Hey readers,

An interesting thing about “progress studies,” a new intellectual movement focused on figuring out why progress happens and how to make it happen faster, is that nearly all their policy proposals strike me as initiatives that would poll at something like 80 percent approval.

We should figure out how to build buildings cheaper and faster? Yeah, definitely! We should invent more stuff so that consumer goods get cheaper and people get richer? For sure! We should make better vaccines and cure more diseases? Sign me up!

The key is that almost everyone thinks we should aim to do those things, but our system seems to stand in the way of actually doing them in any specific case. A key idea of progress studies is that progress isn’t the default in human history — when it isn’t prioritized, it won’t happen.

And the universal popularity of progress ideas in theory butts up against hard limits in practice: Sure, better vaccines sound nice, but can you get a spending bill through Congress that pays for it? Cheaper housing is a popular idea — except when people learn it means developers in their neighborhoods build buildings they might not like the look of.

And sometimes we know what’s broken and want to fix it, but don’t know how. Case in point: Productivity growth seems to have slowed, which is very bad — but you can’t pass a law that says “fix productivity growth.”

All of this was on my mind recently when I talked to Caleb Watney, one of the founders of the new DC think tank Institute for Progress, which is focused on translating ideas from progress studies and related intellectual movements into a format that policymakers can use to solve problems.

Progress studies, Watney told me, “is a more focused and dedicated look at the question of why and how progress happens, and how can we encourage a new set of institutions to increase the pace of progress today?”

Does progress studies make any sense?

A fair criticism, I think, is that the cross-disciplinary questions posed by progress studies are too broad to be answerable.

Maybe building cheaply or halting the rising cost of medicine or accelerating the slowing pace of technological innovation are three problems that don’t really have all that much to do with each other, and there’s little point in building a movement around fixing all of them.

But progress studies advocates point out that in liberal policy circles, the fundamental argument that “abundance and prosperity are good” is a much harder sell than it might seem.

There’s a lot of doubt that growth in itself is good. It’s that doubt that fuels the degrowth movement’s arguments, which say that we should shrink the economy to reduce carbon emissions. And while the movement isn’t politically credible, the vague unease it speaks to is genuinely widespread.

Job creation always polls well, but among the people who set our national conversation, material and economic progress is vaguely unfashionable, and “we should grow the pie” or “everyone should be wealthier” are slightly passé opinions to hold.

And while we need economic redistribution, a focus on redistribution in a world without growth is zero-sum, contentious, and ultimately ugly; our unease makes sense, but it fails to cohere into a policy agenda that would actually work.

Progress studies could achieve a lot just by taking the growth ideals lots of people pay lip service to and making them cool — and by separating out, Watney told me, the argument that growth is important and good from the argument that present-day industry should be unquestioningly backed.

Progress studies is popular in Silicon Valley, which is naturally enthusiastic about the value and promise of tech, and it’s easy to round off to the ideology that the modern economy is working great and the only thing needed is more of what we’re doing already.

“A lot of what we’re saying,” Watney told me, “is that things aren’t working.” Progress studies, then, is less a love letter to Silicon Valley as it stands and more a frustrated cry for it to be something better — and we definitely need that.

Weaving disparate strands together

One of the points of any intellectual movement is to unite lots of disparate threads of concern as part of a single tapestry, and part of the point of any political movement is to unite lots of interest groups as part of the same faction.

Right now, many of the individual efforts to break through the loggerheads in our current system and make construction cheaper, or build massive new vaccine factories, or fix health care, or totally transform how we fund scientific research, tend to run aground in a maze of forces that keep us tied to an unsatisfying status quo.

Those forces have proven intractable to try to fight one by one, as anyone who has followed California’s tortured efforts to accelerate housing or the decadeslong fight for rural internet access can attest to.

So enormous gains could be won by conceptualizing all of those separate fights as planks of a single larger policy agenda, backed not by the generic and nearly universal conviction that progress is probably important but by a specific conception of it.

Progress studies argues that progress is as fragile as it is important. Progress is not the default state of human societies and has been far more the exception than the rule throughout human history; it won’t happen unless there is deliberate and concerted work to make it happen.

And whether or not progress happens is the highest of stakes for humanity’s future. Abundance and material prosperity, Watney said to me, doesn’t simply produce higher incomes and greater comfort; it ideally also “produces moral growth.” A society where housing is cheaper has less homelessness and more compassion for the homeless that remain; one where job growth is strong might be more open to immigrants and more resistant to toxic populism.

We’ll see if progress studies can offer a conviction that replaces generic pro-growth sentiment, or policy prescriptions that get things done. I hope it does, and I plan on watching closely.

—Kelsey Piper

Questions? Comments? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com or find me on Twitter at @kelseytuoc. And if you want to recommend this newsletter to your friends or colleagues, tell them to sign up at vox.com/future-perfect-newsletter.