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.
Good comment. You're basically talking about the journey from modernism to postmodernism. As the process accelerated resources were stripped from material, technological, and human progress and pushed towards cultural progress, a fool's errand. One of the ways this has manifested is through the shift of government workers from blue collar to white collar roles. If one excludes nationalised industries and the NHS (which I classify as useful government work, even if it groans from inefficiency), then in 1950 blue collar workers were 30% of the government workforce in the UK and by 2020 this figure had dropped to 12%. Shades of Peter Turchin's Overproduction of Elites.
An alarming figure, given that in order for a society to retain basic functionality around 3% of GDP needs to be devoted to infrastructure.
Apparently, the replication crisis has now hit pharma. Understandable given the incentives and funding structures.
The 1947-1973 period requires a pretty specific understanding of economics and labour market dynamics. Capitalism is optimal when it creates it's own consumer markets. Inward migration to America was basically shut off in the 1920s. The foreign-born population share in America dropped from ~14.7% in 1920 to ~11.6% by 1930, and it was a process which only continued. Tight labour market dynamics create a more optimal distribution system, and they also shift entrepreneurial dynamics from pure expansion to expansion plus productivity focus. When labour is cheap, there is little incentive to innovate processes, or spend vital resources on capital expenditures. Even the average restaurant could benefit hugely in terms of productivity by buying a £20-25K set of top-range ovens, with chefs focusing instead on pan work during peak times.
At the other polar extreme there is the Gilded Age, Belle Époque era, with its unnamed equivalence in Britain and Germany. In these periods, resources accumulate in the hands of the few and living standards drop, especially in relation to housing costs (more important than wages as a source of reduced living standards). In most countries, the labour surpluses were driven by a massive shift from rural to urban, but in America the shift was powered by immigration. During the Gilded Age the foreign-born percentage peaked at 14.8%. Of course, immigration wasn't eliminated completely. By the 30s it had dropped to 150,000 a year. There is great talk at the CUNY Graduate Center between Angus Deaton and Paul Krugman, where Deaton touches upon the low immigration position.
Admittedly, it would be much less of a problem if house building dynamics weren't what they are, but housing is pretty inelastic. Supply chains, skills requirements, and 8 year cyclical shocks all conspire to keep housing supply quite static. I should mention I'm not opposed to migration. I merely maintain that it should be primarily high-skilled and selective.
Anyway, here is an abridged version of Night Mail by W. H. Auden. It really encapsulates the spirit of an age.
I am not convinced that there is a solid theory for explaining the change in attitude, although increasing support for Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies among college-educated professionals in the West plays a key role.
But the key point is that these changes in beliefs do NOT actually affect the rate of material progress unless they are channeled through government policy. It is government policies that are the proximate causes of slower material progress in the West.
And ironically most views of people in the West before the late 1960s were more traditional than modern, so I am not sure a Modernist (or Technohumanist) world view is necessary for material progress to continue.
By modernist, I mean the more traditional pre-to-post-WWII modernism, rather than modernist architectural approaches, for example. In other words, the modernism which preceded postmodernism.
I understood what you meant, but my point is that the modernism of the pre-to-post-WWII era was also quite traditionalist in many ways that differ from current Western culture, including:
1) Very strong nationalism
2) Very strong religious observance, particularly among Protestants
3) Traditional gender roles.
4) Very high rates of marriage, low divorce rates, and high fertility rates.
5) A far more limited social welfare state and the belief that it is a good thing.
And plenty of other attitudes that today would be deemed reactionary by the Left.
There seems to be a 'Quiet Revival' occurring here in the UK, especially amongst young adults. It makes me wonder whether we've reached the nadir. That being said, I seriously doubt it will be enough.
I searched for Foyle's War last night, with a view to finding a cost for upgrading from DVD to digital. Much to my surprise, one of the freeish digital streaming services is starting a rerun of the series on Wednesday. I've programmed it for series link.
The other day I was somewhat amused to hear Victor Davis Hanson heap effusive praise on the series, arguing that Christopher Foyle best embodies the uncompromising British morality of the time.
It might be true. It is certainly plausible, but I am a bit skeptical.
To the extent that cultural pessimism finds its way into government policy that undermines the foundations of material progress, then yes. I wrote about it here:
But if it does not actually lead to a change in public policy, I am skeptical. Today, we seem to have a lot of cultural pessimism along with extremely talented entrepreneurs and engineers. But I am not convinced that cultural pessimism is really having an effect on extremely talented entrepreneurs and engineers outside of more direct effects of bad government policy.
Good piece. Stand out lines for me, "The 19th-century philosophy of progress was naive, perhaps hopelessly so. But the 20th century left us with something worse: fatalism, defeatism, and a hollowed-out vision of the future."
"Progress is not automatic or inevitable. It does not unfold according to a divine plan or cosmic will. It requires choice and effort. Above all, progress requires that we believe in it. Techno-humanism is the foundation for restoring that belief."
It is surprising how far author goes into finding justifications and reasons for what happened in secondary causes and events, while not mentioning the actual, root cause of it all - capitalism (communism/socialism as well). The system that was predicted to fail and it began to do so right away, destroying humanity to this day.
The task of designing the alternative to capitalism is inevitable. We now spent 100 years on capitalism and still not realising it's a completely unfit system. should have listened to Marx when he said it won't work.
The only way to go is spreading the awareness first. The first step, asking - what else if not capitalism? it will be decades, if not 100 years, until it moves to "we should design a new system".
Exactly! No alternative to capitalism has ever been seriously researched. Not socialism/communism, but actually a professionally, scientifically researched and designed system. We have institutions for physics, biology, construction, engineering, and every other science. And all of them make discoveries and move science forward. Except for this one particular branch.
Why there’s no effort to research and design the social economic system to replace capitalism? Why is only this specific science in a standstill?
Not even that, capitalism itself wasn’t ever updated according to all the new knowledge in sociology psychology and social sciences. Why not?
Yet capitalism is always discussed as some kind of final form of human society. That it will work, we just need to implement checks and balances this and that, and every time there’s a new trouble that bypasses all of that. This time it’s mentally ill person. Okay let’s add law to test presidents for mental fitness, so next time.. but we are now thrown back and how many years to get back on track, and whole generation lived and died to have this part of capitalist democracy tested. It’s not a leaky boat analogy, it’s a boat that’s turned over and we’re at the bottom of the sea surviving. We saw the storm and we knew we need a different boat design yet for no reason we didnt do it.
And democracy is similarly assumed as some perfect system. Yet we use electoral democracy designed literally for 100 persons per one representative. In Ancient Greece elected person knew every one personally. And it grew now up to 50,000 citizens per representative or more, and nobody ever asked if that supposed to work. It wasn’t designed for so many, and it shows.
It was designed when everyone knew everyone personally and it was shameful to take bribes. Yet we use that system as it was 2000 years ago assuming it will work.
Sorry but that’s a typical fallacy. We can say with greater confidence that capitalism prevented a lot of progress. With capitalism a person is accepted only if they produce value and value is proportional to value of their occupation. This makes people who would otherwise be interested in sciences to go to business jobs. And even science that we have is corrupted with financial gain interests instigated by capitalism.
There was a natural experiment about this. The Soviet Union had more focus on science than the West, and yet its technological progress was ever increasingly behind the West.
In USSR it wasn’t degraded by profit motives, but by politics and ideology. Research was often funded according to whether it fit Marxist-Leninist dogma or promised military and industrial advantage. That’s why Soviet physics, space science, and mathematics boomed (they aligned with prestige and defense needs), but Soviet biology was crippled for decades by Lysenkoism, a pseudoscientific doctrine enforced by the Party because it flattered ideology about the perfectibility of man and agriculture.
USSR managed to keep up with the U.S. in space, nuclear physics, math because those were state priorities. But the same system left Soviets decades behind in medicine, computing, and basic biology.
Both capitalism and soci/communism treating science as an instrument, not a human pursuit.
I am not comparing to any system. Validity of my argument has nothing to do with existence of an alternative system.
Such response is otherwise called as “false dilemma fallacy”. It is frequent in political and economic debates because defending the existing order then only requires asking for blueprints, not defending outcomes.
If every time it is shut down like that, then we can never get to discussing the improvement isn’t it?
Let’s first agree on the diagnosis, then we can explore cures.
Good essay. A lot of gritty and substantial historical detail.
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.
Good comment. You're basically talking about the journey from modernism to postmodernism. As the process accelerated resources were stripped from material, technological, and human progress and pushed towards cultural progress, a fool's errand. One of the ways this has manifested is through the shift of government workers from blue collar to white collar roles. If one excludes nationalised industries and the NHS (which I classify as useful government work, even if it groans from inefficiency), then in 1950 blue collar workers were 30% of the government workforce in the UK and by 2020 this figure had dropped to 12%. Shades of Peter Turchin's Overproduction of Elites.
An alarming figure, given that in order for a society to retain basic functionality around 3% of GDP needs to be devoted to infrastructure.
Apparently, the replication crisis has now hit pharma. Understandable given the incentives and funding structures.
The 1947-1973 period requires a pretty specific understanding of economics and labour market dynamics. Capitalism is optimal when it creates it's own consumer markets. Inward migration to America was basically shut off in the 1920s. The foreign-born population share in America dropped from ~14.7% in 1920 to ~11.6% by 1930, and it was a process which only continued. Tight labour market dynamics create a more optimal distribution system, and they also shift entrepreneurial dynamics from pure expansion to expansion plus productivity focus. When labour is cheap, there is little incentive to innovate processes, or spend vital resources on capital expenditures. Even the average restaurant could benefit hugely in terms of productivity by buying a £20-25K set of top-range ovens, with chefs focusing instead on pan work during peak times.
At the other polar extreme there is the Gilded Age, Belle Époque era, with its unnamed equivalence in Britain and Germany. In these periods, resources accumulate in the hands of the few and living standards drop, especially in relation to housing costs (more important than wages as a source of reduced living standards). In most countries, the labour surpluses were driven by a massive shift from rural to urban, but in America the shift was powered by immigration. During the Gilded Age the foreign-born percentage peaked at 14.8%. Of course, immigration wasn't eliminated completely. By the 30s it had dropped to 150,000 a year. There is great talk at the CUNY Graduate Center between Angus Deaton and Paul Krugman, where Deaton touches upon the low immigration position.
Admittedly, it would be much less of a problem if house building dynamics weren't what they are, but housing is pretty inelastic. Supply chains, skills requirements, and 8 year cyclical shocks all conspire to keep housing supply quite static. I should mention I'm not opposed to migration. I merely maintain that it should be primarily high-skilled and selective.
Anyway, here is an abridged version of Night Mail by W. H. Auden. It really encapsulates the spirit of an age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EZxJ9Bkoeg&t=40s
Yes, I just had this discussion on this topic with Maarten Boudry on his Stubstack.
https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/the-future-used-to-be-better-33d
I am not convinced that there is a solid theory for explaining the change in attitude, although increasing support for Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies among college-educated professionals in the West plays a key role.
But the key point is that these changes in beliefs do NOT actually affect the rate of material progress unless they are channeled through government policy. It is government policies that are the proximate causes of slower material progress in the West.
And ironically most views of people in the West before the late 1960s were more traditional than modern, so I am not sure a Modernist (or Technohumanist) world view is necessary for material progress to continue.
By modernist, I mean the more traditional pre-to-post-WWII modernism, rather than modernist architectural approaches, for example. In other words, the modernism which preceded postmodernism.
I understood what you meant, but my point is that the modernism of the pre-to-post-WWII era was also quite traditionalist in many ways that differ from current Western culture, including:
1) Very strong nationalism
2) Very strong religious observance, particularly among Protestants
3) Traditional gender roles.
4) Very high rates of marriage, low divorce rates, and high fertility rates.
5) A far more limited social welfare state and the belief that it is a good thing.
And plenty of other attitudes that today would be deemed reactionary by the Left.
There seems to be a 'Quiet Revival' occurring here in the UK, especially amongst young adults. It makes me wonder whether we've reached the nadir. That being said, I seriously doubt it will be enough.
I searched for Foyle's War last night, with a view to finding a cost for upgrading from DVD to digital. Much to my surprise, one of the freeish digital streaming services is starting a rerun of the series on Wednesday. I've programmed it for series link.
The other day I was somewhat amused to hear Victor Davis Hanson heap effusive praise on the series, arguing that Christopher Foyle best embodies the uncompromising British morality of the time.
How about the more moderate position that widespread cultural pessimism acts as a brake or headwind to progress?
It might be true. It is certainly plausible, but I am a bit skeptical.
To the extent that cultural pessimism finds its way into government policy that undermines the foundations of material progress, then yes. I wrote about it here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-the-left-undermines-progress
But if it does not actually lead to a change in public policy, I am skeptical. Today, we seem to have a lot of cultural pessimism along with extremely talented entrepreneurs and engineers. But I am not convinced that cultural pessimism is really having an effect on extremely talented entrepreneurs and engineers outside of more direct effects of bad government policy.
Good piece. Stand out lines for me, "The 19th-century philosophy of progress was naive, perhaps hopelessly so. But the 20th century left us with something worse: fatalism, defeatism, and a hollowed-out vision of the future."
"Progress is not automatic or inevitable. It does not unfold according to a divine plan or cosmic will. It requires choice and effort. Above all, progress requires that we believe in it. Techno-humanism is the foundation for restoring that belief."
Scott/Lippmann’s technocracy → the counterculture’s anti-progress turn makes the present malaise feel historically legible rather than inevitable.
It is surprising how far author goes into finding justifications and reasons for what happened in secondary causes and events, while not mentioning the actual, root cause of it all - capitalism (communism/socialism as well). The system that was predicted to fail and it began to do so right away, destroying humanity to this day.
So you don't like capitalism *or* communism/socialism? What is your preferred social system?
The task of designing the alternative to capitalism is inevitable. We now spent 100 years on capitalism and still not realising it's a completely unfit system. should have listened to Marx when he said it won't work.
The only way to go is spreading the awareness first. The first step, asking - what else if not capitalism? it will be decades, if not 100 years, until it moves to "we should design a new system".
Exactly! No alternative to capitalism has ever been seriously researched. Not socialism/communism, but actually a professionally, scientifically researched and designed system. We have institutions for physics, biology, construction, engineering, and every other science. And all of them make discoveries and move science forward. Except for this one particular branch.
Why there’s no effort to research and design the social economic system to replace capitalism? Why is only this specific science in a standstill?
Not even that, capitalism itself wasn’t ever updated according to all the new knowledge in sociology psychology and social sciences. Why not?
Yet capitalism is always discussed as some kind of final form of human society. That it will work, we just need to implement checks and balances this and that, and every time there’s a new trouble that bypasses all of that. This time it’s mentally ill person. Okay let’s add law to test presidents for mental fitness, so next time.. but we are now thrown back and how many years to get back on track, and whole generation lived and died to have this part of capitalist democracy tested. It’s not a leaky boat analogy, it’s a boat that’s turned over and we’re at the bottom of the sea surviving. We saw the storm and we knew we need a different boat design yet for no reason we didnt do it.
And democracy is similarly assumed as some perfect system. Yet we use electoral democracy designed literally for 100 persons per one representative. In Ancient Greece elected person knew every one personally. And it grew now up to 50,000 citizens per representative or more, and nobody ever asked if that supposed to work. It wasn’t designed for so many, and it shows.
It was designed when everyone knew everyone personally and it was shameful to take bribes. Yet we use that system as it was 2000 years ago assuming it will work.
Except capitalism hasn't failed, despite repeated predictions of its immanent demise.
In fact, capitalism is what produced the progress in the first place.
Sorry but that’s a typical fallacy. We can say with greater confidence that capitalism prevented a lot of progress. With capitalism a person is accepted only if they produce value and value is proportional to value of their occupation. This makes people who would otherwise be interested in sciences to go to business jobs. And even science that we have is corrupted with financial gain interests instigated by capitalism.
There was a natural experiment about this. The Soviet Union had more focus on science than the West, and yet its technological progress was ever increasingly behind the West.
In USSR it wasn’t degraded by profit motives, but by politics and ideology. Research was often funded according to whether it fit Marxist-Leninist dogma or promised military and industrial advantage. That’s why Soviet physics, space science, and mathematics boomed (they aligned with prestige and defense needs), but Soviet biology was crippled for decades by Lysenkoism, a pseudoscientific doctrine enforced by the Party because it flattered ideology about the perfectibility of man and agriculture.
USSR managed to keep up with the U.S. in space, nuclear physics, math because those were state priorities. But the same system left Soviets decades behind in medicine, computing, and basic biology.
Both capitalism and soci/communism treating science as an instrument, not a human pursuit.
Ok, what system are you comparing capitalism to?
I am not comparing to any system. Validity of my argument has nothing to do with existence of an alternative system.
Such response is otherwise called as “false dilemma fallacy”. It is frequent in political and economic debates because defending the existing order then only requires asking for blueprints, not defending outcomes.
If every time it is shut down like that, then we can never get to discussing the improvement isn’t it?
Let’s first agree on the diagnosis, then we can explore cures.
"Progress was possible."
We have to believe it again. We have to be exposed to more stories about the upward trend.