I tend to be fairly quantitative, and skeptical of any and all "ism's" and aware that the problem with most frameworks is in the construction not their application.
So what does that mean in the context of progress, humanism and agency. Well it means you throw out the humanism. Progress collapses into the expansion of human agency. The expansion of human agency is actually enabled by women's rights, public health and nutrition. Tough to have agency without first giving half the population rights and some power over their bodies, and then tough to have agency without clean drinking water and basic health care and food.
Turns out that despite the wonderful inflection in wealth in the 1850's -- by 1970 1 out of every 2 people in the world still lived in extreme poverty which meant they were malnourished and physically stunted. So in terms of progress there are 2 great inflections - the 1850's and then the inflection in the 1970's when we started the march from 50 pct of humanity being in abject poverty to the current roughly 10 pct.
This is all a simple redux of Hans Rosling / Factfulness / Gapminder.
In terms of human progress, the process of eliminating abject poverty, such that humans can develop in a fashion that they have not been abused and are able to exercise agency -- well that's the base condition we are trying to get more and more of the world to. And as humans are able to exercise constructive agency, it seems they tend to cooperate and do amazing things. (This positive assumption of the nature of humanity is an interesting one because a lot of people who seem good because they want to do good things for other are actually impelled to do good because they think their fellow man is basically bad and they need to offset that - which is really weird).
But back to progress and agency - which are really just different sides of the same coin. I would say that progress is always and everywhere the result of expanded human agency. That is all it is and where it comes from. It's just that enabling agency requires trust and historically trust has been hard because most people have been malnourished and living in awful circumstances and they had the capacity to lash our. This is the old scarcity model of economics and allocating resources and the sort of prisoner's dilemma basis of game theory and philosophy. Note that this simple framework for agency also offers another possible simple metric for progress as counting when and where people are playing win-win games or designing win-win growth oriented systems versus win-lose or redistributive or punishment based systems. The cultural evolution is from playing win-lose games to win-win games and this is actually much easier to survey than it is to even begin to define enlightment and humanism which are hopeful concepts but logically leaky as all hell.
Getting back to Rosling, the problem of human progress is now moved from how do we get the population out of abject poverty so that constructive agency can even be discussed to how to we expand their capacity for agency by increasing their effective wealth. This is where I really think Gapminder's Dollar Street is a great resource. Gapminder categorizes extreme poverty as income level 1, and those who are just above that as income level 2. Folks in level 2 income level live in a structure with a door and may have shoes and a bicycle and some basic appliances - but no motor vehicles or other fancy stuff. This is where the 40% of the global population that escaped level one in the last 50 years sits now. So the issue of progress isn't "humanistic" - but the work to enable these billions of people to live better and pursue their goals.
And this is where we go back to what happened between 1970 and 2020 that got so many out of extreme poverty. Yasheng Huang in Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics basically captured it -- the Chinese government innovated by governing less. The key innovation the Chinese government introduced which may have created more wealth than any other was something no one really talks about. Huang expressed it as ensuring the corporal security of the entrepreneur -- or, they stopped executing people for entrepreneurship. This shift accompanied the liftoff in Chinese growth, and preceded any sort of real property rights -- and note that property rights in china remain contingent to this day, so the whole idea of needing property rights or other things we are taught matter in the western economics is a little questionable.
So the Chinese experience of addressing extreme poverty, or going from China having produced the most poverty in the world to it being able to reduce poverty by an unprecedented amount, may be seen as having been achieved by the government choosing to stop aggressively and deliberately limiting human agency. I think most people have missed this important but fundamental lesson about progress, agency and governance from the Chinese development process.
So Rosling, Gapminder and the basic income and health stats as documented in Factfulness clearly address that despite the human psychological biases to see problems, we are making amazing progress. That progress can be measured in many ways but the best simple way may be by looking at where the global population is across Gapminder's four income tiers, which are illustrated in Dollar Street. The key to our amazing progress in recent history was strangely enough the decision of the government of the world's most populous nation to allow a small degree of human agency, and that government still has the capacity to enable further advances in human progress by making further steps in allowing the agency of its people. Most people in government's actually don't believe that their fellow citizens are good, and that is why they go into government and seek to limit the agency of their peers -- this instinct which is rooted in the same psychology which fails to see human progress is also the key limit to human agency and human progress.
Human progress first saw an inflection point in the accumulation of wealth and knowledge that began in the 1850's and I would argue another inflection point has been the liftoff of getting 9/10ths of the human population out of abject poverty. The next key step in human progress will be how we get the majority of humanity to the point of having the wealth and resources for effective agency?
Economically, the best proxy we have for effective agency is involvement and participation in a consumer economy. So we currently have about 3 billion people on the planet with enough money to be consumers and really only 1 billion with most of those resources (income tiers 3 and 4 in the gapminder framework). But you've got another 3 billion who have lift off and are on their way. Their governments will try to stop them in different ways - so the traditional development of domestic institutions, etc. "narrow path" described by Acemoglu is unlikely to accomodate these folks. And then there is a fundamental capacity problem for everything if we try to imagine doubling number of consumers in the world from 3 billion to 6 billion in the next 20 years.
Solving this problem will require creativity and the application of human agency on a scale we haven't seen before. The alternative is human misery. And that is all in the numbers and doesn't require any "isms"....
I’ve said that we need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. This implies that the world needs, not just progress studies, but a progress movement: the advocacy of a set of ideas.
What are those ideas?
I see three premises at the core of this movement: progress, humanism, and agency.
Progress as a historical fact
The starting point and motivation for progress studies is the historical fact of the enormous improvements in material living standards in the last ~200 years. This observation is so generally acknowledged and incontrovertible that Deirdre McCloskey calls it “the Great Fact.” Everyone in the progress community looks back on the last few centuries and concludes that, no matter how we interpret or caveat it, something obviously went very right.
A sharply contrasting position is declinism: the idea that that world is getting worse. A declinist might think that the benefits of energy are not worth the costs of pollution, that the value of cars does not redeem their role in accidents or congestion, and that the pleasures of social media are outweighed by its psychological and social harms. Perhaps even hunter-gatherers were better off than us moderns, and agriculture was a mistake. (Some won’t go this far, but express agnosticism on the question, or are simply indifferent to material progress, greeting it with a shrug.)
But if progress is real and important—how do we judge this? How do we justify that improvements to material living standards are good? That technological and industrial progress represents true progress for humanity?
Humanism as the standard of value
Humanism says that the good is that which helps us lead better lives: longer, healthier, happier lives; lives of more choice and opportunity; lives in which we can thrive and flourish. This is the standard proposed, for instance, by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now.
To be clear, this need not mean simply satisfying our base material needs, such as full bellies and warm beds. It can encompass everything that makes life worth living, including psychological needs such as excitement, adventure, romance, beauty, knowledge, exploration, and human connection.
Opposition to humanism often comes from some form of romanticism. One form is the romanticization of nature: nature as a loving, protective “mother”; or a “natural” lifestyle as clean, safe, and healthy. Another is the romanticization of the past, of “simpler” times or of lost traditions. Thus progress is criticized from the left because it encroaches on the environment, and from the right because it represents modern “materialism” and “decadence.”
Humanism says that when improving human life requires altering the environment, humanity takes moral precedence over nature; when it requires overturning tradition, life today and in the future takes moral precedence over the legacy of the past.
A belief in human agency
Agency is the belief that our future is shaped by our choices and actions. We have a large degree of control over our destiny. Thus, continued progress is possible, but not guaranteed.
I deliberately choose “agency” instead of “optimism,” for clarity. “Optimism” can mean different things. Prescriptive optimism is a philosophical attitude that orients us towards confident action. Descriptive optimism is a prediction about where things are headed—which is contingent on the facts of any given case. If these two forms of optimism are conflated, it can cause confidence to slip into complacency. I think this is why some progress writers, such as Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling, resist the label of “optimist.” Rosling called himself a “possibilist;” I have proposed “solutionist.”
The opposite of agency is fatalism. Fatalism takes many forms. One is the belief that we are unable to comprehend complex systems or to control them; that tinkering with them will inevitably create unintended consequences and is therefore too dangerous to be attempted. Another is the idea that progress depends on limited natural resources, and that as these resources run out, progress will unavoidably stall. A common error that many forms of fatalism make is to assume that no new breakthroughs in science or technology will be made, simply because we do not see them coming and cannot give evidence for when they will arrive. In any form, fatalism sees progress as a fluke of history: we had a good run, it was fun while it lasted, but now we need to get used to lower growth rates, trending to zero or even negative.
Progress is messy; solving problems often creates new ones. To believe in human agency is not to deny this, but to believe that the new problems are often better ones to have, and that those problems can be solved in turn.
My identification of these three core ideas is partly descriptive and partly prescriptive. I think these concepts will strongly resonate with most of my readers, but I have chosen and formulated them according to my own beliefs, in a way that I think will form an intellectual basis for a progress movement.
All this leaves a lot of room for discussion, disagreement, and debate, not only of the consequences of these ideas, but even of their definition and interpretation. How much of the last 200 years has been good, exactly? What about war, pollution, inequality? What constitutes human well-being? People desire many things; which of the their desires are legitimate, healthy, valuable? Should we attempt to aggregate well-being (as in utilitarianism); and if not, how do we navigate conflicts between individual interests? Should we include the well-being of animals in our standard? How much control do we have, and how do we manage risks—such as the risks of tinkering with complex systems? These are important questions that I hope we’ll have healthy debates about.
I’ve deliberately left out any explicitly political premises. The progress community includes a variety of political opinions, from libertarians to progressives. Just recently, we’ve had Eli Dourado emphasizing the role of regulations in slowing growth; a the Innovation Frontier Project proposing increased federal spending on R&D in geothermal energy; and Ezra Klein advocating increased economic growth so that there’s more to redistribute to the poor. I would like the concepts of progress, humanism, and agency to serve as common ground from which we can have productive debates. With a shared goal, we can examine what policies and principles actually achieve that goal, and everyone can try to prove their case with history, economics, ethics, and logic.
When Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison coined the term “progress studies,” they called for a “broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress” and “targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.” I framed the issue as: “if progress is a moral imperative, it is also a moral imperative to understand its causes, so that we can protect them and reinforce them. We need to ask three questions: How did we get here? … Why did it take so long? … How do we keep it going?”
I think the three ideas I’ve outlined are necessary and sufficient to motivate such an endeavor. Declinism, romanticism, or fatalism would defeat that motivation. But a belief in progress, humanism, and agency entail it.