Name: How is progress measured? | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2025-12-01T16:58:29.000Z
Duration: 39 min 38 s
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I'm Sean, host of this show, the Gray Area.

For the episode this week, I'm talking to Brad DeLong.

He's an economic historian at UC Berkeley, one of the most interesting writers and thinkers out there.

We have a conversation that starts out as really about the history of progress, economic progress, political progress, in the last hundred years or so.

And it really evolves into a much deeper conversation about the difference between getting rich and living well.

Check it out, and I'll see you next week.

Thank you very, very much for inviting me.

I think we need to start with a little bit of philosophical grounding.

So I wanted to start with a big foundational question that I wouldn't ask anybody, but

What are the goals we're pursuing or should be pursuing as a society?

I had a political philosophy teacher, Judith Schlar, whose big shtick was the liberalism of fear, which was all about.

We take other ideologies and social systems and we ask what we fear about them, and

then the question is liberalism, or can liberalism be the answer to that, to what we're scared, scared of?

And so I think the first thing to start with progress and economic growth and so forth is the same thing.

It's what do we fear about other systems?

the first thing we fear is the old Malthusian world in which two out of every five babies died before the age of five because they were sufficiently malnourished that their immune systems were compromised.

The world in which 1 in 10 or more of women bled out in childbed, the world in which you spend a lot of time every day thinking about how hungry you are or how cold you are or how wet you are.

That simply poverty as making human lives quite miserable for very understandable reasons and quite short.

And, you know, once we get out of that, then the question is really how?

If we're no longer in a realm of absolutely dire scarcity pushing down on us, how much do we want to devote our time and our energy to making more stuff for us?

And what kind of stuff do we want to make?

And when do we get something like satiated and turn more or less completely, you know, to living, figuring out how to live wisely and well, because we have enough material resources, enough control over nature Enough ability to organize ourselves, you know, productively and cooperatively, that all of a sudden pushing yourselves further into the world of he who dies with the most toys wins is not really a productive or a good thing for human beings to do.

And so we're moving forward into that realm, and we see signs of that realm, you know, emerging.

That you want to ask what am I principally lacking in my life?

I don't see getting a lot more wealth as being a terribly high priority.

Most other people, even most other people at my income level, would really, to some sense, wish that they either had more stuff or they had to work less hard in order to get it.

So I think the answer is that as far as getting away from the realm of scarcity, we're not yet there.

And we're not yet there for reasons that strike us as very good ones.

And so it's premature to ask what this question is for, because a world in which we had more abundance would be a better world.

Not to go full Aristotle here, no reason not to go full Aristotle.

This is a philosopher, philosophically grounded podcast.

But it does seem that maybe as a culture we've confused means for ends, money, status, owning stuff.

If this is how we measure success and progress, and

it often is, certainly at the individual level, I don't really know how much progress we've made.

I also realize that that's an easy thing to say when you sit at a well fed table in a privileged society.

We have a society that is for the most part full of people who have enough material goods to survive just fine, but

also full of people who do not seem very happy.

But I guess maybe now we're talking about spiritual health, which is not really the business of economics.

But, you know, I throw it out there nevertheless, in that there's.

There's spiritual health, there's somewhat different.

Is living wisely and well with the resources that you have and the question of view whether in fact you are happy in your life.

And actually for this, I would like to throw that question back to you as the Camus scholar who wrestles with these questions deeply and profoundly.

Any political system worth its salt should at the very least create the conditions in which people can become more free and more fulfilled, whatever that happens to mean for them as individuals.

And I don't think we have a system now that's doing that effectively.

I think we have a system now, that is for sure.

We have more things occupying our attention.

We have never been more entertained, that's for damn sure.

But are we getting more free in any meaningful sense?

I think we are accumulating more stuff and accumulating deeper and deeper psychological dependencies, but

But the illusion of freedom is certainly very strong, that we're choosing not to be free or we're choosing to sacrifice our freedom for other things that regard us as good in the moment, right?

I suppose one of the first order problems is the brain hacking of our attention.

But figuring out how to recover our brains and our attention is one big piece of current unhappiness.

A second big piece of current unhappiness, as I understand it, is our feeling that even though we have substantial amounts of wealth and even though we have a society that offers a substantial amount of choice, still somehow we are dominated, right?

We are being bossed around, although we're being bossed around not by individual bosses who are being nasty to us, but

rather by huge social systems, you know, by bureaucracies, by markets, by governments, by militaries, all of which are keeping us from having the freedom to live our lives as we would wish to because they're pushing us via positive and negative incentives in various ways to conform to them.

To some degree, this is a mere illusion because this is simply a result of our having to live together with other people and all give each other elbow room.

That what we regard as bureaucracies and markets that are oppressing us are to some degree simply making us conform and behave so we don't make other people miserable.

It is indeed systems that keep us a lot less free than we should be.

And I promise I will pivot out of the philosophy seminar after this.

But I don't think enough about philosophy over the course of my career.

I said a whole bunch of words and these last 10, 12 minutes or so.

Let me just ask you very simply and very concretely before we do sort of move along here.

When you look at the last 200 years, 100 years, 50 years, 20 years, 10 years, do you feel like we are building and progressing in a way that makes sense and is sustainable?

One way to look at the past century and a half is, is that every generation our Productivity, our ability to manipulate nature and cooperatively organize ourselves has doubled or more than doubled every single generation since 1870.

And this has always taken the form of in 4/5 of the economy, things get maybe 25% better over the course of a generation, but

In 1/5 of the economy, a whole bunch of things are completely transformed.

But that means that if you were in that one fifth of the economy, and

if you were expecting to have a reasonable life doing the same old things in the same old way, you are in real, real trouble.

And figuring out each generation how to deal with the 1/5 of people whose occupations are being completely upended in this current generation, as all existing structures, orders and patterns are steamed away, as all that is solid melts into air, that figuring out how to deal with that has been the principal political, economic problem of humanity in each of the five generations since 1870.

And we resolve it either very badly, moderately badly, or at least somewhat badly.

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How is progress measured? | The Gray Area

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