Innovation

Ronald Bailey | From the May 2024 issue

"The tragedy of today is that we are the heirs and the beneficiaries of thousands of years of progress and we take it for granted. You wake up in a nice soft bed. You go get fresh milk and orange juice from the fridge. You take a shower under hot running water. You hop on the train or car to work. You take the elevator up to the 40th floor. You earn your living by typing on a computer behind big plate glass windows in an air-conditioned building. You relax in the evening by streaming movies and music or catching up with friends from around the world in your real-time video calls. None of this existed a couple centuries ago. A lot of it didn't exist a few decades ago. And yet it's just so easy to go through your days enjoying all of that without giving a second thought to where it all came from or how, or how challenging it was to bring all of those amazing inventions into the world."

Jason Crawford, founder of the Roots of Progress project, is one of the leaders of a new pro-progress movement that is coalescing in a collection of think tanks, websites, and other intellectual incubators. It celebrates humanity's achievements so far. It judges progress not in technocratic terms but with an eye on outcomes for individual human beings. And it imagines, again in Crawford's words, an "ambitious technological future that we want to live in and are excited to build."

These groups promoting economic growth spurred by scientific, technological, and industrial progress are quite distinct from modern political progressives. Contemporary progressives trace their ideological lineage back to the Progressive movement that arose in American politics around the turn of the 20th century as a response to the consequences of mass urbanization, mass immigration, increasing economic inequality, and rapid industrial growth.

Fundamental then as it is today among modern progressives is their certainty that they know the direction in which "progress" must go and that exercise of government power guided by a technocratic elite is central to achieving their version of "progress." Princeton University historian Thomas C. Leonard observes that early 20th century "progressives believed in a powerful, centralized state, conceiving of government as the best means for promoting the social good and rejecting the individualism of (classical) liberalism." In addition, he says, they believed in "the disinterestedness and incorruptibility of the experts who would run the technocracy they envisioned, and a faith that expertise could not only serve the social good, but also identify it."

A hundred years later, one illustrative distillation of modern progressivism is "The Progressive Promise" manifesto issued by the 101 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. "We believe that government must be the great equalizer of opportunity for everyone," forthrightly states the Promise. "We support bold policies to close the gap between the rich and everyday Americans and ensure our government delivers essential services to every person in this country." They envision "transformational change" that includes "ending poverty and income inequality," and "advancing racial justice and equity in every policy." It is notable that unlike their early 20th century forebears' belief in technological progress and economic growth, this essentially redistributionist manifesto nowhere mentions policies aimed at advocating and promoting either in the 21st century. In their view, uncontrolled economic growth is leading to environmental catastrophe and to appalling social consequences.

The contours of the new progress movement stretch from the Human Progress project at the libertarian Cato Institute to the "eco-modernist" initiatives at the Breakthrough Institute and the Pritzker Innovation Fund. Four relatively new groups at the forefront of the pro-progress forces are The Roots of Progress, the Institute for Progress, The Progress Network, and Works in Progress. Together, they are—as The Progress Network puts it—"building an idea movement that speaks to a better future in a world dominated by voices that suggest a worse one."

There are indeed many voices who say our future is bleak. William Rees, a population ecologist at The University of British Columbia, claimed last year that "collapse is not a problem to be solved, but rather the final stage of a cycle to be endured." Also last year, Stanford University biologist and indefatigable population doomster Paul Ehrlich told 60 Minutes "that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to." A 2022 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences declared that climate change could "result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction." Last year an article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology suggested that........

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