A growing and influential intellectual movement aims to understand why human progress happens – and how to speed it up. Garrison Lovely investigates.

一场方兴未艾而有影响力的思想运动旨在理解人类为什么取得进步，以及如何加快进步，加里森·洛弗莉对此展开调查。

You’re a typical American in 1870. You live on a rural farm. If you’re a man, you likely began a lifetime of manual labour as a teen, which will end when you’re disabled or dead. If you’re a woman, you spend your time on labour-intensive housework. If you're Black or any other minority, life is even harder.

1870年，你是一名生活在乡村农场上的典型美国人。如果你是男性，可能从青少年时期就开始了体力劳动生涯，直到残疾或死亡为止。如果你是女性，会把时间用在家务劳动上。如果你是黑人或其他少数民族，生活可能更加艰辛。
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You’re isolated from the world, with no telephone or postal service. When night falls, you live by candlelight. You defecate in an outhouse.

你与世隔绝，没有电话或邮政服务。当夜幕降临时，你在烛光下生活。你排便需要去屋外厕所解决。

One day, you fall asleep and wake up in 1940. Life is totally different. Your home is "networked" – you have electricity, gas, telephone, water, and sewer connections. You marvel at new forms of entertainment, like the phonograph, radio, and motion picture. The Empire State Building looms over New York, surrounded by other impossibly tall buildings. You might own a car, and if you don’t, you have met people who do. Some of the wealthiest people you encounter have even flown in a plane.

有一天你睡着了，醒来后发现自己穿越到了1940年。生活完全变了，你的住宅“联网”了——你拥有电、天然气、电话、水、污水管道。你赞叹新的娱乐形式，比如留声机、收音机、电影。纽约的帝国大厦高耸入云，周围还有其他高得不可思议的建筑。你可以拥有汽车，即使你没有，也会发现别人有。你遇到的某些富豪甚至乘坐飞机翱翔。

These transformations emerged thanks to a "special century" of unusually high economic growth between 1870 and 1970. They were documented in the economic historian Robert Gordon’s 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth – and are detailed in a forthcoming book by the philosopher William MacAskill called What We Owe The Future. And it wasn’t just a US story – the industrialised nations experienced dizzying transformations during the early 20th Century.

这些变化得益于1870-1970这个“特殊世纪”的高速经济增长。经济历史学家罗伯特·戈登在2016年的著作《美国增长的起落》中描述了这些变化——哲学家威廉·麦卡斯基尔在即将出版的著作《我们对未来的责任》中有详尽的描述。这不只是美国的情形——20世纪初期的工业国家都经历了目不暇接的变化。


A vision of the future from the 1940s - a world where home automation boosted leisure time.

20世纪40年代畅想的未来世界——家庭自动化增加了人们的闲暇时光。

For most of history, the world improved at a sluggish pace, if at all. Civilisations rose and fell. Fortunes were amassed and squandered. Almost every person in the world lived in what we would now call extreme poverty. For thousands of years, global wealth – at least our best approximations of it – barely budged.

在历史的大部分时间里，世界就算有进步也很缓慢。文明兴衰无常，财富积聚消散，世界上几乎所有人都生活在我们当今所说的赤贫状态下。在几千年的时间里，全球财富——至少按照最乐观的估计——几乎没有变化。

But beginning around 150-200 years ago, everything changed. The world economy suddenly began to grow exponentially. Global life expectancy climbed from less than 30 years to more than 70 years. Literacy, extreme poverty, infant mortality, and even height improved in a similarly dramatic fashion. The story may not be universally positive, nor have the benefits been equally distributed, but by many measures, economic growth and advances in science and technology have changed the way of life for billions of people.

但在大约150-200年前，一切开始发生变化。世界经济突然呈指数增长，全球的预期寿命从不到30岁增至70岁以上。识字率、赤贫率、婴儿死亡率、甚至身高都得到了大幅改善。这些进步可能并不普遍，利益的分布也不均衡，但以许多指标来衡量，经济增长和科技进步改变了数十亿人的生活方式。

What explains this sudden explosion in relative wealth and technological power? What happens if it slows down, or stagnates? And if so, can we do something about it? These are key questions of "progress studies", a nascent self-styled academic field and intellectual movement, which aims to dissect the causes of human progress in order to better advance it.

什么原因导致了相对财富和技术力量的突然爆发？如果减缓或停滞会怎么样？我们又该怎么办？这些是自诩为“进步研究学”的新兴学术领域和思想运动的关键议题，旨在剖析人类进步的原因，从而更好地推动进步。
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Founded by an influential economist and a billionaire entrepreneur, this community tends to define progress in terms of scientific or technological advancement, and economic growth – and therefore their ideas and beliefs are not without their critics. So, what does the progress studies movement believe, and what do they want to see happen in the future?

创始人是一位有影响力的经济学家和富豪企业家，该学界往往从科技进步和经济增长的角度来定义进步——所以他们的思想和理念不乏批评者。那么进步研究运动相信什么，他们希望看到未来发生什么？

One of the first ways to understand the progress studies movement is to understand its fears. Over the past few years, a number of researchers and economists have raised concerns that scientific and technological progress could be slowing down, which they worry will cause economic growth to stagnate.

要想了解进步研究运动，首先要了解它的担忧。过去几年来，许多研究人员和经济学家提出了对科技进步放缓的担忧，他们担心这将导致经济增长停滞。

To illustrate this more tangibly, Gordon invites his readers to reflect on the rate of progress between the mid-late 20th Century and 2020s. Imagine after that first nap as a typical American, you had taken a second one in 1940, waking up in the 2020s. Your fridge now has a freezer, and your new microwave lets you reheat your leftovers. You are refreshed by air conditioning. You are far more likely to own a car now, and it’s safer and easier to drive. You have a computer, TV, and smartphone. These are impressive inventions, and some seem like magic, but over time, you realise that your living standards haven't transformed quite as much as when you woke up in 1940.

为了阐述得更加透彻，戈登请读者回顾20世纪中晚期和21世纪20年代的进步速度。想象你作为一名典型的美国人第一次睡着后，在1940年第二次睡着了，醒来穿越到21世纪20年代。现在你的冰箱有了冷冻室，新型微波炉能加热剩菜，空调使你神清气爽。现在你拥有汽车的可能性更大了，驾车更加安全便捷。你拥有电脑、电视、智能手机。这些都是令人赞叹的发明，有些东西看起来就像魔法，但随着时间的推移你会意识到，相比第一次苏醒的1940年，生活标准并未发生太大变化。


Faster, cheaper, better?

越快越便宜越好？

Gordon claims that the staggering changes in the US of 1870-1970 were built on transformative, one-time innovations, and therefore Americans can't expect similar levels of growth to return anytime soon, if ever. The remarkable thing is "not that growth is slowing down but that it was so rapid for so long", he writes. In Gordon’s view, this slowdown isn’t anyone’s fault: "American growth slowed down after 1970 not because inventors had lost their spark or were devoid of new ideas, but because the basic elements of a modern standard of living had by then already been achieved along so many dimensions."

戈登声称在1870-1970年，美国的惊人变化是基于一次性的变革型创新，所以美国人不能期待类似的增长速度，即使有也不会很快到来。值得注意的不是“增长速度放缓，而是高速增长太久了”，他写道。戈登认为增长放缓不是任何人的错：“1970年以后，美国增长放缓不是因为发明者失去激情或缺少创意，因为在许多方面，现代生活标准的基本要素在当时已经得以实现”。

Gordon builds on fears made famous by economist Tyler Cowen in his 2011 book, The Great Stagnation. Cowen similarly argues that the US ate most of the "low-hanging fruit" that enabled consistent growth in American median incomes, and that the country can’t expect to grow like it used to.

戈登的依据来自经济学家泰勒·考恩，后者在2011年的著作《大停滞》中提出了著名的担忧。考恩也认为美国吃掉了大部分“低垂的果实”，使美国的收入中位数得以持续增长，美国不能再指望那样的增速了。

So, have all the low-hanging fruit gone? Are "ideas" getting harder to find? A team of economists from Stanford and MIT posed this exact question in a 2020 paper. They found that research and development efforts have significantly increased, while per-researcher productivity has declined. In other words, we’re getting less for our time and money. A lot less. In his analysis of the paper, MacAskill estimates that each doubling of technological advancement requires four-times as much research effort as the previous doubling.

那么“低垂的果实”被吃光了吗？寻找“创意”的难度更大了？在2020年的一篇论文中，来自斯坦福大学和麻省理工学院的一支经济学家团队提出了这个问题。他们发现研发工作量大幅增加，但科学家的人均生产率下降了。也就是说，我们用时间和金钱换来的成果减少了，而且少了许多。麦卡斯基尔在论文中估算，技术进步每翻一番，需要投入四倍的研发工作量。
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Why? Some from the progress community point to sclerotic funding bureaucracies, which eat nearly half of researcher time and create perverse incentives. This may explain some of the drop-off, but the paper authors found that US research productivity has declined more than 40 times since the 1930s. Is it plausible that US scientific funding became that much less efficient?

为什么？进步学界的某些人把矛头对准僵化的拨款官僚机构，它们占用了科学家近一半的时间，进行不当激励。这可以解释一部分生产率下降，但论文作者发现自20世纪30年代以来，美国的科研生产率下降了40多倍。美国科研资金的效率下降这么多，可能吗？
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Instead, the authors favour Gordon and Cowen's low-hanging fruit arguments: we’ve found the easy discoveries and now put more effort towards what remains. For instance, compare the insights that Albert Einstein made as a patent clerk, or that Marie Curie unlocked in a rudimentary lab, to multibillion-dollar megaprojects like the Large Hadron Collider or James Webb Space Telescope.

相反，论文作者倾向于戈登和考恩提出的“低垂的果实”观点：我们过去发现的都是简单的东西，现在投入更多精力发现其余的东西。例如做一下对比，前者是艾伯特·爱因斯坦担任专利审查员时的观点，或者居里夫人在简陋实验室里的发现，后者是数十亿美元的特大项目，比如大型强子对撞机、詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜。

We have partially compensated for this decline by increasing the share of the population going towards research, but this, of course, can’t go on forever. Global population growth may help, but this is expected to slow and then reverse before the end of the century. It's also possible that artificial intelligence (AI) could help reverse the decline – or even initiate a new era of explosive growth – but some researchers fear that superintelligent AI could bring other risks that harm progress, or worse.

我们通过提高科学家在人口中的比例，在一定程度上弥补了科研生产率下降，但这肯定不是长久之计。全球人口增长也许有所帮助，但在本世纪末之前，人口增速可能放缓，继而出现下滑趋势。人工智能可能有助于扭转生产率的下降趋势，甚至开创爆发式增长的新时代，但有科学家担心，特别聪明的人工智能可能带来其他风险阻碍进步，甚至更加糟糕。


Is progress slowing down? And if so, what should we do about it?

进步正在放缓？如果真是如此，我们该怎么办？

The stagnation hypothesis is not universally accepted. Ideas can be combined and recombined, creating a combinatorial explosion of new innovations, an effect that counters the gobbling of low-hanging fruit. And some have pointed out that if you measure research productivity and benefits differently, the picture is much rosier.

停滞假说并未得到普遍认可。创意可以相互组合和重组，创造出组合爆发式的新发明，这种效应能够抵消“低垂的果实”被吃光的效应。有人指出如果以不同的方式衡量科研生产率与收益，情况会改观许多。

Nonetheless, fear of stagnation is a central motivation for many people in the progress community. Unlike Gordon, however, they are optimistic about their capacity to change it – which leads us to the story of how the progress studies movement was founded.

然而，担心停滞是许多进步学界人士的核心动力。但与戈登不同，他们对自身阻止停滞的能力感到乐观——让我们了解一下进步研究运动是如何兴起的。

The origin of progress studies

进步研究学的起源

Around 2016, Cowen received an out-of-the-blue email from Irish billionaire Patrick Collison, who was interested in his book, The Great Stagnation. A few years earlier, Collison had cofounded the online payments company Stripe and now wanted to talk about bigger issues. The pair had a few dinners together in San Francisco and hit it off.

2016年左右，考恩意外收到一封来自爱尔兰亿万富翁帕特里克·科利森的来信，后者对他的著作《大停滞》很感兴趣。多年前，科利森与他人联合创立了网络支付公司Stripe，现在想聊聊更重要的事情。两人在旧金山聚过几次餐，一见如故。

Both Cowen and Collison are infovores. Collison has posted his entire nearly 800-volume bookshelf to his personal site (though he admits he’s only read about half of them). Cowen’s practice of ruthlessly scouring books for the information value they contain and abandoning them – sometimes after five minutes – may make some completionists shudder.

考恩和科利森都是“食知动物”。科利森将自己书架上近800本所有的书籍罗列到个人网站上（但他承认只读完一半）。考恩如饥似渴地翻阅书籍，从中获取知识价值，然后将它们丢掉——有时只翻阅了五分钟——这种做法可能使某些完美主义者不寒而栗。

Cowen’s information-production is nearly as prolific as his consumption. The 60-year-old economist has authored nearly 20 books, 40 papers, six years of Bloomberg columns, over 150 episodes of his podcast, and nearly 20 years of blog posts on his popular economics blog Marginal Revolution. During our conversation, Cowen’s voice was hoarse from the marathon of interviews he conducted to promote his most recent book. In 2020, Cowen ranked 17th on a list of the top 100 most influential economists.

考恩的知识输出几乎与输入同样多。这位60岁的经济学家执笔过20本书、40篇论文、6年的彭博社专栏，150多段播客，他在有关经济学的人气博客“边际革命”上发表了近20年的文章。在我们的交谈过程中，考恩声音沙哑，因为他为推介新书而接受过长期访谈。2020年，考恩在100位最具影响力的经济学家中排名第17。

Collison, nearly three decades younger and running the fourth-most valuable private startup in the world, has written less, but still found time to publish collections of lixs on topics like air pollution, culture, growth, Silicon Valley history, and, of course, progress. Stripe’s nearly $100bn (£83bn/€95bn) valuation puts Collison’s net worth north of $11bn (£9bn/€10.5bn). The online payments company combines the lofty "change the world" rhetoric of Silicon Valley startups with the mundane, competent pipes-building of an infrastructure company.

科利森比考恩年轻三十多岁，经营者一家世界第四位最具价值的私人初创企业，他写得不多，但仍然腾出时间发表了一大堆链接，题材涵盖空气污染、文化、经济增长、硅谷历史，当然还有进步。Stripe公司的市场估值近1000亿美元（830亿英镑/950亿欧元），使科利森的净资产超过110亿美元（90亿英镑/105亿欧元）。这家网络支付公司融合了硅谷初创企业“改变世界”的崇高理念，以及基建公司管道建设的平凡和能力。

During the pair's meetings, Cowen tells me, "we were both talking about the ideas, finding we had common ideas, and somehow hit upon the notion of an article". So, in 2019, they co-authored an essay in The Atlantic, which argued for "a new science of progress".

两人在会见过程中，考恩告诉我：“我们都在谈论这些想法，发现英雄所见略同，不知怎么的就想起写一篇文章”。所以在2019年，他们合著了一篇论文发表在《大西洋》月刊上，呼吁建立“一门新的进步科学”。

"There is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study," they wrote. "We suggest inaugurating the discipline of 'progress studies.'"

“目前没有一种基础广泛的思想运动旨在了解进步动态，或者追求加快进步的深层次目标。我们认为应该建立一个专门的研究领域”，他们写道。“我们建议开创进步研究学科”


Science and technology have brought great changes to human life - many of them undoubtedly positive

科学技术给人类生活带来了巨大变化，许多变化无疑是有益的。

Their essay generated criticism. Classicist Amy Pistone tweeted that this was just another example of Silicon Valley reinventing the wheel (or in this case, the humanities). Historian Monica Black tweeted that they ignore the harms of "progress", a term whose subjectivity means it will reflect the biases of the people invoking it. And Shannon Dea and Ted McCormick, professors of philosophy and history respectively, wrote that, "'progress' is a situated and often interested claim about human efforts, not a natural good or a divine gift. It needs critical assessment, not headlong zeal".

他们的论文遭到批判。古典学家埃米·皮斯托内发推文称，这只是硅谷重新发明轮子的又一案例（也可以说是人文科学）。历史学家莫妮卡·布莱克发推文称，他们忽视了“进步”的危害，这个词的主观性意味着它反映了用词者的偏见。哲学教授香农·迪雅和历史学家泰德·麦考密克写道：“在描述人类努力方面，进步是依托特定环境和关乎利益的说法，而不是自然的善或天生的禀赋。进步需要批判性评价，而不是鲁莽的激情”。

But between Cowen’s intellectual heft and Collison’s ample fortune, progress studies stuck. The pair believe that, unlike past academic fields, progress studies should prescribe action, writing that it, "is closer to medicine than biology: the goal is to treat, not merely to understand".

尽管结合了考恩的知识影响力和科利森的充裕财富，但进步研究学受阻了。两人认为进步研究学不同于以往的学术领域，它应该提供行动指南，他们写道：“进步研究学更接近于医学而不是生物学：目标是治病救人，而不仅仅是求知”。

What progress studies believes

进步研究学的信念

Since Cowen and Collison inaugurated the field, others have elaborated on what progress studies could look like, and its core principles. Among the most influential is entrepreneur Jason Crawford, who had been writing about progress for years before "progress studies" was coined. His blog, the Roots of Progress, explores examples of scientific and technological development, like why internal combustion beat steam. He also opines on ideas like why progress studies is a "moral imperative" and why people are more "smart, rich and free" than their ancestors.

自从科恩和科利森开创该领域以来，其他人阐述了进步研究学可能的面貌，以及核心理念。最有影响力的是企业家杰森·克劳福德，他在“进步研究学”被命名之前，就已写过多年关于进步的文章。他在博客“进步之源”上探讨了科学技术发展的案例，例如：为什么内燃机打败了蒸汽机。他对其他观点也发表过看法，例如为什么进步研究学是“道德义务”，为什么人们比祖先更“聪明、富裕、自由”。
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Crawford has sought to systematise what progress studies means. He argues that the movement holds three premises to be true. First, that progress is real. Material living standards have enormously improved in the last 200 years or so, and that, for whatever reason, "something obviously went very right". Second, that the good from progress is defined in humanistic terms: "that which helps us lead better lives: longer, healthier, happier lives; lives of more choice and opportunity; lives in which we can thrive and flourish." Finally, that societies have the capacity to speed it up or slow it down: "continued progress is possible, but not guaranteed."

克劳福德谋求将进步研究学的内涵系统化，他提出进步运动包含三个正确前提。首先，进步是真实不虚的。过去200多年来，人类的物质生活标准大幅提升，无论是什么原因，“事情显然进展得非常顺利”。其次，从人文主义角度定义进步带来的益处：“帮助我们过上更好的生活：更加长寿、健康、幸福的生活；拥有更多选择和机遇的生活；我们能够兴旺发达的生活”。最后，社会有能力加快或减缓进步的速度：“持续进步是可能的，但无法得到保证”。
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When described like this, progress studies' beliefs seem so broad that almost anything could fall under its sprawling umbrella. After all, many movements claim to be in favour of improving human welfare. So what exactly is progress studies for and against? It's still early days, but there are emerging common themes.

这样说来，进步研究学的信念如此广泛，以至于几乎无所不包。毕竟，许多思想运动声称支持提高人类的福祉。那么进步研究学究竟赞成和反对什么？该领域仍处在起步阶段，但已经出现了共同主题。
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For one, progress studies doesn't desire a world where humans live more harmoniously with nature. As Crawford writes: "Humanism says that when improving human life requires altering the environment, humanity takes moral precedence over nature." It doesn’t necessarily want a world with less inequality and prefers to focus more on growing the pie than on how it’s divided. It also doesn't care much for societal norms that stand in the way of what it conceives of as progress – even ones shared by all cultures. (For example, in the magazine Works in Progress, the researcher Aria Babu recently made a case for artificial wombs to end the burdensome norm of pregnancy.)

举例来说，进步研究学不需要人类与自然更和谐地相处。正如克劳福德所写：“人文主义认为，当改善人类生活需要改变自然环境时，人类道德高于大自然”。进步研究学不一定谋求不平等现象减少，它重视如何将蛋糕做大，而不是如何分配蛋糕。进步研究学不太关心阻碍进步的社会规范——甚至包括一切文化共有的社会规范。（例如，在杂志《Works in Progress》上，最近研究人员阿里亚·巴布论证了利用人工子宫取代繁重的正常妊娠）。