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What Happened to Progress?
In much of the Western world, a curious paradox has emerged: despite living in an age of extraordinary global economic progress, public sentiment is increasingly marked by pessimism. Billions have been lifted out of poverty, life expectancy has risen, and technological breakthroughs – from AI to renewable energy – promise transformative change. But many in affluent societies feel disillusioned. Public discussion focusses on stagnating real wages, perceptions of rising inequality, climate crisis, foreign wars, the impact of high levels of immigration and a sense that the future no longer offers a better world. Talk of progress is largely dismissed as misplaced optimism. The postwar narrative of continual improvement seems fractured, overwhelmed by anxieties about automation, climate collapse, immigration and political dysfunction. Progress, once a shared horizon, now feels fragmented and highly questionable.
By contrast, in large parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, optimism is more palpable. Rapid improvements in living standards, urbanisation, expanding middle classes, and digital connectivity have fuelled a sense of possibility. For many in these regions, progress is not a fading memory but a lived reality.
What does the evidence tell us? Is the world continuing on the road to progress? Or have we entered a period of stagnation and decline? And why is public discourse so focussed on the negatives whilst ignoring the positives?
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on a great summary of the subject “What Happened to Progress?” The case for being content with what we have achieved has been well put.
But.
When anyone talks to me about “the average person in …” I become aware that I am about to be given information, which is profoundly biased, or perhaps even worse, misinformed. In my early education, I was told about a man whose temperature was measured as average could have his head in a fridge and his feet in a fire. So what use was the knowledge that his temperature was average?
And.
I worry about perspective. For example, you said, “From 1700 to 2000, the population of Europe grew sixfold, and standards of living 15-fold. In the United States, during the same period, GDP per capita grew 30-fold.” During that period, several million Native Americans were murdered. Some five million African slaves (or was it ten million?) were transported across the Atlantic—and who knows how many people actually died in the Indian subcontinent? The GDP of what we called India under colonial rule represented something like 20% of the world’s total economic output when the British arrived and was reduced to 4 or 5% when the indigenous people regained their freedom.
Between 1700 and 2000 the British plundered the world., as did many of the other nations of Europe. The people arriving from mostly Europe plundered the Native Americans. And to add to this we had two world wars and two atomic bombs.
With regard to today’s world, we face many rather large problems. Here are just three out of a very long list, in no particular order:
1. The warning from President Eisenhower about giving undue influence to people who do not deserve it, especially the military-industrial complex, has been completely ignored. The money spent of weapons is complete out of control. And nuclear scientists tell us that we are only a matter of a minute and a bit away from a global catastrophe.
2. We have abandoned any real attempt to pursue democratic government. What we have is a series of plutocracies which are essentially self-aggrandising and self-perpetuating, and we pretend they are democratic. The Trump phenomenon can be seen as many of the American people attempting to move away from being ruled by the established political elite who have failed so many of them over the past fifty or more years. Of course, Trump is a complete phoney and will only make life worse for most of the people who had faith in him to make their lives better.
3. We know that we are heading into a period of enormous climatic challenges, yet we are not prepared to face up to what is required to ameliorate the situation. It is by no means certain that new zero could work. We have introduced policies that are risky and are financially regressive. We have allowed climate-change policies to be politicised. This can only result in hardship for many people across the world.
So, what is progress and is it appropriate for me to say that we have made progress? With regard to progress can one ever speak for anything other than oneself? There is absolutely no doubt that I live much more physically comfortably life than any of my ancestors. I have had enormously more opportunities than any previous member of my family. But to what end has this been?
Am I more content with myself and the world I live in than my ancestors were? I cannot answer that question. I do not know. I call for support from the philosopher Emil du Bois-Reymond, who famously said, “Ignoramus et ignorabimus.”
“Ignoramus et ignorabimus” which translates as “I do not know and I will not know” applies to many of the great question we now ask ourselves.
I am reasonably at peace with myself. I was taught from an early age to forgive my own weaknesses. I am less tolerant of the follies I see close around me, and I am much less tolerant of the follies of large organisations and governments. But it is quite possible that my forebears were much more content than I am, if for no other reason than that they lived in a far simpler way than I do and I imagine less reflective.
And maybe one of the important objectives of anyone’s life is to live in peace with oneself.
The graph below shows real household disposable income since the war.
https://ifs.org.uk/data-items/real-household-disposable-income-1948-49
There is a clear inflection point as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, an end to “progress” as experienced by UK residents in terms of their expectation of life becoming “better” in the future compared to the past.
I think its a reasonable counterfactual to say that had this not occurred and “progress” continued along the red trend line there would have been no Brexit, no rise of populism, no Trump presidency and no possibility of Nigel Farage being next Prime Minister.