Progress studies

Why have standards of living improved and how can we speed up progress?

This profile is tailored towards students studying economics, history, law and sociology, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.

Why is this a pressing problem?

Progress Studies is a fairly new field popularised by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison. It is focused on the question of how successful ‘people, organisations, institutions, policies and cultures’ have previously arisen and how to increase positive progress in the future.

Many advancements in science and technology have significantly improved human wellbeing over the past few centuries. It could be highly valuable to increase our understanding of the factors that led to periods of particularly high innovation throughout history, and to identify current bottlenecks to positive progress and interventions that could speed progress up. 

Current incentive structures in science often do not encourage the most productive research strategies, or take focus away from the questions that are most important from a welfare perspective, so finding ways to improve scientific incentives is one promising avenue.

Economic growth also appears to be a highly effective way of improving human wellbeing and reducing poverty. It could be useful to investigate the causes of economic growth and further explore its relationship with wellbeing. This 80000 Hours podcast interview with Tyler Cowen explores this in more detail.

Although Progress Studies tends to focus most on understanding scientific and technological progress and economic growth, one of the leading figures in the field, Jason Crawford, advocates here for the importance of taking a big-picture perspective that includes moral and social changes when exploring the causes and nature of progress. Because of this broad scope, while this profile focuses on scientific and technological progress and economic growth, our profiles on moral circle expansion, understanding the impact of social movements and improving institutional decision making are also relevant to progress studies.

Contributors: This profile was last updated 9/01/2023. Thanks to Martin Kosik and David Janku for writing this profile. Thanks to Kris Gulati, Anton Howes and Matt Clancy for helpful feedback. All errors remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.