# Technology has enabled progress to be a net positive Today, people generally agree that on net, change is good. The sticking point is about *which* changes are good and which are not. New career opportunities pop up, self improvement, we can meet so many new people, social mobility, and of course, continuously improving technology. In the 16th century, this was absolutely not the case. For most people and for most part, change came in the form of someone conquering the land you lived on, burning down your village, or increasing the tax rate. Change as a mostly negative thing had only just started to change by the 18th century when Classical Liberalism was encoded. [[Classical liberalism arose in an environment that no longer exists]]. The story is told to death - the first industrial revolution kicked off in the mid 18th century and we were off to the races. It actually doesn’t matter whether the industrial revolution was simply part of an exponential trend or a true discrete change. What matters is the people *perceive* it as a step change - in the same way that [[Human intuition treats all distributions as lognormal]], we mistake continuous exponential growth for discrete changes. Now, change and progress have default positive connotations because things keep getting better. Technology enabled people to starve less, die of less disease, communicate better, learn more, spend less on lighting, etc. etc. Things still change for the worse sometimes - wars break out, MacBook keyboards fail, etc. At the same time, many things have gotten better because of not-technology: ending slavery, universal suffrage, etc. Some people would argue that these policy changes had more positive impact than the technological changes. It’s a complicated issue to argue, but I would point out that the policy changes may have been in part *enabled* by the increasing wealth generated by technology and that for most people, technology has had a bigger impact on day-to-day quality of life. Of course, the counterargument to the day-to-day quality of life argument is that being the most comfortable, pampered slave in the world is still slavery. I actually find that argument compelling. So perhaps we should think about median change instead of mean change. That is, of all the positive changes, most of them (by number) have been thanks to technology. For at least the past century change (hence PROgress) has been net positive thanks mostly to technology. This idea is probably explored more fully in [[mokyrCultureGrowthOrigins2018]] and it is, to my reading, [[Jason Crawford]]’s primary thesis. This idea is also why [[Stagnation]] should be concerning. [[People are very sensitive to what works]], so if technology fails to deliver positive progress it can create a cascading feedback loop. ### Related * [[Classical Liberalism defaults towards gridlock]] * [[§Type I and Type II Progress]] * [[Post-liberal synthesis]] * [[People who are directly affected by the change often impede progress]] * [[Consistent areas that matter for human progress]] * [[Maslow’s hierarchy is a leaky abstraction]] <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Technology+has+enabled+progress+to+be+a+net+positive) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Technology+has+enabled+progress+to+be+a+net+positive)