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Geary Johansen's avatar

Good essay. A lot of gritty and substantial historical detail.

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Michael Magoon's avatar

Why does "Above all, progress requires that we believe in it?" This seems to be the key point of your book, but I am not sure that there is evidence to back up that claim.

I am not sure I buy the argument that if we all believe in progress, it will jump into existence. And if a large portion of society stops believing in progress, the progress stops.

I think that it is more logical to believe that material conditions can cause some people to innovate and generate economic growth, and then, because of those results, a much larger group of people believe in progress. So belief in progress is more the RESULT of progress than the CAUSE of progress.

And your narrative seems to contradict your proposed causality.

In other sections, you claim that the Enlightenment was a period of belief in progress, but that time period had far less economic growth and technological innovation than later periods. So if "progress requires that we believe in it", why the long delay?

You state, for example, that "The change in sentiment after WW1 is stark." But economic growth and technological innovation in Western nations during the 1920s were very strong.

You state that "The World Wars of the 20th century violently shattered those naive illusions." But the period of 1947-1973 was one of the strongest periods of economic growth in Western history. And after 1990, we have seen the strongest global economic growth outside the West in world history.

I am just not convinced that a belief in progress is the cause of progress.

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