Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress & the History of Technology

For most of human history, living standards barely improved; only in the last few centuries have health, lifespan, mobility, and comfort risen dramatically—and this depends on deliberate choices, institutions, and ideas that can weaken or be reversed.

Each major technology (like electricity) ramps slowly, then rapidly, then plateaus; sustained exponential progress requires continuously seeding and scaling new domains (e.g., biotech, computing) before old ones saturate.

Post‑WWII fears (nuclear horror, environmental crises, oil shocks) and growing bureaucracy may have dampened enthusiasm for science and industry and added friction to invention, a tradeoff for safety that we have not rigorously costed.

Crawford frames it as a school of thought that treats progress as real, important, and fragile, guiding which questions scholars ask, which data they collect, and which policy implications they emphasize across history and economics.

Inventions like the steam engine and transistor emerged from messy back‑and‑forth between theory and tinkering: sometimes technology precedes understanding and then motivates new science, while instruments and tools are themselves technologies that enable further scientific discovery.