This is a part of a series explaining the background, stakes and future of Progress Studies as I understand it. The previous post was A Question in Search of a Discipline. Fair warning: This post is not exactly my beliefs, but it is an earnest attempt to summarize the context of an ideological movement.

In the last year, bloggers have mastered the art of the post-covid rant [1]:

• The elites have failed us
• We need new institutions
• This is a serious matter of life and death

Though it post-dates the coining of the term, this writing is fundamental to my understanding of Progress Studies. Until 2020, the easy rebuttal “why isn’t this just economic history” still had force. Today, it feels irrelevant. Whatever failed us in 2020 will fail us again tomorrow.

Collectively, these posts walk us through the last 12 months, viewed through the lens of crisis management.

As Milton Friedman put it, the promise of liberal capitalism is to put “freedom before equality”, and still “get a high degree of both”. And yet, throughout Covid, we’ve had neither liberty nor prosperity. Instead, liberalism has resulted in twin failures:

• Authoritarian lockdowns and coercive quarantines dramatically outperformed voluntary social distancing. [2]
• Our leading institutions failed, first to take Covid seriously, then to promote the use of masks, then to enable distribution of the vaccine. In fact, they worked actively against these causes. [3]

Perhaps worst of all, the US did not even perform well with regards to individual liberties. Though we were able to avoid truly coercive quarantines, we did deploy numerous lockdowns, shutdowns and curfews. And yet, as our Covid cases continue to rise, it appears that we’ve gotten the worst of both worlds.

These points present a serious crisis for the US. More broadly, they threaten the continued dominance of liberalism as our default political ideology.

As in all crises, these weaknesses have not been a discovery, so much as as the revelation of open secrets. In 1992, Fukuyama’s The End of History claimed:

with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy… humanity has reached “not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” [emphasis mine]

Of course, that is not what happened.

Since 1992, China’s (reported) GDP has grown 35x, from 0.4 trillion, up to 14 trillion today. During this same period, the US grew less than tenth as much (6.5 trillion to 21 trillion). China is now within spitting distance [4], yet rather than confront our impending slip into second place, we seem to be in denial. From Thiel:

I do think it’s interesting that the questions about China are being asked less often in the US today than they were a decade ago. In 2005, it was a very widespread question, in what year will China overtake the US? A decade later, it’s reasonable to think that it’s a decade closer to when this will happen. It’s a much less commonly asked question.

Meanwhile, the US has undertaken what Ben Thompson’s post calls “China-lite without any of the upside”. We won’t take authoritarian action to prevent a pandemic, but we will censor your speech [5]. It is not a coincidence that cultural limitations on free speech co-occur with broader institutional failures. If we were not so deeply in denial, we could at least properly acknowledge and take action against the latter.

Instead, we’ve gone through years of cancel culture by mob, now enshrined by our largest media companies as opaque, unilateral deplatforming. You could probably justify the coordinated ban of the US President, it is not so easy to justify Youtube’s ban on content that contradicts the WHO.

On one hand, the WHO is still ostensibly the world’s leading health organization. On the other hand, their highlights over the last 12 months include leading the charge against face masks, refusing to acknowledge the efficacy of Taiwan’s success, refusing to acknowledge Taiwan’s existence, and issuing the now regrettable claim:

"DON’T - talk about people “transmitting COVID-19” “infecting others” or “spreading the virus” as it implies intentional transmission & assigns blame [6]

Which alone might not sound so bad, had the Director-General not doubled down with:

The stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. And let’s really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy. [emphasis mine]

Viewed in this light, our institutional failures and culture wars are intertwined. While the US was busy arguing about whether to vaccinate by age or occupation and how seriously to weigh racial equity, Israel went ahead and vaccinated 7 times as many people.

Note that this goes both ways! If the US were capable of vaccinating that many people in the first place, we would not have felt the need to waste time fighting for crumbs.

This all ends up presenting a serious ideological challenge, not just to our current crop of leaders, but to the institutions that put them there. As Alvaro writes:

if Carlsen is fake that also implicates every player who has played against him, every tournament organizer, and so on. The entire hierarchy comes into question. Even worse, imagine if it was revealed that Carlsen was a fake, but he still continued to be ranked #1 afterwards. So when I observe extreme credential-competence disparities in science or government bureaucracies, I begin to suspect the entire system.

How deep does the rot go? Is the problem the Director-General of the WHO? The entire organization? The liberal international order that legitimized them?

Progress Studies aims to find out, and cannot do so by relying on existing methods. Though its lack of established disciplinary base is a weakness, it is also a necessity.

In the next posts, I’ll look into what’s required to build a discipline from scratch, what we’ve tried so far, and where we ought to go next.

[1] Most recent in the series is Ben Thompson’s New Defaults. For the best of this genre, see Mark Lutter’s COVID Radicalized Me, Alvaro’s Are Experts Real? and Tanner Greer’s On Cultures that Build.

[2] China’s authoritarian lockdowns worked miraculously, even thought it was the epicenter of the pandemic and didn’t benefit from advance warning. The only sizable countries to perform similarly are either islands, South Korea (effectively an island), or Singapore (tiny city-state), both of which used coercive lockdowns.

[3] Failures on mask usage were not merely a matter of prioritizing supply for healthcare workers. US Surgeon General “STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus” and WHO: “There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly”. I am not sure how badly and unnecessarily FDA delayed vaccine rollout, but it was not 0 days. More details here.

[4] If you look at those numbers and take solace in the fact that we’re still 50% larger, Covid has not yet instilled in you a proper appreciation for exponential growth.

[5] I understand that the former is up to the federal government, while the latter is a question for private actors. Like I said, these are not really my views, but I don’t disavow them either.

[6] Surfaced via Mark Lutter’s aforementioned post.

No one knows what Progress Studies is.

You can read the launch article from Patrick and Tyler, or the writing awarded under the Progress Studies label, but none of this describes a coherent field of practice with its own grounding assumptions and methodology.

Consider this paragraph from The Atlantic article:

This is exactly what Progress Studies would investigate. It would consider the problem as broadly as possible. It would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.

Like the genies of legend, we’ve fullifiled the literal wording of this wish without addressing its intent. Writers have taken “as broadly as possible” to mean investigations without a disciplinary base, and thus without established standards of rigour or proof.

The result? Progress Studies blogs filled with vague manifestors and bold proclamations of belief, despite lacking the disciplinary rigour to justify any of it.

That is not necessarily bad! As Byrne Hobart writes in The High Information Jerk:

being an overconfident jerk is a massive public service to the forces of truth! …Taking the outside view, it’s good for people to be embarrassed when they’re wrong. In the same way that, taking the outside view, it’s good for poor capital allocators to have less capital… And that’s the only way for humanity to collectively clear out obsolete ideas so we can advance our collective understanding of the world. [emphasis mine]

And so I find this all to be a breath of fresh air, and a welcome change of pace from my own neurotic pursuit of nuance. Arrogance is not always a sin, and humility not always a virtue.

But keep in mind, there is a real downside to working without established standards. Here was Caleb Watney’s reply to my rebuttal of his earlier post:

Part of this I take seriously… I agree we can’t declare “The Great Stagnation is over”*, we need much more rigorous empirical work (and just to wait and see what happens!) before we say that.

But when the Great Stagnation is over, the first sign will be a series of anecdotes! How could it be anything but?

That’s a great question! Of course it will be a series of anecdotes, and of course we will attempt to string those together to tell a compelling narrative.

But the problem with anecdotes isn’t that they’re merely directionally (rather than conclusively) true, the problem is that they can be used to support an arbitrary number of claims, and thus fail as a mechanism for resolving disagreements. Caleb can say that some good things are happening, I can say that various other bad things are happening, and at the end of the day, we haven’t really gotten anywhere.

That’s not to say that this writing is without merit. I have done my fair share of anecdote peddling, often with only mild dedication to historical accuracy.

So where do we go from here? I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve been given it serious thought during my hiatus. Over the next few posts, I’ll work to establish the stakes, share some helpful context, and provide directions for future work for Progress Studies.

… for the entire span of the pandemic in this country, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it .

– David Wallace-Wells, We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

In the weeks since the article’s publication, libertarians have lamented the failures of the FDA, our unwillingness to experiment with human-challenge trials, and the bureaucratic nightmare that is seemingly to blame for the entire pandemic.

According to Moderna’s own timeline, the first clinical batch was shipping February 24th, but didn’t receive emergency use authorization until December 18th. That’s a 10 month gap, and so the righteous indignation seems justified, if not outright required.

But how much faster could production have actually gone?

Take a closer look at the timeline, and you’ll see that by August 11th, the US government had already awarded Moderna $1.5 billion for the manufacture of 100 million doses. So whether or not the vaccine had received approval, Moderna was already ramping up production in parallel, just 6 months after the first clinical batch.

Is 6 months still too long? Look back and you’ll see that by May, Moderna had already planned to produce 1 billion doses. Even earlier in April, the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority awarded Moderna another $500 million “to enable large-scale production”.

We can go even further and consider this update from March 23:

While a commercially-available vaccine is not likely to be available for at least 12-18 months, Moderna reported it is possible that under emergency use, a vaccine could be available to some people, possibly including healthcare professionals, in the fall of 2020.

Moderna confirmed that it is scaling up manufacturing capacity toward the production of millions of doses per month, in the potential form of individual or multi-dose vials. [emphasis mine]

So were the delays primarily bureaucratic? From what I can tell, Moderna had the institutional support it required, and began working in March to scale up production, less than a month after shipping the first clinical batch.

Furthermore, regulatory approval aside, Moderna never believed a vaccine could be made available, even for emergency non-commercial use, until fall.

So how much of the delay can be directly attributed to government bureaucracy? I’m not sure, but neither are you.

I accept that there were certainly some needless delays, and these are aggravating to read about, but it matters very much if it is a matter of a couple weeks or of several months.

Appendix: Trust in Vaccines

So long as I am expressing skepticism of bureaucracy as the root of all evil, consider the analogous debate over vaccine rollout.

While some have lamented the bureaucracy entailed in getting the vaccine, I worry this is not as serious an issue as the incredibly high levels of outright rejection.

How high are rejection rates? It depends on who you ask. In ascending order:

• Kaiser Family Foundation reports a rejection rate of 27%, and 29% for healthcare workers.
• A global survey published in Nature reports 28% of people do not agree they would get a vaccine.
• The Public Policy Institute of California reports that 40% of adults and 69% of African Americans “probably or definitely” would not get the vaccine,
• The Wall Street Journal reports a National Association of Health Care Assistants survey claiming “nearly 72% of certified nursing assistants didn’t want to receive the vaccine”.
• The AP reports nurses have a rejection rate as high as 80% at some nursing homes.

It is easy to make fun of anti-vaxxers when they are a niche minority, much harder when they are the majority of healthcare workers. It is worth taking their concerns seriously, and at least attempting to understand why some people may be hesitant.

Remember, for example, when the CDC pretended to treat black Americans with syphilis, but secretly denied them care for 40 years. Or much more recently, when the CIA pretended to vaccine people for hepatitis, but was actually taking DNA for surveillance.

Where is the discussion of these historical ills in all the recent complaints?

My point is not that we ought to be suspicious of vaccines, merely that my current levels of confidence are predicated on the clinical trials. There is a long-game to play with regards to establishing trust, and attempting to play fast and loose with established procedures is not the way to win it.

The same PPIC survey also reports that 68% of Californians are “more concerned about approval of a vaccine moving too fast” while merely 26% are “more concerned about approval moving too slowly, delaying access to a vaccine”. Note that this skews liberal, so other states may be less extreme, but even among Republicans, 51% were “more concerned about approval moving too fast.”

None of this is to say that I am against accelerating future development! A recent proposal in Cell to conduct phase I/II trials for the 100 most likely pandemics is a great idea, and well worth the estimated $3 billion investment. I am certainly not advocating in favor of complacency.

And yet, I am not so confident that our behavior over the last 10 months has been such a disaster, nor am I confident that FDA bureaucracy is primarily to blame.

[EDIT: 03/25/2021] MR has shared a couple posts (1, 2) doubting the role of the Tuskegee study in continued vaccine skepticism: “there was no association between knowledge of Tuskegee and willingness to participate.”