Honest question. Anyone know?
https://rootsofprogress.org/about
My read is that Crawford's hitting some good points, though he's bringing an ideology and some preconceptions to bear which are probably harmful to a full understanding. There's a fairly strong Libertarian bent (despite Cowan himself recently putting distance between himself and that theology).
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/wh...
He's been making a point of hitting numerous podcasts and YouTube channels. Just gave a talk at the Presidio:
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=SCf44d7txcA
While I'd challenge multiple assumptions and interpretations, his reading list (to the extent it's been mentioned in the few talks/articles I've read) is generally good.
I invite critiques of my factual conclusions, and I'm always happy to be taught something!
Read: Vaclav Smil, Robert K. Merton, Joseph Tainter, William Ophuls (esp. Ecology & Plato, and mine the hell out of his bibliogs), Bernhard J. Stern ("Resistances to Technological Innovation"), Robert Gordon (Rise & Fall), W. Brian Arthur (Technology & complexity economics), Robert U. Ayres (generally, energy & econ), M. King Hubbert, Howard & Eugene Odum, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (Entropy), Peter Turchin, Meadows et al, John Nicholas Gray (esp. on Pinker), Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics & Humans), Joseph Needham (generally, though not necessarily comprehensively), John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons (esp. Coal & Money), Daniel Yergin (Prize), Richard Heinberg, Henry Adams (Education), Leslie White, Kyle Harper (esp, The Fate of Rome), Gregory Clark (Alms & Son), Karl Polanyi (Transformation), Elisabeth Eisenstein (Printing Press), Michael & Joyce Heusemann, William Foster Lloyd (esp. "Value"), Jeffrey S. Dukes ("Sunshine"), Jared Diamond (Collapse, esp. bibliog), Philip Mirosky (esp. More Heat than Light), Paul Buran (esp. his cautionary RAND monographs), Shoshana Zuboff (Surveillance Capitalism, Smart Machine), Arthur Toffler (Future Shock), Marshall Poe (Communications), Mokyr's economic history series generally (the one he's editor of) is quite good.
A long list, and could be better organised, apologies. Organising sources has become its own challenge. More mileage generally from the more obscure and less-read authors/works
Ask yourself:
- What is progress.
- What are value & wealth?
- What is technology?
- What are its specific mechanisms?
- What are their limitations?
- Is there a general theory of technology, if not, why, and what might it look like?
I'd also question your "moral imperative". Why, to what end, and with what alternatives?
My initial read was that the general problem was technological. I've become increasingly convinced it's more political & ideological, and the roles of media, power, institutions (formal & informal, overt & covert), and of information technology (high & low) on media and that on mass opinion & behaviour matter more.
Bad models & priors hurt immensely. Question all, especially those held unconsciously.
I agree that politics, ideology, and mass opinion matter a lot, and never meant to imply otherwise. Indeed in some of my posts I touch on how those factors might have affected technological developments. (See e.g. my analysis toward the end of my smallpox post: https://rootsofprogress.org/smallpox-and-vaccines)
Agree also about the importance of models & priors.
If there's any place where you think my specific factual conclusions are in error (whether from bad models or any other error), I always appreciate specific rejoinders.
On politics, models, and media: I've simply found myself looking at these far more than the technical side. I think that's largely because tech simply hasn't moved all that much in 50-60 years, outside of infotech. In terms of energy, our options are largely the same as Hyman Rickover identified in 1957: wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, nuclear fission:
https://archive.org/details/rickover0557/mode/2up
(We've gotten remarkably better at solar, but the total flux remains constant.)
A close read of various cornucopians (Herman Kahn, Julian Simon, M.A. Adelman) shows numerous thin and flawed arguments. Nordhaus's Nobel is quite probably the biggest error in the history of that award, and that's with fierce competition.
What's notable is that we've 1) made little progress in coming up with a generally accepted, sensible, model of economic growth (Atkinson & Krugman: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3l6E3mUNW70&t=2333), 2) there's been a concerted rejection of limits at both the left and right of the political spectrum, despite scientific concensus, in both cases for ideological reasons (see Schoijet's discussion of this: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399), and 3) political will and/or capacity to address challenges has been all but entirely lacking (this is the general thesis of Ophuls in 1977, largely born out over the subsequent 43 years in both action (or lack) and rationales).
It's your framing that strikes me as most flawed, though I suspect you'll also be least inclined to address. Growth as a moral imperative is extraordinarily suspect.
Start there.
I've highlighted it as an area you should focus on. The rest is up to you.