Hey readers,

I think a lot about what makes inventions and discoveries happen. Are they mostly the work of lone geniuses? The product of highly productive universities and research centers? Is funding, public and private, the best way to buy invention, or will it happen at its own idiosyncratic pace no matter how much money you throw at R&D?

These are very difficult questions to answer — difficult enough to answer for any one specific invention, and much harder to answer in full. But there’s a budding new area of research — its practitioners are calling it “progress studies” — that’s dedicated to putting questions like these at the forefront of our thinking and building models of how progress happens.

From mRNA vaccines to cheap solar panels, inventions and discoveries are making the 21st century possible for humanity to live through, often by solving the problems that past inventions and discoveries created (leaded gasoline, after all, was once thought of as progress). Defining progress is an incredibly tricky thing. But I think that doesn’t make it any less worth studying — and in fact is one of the things anyone interested in humanity’s future ought to be focused on.

What studying progress ought to be all about

The progress studies movement is very small — mostly a handful of bloggers and researchers — but it’s one of the more intriguing intellectual movements out there.

Earlier this month, I talked with one of its leading figures, Jason Crawford, the author of a blog called The Roots of Progress that explores the history of important inventions and discoveries. Crawford also just launched a nonprofit by the same name that will expand his historical research and also advocate for the values that, he thinks, drive progress in the world, in the past and now. I’ll be posting a transcript of my conversation with him on the site in the next few days, but in the meantime, I want to talk about my biggest takeaway from our chat.

The “great man” theory of progress says every bit of progress is the work of individual geniuses, moving the world forward while everyone else is mostly irrelevant. That’s one model of progress, and it’s obviously deficient.

Another model is that progress is part of the inevitable march of history, which will happen at its pace regardless of specific societal factors. A lot of conversations about progress seem mostly interested in proposing and rebutting variants of these strains, with an aim of assigning blame or credit — as if the most interesting thing that the history of progress can tell us is whether Jeff Bezos “deserves” to be rich.

But the most important thing the history of progress can tell us is how to make progress happen.

Vaccines, fertilizers, airplanes, assembly lines, pesticides — these things matter because they changed the lives of billions of people. They saved lives, they made food and consumer goods cheaper, they changed the processes that companies use to make and sell things, and, yes, they in some cases poisoned our air and created problems down the road for future generations.

And progress can be political and social as well as technological — bans on child marriage and slavery, and the development of the concepts of secularism and democracy and individual rights, are all kinds of progress warranting close historical study.

It’d be a huge mistake to try to fit the question of how those developments happened — how inevitable they were, what produced the conditions that made them possible, who might have achieved them sooner if only they’d had the opportunity — purely to our favored narrative about how useful Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are. A lot more than narrative is at stake here.

Embracing complexity and interrogating what humanity got right and wrong is really important. What we find in that investigation may very well determine our future. As I’ve written, the world is still very poor and is facing major crises. How do we meet the basic needs of everyone in the world, and do so while preserving the planet for the generations that come after us? The story of progress to this point can help us chart the story of progress in the future.

One of the most consequential moments of recent years was the invention of mRNA vaccines. That happened because of specific people, and also because of an immigration system that allowed them to work in the same room. It happened despite a scientific funding system that was skeptical of the promise of mRNA. It built on earlier discoveries and on manufacturing capacities we didn’t have 20 years ago. To trace even one essential invention back through the many things that had to go right to bring it to life is to get a sense of an entire society, everything it's getting right and everything it’s getting wrong.

The point of building a model of progress is that policymakers would have a better picture of what steps they can take to speed those much-needed inventions and discoveries along. Another side benefit, I hope, is that everyone can clarify our thinking about progress, at least a little.

One big takeaway from my investigation of the degrowth movement was that we had profound disagreements on what conditions produce progress. Degrowthers think capitalism, consumer demand, and prosperity make progress less likely; I think of them as drivers of it. That’s a question of our values, but it’s also a question about how invention actually works — and one it seems important to answer!

When we think about the future, everyone wants it to be better than the present. So we should pay more attention to the question of what produces those changes, what forces ensure they change things for good rather than for worse, and how we can apply those lessons to the present. Expanding the study of progress should help to change that.

—Kelsey Piper, @kelseytuoc

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