Progress studies is more than political engineering

by Jason Crawford · September 11, 2020 · 1 min read

Last month a new online magazine launched, Works in Progress, “dedicated to sharing novel ideas and stories of progress.” It’s funded by a grant from Emergent Ventures and is currently the only publication I know of dedicated to progress studies.

I’ve contributed a post for their blog, riffing on a previous post from John Myers titled “Progress studies: the hard question”:

In a recent post on this blog, John Myers proposes that we need to focus on “how to engineer societal change to get more progress.”

I am broadly sympathetic to this idea. I agree with Myers that there are a number of major areas that are obviously broken: he lists housing, public transit, education, and (US) health care, among others. …

But I also think we need more than a theory of political engineering.

Read my full response on the Works in Progress blog.

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