The Roots of Progress Fellowship
I am excited to be dedicating some time to a personal passion of mine: progress. After doing some writing on semis and manufacturing, I accepted a fellowship with the Roots of Progress Institute.
Why progress?
My life is haunted by this chart. In many ways, we live in an age of unparalleled progress. The inventions that brought us the Information Age were unfathomable a hundred years before, and everyday there are new innovations only possible with access to that much information. Moore’s Law marches on.
But few Americans feel like things are better than ever. The cost of essentials, housing, healthcare, and education, is increasingly constraining the quality of life for my generation and younger. My conviction is that reducing the cost of living while maintaining or improving the quality of life will have numerous benefits. The Housing Theory of Everything details how housing alone shapes much of modern life. I want to add two wrinkles: certainty and stress. I am certain I will need housing and healthcare in the future. I am pretty certain housing will be expensive to unattainable, depending on nearness to other people and career opportunities. I am certain my health will decline at some point, though I am uncertain when. I am certain my family’s health will be in jeopardy at some point and they will need my help. I am certain when these things happen, it will be expensive in time, energy, and cash. I can keep going: kids, education, layoffs, pets, “once-in-a-lifetime” events that have become a staple of modern life.
These are normal stresses in life that get amplified when costs for essentials are high. Fixing that chart is the calling of our age. Fixing it will require more stuff, better, faster, and cheaper than how it is done today, starting with housing, healthcare, and education. The good news and the bad news is that it is largely a result of choices. We can change our mind and fix things.
We are not the only players on the board either. Humanity has thrived with the long peace powered by global markets, education, and American military hegemony (be nice to your local DoE weapons scientist). As Americans question their own stability and feel overwhelmed by its stress, authoritarians feel empowered. Authoritarians look to dominate those that would challenge them or simply those that have something they want. Simply, the free people of the world are under pressure to deliver. If I can help, I will.
What are you going to write about?
My interest is in material progress: how do we build stuff better, faster, and cheaper? The next four essays will be meditations on progress as a verb, exploring some of the cultural divides between industry and the public and some of the biggest strategic questions facing material progress here at home. My goal is to contribute towards a culture of progress in America that will deliver that happy future.
Are you writing for a living now?
I expect to keep building things to make my living. This blog is propaganda for the world I want to live in and my understanding of what it will take to get there.
Are you an intellectual now?
I do not think of myself that way. I have met a few of the other fellows, and they are brilliant PhDs, researchers, and journalists much better suited to that title. I started this blog because it forced me to organize my own thoughts, and others found my perspective unique and helpful. I expect to continue in that spirit.
How can I support you?
First, be optimistic about the future. Not in a pollyanna-ish, everything-will-work-itself-out way. It will be OK because we’re going to make it OK.
Second, make it OK. Take progress seriously. We have amazing, straightforward solutions to problems: just look at what we did for textbooks in the chart. For another example of what I mean, check out Ramez Naam on climate change. Solving the US’ issues will not happen overnight, it will not happen without effort, but you will be amazed at how good things can be with the right choices.
Lastly, sign up! I am writing at roblh.substack.com for now, after a slight rebrand to Happy Future Blog, as nobody can spell my last name but they might remember it translates from French as The Happy .
Hmmm, but strong arguments can be made that the amount of people “pulled out of poverty” is far lower than it would be had capital “G” Globalization not occurred at all, and that most people in most all countries are worse off than they otherwise would be, and, in with a cosmic level irony, there is much less international trade than there otherwise would be had the “free trade” deals not occurred. Even within capital “G” Globalization’s own oversimplified terms, such as the global real GDP growth rate which began to decline as our current system went into effective and declined further an further still as it its phases of installation were reached.
if capital "G" Globalization had not come into being around the year 1980, then most people in most countries in the world would be better off because of the demand destruction effects it caused by pursuing concepts such as "planetary divisions of labor," among other things. Additionally, the financialization that occurred sucked investment out of the real economy and had predatory effects on many developing countries. Despite being developing countries, many African nations were effectively plunged into a process of de-industrialization in the 2000s and 2010s. Technology, such as GPS, telecommunications for operations management, port automation, and containerization, is mostly what led to the increases in real trade that we saw during some periods since 1980. Much of the rest was from one-off offshorings, and most of what happened in China would have happened anyway and was also responsible for much of the trade due to its commodities demand. And a big thing is that we ironically have less trade than we would have had we not had this system that gave us all these so called “trade deals” as demand is the final source of trade and all the financialization, national economic de-diversifications, and de-industrializations have lowered the rates of development and, in some cases, actually reduced countries or large areas of countries' states of development which means there much less demand. Also, we have much less scientific and engineering research and development because there are far fewer firms than there otherwise would be, and those firms also exist in a much less competitive market than there otherwise would be.