Hey readers,
This week, I've been attending Breakthrough Dialogue, a conference hosted by the climate and environmental policy think tank the Breakthrough Institute.
The conference theme is "progress problems": the challenges that stand in the way of technological, societal, and environmental progress; the challenges that technological and societal progress have created and now must solve; the things that we have to look at head-on if we want to keep making progress; and the ways that the world is not, as much as we'd like it to be, just an inspiring march toward greater human freedom and prosperity.
The Supreme Court's decision today to overturn Roe v. Wade, which will have the effect of banning abortion outright or early in a pregnancy in more than 20 states, is a particularly stark reminder of how halting and fraught the quest for progress can be.
It's essential that any movement that strives for human progress be about causing progress, not just celebrating it; that it comprehends the ways that we often move backward and lose important human freedoms; and that it offers a distinct perspective on our modern challenges without being tone-deaf or in denial.
On Wednesday, the first night of the conference, Breakthrough presented its lifetime achievement award to development economist Charles Kenny, who is one of my favorite intellectuals working today, and he and I sat down for a Q&A about his work. (Our talk should be available on YouTube next week.)
The work he does is deeply relevant to Future Perfect, to Breakthrough, to the growing "progress studies" movement, and, I'd argue, to anyone trying to think today about making the world a better place.
Steering between two failure modes of thinking about progress
A major theme of my talk with Kenny was that there are two easy traps to fall into when doing zoom-out assessments of humanity's prospects.
One is nuance-free, rah-rah-rah celebration of progress that makes it seem like an automatic thing that happens regardless of our decisions — a reason to not worry too much about the problems we currently face. One example is Steven Pinker, whose work I like but who can sometimes fall into this trap by minimizing the threat from emerging tech.
To this mode of thinking, the fact that the world is getting richer, safer, freer, and better for everyone is an inevitability. We don't need to take threats to that future too seriously — the world is getting better, after all!
The other is doomerism. It often entails omitting some very obvious statistical facts about declines in child mortality, disease, extreme poverty, hunger, and other tangible measures of people's lives in order to insist that, actually, the world isn't getting better at all.
Sometimes it involves questionable rhetorical moves like arguing that since population is increasing in lower-middle-income countries, and people in those countries tend to be poorer, poverty is exploding in the world today — even though average incomes in those countries are rising and people's lives are getting better.
But doomerism doesn't always require misleading statistics. There are important ways the world today is getting worse for many people, from curtailed civil liberties for pregnant people to rising costs of living. A progress movement that doesn't admit that is going to be deeply unappealing to most people.
The sentiment behind doomerism is fundamentally that the world faces grave, serious problems about which we are mostly in complete denial. We are not rising to the challenge, not coordinating, not even learning from our mistakes.
We have the tools to stall climate change but not the political will; we have a strategy to prevent the next pandemic but can't spare the money or attention for it; other terrifying future concerns, like AI alignment, still have research communities squabbling about whether the problem is real in the first place.
But while doomerism is in some sense a reasonable response to that frustration, it does lose an essential piece of the picture. I asked Kenny what he thought of our response to the pandemic, and he pointed out, yes, that we're refusing to get our act together and spend on preventing the next one. But he also pointed out that the mRNA vaccines are a genuine scientific miracle, the product of work all over the world inventing and developing a solution that has saved countless lives and will continue to do so. He pointed out that the vaccine rollout, for all of the ways it felt frustrating and incompetent, has been the fastest worldwide vaccine rollout in human history.
And yet, he said, we could do so much better.
We could do so much better
That, I think, is the sentiment that makes Kenny a particularly important public intellectual, and the sentiment that animates the progress studies, ecomodernism, effective altruist, and related communities at their best.
Recognition and even awe at the strides humanity has made is important for perspective, for having an accurate understanding of the world we live in, and for awareness that solutions must not risk the incredibly important progress we're making. But for that recognition and awe not to shade into complacency, it has to be dissatisfied. It has to be impatient.
We have to both know that the Covid-19 vaccine rollout was the fastest in human history and wish it had been faster. We have to both appreciate the mRNA vaccines as a miracle and demand 10 more miracles. We have to both celebrate the progress in green energy and carbon capture that has made climate change closer to possible to solve and demand that we actually go and solve it.
It's easy to slide into either self-satisfaction or hopelessness. It's hard — it takes sustained thought and effort — to maintain the careful middle ground of both pride in humanity's achievements and frustration that we haven't reached even further.
But that middle ground is reality; it's the situation we face. And it's the only place from which we can do the real work of continuing to fix things.
—Kelsey Piper
Questions? Comments? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com or find me on Twitter at @kelseytuoc. And if you want to recommend this newsletter to your friends or colleagues, tell them to sign up at vox.com/future-perfect-newsletter.
Correction: Last Friday's newsletter about Happy the elephant stated that Happy's case hinged on a constitutional writ of habeas corpus. In fact, the case hinged on a common law writ of habeas corpus.
