How progress creates its own obstacles

Regardless of what the headline says, do you believe that life is better now than ever? Do you believe that life could be so much better in the future if we simply removed the brakes that society has placed on science and technology and enterprise? Do you want to build, build, build a house in a coastal town, a nuclear power startup, or a colony on Mars?

In that case, friend, you are part of the progress movement. And I just got back from a summit of your people.

I spent an interesting two days last weekend conference put on by Roots of Progress Institute in Berkeley, California. Founded and led by author and thinker (and past Future Perfect 50 honoree) Jason Crawford, Roots of Progress aims to build on Crawford’s intellectual foundation. to call “A New Vision of Progress for the Twenty-First Century.” The conference was an opportunity for hundreds of people in the movement to meet, mingle, and plan how to create a future that will likely look like this:

I’m not much of a joiner, which is half because I’ve become a cynical journalist, but I should say up front that I’m very sympathetic to the goals of the progressive movement. I believe – from health to wealth to security to human rights – overall life today is unimaginably better than ever before. (And if you don’t believe me, go read on Our world in data.) I believe that the doomsayers are wrong, and that our future can be better, if we make the political and personal choices to unlock growth. Fitter, happier, more productive — to me that’s a worthy goal for humanity, not just Radiohead song with scary robot voice.

Due in part to its Bay Area orientation, the Progress Movement is sometimes tagged as Sci-fi utopians who focus too much on frontier technological innovation. And while I love a lecture on fusion power as much as the next Star Trek Geek, what I saw at Berkeley was a movement with much broader ambitions than just technical moonshots.

How we can save millions of lives — mostly from the Global South — by Data’s Saloni Dattani (another Future Perfect 50 honoree) The timeline is accelerated For testing new vaccines and drugs. There was Alec Stapp of the Institute for Progress (same here) all excited about how The solar energy revolution is fast approachingAnd how fast can it get. Or is it merely high-tech: inventions and principles that Made cars safer and took Take out the environment Evidence of progress as well.

You don’t have to buy some wild idea – Artificial womb, anyone? – Scientific and economic progress has made human life much better than before on balance and it makes sense to study it. why Progress has happened in the past and how We may make it more likely in the future. Because it doesn’t just happen of its own accord, and it hasn’t for most of human history. As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker said in his opening keynote: “Progress is an abnormal state. It’s not a default.”

A prerequisite for supportive policies that make future progress more likely is the recognition that progress has occurred—that human choices and discoveries have meaningfully improved life and that they can continue to do so. to give A wealth of evidence This is so, who would doubt?

As it turns out, many people.

Progress and its enemies

As fascinating as the discussions of biotech breakthroughs or artificial intelligence policy were, the most important questions raised at the conference were not technical, but psychological. Given clear evidence of past progress in key indicators such as life expectancy or GDP per capita — progress that, for the most part, continues to this day — why so many people Life is definitely getting worse? Why don’t they just read graph?

I don’t think it takes much convincing to see that we are not in an age of optimism. The United States is less than two weeks away from an election largely defined by fear and negativity. Although the US economy, especially compared to the rest of the world, really goodAbout half of Americans rate it as “poor.” Percentage of voters who see the economy as their top concern It was almost as high as it was in 2008 — a year you might think marked the onset of the worst global recession since the Great Depression.

Looking ahead, we seem more fearful and pessimistic. The day before the start of the conference Journal Dr Lancet Planetary Health published a Study which surveyed nearly 16,000 young people in the United States about their attitudes about climate change and found that 62 percent agreed with the statement that “humanity is doomed.” It’s not promising, both on the face of it and for what it means, how the next generation sees its future.

In fact, you could argue that the biggest evidence against the progress narrative is in our heads. The US economy hasn’t really gone down the tube, and we are, in fact, making it Real progress in cutting carbon emissions — but there is no doubt that such measure happiness And Death of despair Worse in the US. If material systems are often always good, why do so many of us refuse to believe it – and are generally so miserable?

Here’s a possibility: It’s my fault.

Am I a badass?

By me, I mean media, the institution to which I have dedicated my professional life. Over and over again during the conference, I heard versions of the following argument: The media’s obsession with negative stories and default ugliness leads people to believe that the world is much worse than it actually is. It got to the point where I just started introducing myself to people with something like, “I’m from the media, and I’m the reason you’re not getting the progress you want.”

To be clear, it doesn’t no True! As my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote in March 2023, the media proves it Clear negative biasThere seems to be got worse. We pay much more attention to short-term downward trends—say, spikes in violent crime during and immediately after the pandemic—than Long-term trends that are positively skewed. We write far more about what people do wrong than what they do right. We can even turn good news into bad news:

Future Perfect was founded in part to counter those trends. This doesn’t mean we put a big happy face on all our coverage; Rather, we try to identify issues that really matter, including significant issues that the media often ignore because they don’t make good headlines (such as the millions of people in the Global South who still die from preventable diseases or the lessons to be learned from our past epidemics. failure). But when it happens we try to recognize and even celebrate progress. It’s still an uphill battle in media as a whole.

But there is one thing that these media critics tend to leave out: Role of audience. I’ve been working in more or less mainstream media for about 25 years, and one of the biggest changes in that time is that we have a much more granular understanding of what our audience responds to. And I can tell you the audience React much more strongly Negative stories and negative headlines do not outweigh the positive ones. And the media, like all businesses, responds to its customers.

This should not come as a surprise. People, and not just members of the media, have one A well-displayed negative bias. Combined with that Recent influences — our tendency to focus too much on new information and events — and you have a population that is highly sensitive to recent changes that could be construed as negative.

That provides another reason why the progress movement is so hard to believe in for so many people: progress itself.

Progress creates its own counterforce

Here’s how the world economy has grown over the past 2,000 years:

But if you look only at the last 10 years, you see a much less steep line. And that’s the problem. Humans, as Pinker said in his lecture, are much more sensitive to the slope of change than we are to the absolute level — that is, our emotions respond to our perception of what has recently changed. We are not naturally long-term thinkers, either forward or backward.

This means that as progress has increased our general standard of living — lengthened our lives, made us richer, reduced the violence that was an ever-present part of human life — it has also raised barriers to itself. And the higher that bar, the more the low-hanging fruit of progress is plucked and the harder it is to meet that bar.

As with many other things, you can see the process moving quickly in China. Thanks for the regular parts Double-digit magnitude of growth In the decades following economic liberalization — along with recent memories completely destitute – The population of China was not so long ago One of the most optimistic in the world. They experienced life getting better and they expected it to keep getting better.

But recently, as economic growth has slowed, so have the Chinese A recent paper put it this way“From Optimism to Pessimism.” The percentage expressing a pessimistic view of their economic prospects in the future five years rose from 4.4 percent between 2004 and 2014 to 16.6 percent in 2023. Compared to their grandparents, anyone in China today is almost certainly better off, at least economically. But as those improvements plateaued, public expectations soured.

To put it in Silicon Valley terms that many progress conference attendees will be familiar with: The flywheel is broken. Progress improves life, which leads to raised expectations that are more difficult to meet for progress. This helps make people pessimistic, which can make them question whether progress is happening at all. Worse, that pessimism undermines the kind of optimism about the future that you need to lay the groundwork for further progress.

It will not be easy to solve, especially when you consider the means divisive politics And The landmine of veto points What makes transformative change so hard to achieve is embedded in our political system. But I couldn’t at least be movement-aligned if I didn’t have some hope for a better future. The effort to better understand how progress has occurred is the first step to making it fully real again.

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