Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.

This is raised by Tyler Cowen and Patrick in the article asking for a new science of progress. Progress has historically never been linear: it always happens in sudden bursts. To understand how these progress growth spurts happen would need a diverse set of cooperating disciplines like sociology, psychology, organization design, economics to come together and share knowledge.

Without a shared platform to understand the nature of progress, it would be difficult to design systems and institutions that promote it. Although promoting progress can sometime feel like a promotion of unsustainable, consumer driven growth, it is anything but.

Progress is about more than capitalist consumerism. It is about new scripts (society-is-scripted) and creating idea machines which propogate behaviour models which boost everyone’s quality of life.

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