Innovation is a Worthy Cause

Humanity’s incredible progress in less than three centuries has been widely reported and yet still under-appreciated. It is neither opinion nor conjecture to assert that twenty-first century humanity is fundamentally privileged to a degree unimaginable at any prior century of our meager existence.Examples abound, like rates of the world living in extreme poverty:

Humanity’s positive progress coincided with and in many cases catalyzed unparalleled population growth, and yet - we have so much still to solve:“We haven’t yet cured all diseases; we don’t yet know how to solve climate change; we’re still a very long way from enabling most of the world’s population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today; we don’t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters; we aren’t yet able to travel as cheaply and quickly as we’d like; we could be far better than we are at educating young people. The list of opportunities for improvement is still extremely long.”Though recent history has looked quite favorable for humanity, our species’ near- or long-term future is not guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed to be positive. We have no assurance that our Industrial Revolution-catalyzed ascendance is the new “species default” rather than a happy outlier.Progress of the positive kind is not a given but instead emerges from proactive intention, which leads me to ultimately posit that, at least directionally, progress can be designed. Intentional design requires intentional study, which is why Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen proposed building a “Science of Progress”:“Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.”Studying and comprehending progress is a necessary prerequisite but it cannot be the end goal. No, the goal of such work is action - as I note above, if progress can be directionally designed, it is insufficient for such work to remain within the academic realm. It must be embraced by public and private sector operators alike. Again Cowen & Collison (emphasis mine):“An important distinction between our proposed Progress Studies and a lot of existing scholarship is that mere comprehension is not the goal. When anthropologists look at scientists, they’re trying to understand the species. But when viewed through the lens of Progress Studies, the implicit question is how scientists (or funders or evaluators of scientists) should be acting. The success of Progress Studies will come from its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions. In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.”If we wish to effectively maintain the positive direction of progress, we must be far better at proactively designing the paths of growth, for there is no progress without growth.

The Case for Abundance

If Covid demonstrated anything it was the need for more - more protective gear, more vaccines, more politicians actually willing and able to do their fucking jobs (a more difficult type of growth) - more as a resilience function to ensure our species health even in the face of cataclysm. Derek Thompson framed a solution for this need as the Abundance Agenda:“An abundance agenda needs a target. One answer that I’ve given you is: essential goods and services where productivity rates are declining. But that’s a bit fusty and technical. Let me try to offer a simpler answer. We should aim for abundance of comfort, abundance of power, and abundance of time.”Ezra Klein has in parallel written HERE, HERE, HERE, and (non-coincidentally) soon with Derek Thompson HERE, about a similar concept with a different name: Supply-Side Progressivism.Putting aside the politically flavored moniker in dire need of a rebranding, the concept is directionally consistent. Rather than a demand-side approach focused on the distribution of a fixed supply of goods, services, and capital, a supply-side approach focuses instead on building more; on abundance.“Supply-side progressivism shouldn’t just fix the problems of the present; it should hasten the advances of the future. Most liberals can list the programs they want the government to create or expand. Fewer can name the five technologies they want the government to finance or the five scientific challenges they want to see it mobilize to solve. But technology is central to how we make the future look different from the past. To leave that to the market, or to think it apolitical, is abdication.”Brian Deese gave a stirring speech on “modern American industrial strategy” in which he largely concurred:“Our modern American industrial strategy reflects a commitment to make bold investments in key areas that everyone, from academics to business leaders alike, agrees are foundational to economic growth.  These investments help accelerate and shape breakneck innovation, and they encourage private investment and market competition in a way that picks only one winner: the productivity, opportunity, and standard of living of the American people.”Altogether, we begin to see the makings of a governmental-level, policy-focused approach to incentivizing growth, based on the solid economic footing of a Nobel laureate.  

Nonrival Ideas

The proposals offered by both Thompson and Klein owe at least a portion of their intellectual foundation to Paul Romer’s Semi-Endogenous Growth (SEG) Theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018.As detailed by leading SEG economist Chad Jones, the basic idea is that ideas are nonrival - they are infinitely usable. This infinite usability of ideas means that income per person depends on the aggregate stock of ideas, not the stock of ideas per person. Just as more autoworkers will produce more cars, more researchers and innovators will produce more new ideas.People produce ideas and, because of nonrivalry, those ideas raise everyone’s income. This means that income per person depends on the number of people searching for ideas (i.e., researchers). In the before prosperity times, the transmission of ideas was quite costly, and thus ideas were not nearly as universal. The internet permanently reduced these transit times and transmissions to effectively zero.

Quantity Yields Quality

One challenge with such an Abundance Agenda is the focus on abundance itself. Kevin Kelly posits:“Individually, corporately and socially, we’ve tended to favor functions that produce more. For instance, to measure (and thus increase) productivity we count up the number of refrigerators manufactured and sold each year. More is generally better. But this counting tends to overlook the fact that refrigerators have gotten better over time. In addition to making cold, they now dispense ice cubes, or self-defrost, and use less energy. And they may cost less in real dollars. This betterment is truly real value, but is not accounted for in the “more” column.Indeed a tremendous amount of the betterment in our lives that is brought about by new technology is difficult to measure, even though it feels evident. This “betterment surplus” is often slow moving, wrapped up with new problems, and usually appears in intangibles, such as increased options, safety, choices, new categories, and self actualization — which like most intangibles, are very hard to pin down.  The benefits only become more obvious when we look back in retrospect to realize what we have gained. Part of our growth as a civilization is moving from a system that favors more barrels of wine, to one that favors the same barrels of better wine.”This last piece is subtle but important. Technology is arguably most valuable when it is broadly deployed across all domains and ceases to be considered technology; when it becomes invisible. As Jerry Neumann writes:“Connecting a thermostat to the Internet wirelessly is awesome, but calling it an Internet-enabled thermostat will start to be like calling a vacuum cleaner an electricity-enabled broom. And if your thermostat does not connect to the Internet, it will be bought only by retro-chic hipsters.”A positive sign of human progress is when our “life altering technology” quietly fades into the background, assuming its forever role as a necessary but un-special portion of our daily lives.Electricity was once considered transformative technology. So too were the computer, the internet, and soon enough, AI. It’s a clear sign of progress that such patterns represent the inevitable outcome of our technology, even if this “fading progress” is difficult to measure.  

Growth is Progress

We need more research, more invention, more building. Such work is necessary for the perpetual continuation of the positive progress of our species. Progress is certainly not guaranteed, especially when so many (mostly) from the left are intent on pursuing degrowth efforts under logically fallacious and ideologically inane grounds.An Abundance Agenda, or Supply-Side Progressivism, or whatever end-state branding is ultimately applied to a Romer-esque focus on scaling ideas production, is worthwhile precisely because by attempting to increase the total supply of idea generation, especially by incentivizing growth in the total supply of idea generators, we as humanity will be better suited to continue pushing humanity forward.To continue the positive march of progress.