Growth and Progress
So how do we recognize progress?
Growth is what actually saves lives, actually reduces misery, and actually meets people’s basic needs over time. Growth raises the material baseline. Now this definition has admitted limits. The improvement in life is what we can measure, materialistic change, and most people would say that such measurements are inadequate for humans; we desire more. And those more spiritual elements are out of materialism's purview.
But criticism currently seems to be over the failure of growth to be perfect, to vary over populations and be spread indifferently.
A recent psychological study suggests what has been called “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear. Success makes failure stand out.
The difficulty is the solution of many such critics is to turn to processes that historically have been inimical to growth.
But what if growth is indeed the big factor in progress. The difference between an optimist and a pessimist isn’t usually over substance, it’s the time frame they’re looking at. Problems are easier to spot today using a single point of reference, but progress is almost always more powerful over time.
If that's the case, there is an argument that progress is relatively new. This graph is really startling in this context:
Growth is what actually saves lives, actually reduces misery, and actually meets people’s basic needs over time. Growth raises the material baseline. Now this definition has admitted limits. The improvement in life is what we can measure, materialistic change, and most people would say that such measurements are inadequate for humans; we desire more. And those more spiritual elements are out of materialism's purview.
But criticism currently seems to be over the failure of growth to be perfect, to vary over populations and be spread indifferently.
A recent psychological study suggests what has been called “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear. Success makes failure stand out.
The difficulty is the solution of many such critics is to turn to processes that historically have been inimical to growth.
But what if growth is indeed the big factor in progress. The difference between an optimist and a pessimist isn’t usually over substance, it’s the time frame they’re looking at. Problems are easier to spot today using a single point of reference, but progress is almost always more powerful over time.
If that's the case, there is an argument that progress is relatively new. This graph is really startling in this context:
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