# Progress Studies **Draft profile.** A loose intellectual movement, launched in a July 2019 *Atlantic* essay by **[[Patrick Collison]]** and **[[Tyler Cowen]]** titled *"We Need a New Science of Progress,"* arguing that the underlying drivers of scientific, technological, and economic progress are themselves understudied and that a new academic-and-policy discipline should be built to fix that. Progress Studies has become the **velvet-glove ideological project** of the Silicon Valley investor class: same techno-optimist destination as [[Extropianism]] / [[Effective Accelerationism]] / [[Longtermism]], reached through metascience and growth-policy vocabulary rather than apocalyptic existential-risk language. It sits inside this KB as a **[[TESCREAL]]-adjacent movement** — a parallel track to the bundle, with overlapping personnel, funding, and conclusions but distinct branding. ## The Founding Document [Cowen, Tyler & Patrick Collison. *We Need a New Science of Progress.* The Atlantic, July 30, 2019.](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/) Two-page essay arguing four things: 1. **Progress is the most important variable.** Differences in growth rates produce vastly different futures over a century — small accelerations save or improve enormous numbers of lives. 2. **We don't actually study what causes it.** Economics studies growth in the aggregate; history of science studies discoveries; sociology studies institutions — but no discipline integrates these into a *science of progress* as such. 3. **Therefore we should build one.** A new field, "Progress Studies," should empirically investigate the people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have produced progress in the past — and recommend policies that produce more of it. 4. **It needs both academia and practice.** Universities should fund it; foundations and operators should run experiments in better grantmaking, immigration policy, R&D funding, and institutional design. The essay was deliberately short and unfootnoted. It functions less as a research program than as a **manifesto** — a flag to plant in the ground around which a movement could organize. ## Why the Branding Choice Matters The most important thing about Progress Studies is the *name*. It deliberately avoids: - **TESCREAL vocabulary** (existential risk, alignment, singularity, longtermism) - **EA vocabulary** (cause prioritization, expected value, GiveWell, earning to give) - **Accelerationist vocabulary** (e/acc, "build", "deus est machina") - **Crypto/libertarian vocabulary** (exit, network state, sovereign individual) What's left sounds like a **respectable academic discipline** — something that could plausibly get an Oxford chair. That's the strategic accomplishment. The movement reaches roughly the same political conclusions (regulation slows progress, growth is morally urgent, technologists should drive civilizational trajectory) as the more radical TESCREAL bundle, but in language that travels comfortably from a16z partner desks to White House offices to *New York Times* op-ed pages. See [[Patrick Collison]] for the "velvet-glove TESCREAL" framing in detail. ## Intellectual Lineage Progress Studies pulls from three traditions: ### 1. The Great Stagnation thesis ([[Tyler Cowen]]) Cowen's *The Great Stagnation* (2011) argues U.S. productivity, energy intensity, and median living standards stalled after ~1973. Progress Studies offers the response: figure out *why* and reverse it. ### 2. Extropianism / nanotech-utopian engineering culture J. Storrs Hall's *[[Where Is My Flying Car]]* (Stripe Press 2021) carries the [[Extropianism]] / [[Foresight Institute]] / [[K. Eric Drexler]] genealogy into the movement. Hall's "anti-progress counterculture ruined everything after 1970" diagnosis is fused with Cowen's stagnation framing to produce the movement's standard historical narrative. ### 3. Mainstream growth economics + Derek Parfit longtermism Cowen's *[[Stubborn Attachments]]* (Stripe Press 2018) provides the moral philosophy: future people matter, growth compounds, therefore growth is the supreme moral imperative (subject to human-rights constraints). This is **longtermism made respectable** — reachable from a faculty-club starting point rather than from [[Nick Bostrom]] or [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]. ## The Institutional Stack Progress Studies has built itself a small but coherent ecosystem since 2019: ### Publishing - **[[Stripe Press]]** — De facto publishing arm. *[[Stubborn Attachments]]* (Cowen, 2018), *[[Where Is My Flying Car]]* (Hall, 2021), and adjacent titles form the movement's canonical bookshelf. ### Movement-building - **[[Roots of Progress]]** — Jason Crawford's nonprofit (grew out of his 2017 blog), runs writing fellowships and the annual Progress Conference. The movement's institutional anchor. - **[[Institute for Progress]]** (IFP) — DC think tank founded by Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney (~2022). Policy advocacy on metascience, high-skilled immigration, biosecurity, and emerging tech. - **[[Emergent Ventures]]** — [[Tyler Cowen]]'s grant program at the [[Mercatus Center]], distributing small fast grants to "talented young people" — many of whom go on to staff Progress Studies institutions. ### Grantmaking / metascience experiments - **[[Fast Grants]]** — April 2020 COVID-era emergency research funding ($50M, 48-hour decisions) run by Cowen, [[Patrick Collison]], and Patrick Hsu through [[Mercatus Center]]. The movement's proof-of-concept for fast, low-friction R&D funding. - **[[Arc Institute]]** — December 2021 biomedical research nonprofit ($650M launch funding) co-founded by Patrick Hsu, Silvana Konermann, and [[Patrick Collison]]. Direct successor to Fast Grants — a permanent institution for the "fund scientists, not projects" model. - **Open Philanthropy Abundance & Growth Fund** — Co-funded by [[Patrick Collison]] and [[Dustin Moskovitz]]/[[Good Ventures]] (2025). Direct capital partnership between Progress Studies and the EA megafunder couple. ### Cultural production - Conversations with Tyler (podcast) — Cowen interviews Progress Studies fellow travelers - Marginal Revolution (Cowen + Alex Tabarrok blog) — daily intellectual home - Roots of Progress blog and ecosystem of fellowship-trained writers ## Relationship to TESCREAL Progress Studies is **adjacent to** rather than **inside** the [[TESCREAL]] bundle. The overlap and the distinction both matter. | TESCREAL component | Progress Studies relationship | |---|---| | **T**ranshumanism | Adjacent. Most PS figures don't talk about cryonics or radical life extension, but the worldview is compatible. | | **E**xtropianism | ✓ Strong descent. The "build more, faster, regulate less" instinct is pure extropianism. Hall's *Where Is My Flying Car* is the bridge text. | | **S**ingularitarianism | Adjacent. PS doesn't center AGI urgency the way [[OpenAI]] / [[Anthropic]] discourse does, but it's friendly to it. | | **C**osmism | Latent. The flying-car-to-space-colony arc is implicitly cosmist; PS rarely says so out loud. | | **R**ationalism | Adjacent but socially distinct. PS is faculty-club, EA-and-LessWrong is autodidact-and-Bayesian. Overlapping personnel, different vibes. | | **EA** | Friendly engagement, deliberate distance. Cowen and Collison are EA-adjacent rather than EA-aligned. | | **L**ongtermism | ✓ Yes, by another name. *Stubborn Attachments* reaches longtermism through growth economics rather than Oxford philosophy. | **Net read**: Progress Studies is a **respectability laundering operation** for the same broad political project documented across the rest of the KB's TESCREAL coverage. Same destination (techno-elite stewardship, deregulatory growth politics, AI as civilizational project), same capital network (Collison, Andreessen, Moritz, Hoffman, Moskovitz, Tallinn), reached through a different intellectual gateway. ## Critiques ### From the academic left - **Lady Science**, **The Point Magazine**, and others: Progress Studies constructs a sanitized, technologist-friendly history of progress that erases regulation, public-sector R&D, organized labor, and the social costs of accelerationist growth. - The movement's "anti-progress counterculture" diagnosis collapses environmentalism, civil rights, and feminism into a single bogeyman that conveniently mirrors current right-coded culture-war framings. ### From EA / longtermism - Progress Studies dodges the hard utilitarian question — *whose* progress, measured *how* — that EA explicitly grapples with. - Without an x-risk-style stopping criterion, "more growth always" can rationalize concentration of catastrophic capabilities. ### From [[Émile Torres]] / [[Timnit Gebru]] (the TESCREAL critique applied here) - Same structural critique as TESCREAL: the movement concentrates decision-making power in exactly the people who benefit from that concentration. - Progress Studies' specific innovation is doing this in vocabulary that sounds *less* ideological than EA or rationalism — which makes the politics harder to see and harder to contest. ### From traditional industrial policy - The PS focus on individual founders, fast grants, and metascience reform underweights the historical evidence for **directed public-sector investment** (NIH, DARPA, Manhattan Project, Apollo) as the actual source of most 20th-century breakthroughs. ## KB Significance 1. **It is the velvet-glove TESCREAL track** — the version of the same politics that wins op-ed space at *The Atlantic* and *New York Times* rather than appearing on LessWrong. 2. **It is the intellectual brand layer of [[Patrick Collison]]'s public project** — and through him, of [[Stripe Press]]'s publishing strategy. 3. **It feeds directly into [[American Dynamism]] and the defense-tech investor thesis** — same operators ([[Marc Andreessen]], [[Sam Altman]]), same conclusion (build fast, regulate less, technologists should lead). 4. **It is the most institutionally legible TESCREAL-adjacent movement** — academic-flavored enough that universities will associate with it, foundation-grade enough to take Open Phil money, mainstream enough that journalists treat it as a respectable beat rather than a fringe ideology. ## Draft Notes / To Expand - Add a Jason Crawford [[Jason Crawford]] (currently unlinked) - Add Alec Stapp / Caleb Watney profiles - Add Patrick Hsu / Silvana Konermann profiles - Document the **Progress Conference** annual gathering - Trace **Emergent Ventures** grant recipient → Progress Studies institution pipeline - Map specific policy wins (high-skilled immigration reforms, ARPA-style R&D funding pushes, FDA / NIH reform proposals) - Examine whether the [[Trump 2.0]] administration absorbed Progress Studies personnel into actual policymaking - Document the **Speed of Light Capital** / venture-arm offshoots of the movement ## See Also - [[Patrick Collison]] — Co-founder - [[Tyler Cowen]] — Co-founder (currently unlinked) - [[Stubborn Attachments]] — Foundational moral-philosophy text - [[Where Is My Flying Car]] — Foundational engineering-history text - [[Stripe Press]] — De facto publishing arm - [[Roots of Progress]] — Movement-building nonprofit - [[Institute for Progress]] — DC policy think tank - [[Fast Grants]] — Metascience proof-of-concept - [[Arc Institute]] — Permanent metascience institution - [[Mercatus Center]] — Institutional home of Cowen and Fast Grants - [[TESCREAL]] — The adjacent ideological bundle - [[Extropianism]] — Direct ideological ancestor - [[Longtermism]] — Parallel track to the same destination - [[Effective Accelerationism]] — More militant cousin - [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] — Andreessen's downstream crystallization - [[American Dynamism]] — Defense-tech investor thesis Progress Studies feeds into