A little bit about me: I’m an academic whose work straddles human-computer interaction (HCI) and science and technology studies (STS). I find myself limited by HCI’s focus on computation and dispirited by STS’s descriptive (rather than normative) orientation toward science and technology. I recently learned about Progress Studies and am eager to contribute to the field.
Now, my question. In their Atlantic article, Collison & Cowen define progress as “the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.” What does it mean to “raise” standards of living? Who has defined standards of living, and who has decided if they are in fact being raised? I can imagine a few ways to do this, and am aware of a few examples of works that have tried (Pinker’s Better Angels comes to mind).
What are the popular or canonical works that Progress Studies looks to understand what standards of living are and what it means to raise them?
Thanks for your time; very much looking forward to contributing more to this nascent discipline.
I think the term “standard of living” is not defined very rigorously, but is generally understood to mean the overall material conditions of life possible in a given time and place. There are reasonable definitions at Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Investopedia. (I checked Our World in Data’s entry on “Economic growth” and their essay “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it,” but these articles don’t seem to define the term.)
I would consider it to include:
the size and comfort of homes and their amenities (heating and A/C, water and sewage, electricity, gas)
the availability and variety of fresh, nutritious food
the quantity and quality of possessions that the average person has (clothes, electronics, tools, jewelry, sporting equipment, etc.)
the opportunity to work a good job and to avoid excessive or harsh manual labor or other working conditions, and to have leisure time (including leisure for children in school, and the elderly in retirement)
the ability to travel with speed, convenience, and comfort
the ability to communicate for business or socializing
access to knowledge, entertainment, art and culture
overall health and protection from disease
safety from accidents and disasters
Hans Rosling has a simplified way to think about income levels that I find helpful, where he looks at drinking water, transportation, cooking, eating, and sleeping.
If (all else being equal) there is an improvement in any of those factors or similar factors, then living standards have been raised.
The typical metric used to measure living standards is GDP per capita. GDP doesn’t exactly correspond to or capture quality of life, but it’s the best metric we have, and it tends to be highly correlated with other quality-of-life metrics such as life expectancy or literacy rates.
I notice that Marginal Revolution University has a relevant video: Real GDP Per Capita and the Standard of Living
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:
Who cares about electronics? Only a highly electronically-minded society, and a community that views access to electronics as a pre-requisite for a meaningful life. Those assumptions in turn assume shared values: that global connectivity or access to labor are intrinsically enriching. (More likely, they are conducive to continuing or accelerating progress as we view it).
The best work I’ve found on these questions is the theory of capabilities Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum developed over many years of collaboration. Capabilities describe “things you can do.” In understanding ‘development’ (in the sense of ‘developing country’, (an area of concern with many tendrils in progress theory), Sen and Nussbaum ask first: what do people want to do? What kinds of lives do they want to live? As they phrase it, a capability approach to development focuses on enhancing individuals’ capability of achieving the kind of lives they have reason to value.
So: what is the good life? Progress Studies has not examined this question as rigorously as it might. Notions of progress work relative to the capabilities that progress aims to (or is imagined to) create. Here’s a worked example. I often hear, “the Apollo mission was kind of a waste.” But progress, at the Apollo mission’s time, meant allowing people progress toward some future in which the moon is an American suburb (see: any media of the time). I imagine space colonies seemed more important when nuclear war might have rendered the earth uninhabitable. The Apollo mission looked exactly like progress at its time, seemed perfectly reasonable to pursue. Now, what we mean by progress has changed, but we have yet to notice, in part because we have not yet defined the specific capabilities we have aimed progress toward.
I have reason to believe there is contestation here. From my highly informal sample of well-educated people in the Bay Area, for some, space colonies seem to represent progress; for others, an inhabitable and less technological earth seem to represent progress. These two, highly local cultural communities have different views of what progress is. My theoretical challenge is: Progress Studies ought to be able to explain why two communities can view progress differently, and do so in its own terms; that is, in a theory that adequately defines what progress is.
To make progress toward this theoretical challenge, my general research question would be: What can we learn about progress by discussing the capabilities progress imagines itself to create?
Some methods I’ve pondered:
- We might begin by making implicit discussions within Progress Studies explicit (e.g., discourse analysis).
- We might discuss how communities decide what capabilities they want to create.
- We might do historical analysis to see how progress has been understood historically in the recent (50 year) to ancient (1,000+ year) past.
What do you (and the rest of the forum) think?
EDIT: If I’ve missed germane literature/posts in my characterizations here, please point me toward them.