When Economics Professor Tyler Cowen and Stripe founder Patrick Collison proposed the creation of a new field of study, named "Progress Studies", in an article for The Atlantic in 2019 entitled "We Need a New Science of Progress", the world was different.
We were unknowingly about to enter a very dark and twisted couple of years where uncertainty was certain and we feared for both our present and future. We emerged unscathed on average, thanks to emergency measures that combined government permissiveness with private sector leadership, clearing the path to much-needed scientific acceleration. Now that the dust has settled, it leaves us wondering “what if we lived in a world where the usual societal brakes were put on hold for the sake of mankind’s survival?”. Think Operation Warp Speed, but on steroids. How would that come to be? Five years after Cowen and Collison’s article, that was what I went to try to find out in a two-day experimental event in Berkeley, California.
I live in Europe, in Dublin more specifically, and we here are bombarded daily by statistics which tell a story about stagnation, risk aversion, fear mongering, cultural decay, "the vibes are off", the world is going to end and there is nothing we can do about it, basically. But sometimes there is light and I happen to see a tweet that restores my faith in humanity. When I learned about the "“Progress Conference: Toward Abundant Futures” on X, which was being organized by The Roots of Progress Institute, I knew I had to apply for a spot and hope for a good outcome. Thankfully, together with other 150 something high-agency persons who were way more knowledgable and capable than me, I was given the opportunity to participate in what would become two days of intense and productive discussions about how to enable and accelerate human progress in all possible fronts.
Being in San Francisco was an experience in itself. California is an odd state, by all measures, and it can be a shock seeing self-driving Waymos making their way through streets flooded with drug-users in broad daylight. Worth remembering that while dystopian, the former reflects a market success and the latter a governmental failure, which is something you learn pretty quick to distinguish, specially when you are surrounded by self-made tech entrepreneurs. Berkeley, a city 10 miles Northeast of San Francisco, is home to the university where the Manhattan project was first envisioned and where the CRISPR gene editing technology was pioneered. Very fitting then that the conference was hosted at Lighthaven, an unorthodox venue short of a 20-minute walk South from UC Berkeley’s campus.
Opening remarks were delivered by both Roots of Progress Institute's founder and president Jason Crawford, and Harvard psychology Professor Steven Pinker, who brought roughly 20 charts that illustrated that we are likely to be living during the most advanced time in human history. Quite a strikingly different focus than the daily news cycle chooses to concentrate their efforts on. Bad stories sell, unfortunately, and perceptions matter more than we realize. We are creatures of habit and quite tribal, and our biases permeate our thoughts and actions. If abject poverty is the natural state of mankind and it is wealth that is the thing that needs to be created to end it, the same can be said about progress: stagnation is our default state, and progress is the thing that needs to be actively created and nurtured. But how? That is what Progress Studies is for: it is an intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, with the deeper goal of speeding it up.
Throughout the days there were main sessions and “unconference” sessions happening simultaneously all over the venue, which proved to be starting points for conversation and also facilitators of parallel discussions. Some ideas presented are already becoming more mainstream thanks to the efforts of evidence-based studies conducted by individuals who are not afraid to go against the status-quo. You probably heard about the fact that all of our problems have roots on the lack of housing supply, and that we must develop enough state capacity to meet our energy goals without overlooking the need to net-zero emissions. But have you heard about how Texas revolutionized its energy grid by removing the need for expansion-projects to take into account the entire grid-structure? This kind of targeted deregulation illustrates a broader pattern in how the US and Europe diverge in their approach to innovation.
While the US often enables progress through selective regulatory simplification, the EU tends to prioritize “comprehensive” (I am being generous here) frameworks like the AI Act and GDPR that seem designed to protect bureaucrats more than citizens. The results speak for themselves – American permissiveness has given us rapid advances in AI and biotechnology, while Europe's tech sector continues to lag behind, producing endless policy papers but few unicorns. But perhaps the most instructive examples come from smaller nations that have found ways to thread this needle. Estonia's digital transformation shows how a country can move quickly while maintaining high standards, having built a digital citizenship system that is both innovative and secure. Similarly, Singapore's regulatory sandboxes have allowed it to experiment with autonomous vehicles and fintech while maintaining strict overall oversight. These success stories suggest that the path to progress does not require endless committees and impact assessments – it is possible to move fast without breaking things through careful institutional design.
Imagined if all the cookies we needed to worry about were the ones we can eat, drone-delivered to our doors? Expectations are high and Brussels is far away, so if you would like to help us get this continent up to speed in terms of better, more prosperous, living standards and at the frontier of progress, get in touch. Let us shift the vibes and make Europe “progresspilled” by having our own European Institute for Progress. There is a great quote by American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead that goes “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” Now imagine what a great group of thoughtful and committed citizens would be able to accomplish. Let us make the “numbers go up” and leave the idea of degrowth in the past.