Why progress is bad

Progress means actively fostering innovation. Within the drone industry, progress has come in the form of regulatory evolution. When regulation drives innovation, then true progress takes place, regardless of the industry. To me, behind progress lurks another word.

Transparency about our ignorance makes the knowledge we communicate more trustworthy and extends a hand to others. Almost universally, people think that their societies and the world are in bad shape.

Is our expectation that the future will be better than the past a helpful one? But if the idea of progress loses its way, we might also lose the spirit of innovation that makes problem-solving possible. Progress is often measured as economic growth only. But limiting the idea of progress to only that act would miss the widespread structural racism that remains unaddressed.

Progress for me is about what actually matters most in life: health, job satisfaction, housing quality, living standards, and real education. Finland, for example, has one of the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world and the highest proportions of workers satisfied with their lives and the flexibility of their jobs. More workers can choose which hours they work in Finland than in any other country. And Finland has greater income equality than the US, and a much lower carbon footprint.

Not surprisingly, its people are happier. James, B. Our leaps forward have brought about a bunch of good things that we have more of, but plenty of attendant bad things we have more of, too—forest fires, floods, droughts.

In August, British Columbia declared a state of emergency as wildfires raged throughout the province, its second such emergency in the last two years. In Vancouver, the local section of the Pacific Ranges vanished into an orange-yellow pallor that washed the sky, the smoke blocking the sun and lowering temperatures.

Further north, the town of Prince George disappeared into black , the day as dark as night. In these places, we have more progress—and also more devastation. For instance, the Industrial Revolution was a leap forward that improved innumerable lives, but it simultaneously made innumerable lives of those who served it miserable; it was also a big step on the road to climate change.

The rise of mass industry and production also represented the rise of the mass burning of fossil fuels, the lead cause of anthropogenic climate change. Climate change is an existential threat, the greatest ever faced by humanity. Its effects, unchecked, will upend our way of life. It will kill many millions of us, and it could also undermine democracy or even lead to its collapse. So what if, instead of adopting progress as an inherently desirable and good thing, we started to figure out what we want and worked backward?

Essentially: what if we made progress the servant of a moral goal, rather than a technological challenge or organizational puzzle? If we do this, we might conclude that we want billions of people to be able to live with comfort and dignity on this planet for hundreds and hundreds of years to come, to co-exist peacefully, and to love their family and friends.

It also requires us to socialize progress as a fundamental human good that ought to be shared, equitably if not equally, by everyone in this generation as well as the next and the next, on down the line. All of this means we must look much farther into the future than we do today. The former means that politicians are always concerned with getting elected. The latter means that humans who make up the free market are always concerned with immediate growth.

That tendency to focus on the short term, the immediate, poses an existential threat. Probably something like 40 to 60 per cent against.

Indeed, the problem with our conception of progress is that we are viewing the phenomenon in a particular place and time—a high-definition snapshot of life today against a grainy image from the past, which captures every detail but hides so much of the story. The progress narrative belies the threats to upend the genuine advances we have made, the proceeds of which we have failed to adequately distribute and the excesses of which we have failed to prevent or curb—and could cost us the whole damned thing.

We fall into this trap of cognitive dissonance: a state in which our thoughts or beliefs are in tension with one another, in which we must confront some paradox or contradiction or absurdity. Full stop. Nowhere does Mokyr make a claim that this superiority in real consumption implies any kind of superiority in virtue, morality, or ethics.

We are shockingly, amazingly, well off on a material basis compared to our ancestors not only years ago even thirty years ago. This despite the fact that the population of the earth is now roughly times higher than it was when the Industrial Revolution started.

So Caradonna has set up a straw man to take down. Fine, he's hardly the first person to do that. What's his real argument, then?

Let me take a stab at summarizing it. After the Industrial Revolution, bad things happened in addition to good things. Caradonna thinks those bad things are particularly bad, and thinks we should give up some of the good things gas-powered cars in order to alleviate the bad things global warming.

I'm with you Prof. Seriously, I'm in for a carbon tax and expanded spending on alternative energy R-and-D. I want to drive around either an electric car, or one powered by hydrogen, or using gas produced by algae that actually pulls CO2 from the atmosphere. But the idea that economic growth - progress - is somehow the enemy of that goal is misguided.