Progress vs. Progressivism

A research group on aging led by Oskar Burger at the Max Planck Institute has pointed out that the bulk of humanity’s mortality reduction has been experienced by only the last four of roughly 8,000 generations of homo sapiens since we evolved around 200,000 years ago.

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Fewer large markets are open to Chinese technology exports than ten years ago. For any Chinese product that might rise to the attention of a Congressperson, the US is fairly hostile. Europe remains open, but it too is grumbling about protection. A huge blow to Chinese tech firms in recent years was the loss of the Indian market. One of the many surprises 2020 was the deadly skirmish between Chinese and Indian troops that erupted after decades of relative calm. In the aftermath of the brawl, India’s government locked Chinese companies out of a market many staked growth plans on. India is not fully closed, and Chinese firms still have a lot of markets to export to. But that set has shrunk, and who can be sure that Beijing’s diplomatic and military posture won’t hurt markets for other entrepreneurs?--Wang

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Hackers linked to Beijing accessed the email account of the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, in an attack that is believed to have compromised at least hundreds of thousands of individual U.S. government emails, according to people familiar with the matter.
Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, was also hacked in the cyber-espionage attack, the people said. The two diplomats are believed to be the two most senior officials at the State Department targeted in the alleged spying campaign disclosed last week, one of the people said.

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Progress vs. Progressivism

From a recent Geo. Will article on Progress vs. Progressivism:

"Progressives’ obsessing about race is not only undiminished by decades of improvements in race relations (e.g., approval of interracial marriages was 4 percent in 1958 and 94 percent in 2021), it is inversely related to improvements. There are vocal interests with large political and lucrative financial stakes (e.g., the “diversity” consultants industry) in the myth of nonprogress. Similarly, portions of the government have an interest in insisting on its failure, despite trillions spent, to substantially improve economic equality: Hence the government’s practice of not counting transfer payments and tax rebates (the earned income tax credit) as income for those of modest means. Counting those augmentations of income would reveal that the 2021 poverty rate was not 11.6 percent, but 2 to 3 percent.

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In “Life After Capitalism,” George Gilder, citing Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley in the Cato Institute’s volume “Superabundance,” writes that “between 1980 and 2022, workers have been able to buy some 300 percent more goods and services with their hours and minutes.” The secret sauce is applied knowledge. Economist Thomas Sowell is right: “The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today.” They lacked only know-how. As did the nail-maker before the Industrial Revolution, making one nail a minute. Today’s nail maker can produce 3,500 per minute.

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Economic growth has not just coincided with, it has been caused by, population growth — more brains, more trade in knowledge. There are, however, those who consider people a plague, and who favor ever-larger regulatory government to prevent ruinous human ingenuity and planet-threatening dynamism. Such people resent the time-price metric of economic (and hence social) progress because it measures the results of millions of unplanned and uncoordinated decisions, cooperations, inventions and refinements.

The metric frustrates those who believe, and who benefit from, pessimistic predictions that the supposedly retrograde present is a harbinger of a stagnant future of scarcities — unless government plans a better future. The time-price metric blows to smithereens the idea that progressivism is conducive to progress."