Progress for progressives

The “party of science” must also embrace technology and economic growth

I was invited to speak at the Festival of Progressive Abundance, a conference to rally around “abundance” as a new direction for the political left. This is a writeup of what I said: my message to the left.

Thank you for having me—it’s great to be here. I’m the founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute, and we’re dedicated to building the progress movement.

There’s a lot of overlap between the progress movement and the abundance movement—a lot of shared vision and goals, and a lot of the same people are involved. So I was invited here to talk about progress and how it’s relevant to abundance.

I agreed to come, because I love abundance. I love it as a vision and a goal. And I love it as a direction for the Democratic party and for the political left.

The left styles itself the party of science. That’s good, because abundance needs science, in the long term. But it’s not enough: abundance also needs technology and economic growth.

Technology and growth are historically how we have created the abundance we already enjoy. Abundance, after all, is relative, and we have a lot compared to the past. We should always remember how lucky we are to live today instead of 200 years ago—when homes didn’t have electricity, refrigerators, or toilets; when almost no vaccines existed to protect us from disease; when a room like this would have been lit not with clean electric lights but with smelly, polluting oil lamps; when a gathering like this would in fact have been impossible, because to travel across the country was not a six-hour plane flight, but a six-month trek by horse and wagon, Oregon Trail style.

Just as we have abundance compared with the past, we should hope that the future can be just as abundant, compared to the present. Indeed, the recent book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson opens with a imagined scene from a technologically advanced future: energy from solar, nuclear, and geothermal; desalination using microbial membranes; indoor farms where food is grown with light from LEDs; lab-grown meat; drone deliveries; longevity drugs made in space-based pharmaceutical plants; supersonic passenger jets; artificial intelligence raising everyone’s productivity so we can all enjoy more leisure.

The historic pattern of increasing abundance over time, and the hope and promise of an even more abundant future, is what used to be commonly known as progress.

Progressives used to believe in progress. The old left was not just the party of science—it was a party of science, technology, and growth.

Take Teddy Roosevelt—a progressive if there ever was one. One of the signature achievements of his administration was the Panama Canal. This was a massive engineering project, a triumph of hydraulic engineering technology, celebrated at the time as the 13th Labor of Hercules. When FDR launched the New Deal, one of his signature projects was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which created hydroelectric dams to provide electricity for an entire region. And JFK, of course, is the president who called for putting a man on the Moon—one of the greatest technological achievements not just of its era, but of all time. When JFK gave his famous speech about the Apollo program (the one where he said “we choose to go to the Moon”), he put it in the context of the grand story of human progress. He invoked that narrative to inspire the people and justify his aims.

The Moon landing, in 1969, was a peak moment for America: literally the highest we had ever reached. But after that, something changed.

The children of the ‘60s were starting to see technology and growth as responsible for some of the worst problems of the 20th century, such as environmental damage and the horrors of war. Growth had created pollution and acid rain. Technology had created machine guns, chemical weapons, and the atomic bomb.

But instead of just being anti-pollution and anti-war, the new left decided to become anti-technology and anti-growth. And so a party of science, technology, and growth became just a party of science.

That was a mistake, a costly historical error that we should now correct.

What has 50 years of the anti-growth mindset gotten us? Stagnation and sclerosis. We can’t build anything in this country anymore. We can’t build the homes we need to make our cities affordable. We can’t build the transit we need to make those cities livable. We can’t build energy infrastructure, either generation or the power lines to connect it to the grid.

Without economic growth, we don’t have the engine that raises the standard of living for everyone and helps people lift themselves out of poverty. Without growth, people feel they are playing a zero-sum game—and they turn to exclusion. “No, you can’t move to my neighborhood, it’s too crowded.” “No, you can’t immigrate, you’re going to steal my job.” We want abundance thinking instead: “Yes, move to my neighborhood—we’ll build more homes!” “Yes, immigrate here—there’s so much work to be done, we need all the help we can get.”

I think people have grown weary of the anti-growth mindset, weary of stagnation and sclerosis. So I’m glad to see that abundance is now a politically winning issue. And I would love to see it be a new direction for the left.

But the right is also moving to embrace technology and growth—or rather, they’re doing that with one hand, while fighting those things with the other. On the one hand, they’ve embraced technologies like nuclear power, supersonic flight, and AI. On the other hand: They’re fighting vaccines, one of the greatest technologies ever invented. They’re defunding research into mRNA, one of the most promising genetic engineering techniques. They’ve disrupted research funding broadly. They’ve disrupted immigration, including high-skilled immigration, which is one of our best talent pipelines into R&D. And they’ve put tariffs on everything, which almost any economist will tell you is hurting affordability and slowing growth.

So the right has at best a mixed record on abundance. The left can still be the party of abundance, if it wants to be.

But it won’t be easy. It will be uncomfortable. Because to become the party of abundance requires truly embracing technology and growth—and the left has developed an allergic reaction to those things. So there’s some work to be done: some lessons to be unlearned, some old habits to be broken.

But I’m excited to help with that work, and I invite you to talk to me about it. I’m eager to see the party of science become once again a party of science, technology, and growth. And I look forward to the day when progressives once again believe in progress.

PS: I would also like to see the right become, more consistently, the party of abundance. I would like to see both parties competing to be the party of abundance! At some point I may write up an analogous “message to the right.”