Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress

Dwarkesh Patel introduces Jason Crawford as a former tech startup founder who now writes the Roots of Progress, a body of well-researched posts on the history of technology and industry. Patel says Crawford fills a gap in his own education: the history of progress, its consequences, and the lessons to draw from it.

Crawford describes his subject as the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. His central question is how the world of the last couple of hundred years came about. Life today is better in almost every way than it was 200 to 250 years ago, and things have kept improving even over 100 or 50 years. He calls this unprecedented. For thousands, even tens of thousands, of years there was very little improvement in living standards, life expectancy, health, or the ability to get around, which stayed limited to the speed of horses and sail.

From that observation he draws a set of questions: what the steps, inventions and discoveries were, why it took so long, what root causes made things take off, and how to keep progress going without letting it slow, stop or reverse by accident.

Patel offers a different reading of why the subject matters now. Figures such as Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen worry about progress because the last 50 years have been underwhelming rather than overwhelming. His example is air travel: we still fly at the speed of the 747, which was invented in the 1970s. Crawford agrees that this was not his original motivation. He says he was somewhat skeptical of the stagnation hypothesis at first and has since warmed to it, because the numbers are there and he can see where the idea comes from.

He still sees the two interests as the same project. His own entry point was contrasting the last 200 or so years with the thousands before, and both lines of inquiry ask what the root causes of progress are and how to keep it going. What stagnation adds, in his view, is urgency, because it shows that progress is not automatic or inevitable, does not keep going on its own momentum, and may be running into friction.

Crawford ranks the forward-looking question above the backward-looking one. Whether progress slowed in the past matters less to him than whether it could be sped up in the future: the range of possible futures, how much it might slow or accelerate, how much control we have, and what the control knobs or levers are. Knowing whether the past slowdown was natural or caused by something done or not done is useful only for shaping the future.

so that we can shape the future that's really what it's all about.

Patel presses on an apparent tension. If progress begets progress, how can two centuries of it lead to less progress? Crawford first puts the slowdown in proportion: even if progress has slowed over the past 50 years, it is still much faster than in the thousands of years before the industrial age, so it has not stopped by any means. He then returns to the point that progress is not automatic. Each major discovery gives a boost, and the gains from it level off over time.

He frames this with S-curves, the subject of a recent post. An individual technology starts in a slow period while basic inventions are figured out, hits an inflection point where progress becomes very fast, and eventually saturates once everything useful has been done with it and it has transformed the economy.

Electricity is his example. People tinkered with it for a long time without knowing what to do with it, and it affected only a few things such as the telegraph in the 1830s and 1840s. Takeoff came around the 1880s with light bulbs, the grid and power generators. By the 1920s to 1940s it was leveling off, with the main remaining task being extension to rural areas. Today electricity is a utility, already fully integrated, and not a growth industry. Crawford adds that the technical term may be closer to a sigmoid, an S stretched out.