It’s been way too long since the last links digest, which means I have way too much to catch up on. I had to cut many interesting bits to get this one out the door.

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• Apply to the Roots of Progress Fellowship by June 1st (tomorrow!)
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For paid subscribers:

• Stagnation was the goal
• Is stagnation a measurement illusion?
• Eroom’s Law
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Apply to the Roots of Progress Fellowship by June 1st (tomorrow!)

Applications are still open for the 2025 Blog-Building Intensive! Launch a blog and improve your progress-focused writing with expert guidance and an amazing...

Social media exploded with pent-up frustrations, swirling like an inexhaustible tornado, after the UnitedHealthcare tragedy. Why does health insurance produce such a wellspring of anger? In other markets, if you don’t like your meal, you send it back or pick a different restaurant. If your TV is faulty, you speak with customer service, or, if you do level up and tag the company on social media, there’s a good chance you’ll get an immediate, penitent resolution. Why does it seem like we’re screaming into the void with insurance?

1. Two’s company, three’s a complicated financial relationship

In the simplest version of an economic transaction, you, the consumer, buys an apple and pays the producer directly. A two-person party. Healthcare services are different from other parts of the economy because...

Movement alone isn’t progress, and there are dangers in ignoring dimensions and directions of acceleration.

Note: This is cross-posted from my Substack on Exploring Cooperation, responding to a recent post by Helen Toner,  and I think that post, and hopefully my long-form reply, will be of interest to the progress studies community.

Progress, Acceleration, and the Fragility of Civilizational Defaults

In debates about progress, societies seem trapped between two crude narratives. On one side, all progress is framed as inherently heroic—proof of human ingenuity, resilience, and ambition. On the other, any concerns about technologies, much less calls for regulation or opposition, is cast as luddism and bureaucratic overreach fighting the engines of prosperity. But the simplistic counter-narrative that technology leads to ruin, while slow and natural changes were what created...

In the progress movement, some cause areas are about technical breakthroughs, such as fusion power or a cure for aging. In other areas, the problems are not technical, but social. Housing, for instance, is technologically a solved problem. We know how to build houses, but housing is blocked by law and activism.

The YIMBY movement is now well established and gaining momentum in the fight against the regulations and culture that hold back housing. More broadly, similar forces hold back building all kinds of things, including power lines, transit, and other infrastructure. The same spirit that animates YIMBY, and some of the same community of writers and activists, has also been pushing to reform regulation such as NEPA.

Healthcare has both types of problems. We need breakthroughs in science...

[I am relatively new to this forum. I recently published this post on my substack inspired by the progress studies mindset. I hope some of you can resonate with this.]

Ever since broadening my views on how to help animals, I've been learning about more movements and ideas that may provide new insights for animal welfare. I believe progress studies is one such movement.

The Progress Studies Framework for Animal Welfare

While lot of progress studies ideas are great, I don't completely agree with the progress studies movement on everything, notably...

The US is experiencing a great decline in trust. According to the US General Social Survey, people who agreed with the statement "most people can be trusted" went from 49% to 25% between 1984 and 2022.^[1]

Trust in institutions is also falling. Over that same period trust in the government fell from 42% to 20%.

For civil services it fell from 56% to 41%, for the police it fell from 74% to 68%, and for congress it fell from 52% to a whopping 15%.^[2]
Even international institutions, like the United Nations, are losing trust, going from 47% to 44%.

It’s not just institutions, organizations are also losing trust. According to the WVS, over that same period public trust in the press declined from 49% to 29%, trust in major companies declined...

Last fall the Roots of Progress Institute hosted the first annual Progress Conference. 200 people excited about human progress gathered for two days in Berkeley, California, to share ideas in deep conversation, catalyze new projects, and get energized and inspired. Several attendees even said it was the best conference they had ever attended. We shared more about our reflections here, including a list of over a dozen write-ups from writers such as Noah Smith, Packy McCormick, Scott Alexander, and many more.

Whenever a new movement is growing, an annual event like this is important to build its community and establish its identity. So, after last year’s great reception, we’re excited to announce Progress Conference 2025. It will be bigger, longer, and better, as we build on last year’s...

There's a common story we tell about innovation — that it's a relentless march across the frontier, led by fundamental breakthroughs in engineering, science, research, etc. Progress, according to this story, is mainly about overcoming hard technological bottlenecks. But even in heavily optimized and well-funded competitive industries, there is a surprising amount of innovation that happens that doesn't require any new advances in research or engineering, that isn't about pushing the absolute frontier, and actually could have happened at any point before.

Road Cycling is an example of a heavily optimized sport - where huge sums of money get spent on R&D, trying to make bikes as fast and comfortable as possible, while there are millions of enthusiast recreational riders, always trying to do whatever they can to...