The discipline of “progress studies” wants to figure out what drives discoveries and inventions so we can supercharge human flourishing.

I’ve said before that understanding where our modern standard of living comes from, at a basic level, is a responsibility of every citizen in an industrial civilization. Let’s call it “industrial literacy.”

As I learn about the story of human progress, I have come to think that an entire subject is missing from basic education.

The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background.

Why, then, wasn’t it invented much earlier?

Smallpox was one of the worst diseases in human history. It killed an estimated 300 million people or more in the 20th century alone; only tuberculosis and malaria have been more deadly. Its victims were often children, even infants.

But of all the challenges facing the sailor, the biggest was simply knowing where you are.

I recently finished The Alchemy of Air, by Thomas Hager. It’s the story of the Haber-Bosch process, the lives of the men who created it, and its consequences for world agriculture and for Germany during the World Wars.

From the time that humans began to leave their nomadic ways and live in settled societies about ten thousand years ago, we have needed to build structures: to shelter ourselves, to store our goods, to honor the gods.

Metalworking is one of the oldest crafts, going back far beyond recorded history. But until a few thousand years ago, one of the most abundant metals—iron—was virtually unknown.

Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison recently published an article in The Atlantic calling for a new discipline of “progress studies”.

It met with an enthusiastic response from many people and has galvanized a small movement, which now has a Slack group and last Wednesday held its first meetup (hosted at Founders Fund). I was the speaker and gave a talk on the history of steel (recording coming soon).

I concluded with some thoughts on progress studies, why it’s crucially important, what I’m doing about it—and how you can help.

We live in an age that has lost its optimism. Polls show that people think the world is getting worse, not better.

I’m glad to see many of my colleagues in the tech community promoting immigration reform (e.g., FWD.us). They point out that immigrants are often innovators and job-creators, and that immigration helps our economy. This is true and important, and it’s a good reason to loosen our draconian immigration laws.

Did the Industrial Revolution decrease costs or increase quality? Automation improves costs, but it improves quality too, and we should think of them together.

The number of protons in an atom determines what element it is; the number of electrons usually matches. But how many neutrons are in the nucleus? Does it even matter?

It turns out that it matters a lot:

Some questions I have about the differences between the progress studies and Effective Altruism / x-risk communities

It’s almost impossible to predict the future. But it’s also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past.

All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does.

In researching the threshing machine, I ended up transcribing a 1636 patent granted by Charles I to Sir John Christopher Van Berg, knight of Moravia.

It is amazingly broad and vague, listing an incredible variety of machines for every conceivable purpose.

The threshing machine was a crucial advance in agricultural mechanization, but diffusion/adoption took many decades.

As with the bicycle, the flying shuttle, or the cotton gin, we have to ask: what took so long?

Our mission is to establish a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century.

Understanding the history, nature, and causes of progress should be a focus for anyone who wants to defend philosophical liberalism. Here's why.