the upward march of human progress largely resumed in 2023. Consequently, it was of great interest to see if these positive trends continued in 2024 ("Our Editor’s End of the Year Missive")
HumanProgress.org used to be one of my favorite publications. I remember when I first cold-called the editor (author of this piece) over five years ago, and not only did he respond but he accepted my article and praised it. Imagine my surprise... and then I asked for money, and he agreed to pay me for my articles. HOLY MOLY!
I still love them, and I'm still happy about their (expanding!) work. According to Authory, I have 25 articles for them. I enjoy contributing to what is an intellectual counterweight against mainstream much doom and gloom.
...but at the same time, I've gotten gloomier myself. And depending on the glasses you bring for your reading session, there is plenty of gloom to be found. Over the last 5-10 years I've started to see troubles I never noticed before—declines in morals and behavior that I couldn't perceive previously.
Ever since the 'rona debacle—where human flourishing was put on a hold, mostly artificially, and most intellectuals' brains broke—I've contributed to HP only reluctantly: three-four articles a year during 2022-2024 compared to six and eight the previous years.
=I honestly can't find much to write about that will suit their optimistic, upward-only style, when so much is broken and so much is falling apart.
Bitcoin really is a shining beacon (...on a hill), and one of my HP pieces this year was straight-up bitcoin-y:
("Bitcoin Brought Electricity to Countries in the Global South: It won’t be the United Nations or rich philanthropists that electrifies Africa.")
In many ways humanity haven't made progress in the last four years....which is why the editor in this year-review makes all sorts of comparison to 2019—the previous peak. He points to two common indicators: real per-capita GDP and global life expectancy
- Global life expectancy is marginally higher than five years ago. While a nice and easy metric, it mostly reflects dramatic improvements in child mortality, meaning that we're not really seeing much benefits it in the west anymore. The U.S., for instance, had been flat for a decade before it started marginally trending upwards again since 2022:
- Per-capita real income is ridiculously sensitive to any price deflator (PCE, CPI etc) and how they are constructed. Putting a larger weight on certain items (median house price or high-quality meat etc) much of these conclusions would flip.
Plus, as the article mentions, more people live in autocracies, and there's more political violence (Gaza, Ukraine, Burma) than last year.
This is the asymmetry that projects like HP (and positive news efforts, really) are stuck in:
- From zero, change can only go in one direction.
- Since the ethos of the project is on improvement, any time period in which some/most indicators aren't improving, us writers feel the urge to spin that in a positive way and focusing only on those things that did improve (ignoring those that got worse.)
Just a few days ago there was a plane crash in South Korea killing hundreds, totally ruining the air traffic safety stat for 2024 (ed: it might have been crap already; I don't know). In 2017, I believe there was a literal zero. Hard to beat.
Always having to explain away or look past deteriorations isn't a particular good way of approaching reality. Some of the things I wrote in 2022-ish were written with a pit in my stomach, knowing that this is the wrong thing to look at. At one point in 2023, I even managed to publish a piece that acknowledged this (though, by talking about ways in which declinist fears were incorrect): "Dear Americans, Define 'Worse Off'"
I love HP, and I'm looking forward to seeing their progress(!) in the next few years.
...but as is obvious from even this year-in-review piece, there's a lot of grasping at straws to find the optimistic take.