All of elsehow's Comments + Replies

Thanks for your reply! I appreciate the thought.

Progress Studies generally pre-supposes that industrial, scientific, and economic development are good things.

Consider this: What's development? What subset of industrial, scientific, and economic labor count as development (versus business as usual)? Surely not everything - many things are dead-ends. Many developments, even ones that were temporarily widely used, turned out not to be worth the risk (see: thalidomide). Other developments are deemed, by some, not worth the risk, and well worth it by others (se... (read more)

Thank you for this thoughtful comment, and many apologies for the delayed reply. 

I've worked through some thoughts, and I'm very eager to hear (from you or anyone else) whether I'm "onto something."

From my reading, progress studies defines progress as advancement that raises standards of living.

My 'challenge' (that is, a complicating notion that I think gets us somewhere helpful): notions of progress are intrinsically normative; they describe what types of lives people ought to live. Consider: 

"the quantity and quality of possessions that the ave