Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All

By Michael Magoon

In the second book of the From Poverty to Progress series, Michael Magoon shifts from explaining the causes of modern progress to how we can use that knowledge to create a better world. Magoon argues that current government policies are gradually undermining the foundations of progress and that we must replace them with pro-progress pol

• Language: English
• Publisher: Upward Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958206072

Book preview

Book Series

This book is the second in the From Poverty to Progress series about history, material progress, technological innovation, economic growth and policy reforms. Each book in the series has a specific focus, but they all have a common perspective.

Published Books

From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement

Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All

Forthcoming

Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda to Uplift the Working Class and Poor

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Praise for This Book Series

Progress is not a matter of optimism; it’s an empirical fact of history, obscured by seeing the world through headlines rather than data. And it is not a natural process but the effect of distinctive technological and political circumstances. Magoon has made a valuable contribution in adding to our understanding of the facts and causes of the most important development in human history.

Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now.

The concept of progress is perhaps the most important human idea. Michael Magoon’s new book gives an excellent account of the origins of progress, its root causes, as well policies for how we can keep it going. It will change your thinking about progress and its relevance to your life.

Tyler Cowen, author of Stubborn Attachments and The Great Stagnation; Named by The Economist in 2011 as one of the top 36 most influential economists of the decade.

In his book, Michael Magoon documents and explains the amazing progress of our time. Magoon’s concept of the ‘Five Keys to Progress’ gives us a powerful new perspective on the historical causes of progress, how wealthy nations can keep it going and how developing nations can enjoy greater progress… A good read!

Johan Norberg, author of Progress and Open: The Story of Human Progress,

The Economist’s Book of the Year, 2021

In an Age of Despondency, this book's deep faith in progress is like a breath of fresh and hopeful air. May Magoon be right.

Joel Mokyr, author of A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy and The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850

"Michael Magoon’s From Poverty to Progress is the kind of book that is increasingly rare in this age of academic hyper-specialization: a study of material progress from a perspective that is at once global, historical, and evolutionary. Bursting with a wealth of hard data and cogently argued, Magoon shows how modern technology has lifted humanity out of poverty, conquered famine, and brought longer and happier lives to hundreds of millions.

A significant contribution to the understanding of modern society."

Richard L. Currier, author of Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human

"At a time when many people believe the world is going to hell, Michael Magoon shatters conventional wisdom. Using historical and empirical information he shows that things are actually getting better across the globe.

Magoon introduces a provocative new theory explaining why previous generations were trapped in a grinding poverty and how humanity created wide-spread progress for the masses. He shows why those interested in progress and technological innovation need to replace their narrow focus on today’s bleeding-edge technology with a broader historical perspective.

This book offers a tantalizing bit of optimism at a time when everyone needs some hope."

Darrell West – VP Center for Technology Innovation

Brookings Institute

This book introduces a promising new thinker in the field of history and its effects on today’s world. His emphasis on the power of diversity to drive innovation is an important addition to our understanding of why Europe rose to prominence and how it affected the rest of the world. Magoon not only shows why progress took place in Europe; he shows why it is possible in any society that lays the right foundations.

Jack A. Goldstone, author of Why Europe?: the Rise of the West in World History 1500-1850

This book offers a radical challenge to the current––and very pessimistic––academic interpretation of history. It stresses the importance of technology, cooperation, and competition and the primacy of Western civilization in raising the living standards of the majority of humankind. All readers, whether they agree or not, will find it a refreshingly new perspective on history.

Daniel R. Headrick, author of Technology: A World History

The world is a complicated place. But a handful of basic principles help make sense of it and reveal the road to progress. In this book Magoon does much to identify the wellsprings of material progress. I recommend it -- especially to those who have begun to doubt the possibility of progress.

Jan de Vries, author of First Modern Economy

Magoon’s call for hope in the world should make us all appreciate what we have inherited from our shared human past. With that hope, we could share an even more promising future.

Peter Bellwood, author of First Farmers and First Migrants

"We tend to forget that technological change has vastly improved our standards of living over the course of history and dwell upon the losing end of innovation. Against this background, Magoon’s rich narrative offers a compelling reminder of how societies have prospered by elevating the successful to models worthy of emulation.

Highly recommended."

Stelios Michalopoulos, author of Ethnic Inequality

"A fascinating addition to our understanding of the connection between long-term history and economic development. Michael Magoon forcefully reminds us of the progress made by humankind. Backed by a wealth of facts and data, he delves deep into the ingredients that enabled societies to achieve this.

Highly recommended."

Areendam Chanda, author of Early Starts, Reversals and Catchup in the Process of Economic Development.

Introduction

The last 30 years have seen by far the greatest material progress in human history. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, dozens of nations have moved from desperate poverty into middle-income status, and billions of people have been elevated out of poverty. Even Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced real material progress during this period.

As I documented in the first book in this series, From Poverty to Progress, this progress can be measured across dozens of different domains: economic growth, declining poverty, increasing life spans, declining infant mortality, improved sanitation, increasing literacy, longer schooling, declining slums, increasing nutrition, a decline in wars and violent conflicts, and increasing happiness. These trends are seen in the vast majority of nations throughout the world.

Despite this progress, those who enjoy the greatest benefits of that progress are anxious and worried about the future. Over the last ten years in wealthy Western nations, there has been a noticeable increase in pessimism about both our current situation and our long-term future. Ironically, the very people who have most benefited from progress, college-educated professionals in Western nations, have become the most pessimistic of any group.

Just as disturbingly, material progress appears to be stalling in many industrialized Western nations. As of 2022, the European economy has essentially not recovered from the economic recession of 2007. This 15-year period of essentially zero economic growth is longer than the Great Depression of the 1930s. In addition, Canada has seen virtually no economic growth since 2011.

Japan, once the Asian nation that most embodied economic dynamism, has seen very little growth since 1995. Moreover, future economic prospects in Canada, Japan and Europe do not look any better than the recent past.

Among Western nations, the United States is one of the few that has experienced robust economic growth over the last ten years. Unfortunately, recent trends as of 2022 suggest that stagnant economic growth may be spreading to the United States. Many of the causes of the apparent recession in 2022 are related to short-term factors, such as the Covid lockdowns and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But more systemic factors are also in play.

Neither the ideological Left nor the ideological Right offer any real solutions to our current problems. Perhaps most discouraging is the fact that much of the political leadership in the West has given up on the idea of progress or completely misunderstood where it comes from. Political movements that should be promoting progress are failing to do so because of incorrect assumptions.

Many leaders on the traditional Left, for example European Social Democrats and the Democratic party in the United States, believe that progress can only come from ever-increasing government social programs to redistribute income or regulation to control corporations. With near-zero economic growth, however, this entire model is unsustainable because it relies on constantly increasing tax revenues.

The only true accomplishment of the traditional Left has been an ever-expanding central government that achieves fewer and fewer results. As of 2020, most wealthy Western nations have government expenditures that reach or exceed 50% of their total GDP. The French government accounts for 62% of the country’s GDP, Italy spends 57%, Germany 51%, and the UK 50% of their respective GDPs. Even the government in the supposedly free-market United States is now spending 46% of GDP, while Japan is at 47%. Only Ireland at 29% and Switzerland at 36% have governments that spend substantially below 50% (IMF).

The traditional Left has abandoned the idea of material progress based on economic growth. They appear to believe that ever-expanding social programs to redistribute income and regulations to constrain corporations will create a better society. The traditional Left claims that things are bad, but doing more of the same will solve the problem. Failures of government redistribution in the past breed skepticism about the concept of progress and undermine confidence in the efficacy of government.

More radical ideologies on the Left are typically hostile to the idea of progress. This includes Democratic Socialists, Greens, and Critical theorists (more commonly known as the Woke). Many of these ideologues believe that progress is the cause of our problems, so most Leftists deliberately seek to restrain it. They believe that progress is:

Inherently unfair because it is unequally distributed

A destructive force on the natural environment

Immoral because it is based purely on material goods

Immoral because it further solidifies the power of the oppressors over the oppressed

Greens believe that material progress leads to ecological collapse and cling to fanciful ideas that renewable energy and organic food will make all the difference. Critical theorists see every idea, institution, and practice as a system of oppression for people of color and other underrepresented minorities. Democratic Socialists believe in an oxymoron. You cannot radically concentrate power in the hands of a centralized government and nonetheless maintain democracy. In such circumstances, centralized power will ultimately overcome democratic governance.

Everywhere in the Western world we see the traditional Left being replaced by an anti-progress Left-wing. This means that traditional Left policies that unintentionally undermined progress are being replaced by Left-wing policies that deliberately undermine progress, particularly in the fields of energy, housing, agriculture, and the centralization of government.

Ideologies on the Right offer no real alternative, because conservatives are no more positive about the concept of progress. As Josef Schumpeter has noted, material progress works through a process of creative destruction. As new technologies and organizations are created, they drive old technologies and organizations to extinction. This destruction affects many of the very institutions and values that conservatives hold dear.

For this reason, ideologies of the Right are skeptical of progress. They believe that the most important recent trends have been a decline of moral values, the relentless expansion of government, and the decline in religious observance, patriotism, and traditional institutions.

Most importantly, the Right has no alternative policy solutions. I believe that Conservatism is best summarized by the famous William F. Buckley Jr. quote: A conservative is someone who stands athwart history yelling ‘Stop’… Many conservatives see Progress as a constant decline in moral standards and traditional institutions. Most conservatives look back with a rosy nostalgia at a past that, upon examination, was far less rosy than conservatives imagine.

While conservatives are correct that some change is bad, it is not true that all change is bad. The fundamental problem with Conservatism as a worldview is that it has no means to separate good change from bad change. More sophisticated conservatives, such as Edmund Burke, believed in cautious reform. But reform to what end? Reform by what means? How do conservatives know whether a specific reform is good or bad?

In practice, this has meant that conservatives oppose whatever proposal the Left has to offer at any given time. This has resulted in the Left ever so slowly winning victories, and the Right caving in to each of the arguments that had previously been made by the Left. The result is a conservative base that is bitter, skeptical of progress, and willing to follow less-than-reputable leaders.

Though conservatives (and also libertarians) oppose the practices of the Left, neither offers a coherent alternative. Supporters of both world views seem resigned to constant political defeat and focus on rallying their base during elections. Once in power, they do little to fundamentally change anything. They are opposed to everything the Left does, but they make few fundamental policy reforms once they win elections.

The entire history of material progress over the last two centuries that I documented in the first book in this series, From Poverty to Progress, invalidates much of the conservative viewpoint. If the world had stayed the same in 1820, as conservatives at that time believed was necessary, virtually all of mankind would be living in absolute poverty, living much shorter lives, eating less food, being educated less than one year per person, and experiencing a life of sheer physical drudgery.

The combination of hostility to progress from the Left-wing, misunderstanding of the causes of progress by the traditional Left, and skepticism of progress from the Right have undermined our collective belief in and understanding of progress. Despite what ideologues claim, it is not progress that is the problem. It is our politics, ideology, and government policy.

Unfortunately, these anti-progress viewpoints on both the Left and Right are magnified enormously by the media, social media, and interest groups. Whereas these institutions once tended towards the political center, they are now all affiliated with the ideological Left or the ideological Right. Their ideological viewpoints have corrupted the original purpose of the institutions that they dominate.

All of these institutions have learned that the best way to motivate people is with fear and hate towards the other side. To generate more revenue, viewership, votes, and political power, they have adopted a business model based on negativity and intransigence. These business models further undermine belief in progress.

Whereas politics was once constrained largely to elections and governance, it has now permeated all aspects of society. As the political parties have polarized between Left and Right, so has our society. Even families and once non-political institutions have been torn apart by ideological division. It is becoming increasingly hard for Americans to unite on any basic principles.

Some claim that all these problems prove that progress does not exist or that progress is a bad thing. At best, they claim that progress is now a thing of the past, which is no longer relevant to our current situation. The implication is that our current problems are just too large in scale to be solved by traditional methods.

I believe that the skeptics of progress are wrong, both factually and morally. Our current problems are not caused by any negative effects of progress. They are driven by politics, ideology, and failed government policies.

Progress is the single most important trend of the last century. Today, the material standard of living of humanity is far higher than it has ever been. This is not something that we should take for granted. Problems exist, just as they have always existed, but they are now less severe than ever. And the number of our problems is fewer than ever. It is merely our perceptions that magnify current problems into unsolvable crises.

Rather than abandon the concept of progress, we must learn from the ways our ancestors built progress in the first place. Our ancestors overcame problems far more difficult and complex than ours, and they did so with a much smaller base of technology and scientific knowledge. Most importantly, our ancestors gave us a toolkit for promoting progress that is still effective today, if we just give it a chance.

The fundamental problem is that neither the Left nor the Right has a concept of progress that is based on real human history. The Left compares our present condition to an ideological vision that cannot exist, while the Right compares our present condition to nostalgic memories that never existed. They are both excellent at provoking emotional reactions to mobilize supporters, but they are both bad at solving contemporary problems.

I do not believe that any existing ideology can make major contributions to maintaining progress in wealthy nations and enabling developing nations to experience greater progress. The fundamental reason is that none of them embrace human material progress as a primary goal. Far too many explicitly reject the concept of progress or are at least skeptical of it.

We need a new political perspective that is clearly differentiated from both the Left and the Right. We do not need to transform society (as the Left wants), nor do we need to preserve it in amber (as the Right wants). Instead, we need to roll back government policies that are undermining the foundations of progress.

We need a third option in the ideological center of American politics that promotes widely-shared progress and understands that this progress will largely come from society, not the government. This option cannot be based on reasonable compromises between the current positions of the Right and Left. Instead, it must offer an entirely new vision of the role of government that is both pragmatic and radical.

We need a Progress-based reform agenda focused on the following principles:

Promote long-term economic growth.

Create a prosperous working class.

Promote a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter the prosperous working class.

Focus relentlessly on results.

Reform the political process to make all the above possible.

I sum up goal #1 as Promoting Progress and goals #2 and #3 as Promoting Upward Mobility. I will focus on goals #1, 4 and 5 in this book. In my subsequent book, Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda for Uplifting the Working Class and Poor, I will focus on the second and third goals.

Promoting long-term economic growth must be the bedrock of a Progress-based reform agenda. Economic growth gives all individuals more material resources with which to solve their own personal problems and their families’ problems. Economic growth also supplies the material resources to take on improvements in education, health care, pensions, and care for the disabled, the mentally ill, and the homeless. Without economic growth, all other goals become far more difficult to accomplish because there are simply not enough resources available to achieve them.

Creating a prosperous working class is essential to ensuring that economic growth is widely shared and politically sustainable. Far too high a proportion of the benefits of our current economic growth go to the college-educated professional class. And much of that distribution is due to bad government policy.

We must implement policies that ensure that the working class receives a far greater share of the benefits of progress and that they do so by contributing to society. A prosperous working class will not achieve equality. However, in combination with economic growth, it will achieve upward mobility.

Promoting a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter that prosperous working class is also essential. With each generation, modern societies must pass on the necessary skills, habits, and values to the next generation. We cannot create a prosperous working class with no way for young people, particularly those from low-income families, to enter that class. By promoting a clear pathway into a prosperous working class, we can sustain this progress and upward mobility for generations to come.

Supporters of progress must focus relentlessly on results. A Progress-based reform agenda must never be allowed to degenerate into a dogmatic ideology that is fixated on certain policies regardless of results. While the long-term goal of promoting progress and upward mobility must be fundamental to our viewpoint, how we do so should always be determined by experimentation in the real world.

Like scientists looking for a cure for cancer or an entrepreneur trying to scale up a business, we must try many possible solutions and only scale one up once it has been proven effective by rigorous methodologies. The fundamental principles that I mentioned above will be very difficult to achieve. They will each require a great deal of experimentation with policy. Many proposed policies will fail to work, so they must be reformed or eliminated.

Supporters of progress cannot just dream up seemingly great policy solutions and then pass legislation. Instead, we must go into this project with a realization of how hard it is for government programs to achieve positive results in the real world.

Of course, this experimentation must avoid potential negative effects on society. In particular, we must respect basic human rights enshrined in the Constitution. But this still leaves us a great deal of leeway for effective and ethical experimentation.

In the end, the actual results of a policy are far more important than the good intentions of those who implemented it. Only results matter, because it is results that affect people, not intentions.

Any reform agenda must also confront the problem of scarce resources. So much of our economy is now devoted to current government programs that there is no chance of finding additional revenues without serious negative economic consequences.

Rather than building up additional layers of government programs, a Progress-based reform agenda should focus on rolling back government policies that undermine the foundations of progress and upward mobility for the working class and poor. In particular, we should make energy, food, housing, education, health care, transportation, and consumer goods more abundant and affordable so that the working class and poor can afford to purchase those items on the marketplace without government subsidies.

Rolling back failed government policies will not only accelerate economic growth by reducing costs but doing so will also ensure that the benefits of that growth are widely shared. We should also decentralize government to promote the maximum possible amount of policy experimentation.

Finally, a Progress-based reform agenda must reform the political system. The American political system, which is polarized between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, leaves no space for any other perspective. Both sides are more concerned about rallying their base against the other side than about solving problems. For the good of the nation and the good of our movement, we must open up political competition to allow representation in state and federal government for ourselves and other outsiders.

From Poverty to Progress

Before I propose my Progress-based reform agenda, we need to more fully explore the concept of Progress itself and why understanding it can help us solve our current problems. After decades of studying history, I have come to believe that the only way that we can make the future better is by understanding the past.

In the first book in this series, From Poverty to Progress, I explained how and why human progress originated, how it works and how progress gradually spread from a few small city/states in Northwest Europe to most of the world. Though we take this progress for granted, it is the single most important factor in our lives. This progress means that our lives differ radically from the standard of living of our ancestors.

A key concept in this book series is the concept of the Five Keys to Progress. The Five Keys to Progress are the necessary preconditions to start human progress and for it to continue. When a society achieves the Five Keys to Progress, that society becomes a vast, decentralized problem-solving network that makes material life better for its citizens.

I believe that the concept of the Five Keys to Progress enables us to establish policies and practices which maintain existing progress. In other words, the concept not only helps us to understand our world and how we got here but also how to change it for the better.

The rest of this chapter briefly summarizes key concepts from my previous book that will help you to understand why I believe that the proposals made in this book will lead to greater amounts of material progress. If you have already read that book, you can skim this chapter to refresh your memory and then skip to the next chapter.

What is Progress?

I believe that the most useful definition of progress is the sustained improvement in the material standard of living of a large group of people over a long period of time. In particular, I focus on changes to the standard of living that are rapid enough and sustained enough that one person could notice positive changes within their lifetime.

Progress within one year that is immediately erased by a regression in the next few years does not qualify as progress. Since a generation is generally considered to be 20 years, I look for relatively uninterrupted progress for at least that length of time. One sharp downturn is not enough to invalidate a decade of progress, but a downturn that lasts for decades surely means that progress did not exist during that time.

Progress is not about enriching a small portion of society. While it is possible to apply the term to changes that exclusively benefit the rich and powerful, I am far more concerned about material progress for the vast majority of citizens.

People living in Western nations today have a level of affluence far surpassing anything ever seen on planet Earth. Even the poor in Western nations have a level of affluence that is higher than all but the richest people in 1970.

All across the world, nations are being transformed from oppressive poverty to a level of affluence that was once only possible in Western nations. Japan, South Korea, China, India, Singapore, Botswana, Chile, and Puerto Rico all transformed themselves within one generation. Even in some of the poorest nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, levels of education, health, literacy, sanitation, longevity, transportation, communication, and housing are rapidly improving.

Progress is mankind’s greatest achievement. It has transformed our lives in so many positive ways… But we take it for granted, deny its existence, or claim that it is actually bad.

Why Does Progress Matter?

Too many people today live in a negative feedback loop caused by cognitive biases towards pessimism and perceived threat, unrealistic views of what is possible, nostalgic memories of what life used to be like, self-imposed isolation from alternative viewpoints, and institutional self-interests that create constant crises and threats. This feedback loop creates what can only be described as an alternative reality that seems very real to people but does not exist.

I believe that the objective study of history to understand progress is a form of therapy for this dysfunction. We need a change of perspective to clear out the cognitive biases that make so many of us unhappy, angry, and resentful in a world full of abundance and progress.

To understand the benefits of progress, we need to shift the focus from the problems of today to the study of how our ancestors actually lived. Only by comparing today’s life to the actual lives of previous generations can we fully appreciate the progress that we have experienced today.

Once we look at actual metrics comparing today’s material circumstances to our ancestor’s circumstances, we can see that we live in a world of progress.

Even better, learning how our ancestors built progress gives us a toolkit for solving most of today’s problems. We can see that, in situations far worse than our own, our ancestors learned highly practical strategies for solving short-term local problems. And those that worked best were copied by others.

When we clear out our cognitive biases, we can see that life in the past was actually pretty terrible. It was full of people with the same dread and worry that we have today. It was also full of problems that were daily threats to survival that we do not have to deal with as often today.

We can learn that, though very real problems still exist, those problems are actually fewer in number and milder in severity than what previous generations had to deal with. And previous generations did not have all the technologies, skills, organizations, and scientific knowledge that we have today.

The good old days were never really that good. Utopias cannot exist in the real world. The world as portrayed by the media and politics is highly distorted and dangerously so.

Life Before Progress

Today’s progress is a startling transformation compared to the way humans have lived over the past 100,000 years. In the past, humanity lived in a stable state because technological innovation only occurred very rarely.

Our ancestors lived in a world where acquiring food took up the bulk of their waking hours. Entire societies were structured around the quest to acquire enough food to survive and reproduce in their local environment. This quest was so all-encompassing that little time was left to solve other problems.

In order to innovate, people needed to live in close proximity to each other, but in order to acquire food, they needed to spread out. Therefore, the need for food was the key limiting factor in the rate of innovation.

The type of food that could be acquired was highly constrained by fundamental geographical limits. In particular, the biome (i.e. dominant vegetation) that a society inhabited and its access to domesticatable plants and animals largely determined whether agriculture based upon animal-drawn plows could evolve. Other factors such as altitude, soil type, growing season, distance from rivers and more complex societies in the Middle East placed additional constraints.

How a society acquired its food, in turn, placed powerful constraints on how rapidly the society could innovate technologies, skills, and social organizations or copy the innovations of others. Where geography made the use of animal-driven plows possible, complex Agrarian societies evolved. Where the use of animal-driven plows was not possible, humans could not evolve past less complex types of societies. Those societies had no chance of experiencing progress.

Even in geographical regions that could support Agrarian societies, two forces prevented progress. The first was that most of the food surplus went into having more babies, who then ate away much of the food surplus.

Secondly, powerful political, economic, and religious elites constructed institutions that extracted the food surplus for their own benefit. They used this extracted wealth to flaunt their social status with a lavish lifestyle, build conspicuous monuments, and construct powerful militaries capable of conquering other peoples. This extraction of wealth undermined the rate of innovation and hamstrung the potential for progress.

Because of these geographical, demographic, and political constraints, most societies of the past were trapped in poverty. There was little an individual could do other than survive and live a life almost identical to previous generations.

The Five Keys to Progress

So how did we transition from a world of poverty to a world of progress?

The single most important concept in my book series is the Five Keys to Progress. I believe that the Five Keys to Progress is an essential unifying concept for understanding progress. They are so critical because they are the necessary preconditions for progress, and they are actionable in today’s world. In other words, the concept not only helps to understand the world but also how to make it better.

The Five Keys to Progress enable us to cut through all of the clutter of history and modern times so that we can focus on what really matters. They enable us to answer some of history’s most difficult questions, as well as provide policy solutions and practices that can make the world a better place.

Using the concept of the Five Keys to Progress, it is easier to understand:

The historical origins of progress

Why progress took so long to get started

How and why progress started in Northwest Europe

How and why progress spread to different societies over time

Why so many poor nations were left without progress for centuries

Which forces threaten progress today

What policies and practices wealthy nations need to adopt to keep their progress going

What policies and practices developing nations need to adopt to enjoy greater progress

So what are the Five Keys to Progress? To transition from poverty to progress, a society needs to acquire:

A highly efficient food production and distribution system. This enables societies to overcome geographical constraints to food production so that large numbers of people can focus on solving problems other than finding enough food to eat.

Trade-based cities packed with a large number of free citizens possessing a wide variety of skills. These people innovate new technologies, skills and social organizations and copy the innovations made by others.

Decentralized political, economic, religious, and ideological power. Of particular importance are elites being forced into transparent, non-violent competition that undermines their ability to forcibly extract wealth from the masses. This also allows citizens to freely choose among institutions based on what they have to offer to each individual and society in general.

At least one high-value-added industry that exports to the rest of the world. This injects wealth into the city or region, accelerates economic growth, and creates markets for smaller local industries and services.

Widespread use of fossil fuels. The incredible energy density of fossil fuels injects vast amounts of useful energy into society enabling it to solve a wide variety of problems. Without this energy, life would return to the daily struggle for survival that dominated most of human history.

Each of the Five Keys to Progress is necessary for a society to experience progress, but none are sufficient by themselves. It is only in combination that they enable humanity to deliver progress.

I believe that the degree to which societies have enjoyed progress is largely determined by long-run historical factors that go back centuries or even millennia. These factors determined the extent to which societies acquired the Five Keys to Progress. For most of human history, there was no progress, because these five key factors were either completely missing or were very underdeveloped.

How Progress Works

Once a society achieves the Five Keys to Progress, that society becomes a vast, decentralized problem-solving network. Now the day-to-day behaviors of regular human beings break the chains of the poverty trap imposed by geography, demographics, and politics.

This progress comes from a self-sustaining feedback loop among the following:

Technological innovation. This includes radical innovations such as the railroad, electrical grid, computers, and the internet, as well as the ongoing incremental improvement and differentiation of thousands of other existing technologies.

People learning new skills to support those technologies. Without these skills, technologies are not useful, a fact that is often forgotten.

People cooperating within organizations. Those people work together using a wide variety of skills and technologies to accomplish a common goal.

Competition between organizations for scarce resources. In the past, this was usually food, while now it is usually revenue. This forces organizations to embrace new technologies, skills, and processes in order to out-compete other organizations. It also forces people within the group to cooperate more closely and enables new organizations to be founded and older organizations to fail.

People copying successful technologies, skills, and organizations and then modifying them to solve different problems. This enables innovations that work to spread into new companies, new sectors of the economy, and new geographical regions. This step is critical for ensuring that progress is widely shared.

Vast amounts of useful energy being injected into the system. Without energy, none of this can happen. Today, the vast majority of that energy comes from fossil fuels.

It is important to note that all of these behaviors have been in