You’re a typical American in 1870. You live on a rural farm. If you’re a man, you likely began a lifetime of manual labor as a teen, which will end when you’re disabled or dead. If you’re a woman, you spend your time on labor-intensive housework. If you're Black or any other minority, life is even harder. You’re isolated from the world, with no telephone or postal service. When night falls, you live by candlelight. You defecate in an outhouse. One day, you fall asleep and wake up in 1940. Life is totally different. Your home is "networked" – you have electricity, gas, telephone, water, and sewer connections. You marvel at new forms of entertainment, like the phonograph, radio, and motion picture. The Empire State Building looms over New York, surrounded by other impossibly tall buildings. You might own a car, and if you don’t, you have met people who do. Some of the wealthiest people you encounter have even flown in a plane. These transformations, documented in the economic historian Robert Gordon’s 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, emerged thanks to a "special century" of unusually high economic growth between 1870 and 1970. And it wasn’t just a US story – the industrialized nations experienced dizzying transformations during the early 20th Century.
For most of the history, the world improved at a sluggish pace, if at all. Civilizations rose and fell. Fortunes were amassed and squandered. Almost every person in the world lived in what we would now call extreme poverty. For thousands of years, global wealth – at least our best approximations of it – barely budged. But beginning around 150-200 years ago, everything changed. The world economy suddenly began to grow exponentially. Global life expectancy climbed from less than 30 years to more than 70 years. Literacy, extreme poverty, infant mortality, and even height improved in a similarly dramatic fashion. The story may not be universally positive, nor have the benefits been equally distributed, but by many measures, economic growth and advances in science and technology have changed the way of life for billions of people. What explains this sudden explosion in relative wealth and technological power? What happens if it slows down, or stagnates? And if so, can we do something about it? These are key questions of "progress studies", a nascent self-styled academic field and intellectual movement, which aims to dissect the causes of human progress in order to better advance it. Founded by an influential economist and a billionaire entrepreneur, this community tends to define progress in terms of scientific or technological advancement, and economic growth – and therefore their ideas and beliefs are not without their critics. So, what does the progress studies movement believe, and what do they want to see happen in the future? You may also like: Why the next stage of capitalism is coming Is there such a thing as a 'good' or 'bad' recession? Technology in deep time: How it evolves alongside us One of the first ways to understand the progress studies movement is to understand its fears. Over the past few years, a number of researchers and economists have raised concerns that scientific and technological progress could be slowing down, which they worry will cause economic growth to stagnate. To illustrate this more tangibly, Gordon invites his readers to reflect on the rate of progress between the mid-late 20th Century and 2020s. Imagine after that first nap as a typical American, you had taken a second one in 1940, waking up in the 2020s. Your fridge now has a freezer, and your new microwave lets you reheat your leftovers
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iam just a child but. evil.. brain..
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