>You have a computer, TV, and smartphone. These are impressive inventions, and some seem like magic, but over time, you realise that your living standards haven't transformed quite as much as when you woke up in 1940.
The living standard of kings hasn't quite changed since 2000 BC.
What's changing is the life of the less fortunate. Women not spending time on washing clothes is a huge difference. [1]
What's holding society back is not lack of progress but conventions. When you have microwaves, but you still build houses with kitchens as if your wife stays at home all day, then resources are stuck and cannot be used to change living standards significantly.
Similarly, Smartphones are called Smartphones and not mobile computers because people still use them as phones. Living standards will change when the general public starts engaging with computers and crunches data to e.g. automatically choose the best product to buy, or to coordinate housing projects. The housing bubble exists because buyers don't coordinate to remove bottlenecks on the supply side.
In a sense, we have the printing press, but people are still illiterate.
>There is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.
How about China? It would be surprising if they hadn't analyzed how they can out-innovate the US.
Then again, does progress need an intellectual movement? That sounds like increasing the study of arts to create more music and literature.
Instead of letting intellectuals assemble, where could people meet who would want to make progress? I would like to say HN, but my suspicion is that the bottlenecks are not easily monetizable so that angle investors and VC are not enough.
E.g. to build a city for the future with affordable housing, does it take nation states like China and Saudi Arabia, or could that be achieved in another way?
[1] General Electric also introduced its first top loading automatic model in 1947 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine