The Progress movement, akin to the Abundance movement, studies past progress to inform and enable the progress happening in the present. I’m still learning about both, but I also know there are other groups that study progress, including the Libertarian Cato Institute, which runs Human Progress, which puts out some very good articles about progress and what makes it happen. It is a very informative online source. These articles from Big Think, another very good online source for many kinds of information, come from the Roots of Progress Institute’s Progress Conference 2025, held in Berkeley, California, in October.
1 - Why culture may be our most powerful lever for progress
In the first article - Why
culture may be our most powerful lever for progress, Beatrice Erkers argues
that progress begins with culture. She argues that culture often sets up
technological breakthroughs, often by inspiring the right people to ask the
right questions. She sees culture as infrastructure. It is below hard
infrastructure like roads, bridges, and buildings, and soft infrastructure like
laws and institutions.
“Hard infrastructure builds the roads. Soft
infrastructure sets the rules of the road. Culture decides which destinations
are worth visiting.”
She calls culture invisible
infrastructure and defines it as:
“The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which
futures feel plausible and worth pursuing.”
She thinks she sees
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) following this pattern. She invokes
Scientist Michael Nielsen’s idea of hyper-entities, which he defines as “imagined
hypothetical future object[s] or class{es} of object{s},” or as something
that exists in consciousness before it exists in reality. Past examples include
the internet, submarines, and cellphones. Currently, some possible future
examples include AGI, space elevators, Martian settlements, the Singularity,
and universal quantum computers. She sees William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer,
which coined the term “cyberspace” as an example of a hyper-entity.
She argues that the Green
Revolution arose from stated desires to get hungry people fed. She also notes
that not all hyper-entities are benign; some, like bureaucracy (implemented for
better coordination but often backfiring) and our outdated education system,
may amplify inertia rather than a good idea. She comes back to AGI, which she
sees as a powerful hyper-entity of our time.
“It doesn’t exist yet, but the story of AGI already
shapes budgets, regulation, research agendas, and the careers of thousands. It
may never arrive, but for now, the idea itself is acting as cultural
infrastructure, organizing effort across society.”
While hyper-entities are
slow-moving and may exist for decades before becoming real (or not), a smaller
packet of culture, known as the meme, a term coined by biologist Richard
Dawkins in 1976, is easy to transmit as they often come in simple, contagious
forms, such as jokes, slogans, and pictures that spread ideas and influence
others.
Eskers notes that culture
magnifies indiscriminately so that the good and the bad can get amplified
through hyper-entities and memes. She cites irrational public fear of
genetically modified foods and nuclear energy as examples where culture
inhibits progress. She notes that culture can be an unpredictable kind of
infrastructure, akin to weather. It can amplify both fear and hope. She sees
optimism as passive and hope as an active force. She cites the progress
movement, specifically Jason Crawford, founder of the Roots of Progress
Institute, who contrasted different kinds of optimism. He noted that blind
optimism is not a cure for blind pessimism. He noted that complacent optimism,
assuming something will happen automatically, is not as flexible nor durable as
pragmatic optimism, which asserts that we must work in order to achieve the
results.
Interestingly, she notes that
utilizing cultural references often leads to grabbing those close at hand,
which are often bleak. Here, she cites the prevalence of dystopian movies,
books, art, etc., and the lack of hopeful narratives. Regarding AGI, there are
both dystopian and utopian views. She prefers neither, but a hopeful one.
In the final section, Investing
in Culture, she turns to the subject of funding new ideas. She advocates
for funding hopeful narratives, though that seems vague.
“AGI may not exist, but the story of AGI already
mobilizes billions of dollars. That shows how culture lays the groundwork
before a technology ever arrives.”
“The problem is that most of the cultural ground we’ve
laid is dominated by dystopias, and that imbalance won’t correct itself. It
needs deliberate work, not only from institutions and funders, but from all of
us. Culture isn’t just made in conferences or boardrooms. It is shaped in the
stories we tell, the art we share, and the memes we pass along. Everyone
participates.”
“Economic infrastructure is the bridge that carries
culture into the world: from invisible symbols, to soft institutions, to hard
technologies. Culture is unpredictable, double-edged, and too important to
ignore. If we want progress to keep moving, we need to balance our culture of
fear with visions of hope, and then back those visions with the resources they
need to become real.”
This last paragraph reminds
me of Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, who in their essay and book “The
Death of Environmentalism” argued for a politics of possibility instead of a
politics of limitation and grievance.
2 - Physical dynamism and the immigrant’s edge
Afra Wang presented this
topic at the Roots of Progress Institute's Progress Conference 2025. Wang ties
the Progress movement to the Abundance movement, suggesting they are the same.
She posits a societal yearning for “what writer Dan Wang calls “physical
dynamism,” the tangible acceleration of the material world that makes tomorrow
feel radically different from today.”
She mentions several bold
business and engineering initiatives spurred by immigrant entrepreneurs and
technologists.
“Amid all this intellectual diversity, a pattern emerged
that the conference rarely named explicitly: The most audacious physical
dynamism projects are led by first-generation immigrants. Look closely at the
progress movement’s architecture, and you’ll see immigrants everywhere,
including at the foundation.”
She goes on to list some of
these immigrant leaders: Patrick Collison, the Irish immigrant who co-founded
Stripe and launched “progress studies” in an article in the Atlantic with
economist Tyler Cowen in 2019, Heike Larson, who co-founded the Roots of
Progress Institute, and grew up in Germany, and Dan Wang, a Chinese Canadian
mentioned above, and author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the
Future. The article’s author, Afra Wang, is a Chinese immigrant to the U.S.
She notes that immigrants
often bring new and unique perspectives:
“Immigrants not only bring non-American-centric mindsets
and building speed. They carry lived experiences of both progress and collapse,
which breeds a particular kind of vigilance. They see not only what America
could become, but what it risks losing. Many arrived believing in promises
America made to the world, and now they’re trying to hold the country
accountable to those promises, to push it to live up to the dream that brought
them here.”
She also notes what Dan
Wang’s book has revealed about China vs. the U.S. in building and engineering:
that we in the U.S. are overly burdened with regulatory processes and costs.
“It reveals new facts about China, but also articulates
what American builders already feel viscerally: that the U.S. is trapped in
lawyerly procedures while physical dynamism accelerates elsewhere.”
Here she compares the Chinese
and California high-speed rail projects. California has spent $120 billion over
17 years and is still a long way from being complete, while China built a
comparable project in three years for $40 billion. Surely, we can do better.
Permit reform is one sure need. The end result is that America is less dynamic
than China in infrastructure building.
She goes on to talk more
about the conference, attended by many engineers, founders, scientists, and
policymakers, and about the idea of American dynamism. She emphasizes the
American experiment and the idea that America is a flexible and accommodating
idea that immigrants can embrace.
“America cannot reindustrialize without immigrants and
immigration reform. It also cannot do it alone, without borrowing wisdom from
countries like China, Korea, Singapore, etc. I envision a different future: one
where immigrants and transnational talent, people carrying know-how and the
secret formulas across borders, fluent in multiple systems, fuel this dynamism.
Radically pluralistic, ambitious, grounded in the lived experience of people
who urge America grow into something it’s never quite been.”
She praises talks that
pondered the importance of “industrial literacy,” increasing knowledge of how
the world actually works. She also emphasizes the importance of optimism and a
move away from the techno-pessimism that has not been helpful.
“This is a simple yet encouraging belief that progress
is good, necessary, and achievable.”
3 - How Pragmatists and Purists work together to change the
world
The last article is by Jonny
Thomson. He sees activism as a spectrum with purists at one extreme and
pragmatists at the other. I prefer to be a pragmatist without being an
activist, and I certainly don’t see pragmatism as an extreme. He suggests that
when purists and pragmatists work together, activism can be functional and
effective.
“Pragmatists see progress in terms of raw numbers.
Purists see it in terms of an absolute criterion.”
He suggests that pragmatism
is tied to a “consequentialist” philosophy, which means that measurable
incremental gains are acceptable and desirable. Purism, or absolutism, in
contrast, is concerned with strict positions with no compromise on certain
topics. For example, no amount of slavery or marital rape should be acceptable.
Most people can agree with that fairly easily. I would add that the same is not
true for many other debates, such as environmental impact or resource use. We
have to accept some levels of it. He introduces some hypothetical arguments,
including the effects of a piecemeal approach to slavery, for instance, by
banning child slaves and allowing adult slaves. It could have saved many from
suffering, but could also have delayed the full banning of slavery and led to
more suffering, vs. banning it in full earlier. In this case, it would be a
short-term gain but a long-term loss. He says, in that case:
“It isn’t about absolutism vs. consequentialism, but
longtermism vs. presentism.”
I agree that we have a moral
obligation to future people. However, I would counter that it would be
difficult to determine the possible effects of partial vs. full changes, even
in the hypothetical slavery case mentioned above.
Thomson sees purist and
pragmatist activists as potentially complementary.
“The Purist calls out the moral horror. The Pragmatist
makes the change possible.”
I have always thought
something similar, that activism is great for drawing attention to something,
especially a moral outrage or a great injustice. The purists are good for that.
However, in other situations, like environmental impact and climate impact,
there is often no real justification for the paths activists want to take, such
as bans on legitimate economic activity. Here, activists often espouse a
minority position, very loudly.
Thomson cites the bombings of
radical groups in the 1960s as a failure of purists, which made people hate
leftist movements. While that is true, I am not sure I agree that pragmatism
has a tendency to be harmful to those in the future. It certainly could be in
certain situations, but the examples he gave, while suggestive, are not
convincing. I see his point, but I’m not sure if it is a relevant
issue. That said, I believe pragmatism, as a method based on utilitarianism, is
a viable, useful, and very American way of solving problems. Back in February,
I published a post on American Pragmatism.
References:
Why
culture may be our most powerful lever for progress: Before we can build the
future, we have to imagine it. Beatrice Erkers. Big Think. November 19, 2025. Why culture may be our most powerful
lever for progress - Big Think
Physical
dynamism and the immigrant’s edge: At the foundation of America’s progress
movement are immigrants who still believe this country can build. Afra Wang.
Big Think. November 19, 2025. Physical dynamism and the immigrant's
edge - Big Think
How
Pragmatists and Purists work together to change the world: History shows that
progress often depends on activists at both ends of the spectrum. Big Think.
November 19, 2025. How Pragmatists and Purists work
together to change the world - Big Think
No comments:
Post a Comment