The kids are all right
One of my key takeaways from the Progress Conference echoed Jason Crawford’s closing remarks, and it was pretty simple: the kids are all right. This was reinforced through a number of chance meetings I had. In one sessio…
Progress Studies
9 blurbs
Progress in education, flight, and flight safety
Some things I learned at Progress con: It can often seem like there is no progress in education at all - for hundreds of years, the expert has stood at the front of the room and the students sat at desks listening. But M…
GDP makes you better off, but it’s not the meaning of life
GDP per capita is positively correlated with a lot of desirable things, like health and subjective well-being (even though self-reported well-being in the United States has been falling for the last decade, it remains ro…
10,000 pieces of type
One of my favorite 4th of July traditions is to go to the historic fort in town for a reading of the Declaration and firing of the cannons by a historical reenactment group. This year, with the sweltering temperatures, w…
The limit of human felicity
I’ve been listening to the wonderful new podcast Everyday Abundance (no affiliation!) by Virginia Postrel and Charles Mann, based on Dylan’s recommendation two weeks ago. Each episode looks at the history of some aspect …
Serviceberries, Lincoln, and shared abundance
Nisha Austin: Around the time when I started getting into ‘Abundance’ (in the way we all think about it here), my mother-in-law gave me Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry . I think she was trying to piece together ex…
The unhappiness that outlasted the pandemic
Sam Peltzman has an alarming new paper about American happiness. Since 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a random sample of Americans how happy they were, and in the blue line of the figure above I’ve plott…
Phone surveys felt better than online ones
Why does it feel like things are always getting worse? That’s a deep question , but in the short term, part of the problem might be the internet: people who answer the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey onl…
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 positi…