Progress Local & Continuous

Continuing conversation with Michael Magoon

Michael Magoon

was kind enough to respond in depth to my summary of his work ongoing over at From Poverty to Progress. I want to keep the conversation going. I’m going to accept his ante and raise him on questions of locality and continuity.

Michael’s mission is focused on the past, on history.

My work is primarily about understanding the causes and origins of human material progress.

(All quotes are from Michael’s long comment on my original post.)

Material vs. Non-Material

Michael is focused, first, on material progress, although he by no means excludes non-material progress, things we might like to achieve that go beyond material welfare, like education, art, culture, philosophy, religion, friendship and many other social and political goods (that’s my list). It may be that non-material goods like these can only be pursued, in fact, when some minimal level of material well-being is secure. Most people won’t care much about art or philosophy if they’re starving.

When I questioned Michael about issues of inequality and injustice, intangible values regularly applied to material goods, Michael disagreed with me that values like these are at substantial risk. Quite the opposite. As long as material progress — economic growth — continues to happen, everyone benefits.

I disagree that “social matters of (in)justice and (in)equality will weigh heavily.” The evidence is overwhelming that the poor, working-class, developing nations, and minorities have benefitted substantially from material progress. Equality is unachievable and likely always will be. And justice can be defined however one wants. Any justice that undermines the above groups is not justice. And given that this progress has lasted for centuries, it is by definition “sustainable.”

It is true that historically, empirically, growth has benefitted the poor, the working class, developing nations, and minorities — all those “billions lifted out of poverty” — even if they are otherwise “left behind” the wealthier classes as inequality grows. I’m also inclined to agree that absolute levels of income or wealth or material resources are more important than relative or comparative levels. Nevertheless, extreme and growing disparity will sooner or later be perceived as unjust, and political unrest will follow. Political unrest in turn will lead to redistributive politics and policies, and then economic progress may become unsustainable not for technological or economic reasons, but for political reasons.¹

Michael takes political obstacles seriously, so there must be more to the story.

I do not advocate accelerating material progress to the maximum possible extent. I am mainly concerned with rolling back government policies that intentionally or unintentionally undermine material progress. I believe that the benefits of past material progress are reason enough to not undermine the trend.

Even more effective than rolling back bad policies would be to not let them be rolled out in the first place. My contention would be that exactly these kinds of roll outs will become increasingly likely, politically, the more inequality grows, even if the poor are making absolute gains.

The problem would be exacerbated the more focus is on material wealth vs. non-material or holistic human flourishing. I may be relatively poor, but if I have enough materially speaking, and if I have leisure time, low stress, peace, family, friendships, and community, that makes up for a lot of luxuries and toys.

Innovation, Risk & the Future

I asked Michael about fossil fuels, and about risk. Both questions concern past and future. Historically speaking, most people would have to agree that the development and use of fossil fuels as a high-intensity energy source was the chief catalyst to the technological breakthroughs, economic growth, and escape from Malthusian poverty that occurred around the time of the industrial revolution. Historically speaking, fossil fuels were essential to material progress. That doesn’t mean there won’t be better energy options in the future.

You ask about fossil fuels. It is important to note that my work is primarily about understanding the causes and origins of human material progress. It is not meant as a prediction of how future societies will be or constructing a utopia.

I believe that widespread use of fossil fuels is an essential precondition to a society to transition from poverty to a state of material progress that benefits most citizens. For the foreseeable future, I do not see an alternative to widespread fossil fuel usage. I am confident that in the coming century a new energy source will be invented that will make fossil fuels obsolete, but that does not exist now.

As quickly as we are moving to renewable energy, to nuclear coming back on the table, to (hopefully!) some as yet undetermined new energy source becoming available in the next century, it does seem that we’ll remain at least partially reliant on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future — with all their negative impacts of pollution and carbon emissions/climate change dogging us. At least there is now increasing widespread recognition that the human energy mix must innovate and change. The historic way is not a good way for the future. We’ll continue to bear ongoing fallout from the energy commitments of prior centuries.

Not that anyone knew, when original historical choices were made! The future, for those in the past — our present! — was unknowable. The same goes for us. No matter what we choose now, there are plenty of risks — environmental, geopolitical, sociocultural — to be faced even as material progress continues (as we hope it does). Whatever the risks, unknowable, what we can do, as Michael strongly advocates, is to continue to work to understand how progress was made in the past. There are lessons to be learned, some of which are to decipher how to avoid taking certain kinds of risks, unmitigated, that we know in the past led to bad outcomes.²

Locality & Scale

Again, Michael’s main goal is to understand the origins and causes of material progress in the past. He has no particular agenda or prediction about the future except a strongly expressed desire to continue as we’ve been doing because it’s been a net good — and good for all.

Material progress has been good for all humans. Clearly other living creatures have suffered, and planetary environments and ecosystems have been depleted and outright destroyed. So far this hasn’t come at great overall human (species) cost, given the benefits received by so many. I think Michael would argue thus.

Nevertheless, strong negative impacts on local people (labor) and lands, easily exploited as they are by national or global interests, plus an unequal distribution of proceeds and profits, which tend not to return equitably to locals, should be kept in the picture. Local negative costs may not be enough to outweigh overall progress and gain, but unless one is doing a purely utilitarian calculus, local burdens do matter, both economically and ethically.³

They may also matter deeply to the very principle of growth as Michael sees it:

As for progress, I do not see the trend as a result of “what we want.” We do not vote on progress. I see material progress as the unintended consequences of people making decisions to solve local problems. My guess is that will continue to be largely unintended in the future.

And again:

Results are what actually occurs when we try to implement an idea in reality… This can only be identified after the idea is implemented. I advocate for small-scale experimentation and then scaling up when the results are positive.

Based on an understanding of material progress in the historic past, Michael sees overall gain resulting from the unintended consequences of people making decisions to solve local problems. In other words, we’re not talking top-down social engineering. It’s not governments setting out policy agendas with progressive ends in mind that are accomplishing anything. What matters is the effective operation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Aggregate outcomes are realized, according to this principle, by unintended actions taken by local people working to solve local, everyday problems. One would like for those local people solving problems to be the ones benefiting from solving them!

Empirically, though, what about historical transitions in agriculture, in mining and resource development, in the deployment of technology (here I’d love to hear

J. Michael Wahlen

chime in), in finance, and so on? It seems that most operations have only gotten bigger over time, with profits and wealth concentrating at the top, thereby driving financial resources for further innovation (capital) out of the hands of those local people solving problems — unless, that is, they can gain the attention and enthusiastic support of a “local” VC angel investor.

At best, I see a strong tension between a historical reality — and a principled ideal! — favoring the small and local, complete with the possibility of scaling up, versus the more recent historical reality trending to monopoly, globalization (anti-local), and concentrated power in industry, banking, and government. Historical material progress may indeed have originated in small commercial states in the early modern era, but over the last century and a half the driving causal factors of material growth are of a different sort.

Did not a substantial shift in scale occur during the Gilded Age? And didn’t the social repercussions result in the Progressive Era (so-called), where increasingly big government and policymaking tried to control monopolies, big industry, and big banking? In the end, critics say, however, big Progressive government colluded rather than controlled big industry and big finance — and regulatory government agencies were “captured.” Progressive-minded governments soon launched equally big social agendas — especially after two world wars and a nation-shattering depression — to the point we now have ubiquitous “anti-progress” (?) Progressivism we all know and either love or hate.⁴

I keep coming back to the Progressive Era, as it extends into present politics, as marking, ironically, a confusing historical shift particularly on the point of progress.

Continuity

Perhaps my deepest reservation about ongoing material progress, that is, a reservation about the possibility and likelihood of keeping what’s happened in the past going — the continuity of it all — is itself grounded upon that very past. Equally grounding ourselves in history, Michael and I come to somewhat varying conclusions.

The basic idea of the Anthropocene, as I see it, is that something fundamentally shifted. It doesn’t matter when one dates the beginning of human planetary dominance — increased human control over our destiny, as a wildly successful species, as modern nation states, or as individual lives and livelihoods — the point is that our human “gift” as a species is to fundamentally change things. The near past, over the last couple centuries, yes, has shown a lot of continuity if the measure is sheer material progress. We do seem to have escaped Malthus’ trap, for example. Brad deLong’s book on economic history over the long 20th century does a good job describing that escape.

But humans have also initiated a bunch of exponentially shaped growth and decline curves, across a whole range of indicators, and exponential change — careening off into the infinite — is almost by definition not sustainable. Curves have to level off. Equilibria have to be reached, whether as single stable points or oscillating dynamisms around steady averages or means. Otherwise, there isn’t any continuity, only wild swings. Whatever one thinks about climate tipping points, planetary boundaries, limits to growth, diminishing returns — they are all theoretical constructs or metaphors used to face the real difficulty inherent in trying to balance stability or continuity against catastrophic revolution.⁵ We’re back to problems of the dynamics of risk.

Continuous improvement, positive evolutionary (gradual) change, growth, is what Michael assumes about material progress, as he has studied its historical origins and material causes. His studies give him hope that progress can and will be ongoing. His goal is to maintain the positive continuity.

I hope we can. I hope for stability and continuity in material progress, I hope positive gradual change won’t give way to exponential growth curves hitting hard ceilings or catastrophic slides to radically different system equilibria. I hope local people solving problems can keep improving to reduce and offset negative side effects and costs borne by a few. I hope the planet with its complexity of physical, biological, and ecological systems, and with its non-human inhabitants as well as human ones, is resilient enough to continue to support continued material progress — for all.

History is great to discover empirical origins and causes for its single existing thread. Cross culturally and comparatively, it’s great to spot trends and empirical regularities, to assess risks that might be mitigated next time around or in a different application. But nothing from history is guaranteed to repeat itself, and in most respects our species is master of discontinuity, of change, of experimentation, of radical innovation at planetary scale.

Hope reassures itself based on continuities originating in the past — like that of material progress — but it ultimately belongs to the future. In the Anthropocene, hope has to reside in the prospect of humans continuing to do well.

image generated by Substack

1. Can we assume an expanding welfare state in fact reduces baseline economic growth? I’m sure all the studies have been done. Simplistic logic would suggest that expanding transfer payments gives incentives to everyone to work less hard. Karl Polanyi argues a much more sophisticated version — I think — of what I’m trying to say, i.e. that there will be inevitable political blowback. I continue to wrestle with political economics in all of it.

2. Since I don’t want to advocate for risk-averse behavior — by no means! — it may be that the most important wisdom to be gained from the past will come in the form of awareness of what was then unforeseen and unexpected. The more knowledge and experience we gain, even with imperfect future vision, the more innovation can be risked while simultaneously we can prepare to mitigate against inevitable fallout.

3. I’m thinking specifically about resources harvested locally around the world that get shipped to the economies that need them: whether it’s cotton to British textiles, minerals from mines in Africa, rubber from Indonesia, palm oil, produce and agricultural specialties, or fossil fuels. Travel, tourism, and hospitality today make up roughly one tenth of global GDP, services provided are highly localized, and yet massive profits accrue to airlines, international hotel groups and tour companies, and national coffers through taxes. My claims here are impressionistic. To get at current actual numbers, one would need to ferret out all the data sources and assess.

4. Is Progressivism anti-progress? How do you define “progress”? There are competing definitions.

5. For stability or continuity, if there’s not actual equilibrium or stasis, at least there’s gradual predictable change, “evolution” as opposed to “revolution.”