Culture: Inspiring progress in stories and institutions
Talks and writing from Progress Conference 2025
Our mission at the Roots of Progress Institute is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and to build a culture of progress.
Though we didn’t formalize a “culture track” at Progress Conference 2025, several excellent talks covered how to teach, tell stories, and inspire a culture of progress. And Jason Crawford’s remarks touched on similar themes. Here are some selected talks from the conference and related writing.
Conference dispatch
The common thread of progress by Jason Crawford
In the introduction to Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI founder Jason Crawford discusses the unity of one goal of the progress movement: to move humanity forward.
All of us — from technologists to policy wonks to storytellers — are contributing in our own way to the grand project of human progress. There is strength in realizing that and reminding ourselves of it. By uniting in a progress movement, we can each see our work as part of a larger whole. The NEPA writer isn’t just pushing for permitting reform, and the materials researcher isn’t just trying to improve the efficiency of semiconductor manufacturing — all are working for the advancement of humanity. Each of us has our hill to take. Seeing our efforts that way can inspire and rejuvenate us, and salve the loneliness that often accompanies ambitious work.
Talk videos
Dan Wang in conversation with Kmele Foster
Jason Crawford’s Opening Remarks
The role of philanthropy in promoting progress (and safety)
In this talk, Alexander Berger, CEO of Open Philanthropy, discusses a number of examples of how philanthropic funding can help accelerate progress, especially in science and technology, ranging from the earliest days of the YIMBY movement to recent cases of boosting metascience and innovation policy. He also touches on the relationship between progress and safety and why there is a strong philanthropic case for funding both.
Worth reading along with this talk is Why We Fund Both Progress and Safety by Alexander Berger and Emily Oehlsen.
Building a culture of progress
Jerusalem Demsas, Editor-in-Chief of The Argument, speaks about a culture of progress. She argues that we need a new generation of cultural entrepreneurs for progress, people like Martin Luther, Charles Darwin and Adam Smith, hailed by Nobel Price winner Joel Mokyr as helping kick-off the culture of progress behind the industrial revolution. She urges progress-minded people and technologists to realize that persuasion is both necessary and possible. Tech isn’t just cool or world-changing or necessary for the US to succeed vs. China—all arguments that resonate with VCs and fellow tech people. Instead, we should emphasize in our communications that tech’s fundamental worth comes from improving human lives and flourishing—arguments that resonate with the broader population who otherwise might oppose progress and slow it down.
How the System Works
Listen to Charles C. Mann, author of the “How the System Works” series in The New Atlantis, and Virginia Postrel, celebrated author of The Future and Its Enemies and The Fabric of Civilization, discuss the overlooked burden and duty of maintaining past progress.
In the last 150 years, every developed nation has constructed vast systems that provide food, water, energy, and health-care to their citizens. They are high on the list of the great accomplishments of our civilization.
Like Europe’s great cathedrals, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-production network, and the public-health system were constructed by the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. But unlike those cathedrals, they don’t inspire caravans of gawping tourists or great works of art. No visitors clamor for tickets to visit electric reliability centers or pump-storage stations. No poets celebrate the sewage-treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery.
This ignorance is not just the province of dunderheads and yahoos. Even the educated elite—such as, just possibly, the attendees of conferences like this one—know all too little about the vital systems that undergird their daily lives. And this is a problem. All of these systems, which represent so much of the progress in our material well-being, need to be maintained and revamped to accommodate rising populations, technological advances, increasing affluence, and climate change. Schools should be, but are not, teaching students why it is imperative to join this effort. And the bitterly divided partisans of our political wars are doing anything but pay attention to the infrastructure that is the basis of our collective economic prosperity.
Closing: A Culture of Progress
Jason closes out the conference with some remarks on why culture matters for progress, especially how it guides young talent to important problems, and what the Roots of Progress Institute is doing to address that.
Other media
Why culture may be our most powerful lever for progress by Beatrice Ekers
In an op-ed, Beatrice Ekers (Foresight Institute, Existential Hope) writes about the “invisible infrastructure” of culture that shapes the future.
Progress rests on multiple layers. At the top is hard infrastructure: bridges, laboratories, power grids, and rockets. Beneath that lies soft infrastructure: laws, institutions, and systems that make the hardware useful. And beneath both rests a third layer: invisible infrastructure. Culture. The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which futures feel plausible and worth pursuing.
This layer is easy to overlook because it doesn’t leave behind blueprints or legislation. Yet history shows its importance. The Enlightenment was not an engineering project but a cultural shift. In coffee houses and pamphlets, curiosity and reason became public virtues. That shift created the conditions for modern science and the Industrial Revolution. The machines were built in workshops, but the idea that machines could transform the human condition was built in culture first.
Watch The moment every civilization fears: the growth plateau with Jason Crawford
“People got skeptical, fearful, doubtful of the very idea of progress in the 20th century and we allowed that to slow down progress itself.”
In part 3 of the Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford explores what a Culture of Progress could look like. Especially in Chapter 11, The Progress Agenda:
A basic understanding of industrial civilization—how it works and why we need it—should be considered an essential outcome of an education. Call it “industrial literacy.”
Industrial literacy could start in grade school. Students could learn basic facts relevant to economic life: what crops need in order to grow, what farmers do, and how pests or disease can damage the harvest; what types of materials our world is made of, and how things like metal, glass, ceramic, and textiles are produced; different sources of energy, how to harness them, and how to direct forces using simple machines such as gears and levers. They could learn the stories of specific inventions and inventors: Edison and the light bulb, Stephenson and the locomotive, Bell and the telephone. They could learn basic facts about economic history: that people once lived without heating, air conditioning, plumbing, or electricity; that most people worked manual jobs, and mostly on farms; that severe disease was common, especially in childhood. They could engage in many hands-on activities to get first-hand knowledge of historical and modern processes: gardening, weaving, carpentry, paper-making and printing, navigation with a compass. They could try going a day eating only food they had grown themselves, wearing only clothes they had sewn, or using light only from candles they had dipped.
We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.
Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.