Such a very important reminder of how great we have things. I live in a country where it's harder to take some of these things for granted, and I am grateful that I do. Relatedly, I wonder whether this obliviousness to problems informs why, for instance, higher percentages of people in developing countries are pro-vaccine than in many wealthier countries: You know who understands why the DTaP vaccine is awesome? Someone who remembers her brother dying of diphtheria, tetanus, or pertussis when she was a kid.
Also, because it is about what you've written about here and I think you would appreciate it, here is a piece on laundry in the tropics and progress:
This was great Jason. What struck me the most is how any single example of progress in this chapter makes our lives very different from the past, and yet we have *all of them*. I think the totality is itself remarkable, and it's how I interpret your chapter title. It's already inspiring to think about a single example of progress, but it's dizzying to think about their cumulative impact!
Great piece. But humanity's ingratitude for luxuries and life-saving advances isn't new. It's hilarious to think about, but the Greeks and Romans bemoaned our inability to appreciate good fortune and luxuries with a 40% infant mortality rate, rampant plagues and famines, and the ever-present threat of war.
The problem isn't a lack of flying cars or not-quite-fast-enough GDP growth, but human nature. We're chained to a hedonic treadmill, never satisfied because we compare ourselves not with our great grandparents or any distant era, but with our neighbors.
I believe you’ve hit a good point Andrew, the hedonistic treadmill and comparing with our neighbours (or keeping up appearances or FOMO). What I’ve observed over the years from a design perspective, is the lack of understanding about the value of good design vs bad design with the general population. What I mean by that is we have very well designed products that come out to market, only to be left competing with cheaper but hugely poorer quality (low life span, planned obsolescence call it what you will) products which have the “appearance” of looking the same or similar to the quality, only to break down in a short period of time and ending up in landfill. Short term thinking on part of the price driven consumer, when if they had a bit more education on the benefits of quality, they’d come to realise, longer term they would save money but also contribute to a healthier economy by reducing overall consumption.
If economics is the art of wasting more abundant, lower-value resources in order to conserve scarcer, higher-value ones, and so on, and so on, then technology is the art of replacing big problems with smaller ones, and so on, and so on.
Concern about the environment is the "privilege" (happy to be given a better word) of a society that can afford to think (and invest) longer term, and not merely about where to sleep for the night or where the next meal is coming from, because we've mostly solved those lower-order problems.
With such a staggering amount of progress made in human well-being during the last couple of centuries we should be filled with hope for the future, well at least I am.
Yet a significant portion of Gen Z feels hopeless about the future.
Read your last few posts. It’s amazing how we humans could have achieved so much without much information available in early stages of history. On extension of this progress, how do you visualise the future is going to be. Curious to read your thoughts.
I hear what you’re saying.. I recall an article some years back defining the rate of progress which in a nutshell predicted that our rate of progress in this century will surpass the last century by 2025 - exponential growth.
I have read my fair share of „progress literature“ over the years. I can‘t remember to have read something so well put and in a such a succinct writing style. Thank you! Can‘t wait to read the next chapters.
This was a fantastic survey of technological progress. Very excited for the rest of the book.
One thought: I know it’s not the core of this project but I am interested how to relate this narrative to questions of moral progress: emancipation, abolition, gambling, murder, theft, drug use, marriage, community etc.
In many ways the experience people have in relation to these kinds of moral activities determines the quality of their lives just as much as their material situation, if not more. It also strikes me that the most compelling critiques of this story of technological progress are not ones that questions the facts but ones that reinterpret the facts through some kind of alternative moral lens. So having a position in relation to these moral changes seems important (even if it is only to for the most part to sidestep such questions).
Unfortunately or may be not (such behavior could bring some benefits from evolutionary point of view), humanity has a tendency to forget and to misjudge the unobserved past. And even the lived struggles of our own past are very easily forgotten and romanticized just because we mix the energy, naivity and optimism of youth with ease of living....
These tendencies extend towards progress and technology and were captured brilliantly by the famous Douglas Adams' take on human attitude towards technology:
"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re between fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. " (Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt)
Jason, you’ve compiled a great number of past challenges in our history to give us a perspective to look back on, to appreciate how we have it today. It’s worthy to pause for a moment and this is what you’ve allowed us to do here. A common phrase I used to hear from the older generations of my time when I was a lot younger (and I’m a tail end baby boomer) “back in my day, things were like this, and that” (I’ve even used a reinterpretation of that phrase with my own daughter and others) and I (sometimes) would roll my eyes, too occupied with the present, too young to understand. The beauty of history as most of us here would be aware, is knowing what went right and wrong in order to make our future better.
Yes, the amount and degree of progress is indeed amazing. But it also has begotten a staggering level of consumerism that plays a huge role in climate change, and helps create - and holds a mirror to - some grossly misplaced values in modern society in wealthier countries.
I see comments here about the luxury of solving environmental problems and about accelerating or even exponential growth in the future.
A fundamental flaw of this piece and all the reasoning behind it is that it ignores the fact that we have mortgaged the future of the environment and our planet to afford the progress we have today. Much of what you have highlighted is amazing, and we should not reject all technology. What we need to do is reject an economic system with the aim of unlimited growth on a finite planet. Hand-waving responses along the lines of "if we just keep improving technology, we'll be able to reverse climate change at some point" aren't the way. Anyone who enjoys and benefits from all the modern advances we have made (as I do) should be critically examining the social and political context in which those advances are applied, rather than propagating false assumptions of perpetual upward progress.
Such a very important reminder of how great we have things. I live in a country where it's harder to take some of these things for granted, and I am grateful that I do. Relatedly, I wonder whether this obliviousness to problems informs why, for instance, higher percentages of people in developing countries are pro-vaccine than in many wealthier countries: You know who understands why the DTaP vaccine is awesome? Someone who remembers her brother dying of diphtheria, tetanus, or pertussis when she was a kid.
Also, because it is about what you've written about here and I think you would appreciate it, here is a piece on laundry in the tropics and progress:
https://doctrixperiwinkle.substack.com/p/oh-happy-day
and here is one on how we've basically defeated childhood blindness without anyone noticing:
https://doctrixperiwinkle.substack.com/p/born-blind
Thanks again for this essay.
This was great Jason. What struck me the most is how any single example of progress in this chapter makes our lives very different from the past, and yet we have *all of them*. I think the totality is itself remarkable, and it's how I interpret your chapter title. It's already inspiring to think about a single example of progress, but it's dizzying to think about their cumulative impact!
Great piece. But humanity's ingratitude for luxuries and life-saving advances isn't new. It's hilarious to think about, but the Greeks and Romans bemoaned our inability to appreciate good fortune and luxuries with a 40% infant mortality rate, rampant plagues and famines, and the ever-present threat of war.
The problem isn't a lack of flying cars or not-quite-fast-enough GDP growth, but human nature. We're chained to a hedonic treadmill, never satisfied because we compare ourselves not with our great grandparents or any distant era, but with our neighbors.
Luckily, we do have an age-old key for the lock, and it's quite effective. Greco-Roman philosophers figure this out long ago: https://andrewperlot.substack.com/p/how-wise-people-escape-from-our-dystopia
Maybe! I do think that there was much more general public appreciation for progress at least in the late 19th / early 20th century, vs. today.
I believe you’ve hit a good point Andrew, the hedonistic treadmill and comparing with our neighbours (or keeping up appearances or FOMO). What I’ve observed over the years from a design perspective, is the lack of understanding about the value of good design vs bad design with the general population. What I mean by that is we have very well designed products that come out to market, only to be left competing with cheaper but hugely poorer quality (low life span, planned obsolescence call it what you will) products which have the “appearance” of looking the same or similar to the quality, only to break down in a short period of time and ending up in landfill. Short term thinking on part of the price driven consumer, when if they had a bit more education on the benefits of quality, they’d come to realise, longer term they would save money but also contribute to a healthier economy by reducing overall consumption.
If economics is the art of wasting more abundant, lower-value resources in order to conserve scarcer, higher-value ones, and so on, and so on, then technology is the art of replacing big problems with smaller ones, and so on, and so on.
Concern about the environment is the "privilege" (happy to be given a better word) of a society that can afford to think (and invest) longer term, and not merely about where to sleep for the night or where the next meal is coming from, because we've mostly solved those lower-order problems.
What a good read!
With such a staggering amount of progress made in human well-being during the last couple of centuries we should be filled with hope for the future, well at least I am.
Yet a significant portion of Gen Z feels hopeless about the future.
( https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-gen-z-is-a-climate-anxious-pessimistic-force-to-be-reckoned-with/ )
What could be causing this?
Read your last few posts. It’s amazing how we humans could have achieved so much without much information available in early stages of history. On extension of this progress, how do you visualise the future is going to be. Curious to read your thoughts.
Overall, I expect the future to be one of accelerating progress—even faster growth than the past. See Chapter 6 and more broadly Part 2
I hear what you’re saying.. I recall an article some years back defining the rate of progress which in a nutshell predicted that our rate of progress in this century will surpass the last century by 2025 - exponential growth.
I have read my fair share of „progress literature“ over the years. I can‘t remember to have read something so well put and in a such a succinct writing style. Thank you! Can‘t wait to read the next chapters.
Love it! Came here via Packy's post. Really poignant start to the series. Looking forward to reading them all.
This was a fantastic survey of technological progress. Very excited for the rest of the book.
One thought: I know it’s not the core of this project but I am interested how to relate this narrative to questions of moral progress: emancipation, abolition, gambling, murder, theft, drug use, marriage, community etc.
In many ways the experience people have in relation to these kinds of moral activities determines the quality of their lives just as much as their material situation, if not more. It also strikes me that the most compelling critiques of this story of technological progress are not ones that questions the facts but ones that reinterpret the facts through some kind of alternative moral lens. So having a position in relation to these moral changes seems important (even if it is only to for the most part to sidestep such questions).
Very crisply written. And I loved your metaphor.
> ...for which thanks are traditionally given to God.
Perhaps - for which thanks are traditionally given to _a_ God
Be content with what we have, while we continue to strive for what we want
This was so pleasing and so uplifting to read!
Unfortunately or may be not (such behavior could bring some benefits from evolutionary point of view), humanity has a tendency to forget and to misjudge the unobserved past. And even the lived struggles of our own past are very easily forgotten and romanticized just because we mix the energy, naivity and optimism of youth with ease of living....
These tendencies extend towards progress and technology and were captured brilliantly by the famous Douglas Adams' take on human attitude towards technology:
"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re between fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. " (Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt)
Recently, Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert tackled similar topic in a very interesting study on "The illusion of moral decline" - the generally perceived notion that moral decline in the society started just sometime around the birth of the person asked. It is very interesting piece and it can be read on Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x) or in Mastroianni's substack (https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-illusion-of-moral-decline)
Once again, great work! I wait for the next chapters impatiently !
Jason, you’ve compiled a great number of past challenges in our history to give us a perspective to look back on, to appreciate how we have it today. It’s worthy to pause for a moment and this is what you’ve allowed us to do here. A common phrase I used to hear from the older generations of my time when I was a lot younger (and I’m a tail end baby boomer) “back in my day, things were like this, and that” (I’ve even used a reinterpretation of that phrase with my own daughter and others) and I (sometimes) would roll my eyes, too occupied with the present, too young to understand. The beauty of history as most of us here would be aware, is knowing what went right and wrong in order to make our future better.
Yes, the amount and degree of progress is indeed amazing. But it also has begotten a staggering level of consumerism that plays a huge role in climate change, and helps create - and holds a mirror to - some grossly misplaced values in modern society in wealthier countries.
I will address climate change in Chapter 5. I will touch on the question of values in Chapter 4.
Here's something from me about consumerism: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/why-consumerism-is-good
I see comments here about the luxury of solving environmental problems and about accelerating or even exponential growth in the future.
A fundamental flaw of this piece and all the reasoning behind it is that it ignores the fact that we have mortgaged the future of the environment and our planet to afford the progress we have today. Much of what you have highlighted is amazing, and we should not reject all technology. What we need to do is reject an economic system with the aim of unlimited growth on a finite planet. Hand-waving responses along the lines of "if we just keep improving technology, we'll be able to reverse climate change at some point" aren't the way. Anyone who enjoys and benefits from all the modern advances we have made (as I do) should be critically examining the social and political context in which those advances are applied, rather than propagating false assumptions of perpetual upward progress.
I disagree, and I'll explain why in future chapters of the book. Stay tuned