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Jason Crawford (The Roots of Progress)

Feb 24, 2020

Jason Crawford studies the history of innovation on his blog The Roots of Progress with detailed case studies on things like the invention of the bicycle, the invention of steel, and how we decided between alternating and direct current. In this conversation, we discuss why my skeptical and argumentative 16-year-old self was misguided about the nature of progress and what Jason has learned through his studies of historical progress. We also discuss possible causes of stagnation in economic growth and scientific discovery, as well as the differences between studying history from a top down vs a bottom up approach.

Check out more from Jason and The Roots of Progress here:

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Show Notes:

  • [01:04] Disabusing my 16-year-old self of some misguided assumptions about the nature of progress – and all the ways in which life is better now for just about everyone than it was in 1700.
  • [10:10] Common arguments against “progress”: zero-sum thinking and Malthusian concerns about population. And, the unexpected developments that change the population calculus.
  • [17:16] Why Jason is skeptical of arguments about “relative happiness” and increasing inequality.
  • [19:27] Behaviorally modern humans have been around for a long time, so why wasn’t there “progress”? What changed that caused us to start inventing things much more quickly?
  • [28:13] Are there broad sociological trends that kickstart progress (like WEIRD psychology and the Catholic Church)?
  • [34:27] Jason prefers to take a bottom-up approach to understanding progress through specific examples of inventions like bicycles, steel, vaccines, etc.
  • [41:02] What about ideas that potentially require several things to go correctly at a time? Do these kinds of ideas resist “tinkering” or are do they have tangible intermediate steps?
  • [45:40] Are we really in a period of scientific and economic stagnation – as argued by Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, Peter Thiel and others? Or, are we just waiting for the next “S Curve” of progress to take off?
  • [53:14] Why hasn’t the increased accessibility to information facilitated by the internet resulted in more progress? What are the negative impacts of things like bureaucratic calcification and institutions that optimize for things like prestige and politics over progress?
  • [01:06:42] Coming soon on The Roots of Progress: Mortality rates and public health improvements, agriculture and the economics of food, and how to build a bridge that doesn’t collapse.

Links and Resources Mentioned