking.
I feel like the United States has just forsaken philosophy, especially as it relates to economics, in favour of their Chicago School theories of free markets. Now that the markets have been let to run free, and they're running towards nothing good in particular, perhaps it's time to just look back at all the literature written elsewhere on these matters.
I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction.
> Many free-market oriented people would disagree that we've let the free market run amok, as measured by the percentage of the economy that the government spends directly or controls through price controls.
I agree with this actually. The federal government does move the pieces quite a bit and there's definitely people who think it could be even more free. Though to be fair, I'm thinking about this in relation to other countries like some in Europe, for example. In that context, I get the sense the US is more scared of regulation and in general prefers letting the market decide.
For example, plastic bags. The UK has introduced a charge on them, and is going to enforce a ban soon. In the US you see less action in this direction, and the general trend I see to fight the issue is "lets educate the population so they crate demand for alternative options".
IMO, what the UK is doing is progress— they've identified the moral obligation to take better care of the environment and through policy they're altering the market to work towards it. The US seems to prefer to "progress" according to market demand. If this idea is to be made policy, first it has to be demanded by the market. I could be wrong though ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
This is of course at a Federal level, because at a state and municipal level I do hear of more independent action taken in the US.
> I would agree that a stress on philosophy in economics would be helpful, but people like Hayek wrote in a philosophical way having seen the societies that adopted ideas of Marx and found even further dysfunction.
That's true. I'm not arguing for the adoption of societies modeled after the ideas of Marx, which are notoriously vague. I'm more just making the case that there's previous literature reflecting on what "progress" is, and arguing that perhaps it's not just increasing GDP without bounds.
read the responses to The Atlantic tweeting this out. https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1156260396317253632
> there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress
The major difference between what they're saying and existing fields (history, sociology, STS, economics, urbanism) is that the authors are only talking about looking at successes, not failures. That is juvenile at best, catastrophic at worst. Studying progress without studying failure is incredibly ill-defined, because you have to start by defining progress, and you can't actually guarantee progress without studying failure and studying how to avoid failure. I'm sure we can all come together and agree on a single definition of progress, right? Seems so straightforward.
This article is embarrassingly dismissive of other fields.
You perfectly articulated what I wanted to write but couldn't find the right words. Reinventing the wheel is one thing, but reinventing it and adding corners to it is just embarrassing.
What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance. But why would you be entitled to that?
Yeah, it was a turn of phrase, didn't mean its literally banned.
You're not banned, you're just not welcome to say it, you will be treated as pariah for saying it, you will get downvoted to death, and if a discussion happens to grow around such a viewpoint, it will be in all probability marked "dead".
>What you seem to request is that nobody is criticizing your stance.
No, what I request is that people give thought to such propositions and argue with counter-arguments as opposed to facile dismissals and outrage...
You didn't argue at all yet, so it is not really a surprise that nobody gives counter-arguments.
Progress as we understand it seems to be baked into nature and the emergent systems we live in and are. You don't give up on life as soon as you are born because you will die one day right? Whether you're aware of it or not, your body naturally preserves the order it can, and you actually grow up before you die.
1. "progress is stealing from future generations" is not the same thing at all as "progress is limited by natural resources", even if you accept the second one is true. Our grandchildren are still better off if we make progress now, even if there is a limit at some point.
2. value in a knowledge-based economy like ours is not linked to natural resources. I can spend this afternoon on my computer either coding or playing games. The resource consumption is the same, but one generates economic value, the other doesn't. The basic assumption that all economic value arises from the consumption of natural resources is flat wrong.