Jason Crawford, a former tech startup founder, writes at The Roots of Progress about the history of technology, industry, and the philosophy of progress. He explores how humanity achieved an unprecedented rise in living standards over the last 200–250 years after millennia of stagnation, and asks what caused it, how to sustain it, and whether it is slowing down.
Progress is not automatic
Crawford argues that progress is not inevitable or self-sustaining. It requires deliberate effort, talent, and favorable conditions.
He uses the concept of S-curves to explain technological progress: each technology starts slowly, accelerates through a period of rapid improvement, then levels off as it matures and saturates the economy.
Example: Electricity went from early tinkering (telegraph, 1830s–40s) to explosive growth (light bulbs, power grids, 1880s) to maturity (by the mid-20th century it was a utility, not a growth industry).
Long-term exponential progress comes from overlapping S-curves—as one technology matures, new ones take off. If new S-curves aren’t ready when old ones plateau, overall progress can slow.
Crawford speculates that several factors may have contributed to a relative slowdown in the last 50 years:
Cultural shifts: Post-WWII anxieties (atomic bomb, nuclear fears, environmentalism, oil shocks) may have reduced enthusiasm for technology and industry, affecting talent recruitment into science and engineering.
Regulatory and bureaucratic creep: Safety regulations and institutional bureaucracy (in government, corporations, universities) add friction and overhead to innovation. While individually rational, their cumulative cost may not have been fully evaluated.
Talent allocation: Fewer motivated people entering technological fields could slow the creation of new S-curves.
Progress Studies as a school of thought
Crawford distinguishes between descriptive progress (whether things are actually getting better) and prescriptive progress (the commitment to make things better regardless of current trajectory).
He sees Progress Studies not as a new academic discipline but as a school of thought—a set of premises and values:
Progress is real, enormously beneficial, and not automatic.
Therefore it deserves focused study, protection, nurturing, and acceleration.
He draws on existing academic work by economic historians like Joel Mokyr and George McCluskey, and researchers like Pierre Azoulay and Andrew Lowe at MIT Sloan, and Asha Raud at Duke.
He notes that Tyler Cowan and Patrick Collison coined the term “Progress Studies” in a 2019 Atlantic article calling for a new science of progress.
Lessons from other intellectual movements
Crawford observes that deep philosophical ideas take decades to move from academia into broader culture, but when they do, they are extremely powerful (quoting Keynes: “the world is ruled by little else” than the ideas of defunct economists and philosophers).
He suggests Progress Studies could learn from how movements like critical theory grew within academia, though he is not an academic himself and sees the need for something new rather than piggybacking on an existing paradigm.
Educating young people about progress
Crawford co-created an online learning program called Progress Studies for Young Scholars with Higher Ground Education (the largest Montessori operator in the US) and its high school brand, the Academy of Thought and Industry (ATI).
The program teaches the history of technology to high schoolers, because Crawford believes the history of progress is neglected in education and students graduate taking industrial civilization for granted.
He argues that every citizen needs a basic understanding of how modern life works—where food, transportation, energy, and materials come from—to make informed policy decisions.
Why progress has been understudied
Crawford argues that understanding progress is not automatic either; it requires deliberate choice and effort to create a field of study.
He hypothesizes that as people became more ambivalent about progress (focusing on its downsides), fewer scholars studied it in the humanities, and fewer young people entered fields that push the frontier forward.
The relationship between science and technology
Crawford rejects the linear model of innovation (science → technology → products) as oversimplified, though it contains grains of truth:
Science does provide essential foundations for technology (e.g., electromagnetism for electronics, quantum physics for semiconductors, microbiology for antibiotics).
The full applications of scientific discoveries cannot be predicted in advance, so science motivated purely by curiosity is justified.
But the real relationship is cyclical and iterative, not linear:
Transistor example: Bell Labs scientists had to develop new semiconductor physics theory to explain unexpected experimental results, then used that theory to build better transistors—shuttling back and forth between science and invention.
Steam engine example: The steam engine (Newcomen 1712, Watt 1769) preceded thermodynamics (Carnot 1824). The engine depended on earlier science (air pressure, vacuum) but also motivated and informed later science. Watt independently rediscovered principles of latent heat.
Science is also dependent on technology for instruments (microscopes, thermometers, pressure chambers) that enable observation and measurement.
Despite this inseparability, Crawford thinks it is useful to distinguish science and technology for purposes of study, just as physics, chemistry, and biology are distinguished despite their interconnections.
Moral, scientific, and technological progress
Crawford divides progress into three intertwined domains: scientific, technological, and moral (the last encompassing society and government).
He notes that the Scientific Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and the rise of democratic republics all occurred around the same time (roughly the 1700s), and are likely interconnected—for example, the dissolution of guild systems enabled new businesses and technologies.
He is most uncertain about moral/political progress: while there have been clear gains (e.g., the civil rights movement since the 1950s), the picture is murkier and more mixed than in science and technology.
Risks of progress and resilience
Crawford acknowledges that progress increases interdependence and specialization, which can make civilization more vulnerable to shocks like pandemics or black swan events.
However, he argues that humans have always been interdependent, and the solution is not to slow down but to use the same tools—science, technology, engineering, statistics—to build resilience into systems:
Avoiding single points of failure.
Building buffers and slack to absorb shocks.
Analyzing complex systems for vulnerability.
He frames this as a portfolio allocation problem: we should devote appropriate resources to safety and resilience alongside “more, bigger, faster, better”—not as a compromise or braking, but as a reallocation.
Prescriptive optimism
Crawford distinguishes between descriptive optimism (a prediction that things will get better) and prescriptive optimism (a determination to act to make things better).
He is not always a descriptive optimist—he takes existential risks seriously and cannot prove worst-case scenarios impossible—but he is always a prescriptive optimist.
He references Tyler Cowen’s prediction that human civilization may not last more than 800 years due to the asymmetry between destructive capacity and defensive capacity. Crawford finds such long-range predictions unproductive except insofar as they guide present action.
He sees prescriptive optimism as synthesizing the tragic vision (things fall apart without active intervention) with the optimistic vision (progress is possible through human effort).
When combined with descriptive pessimism, it yields a fighting spirit: no matter how bad the odds, keep working toward a better future.
When combined with descriptive optimism, it yields bold, ambitious plans: colonizing the solar system, solving aging, creating material abundance for all.
