What happens when you show people a better future

Finally, let’s zoom out to a big question: is progress slower than it could be, because too many people don’t believe progress is possible? I’ve wondered about this for awhile; in 2024 I wrote about the decline in positive, future-oriented writing around the world, which seems at least somewhat correlated with a slowing pace of economic growth. But which way does causality flow? A new paper about an experiment in raising ambitions about the future is interesting, when seen in this light. In a remote part of Ethiopia, economists showed a random subset of the population some documentaries about people like them working hard to achieve more material prosperity (control groups saw entertainment programs or just got a survey). Five years later, the authors find surprisingly large positive impacts on work levels, schooling for kids, and more, for the group that saw the aspiration-raising documentaries. I wouldn’t extrapolate too much from any single study, but it joins a host of other papers that show how ideas around what it is possible to do with your life matter.