What does progress look like? (And how can we make it happen?)

Brad DeLong, author of the new book Slouching Towards Utopia, was interviewed in a Big Think Expert Roundtable about what progress looks like. He provided his answers in his newsletter, Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality. It’s subscription only, but he’s given us permission to share it with you here.

How do you define progress?

Three elements:

First, getting out from under the hammer of necessity, which for most of human history has been the Harrow of Malthus: A world in which you see half your babies die, your life expectancy is 25, you go to bed hungry lots of the time, and much of your planning has to be simply, “How do I keep this biological machine going for one day?” Progress is getting away from that: acquiring power to manipulate nature, and power to successfully, and politely, and peacefully organize humans to actually get things done. Progress is [the] power to escape from the kingdom of necessity, and enter the kingdom of freedom.

Second, progress has to be relatively egalitarian. An élite of thugs with spears assisted by tame accountants, propagandists, and bureaucrats running a force-and-fraud exploitation-extraction-and-domination grift régime does not become “progress” when you add laser weapons to it. Ming the Merciless, Emperor of Mongo, is not what we are looking for.

And third, there’s the question of actually using your power to manipulate nature and figure out how to organize ourselves, so we can actually have a sophisticated functioning, hence highly productive division of the labor, figuring out what we then want to do, in order that we live lives worth living.

What are the essential elements required for progress to happen?

Technological power—plus what humans want in terms of reward and respect, so that we can organize ourselves in what Charlie from Trier said the goal was: “a free society of associated producers.” People not only need to have material stuff and social powers to achieve their purposes, they also need to feel that they are respected, and even more they need to feel that they’re making a contribution. Those three elements have to be built on top of technological competence and excellence. As for the utilization of technological power, you have got to say: “Let 100 flowers bloom.” Progress will be when people can thoughtfully let their best selves choose what the goals they wish to accomplish in their lives are.

What would a “progress agenda” look like? What changes are required in how we approach our most significant problems?

Much more attention to the downsides of technology. Winston Churchill, writing after World War I, looking backward, noted how the people like him who had marveled at all the technological inventions of 1870 to 1914 had not fully realized what that meant for how destructive war would be. And Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty: the person in charge of procuring the guns with the 15-inch barrels that throw multi-ton shells 15 miles where they then go boom. Where our technology is taking us, and how we need to form it in such a way that it empowers people rather than bureaucracies and the... I don’t want to say remnants, but the functioning force-and-fraud exploitation, extraction, and domination machine, the thugs with spears with their tame accountants, propagandists, and bureaucrats. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, Steve Jobs and company’s 1984 Macintosh commercial. Technology in the service of the individual human mind, rather than technology in terms of the inhuman systems that dominate us all.

What do you see as some of the most significant barriers to progress right now?

We are jumped-up East African Plains Apes, with brains barely competent to figure out where we left the keys in the morning. To ask us to think deeply and well about how to organize an 8 billion-node anthology intelligence for collective progress and human betterment is well beyond us. The barriers are our fear and contempt, for when we get ourselves in a good place and recognize that we might well have been the people on the other side of the globe who have big problems then we can pull out an enormous altruistic, charitable effort to help people far away who we never knew and never will know. We have been growing this moral sense for quite a long time. It is a very good sense to grow.

What are the easiest opportunities for progress in your opinion? What are the areas in which a few critical interventions or changes could unlock a disproportionate amount of progress?

The government should be funding a lot more research and development. Michael Kremer’s ideas about big prizes for actually accomplishing missions. The market is a very nice mercenary institution in its place. But there is absolutely no way that it can generate the right kind and right amount of science and technological development. Science is an absolutely wonderful fiduciary institution, as Michael Polanyi would have put it, but it generates knowledge that’s relatively abstract: the kinds of knowledge that a person or a team can discover, and then get enormous reputation credit for. There’s this space in the middle of developing useful technologies and figuring [out] how to apply them. It requires the public spirit and the enthusiasm about deploying and disseminating it of the scientist, but also the focus on the bottom line and “let’s make this actually work cheaply at scale” that the market-driven corporation can achieve. So we really need something in the middle: something that marries the Cathedral and the Bazaar.

And conversely, what do you see as the most important places we need to make progress (even if it’s going to be more difficult)?

We have managed to successfully transfer public health technology all around the globe. Pretty much everyone’s life expectancy at birth now is 70 or more, but the world is still extraordinarily, astonishingly unequal: there are still 500 million of our brothers and sisters who live at less than $3 a day in real terms. And, even in the United States, greater San Francisco is four times as rich as rural Mississippi.

Figuring out how to do for the ability to productively contribute to the global division of social labor what we figured out how to do in spreading public health technologies around the world successfully—that is job one. Job two is to push ahead the technological frontier. And, of course, then there are jobs three and jobs four: keep nuclear weapons from blowing us up, and keep global warming from cooking the planet, probably by causing someone to use nuclear weapons.

The fact that the monsoon is 200 miles south of where it ought to be this year, with consequences that are not fun—that is not a canary in the coal mine. It’s a giant awk that’s screeching at maximum volume.

People seem to be more pessimistic about the potential for progress moving forward than they have been in the past. Do you think that’s true and if so, why?

No. There are now 8 billion of us. We’re better educated than before. We can better communicate than before. We have been a successful anthology intelligence since we learned to speak at various scales. At bigger scale, we should be more powerful and competent.

One argument is that we’ve finally reached the scale beyond which the anthology intelligence that is the human group can function, that our global anthology intelligence human mind is going insane. And if humanity is best thought of as a global anthology intelligence, it is a very, very loosely wrapped one. It is not tightly wrapped at all.

But communication is on our side. It is much harder now for fights among friends and neighbors to end in deadly violence, than it is if you were say, in the Highlands of Scotland where you rarely see strangers, in which case it’s very easy to divide people into clan members to be helped and assisted, clan enemies to be killed, and strangers to be simply robbed. It ought to be harder and harder to do this. It ought to require more and more effort on the part of those who are performing the ethno-nationalist grift: “I’m going to get some kind of power by persuading you that people who look slightly different than you, who live in a slightly different place than you, or who, God forbid, want to major in lesbian dance therapy, are your enemies, and you need me to figure out how you can efficiently and effectively kill them, or at least keep them down.”

That is becoming a harder and harder thing to do as communication becomes better and better. But that’s just a hope.

The arc of the universe does not tend in any direction at all, except possibly to heat death followed by random Boltzmann brains due to quantum fluctuations.

How can we work to ensure that progress benefits everyone?

Adopt the hard utilitarian mindset: The greatest good of the greatest number, with a strong recognition of how fast the marginal utility of wealth declines. Trust in human agency—in technologies that get people the information and then ask them to take action, as opposed to technologies to force people to do what some planner at the top has decided. We need gardeners and fertilizers, not bosses and commanders. That is where we’re trying to guide our technologies. Authoritarian state surveillance capitalism, no matter how many utopian and egalitarian aspirations it has, is probably not the right place to go.

Are you optimistic about the future?

As I person, I am generally happy. I don’t know whether I’m optimistic. When people ask me if I am, I reach either for Gramsci or for Camus. Even if you have pessimism of the intellect, you aren’t going to get anything done if you do not have optimism of the will. Depression is a biological mechanism to make you move a little while you heal. That’s not the right response to anything today. Camus’s line is: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” That is deliberately ambiguous. Is it the logic of the situation that compels us, when we consider it fully, to realize that it is impossible for a rational being to think that Sisyphus is anything but happy? Or is it that if we do not think Sisyphus is happy then we cannot live, and so we go kill ourself today? That ambiguity is an important thing to register.