2024 was a big year for me, and an even bigger year for the Roots of Progress Institute (RPI). For one, we became the Roots of Progress Institute (with a nice new logo and website). Here’s what the org and I were up to this year. (My annual “highlights from what I read this year” are towards the end, if you’re looking for that.)
Progress Conference 2024, hosted by RPI together with several great co-presenters, was the highlight of my year, and I think some other people’s too. We’ve already covered it in previous writeups, but in case you’re just tuning in: well over 200 people attended (with hundreds on the waitlist); dozens of great speakers, including Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, and Steven Pinker; and over 30+ participant-led “unconference” sessions on a variety of topics from healthcare to medieval Chinese technology. Several people told us it was the best conference they had ever attended, full stop. (!) See the writeups from Scott Alexander, Noah Smith, Packy McCormick, or Bryan Walsh (Vox), to pick a few.
Most of the talks are now online, and most of the rest will be up soon.
In 2024 we also ran the second cohort of the Roots of Progress Fellowship. Two dozen talented writers completed the program, publishing dozens of essays and almost doubling their audiences. I was thrilled with the talent we attracted to the program this year and excited to see where they’re going to go. See our recent writeup of the program.
In 2024 I published 17 essays (including this one) totaling over 37,000 words. That’s about half of last year, which decline I attribute in part to being involved in the programs mentioned above, and to doing fundraising. Also, about half of those essays, and well over half the words, were for my book-in-progress, The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, and that is some of the hardest writing I’ve done.
Highlights:
In 2024:
In all, I got (if I’m reading the reports correctly) 360k unique views on Substack and another 192k unique page views on the legacy ROP blog.
Also, in July, I launched paid subscriptions on the Substack. I’m up to 113 paid subscribers, and a ~$16k annual revenue run rate. That’s only 0.3% of the free audience, and I’ve only done five paywalled posts so far, so I think there’s a lot of potential here. Paid subscriptions are part of the way I justify my writing and make it self-supporting, so if you like my essays, please subscribe.
Gratitude to Ethan Mollick, Tomas Pueyo, Noah Smith, and Packy McCormick for being my top Substack referrers.
Some of my top posts of the year:
I tried hard to say no to these in 2024, in order to focus on my book, but I did a few. Highlights include:
Events I got the most FOMO from missing included: Bottlenecks, The Curve, and Edge Esmeralda. Maybe next year!
Some highlights from the Progress Forum this year:
In 2023 I did several “what I've been reading” updates. Those were fun to do and were well-received, but they took a lot of time; in 2024 I put both them and the links digest on hold in order to focus on my book. Here are some of the highlights of what I read (read part of, tried to read, etc.) this year.
C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures.” A famous essay arguing that scientific/technical culture and literary/humanities culture are too isolated from and don't take enough of an interest in each other. A few passages I highlighted where he criticizes traditional culture for failing to appreciate the accomplishments of material progress:
In both countries, and indeed all over the West, the first wave of the industrial revolution crept on, without anyone noticing what was happening. It was, of course—or at least it was destined to become, under our own eyes, and in our own time—by far the biggest transformation in society since the discovery of agriculture. In fact, those two revolutions, the agricultural and the industrial-scientific, are the only qualitative changes in social living that men have ever known. But the traditional culture didn’t notice: or when it did notice, didn’t like what it saw.
Almost everywhere, though, intellectual persons didn’t comprehend what was happening. Certainly the writers didn’t. Plenty of them shuddered away, as though the right course for a man of feeling was to contract out; some, like Ruskin and William Morris and Thoreau and Emerson and Lawrence, tried various kinds of fancies which were not in effect more than screams of horror. It is hard to think of a writer of high class who really stretched his imaginative sympathy, who could see at once the hideous back-streets, the smoking chimneys, the internal price—and also the prospects of life that were opening out for the poor, the intimations, up to now unknown except to the lucky, which were just coming within reach of the remaining 99 per cent of his brother men.
Brad Delong, Slouching Toward Utopia. A grand narrative of what Delong calls the “long 20th century”, 1870–2010. Roughly, it's a story of the rise and fall of capitalism, or at least a certain form of it. Delong focuses on the competition between a Hayekian view that believes in the justice of the market, and a Polanyian view that people have rights that are not guaranteed by free markets, such as a stable job and income; with the Keynesian approach being the synthesis. I find much to disagree with in Delong's framing, but I've been learning a lot from the book. I might do a review when I finish it.
Karl Popper, “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject.” Popper argues that epistemology should study knowledge not only as it exists in the heads of certain knowers, but as a product that exists independent of any observer—as is the case in a scientific society where knowledge is written down and codified. While traditional epistemology is interested in “knowledge as a certain kind of belief—justifiable belief, such as belief based upon perception,” in Popper's framing epistemology becomes “the theory of the growth of knowledge. It becomes the theory of problem-solving, or, in other words, of the construction, critical discussion, evaluation, and critical testing, of competing conjectural theories.”
All work in science is work directed towards the growth of objective knowiedge. We are workers who are adding to the growth of objective knowledge as masons work on a cathedral.
Will Durant, “Voltaire and the French Enlightenment,” Chapter 5 of The Story of Philosophy:
Contemporary with one of the greatest of centuries (1694–1778), he was the soul and essence of it. “To name Voltaire,” said Victor Hugo, “is to characterize the entire eighteenth century.” Italy had a Renaissance, and Germany had a Reformation, but France had Voltaire…
What Voltaire sought was a unifying principle by which the whole history of civilization in Europe could be woven on one thread; and he was convinced that this thread was the history of culture. He was resolved that his history should deal not with kings but with movements, forces, and masses; not with nations but with the human race; not with wars but with the march of the human mind.
Voltaire was sceptical of Utopias to be fashioned by human legislators who would create a brand new world out of their imaginations. Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in logic; and when the past is put out through the door it comes in at the window. The problem is to show precisely by what changes we can diminish misery and injustice in the world in which we actually live.
Ted Kaczynski, “Industrial Society and its Future.” As I wrote earlier this year:
Given that Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, was a terrorist who killed university professors and business executives with mail bombs and who lived like a hermit in a shack in the woods of Montana, I expected his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and its Future,” to read like the delirious ravings of a lunatic.
I was wrong. His prose is quite readable, and the manifesto has a clear inner logic. This is a virtue, because it’s plain to see where he is actually right, and where he goes disastrously wrong.
See my mini-review for more.
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone. A detailed, scholarly argument for the thesis that there has been a broad-based decline in all kinds of community participation in the US. I got through part 1, which describes the phenomenon; maybe I'll finish it at some point. I found this interesting for the unique scope that Putnam chose. It would have been easy to pick one narrow trend, such as the decline in fraternal organizations or the PTA, and try to come up with narrow explanations. Looking across so many varied phenomena makes the case that there is something going on at a deeper level.
Vitalik Buterin, “Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is ‘pro-crypto’.” Eminently sensible as usual:
If a politician is pro-crypto, the key question to ask is: are they in it for the right reasons? Do they have a vision of how technology and politics and the economy should go in the 21st century that aligns with yours? Do they have a good positive vision, that goes beyond near-term concerns like "smash the bad other tribe"? If they do, then great: you should support them, and make clear that that's why you are supporting them. If not, then either stay out entirely, or find better forces to align with.
Evidently Vitalik is not impressed with Stand with Crypto.
“Why are there so many unfinished buildings in Africa?” (The Economist). Lack of finance, for one: “people break ground knowing they do not yet have the funds to finish. When they earn a little more money they add more bricks. … Many Africans, in effect, save in concrete.” Weak property rights and flaky or corrupt contractors are a problem too. There are also social reasons: “If you have millions in the bank, people do not see it,” but “when you start building the neighbourhood respects you.”
Stephen Smith, “The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed” (NYT):
The problem with elevators is a microcosm of the challenges of the broader construction industry — from labor to building codes to a sheer lack of political will. These challenges are at the root of a mounting housing crisis that has spread to nearly every part of the country and is damaging our economic productivity and our environment.
Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labor that the construction industry desperately needs. Regulators distrust global best practices and our construction rules are so heavily oriented toward single-family housing that we’ve forgotten the basics of how a city should work.
Similar themes explain everything from our stalled high-speed rail development to why it’s so hard to find someone to fix a toilet or shower. It’s become hard to shake the feeling that America has simply lost the capacity to build things in the real world, outside of an app.
Liyam Chitayat, “Mitochondria Are Alive” (Asimov Press). Fascinating brief opinion piece arguing that “mitochondria are not just organelles, but their own life forms.”
Shyam Sankar, “The Defense Reformation.” A manifesto for reform in the defense industry. One core problem is extreme consolidation: in 1993, there were 53 major defense contractors; today there are 5. Further, most defense contractors were not exclusively defense companies until recently:
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only 6% of defense spending went to defense specialists — so called traditionals. The vast majority of the spend went to companies that had both defense and commercial businesses. Chrysler made cars and missiles. Ford made satellites until 1990. General Mills — the cereal company — made artillery and inertial guidance systems. … But today that 6% has ballooned to 86%.
Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child. Argues that between about 1870 and 1930, society shifted from viewing children primarily as economic assets to viewing them as economically “worthless” but emotionally “priceless.” Very interesting book.
Some articles that used the term “techno-humanism” before I did: Reid Hoffman, “Technology Makes Us More Human” (The Atlantic); Richard Ngo, “Techno-humanism is techno-optimism for the 21st century.” Related, I appreciated Michael Nielsen's thoughtful essay, “How to be a wise optimist about science and technology?”
Some pieces I liked on a contrasting philosophy, accelerationism: Nadia Asparouhova, “‘Accelerationism’ is an overdue corrective to years of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley”; Sam Hammond, “Where is this all heading?” Nadia's piece was kinder to e/acc than I have been, but helped me see it in a more sympathetic light.
A few pieces pushing back on James C. Scott: First, Rachel Laudan, “With the Grain: Against the New Paleo Politics” (The Breakthrough Institute):
It’s time to resist the deceptive lure of a non-agrarian world in some imagined past or future dreamed up by countless elites. Instead, we might look to the story of humanity’s huge strides in using these tiny seeds to create food that sustains the lives of billions of people, that is fairly distributed and freely chosen, and that with its satisfying taste contributes to happiness.
And Paul Seabright, “The Aestheticising Vice” (London Review of Books):
That scientific agriculture has faced unforeseen problems is undeniable, as is the fact that some of these problems (the environmental ones, for instance) are serious. But the achievements of scientific agriculture to be set against them are remarkable. The proportion of the world’s population in grinding poverty is almost certainly lower than it has ever been, though in absolute numbers it is still unacceptably high. Where there have been important areas of systematic failure, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, these owe more to social and institutional disasters that have hurt all farmers alike than to the science of agriculture itself. To equate the problems of scientific agriculture with those of Soviet collectivisation is like saying Stalin and Delia Smith have both had problems with egg dishes.
James Carter, “When the Yellow River Changes Course.” The course of a river is not constant, it changes not only on a geologic timescale but on a human-historical one, over the span of centuries. I first learned this from John McPhee's essay “Atchafalaya” (The New Yorker, reprinted in the book The Control of Nature), which was about the Mississippi; it was fascinating to read a similar story from China.
Samuel Hughes, “The beauty of concrete” (Works in Progress): “Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.”
Alec Stapp and Brian Potter, “Moving Past Environmental Proceduralism” (Asterisk):
In many of the most notable successes, like cleaning up the pesticide DDT or fixing the hole in the ozone layer, what moved the needle were “substantive” standards, which mandated specific outcomes. By contrast, many of the regulatory statutes of the late 60s were “procedural” laws, requiring agencies to follow specific steps before authorizing activities.
On culture: Adam Rubenstein, “I Was a Heretic at The New York Times” (The Atlantic); Michael Clune, “We Asked for It” (The Chronicle of Higher Education).
On the scientific fraud crisis: Derek Lowe, “Fraud, So Much Fraud”; Ben Landau-Taylor, “The Academic Culture of Fraud” (Palladium).
Some early-20th-century historical sources criticizing proress: Samuel Strauss, “Things Are in the Saddle” (1924); and Lewis Mumford, “The Corruption of Liberalism” and “The Passive Barbarian” (both 1940). I quoted from the Mumford pieces in Chapter 4 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto.
In fiction, I enjoyed Hannu Rajaniemi's Darkome. A major biotech company develops a device anyone can wear on their arm that can inject them with mRNA vaccines; the device is online, so whenever a new pathogen is discovered anywhere in the world, everyone can immediately be vaccinated against it. But a community of biohackers refuses to let a big, centralized corporation own their data or inject genetic material into their bodies. The book is sympathetic to both sides, it's not a simplistic anti-corporate story. I also enjoyed the new Neal Stephenson novel, Polostan.
In poetry, I'll highlight James Russell Lowell, “The Present Crisis” (1845). The crisis was slavery in the US, and it became an anthem of the abolitionist movement. I love the strong rhythm and the grand moral and historical perspective.
Finally, some random books on my infinite to-read list:
I'm excited for next year. We're going to reprise the Progress Conference, which will be bigger and better. We'll run at least one more cohort of the fellowship. I'll finish The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, and begin looking for a publisher. And there is more in development, to be announced.
I'm happy to say that thanks to several generous donors, we've already raised more than $1M to support these programs in 2025. We are looking to raise up to $2M total, in case you'd like to help.
I am grateful to all of you—the tens of thousands of you—for deeming my writing worthwhile and granting me your attention. I am grateful to the hundreds who support RPI financially. I am grateful especially to everyone who has written to me to say how much my work means to you, or even to tell me how it has changed the course of your career. Here's to a fabulous 2025—for us, for the progress movement, and for humanity.