CONCEPT
Progress Studies
The field proposed by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen in 2019: the systematic, empirical study of how human progress actually happens—what causes it to accelerate or decelerate—on the grounds that this question, among the most consequential in human history, has never been subjected to the serious investigation it requires.
Across the past two centuries, the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement transformed human life more thoroughly than anything in the prior history of the species. And yet, as
Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen observed in their 2019 Atlantic essay, there is no broad field dedicated to understanding how that advancement actually works—what causes it to speed up or slow down, or how it might be deliberately accelerated. We study the outputs of progress in a hundred specialized disciplines. We do not study progress as such. Progress Studies is their proposal to remedy this: to treat the question of how human advancement happens as itself a research question, subject to the same rigor and empirical discipline we apply to chemistry or medicine or economics. The stakes are not academic. Progress, properly understood, is the difference between a world of mass poverty, childhood mortality, and