Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress & the History of Technology
Dwarkesh Patel (host), Jason Crawford (guest)
In this episode of Dwarkesh Podcast, featuring Dwarkesh Patel and Jason Crawford, Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress & the History of Technology explores jason Crawford Explores Why Progress Happened—and How To Protect It Jason Crawford discusses his work at The Roots of Progress, focusing on how technological, scientific, and social advances created modern prosperity and why continued progress is neither automatic nor guaranteed.
Jason Crawford Explores Why Progress Happened—and How To Protect It
Jason Crawford discusses his work at The Roots of Progress, focusing on how technological, scientific, and social advances created modern prosperity and why continued progress is neither automatic nor guaranteed.
He engages with the “great stagnation” hypothesis, explaining how overlapping technological S‑curves, cultural attitudes, regulation, and talent allocation may explain why progress feels slower in recent decades.
Crawford outlines the emerging field of “progress studies” as a cross‑disciplinary, value‑laden lens on history and economics, and describes efforts to educate high school students about the history of technology.
He argues for a nuanced, prescriptive optimism that acknowledges existential risks and systemic fragility while insisting on active, deliberate effort to build a safer, more advanced future.
Key Takeaways
Progress is real, transformative, and historically unprecedented, but not automatic.
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.
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Technological progress follows overlapping S‑curves, so stagnation can occur when new curves lag.
Each major technology (like electricity) ramps slowly, then rapidly, then plateaus; sustained exponential progress requires continuously seeding and scaling new domains (e. ...
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Culture, education, and regulation strongly shape the rate of innovation.
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.
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Progress studies is less a new discipline than a coherent lens and value system.
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.
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Science and technology are deeply intertwined, not simply a one‑way pipeline.
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.
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Modern societies must consciously invest in resilience and safety, not just speed and scale.
Interdependence and specialization increase vulnerability to shocks, but engineering principles—redundancy, slack, avoiding single points of failure—can be applied at system and policy levels if we deliberately prioritize them alongside growth.
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Prescriptive optimism is a commitment to act, even amid grim forecasts.
Crawford distinguishes between descriptive optimism (what you think will happen) and prescriptive optimism (your resolve to improve outcomes), arguing we should always maintain the latter by fighting for better futures regardless of the odds.
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Notable Quotes
“Progress is not automatic, it's not inevitable, it doesn't just keep going with its own momentum.”
— Jason Crawford
“We get long‑run exponential progress by overlapping the S‑curves.”
— Jason Crawford
“Progress studies is not really a new field… it's more like a school of thought, a set of premises and values.”
— Jason Crawford
“It's been said that thermodynamics owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine does to thermodynamics.”
— Jason Crawford
“I am always and ever a prescriptive optimist… no matter how bad the odds are, we're never going to give up.”
— Jason Crawford
Questions Answered in This Episode
How could we systematically measure whether regulation and bureaucracy have actually slowed technological progress, versus simply made it safer?
Jason Crawford discusses his work at The Roots of Progress, focusing on how technological, scientific, and social advances created modern prosperity and why continued progress is neither automatic nor guaranteed.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What concrete policies or institutional reforms would best realign talent and culture toward ambitious, pro‑progress projects today?
He engages with the “great stagnation” hypothesis, explaining how overlapping technological S‑curves, cultural attitudes, regulation, and talent allocation may explain why progress feels slower in recent decades.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should education at the high school and university level change if we took progress studies seriously as a core civic subject?
Crawford outlines the emerging field of “progress studies” as a cross‑disciplinary, value‑laden lens on history and economics, and describes efforts to educate high school students about the history of technology.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Given the intertwined nature of science and technology, how should funding and organizational structures for research be redesigned?
He argues for a nuanced, prescriptive optimism that acknowledges existential risks and systemic fragility while insisting on active, deliberate effort to build a safer, more advanced future.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What practical steps can individuals and institutions take to embody prescriptive optimism in the face of existential risks like engineered pandemics or advanced AI?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jason Crawford. Uh, he's a former tech s- uh, startup founder, and now he writes at The Roots of Progress. He has these posts that are very well-researched and insightful about the history of technology and industry, um, and he's filled the gap, at least in my education and I suspect many others', of, um, the history of progress and its consequences and the lessons we can learn from it. So, uh, Jason, it's very nice to talk to you.
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
Of course. And, uh, c- can you just tell us, before we get into the weeds, what you're doing at The Roots of Progress?
Yeah, sure. Uh, I write about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. So, uh, The Roots of Progress looks at how did... over the last, you know, couple of hundred years, how did we create this amazing, uh, world, uh, around us and this really wonderful incredible standard of living that we now enjoy that is, uh, you know, so much b- life is just so much better in so many ways, in almost every way than it was about, uh, 200, 250 years ago, uh, or so. Uh, really even than if you compare to 100 years ago or 50 years ago. Um, things just keep getting better, and this phenomenon is unprecedented in history. For thousands, tens of thousands of years, as far back as you wanna go really, there was, uh, there was very little, uh, improvement in the standard of living, the way people lived, in life expectancy, in health, in, uh, you know, our ability to get around. I mean, for so many years, we were limited to the speed of horses and, and sail on the wind. And, uh, and then the last couple hundred years, all of that changed, and it was just, it was just absolutely unprecedented. So, how did that happen? What were the steps? What were the major inventions and discoveries? And then what can we learn from this? Like, why did it take so long? What were the root causes, uh, that suddenly, you know, caused things to take off an- and for life to improve? And, uh, you know, how do we keep it going? Um, and how do we make sure that it doesn't sort of accidentally slow down or stop or even reverse? Those are the questions I'm concerned with.
So, let me offer a different interpretation of what you might be up to, 'cause you say you're studying why progress has been so overwhelming, but may- maybe a different way to look at it is, why, while you're studying progress at this moment and why people like Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are worried about it, it's not because progress has been so overwhelming recently, but in the last 50 years, it's actually been underwhelming. Uh, you mentioned the speed of travel, but we're still, uh, flying at the speed of the 747 which was invented in the 1970s.
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