We have more stuff, more data, more entertainment, and more ways to stay connected than any generation in human history. By every traditional economic measure, we're progressing faster than ever. Yet something feels fundamentally broken. We're not happier. We don't feel freer. And the promised benefits of all this progress seem to be accruing to a smaller and smaller group of people.
This paradox sits at the heart of a deeper question: What actually is progress for?
Progress as Escape, Not Destination
To understand progress, we need to first understand what we're running away from. For most of human history, the constraints were simple and brutal: two out of every five babies died before age five from malnutrition. One in ten women died in childbirth. People spent most of their mental energy thinking about hunger, cold, and wet—the basic physicality of survival.
The initial push for economic growth wasn't frivolous. It was existential. Getting richer meant escaping a Malthusian trap where resources were so scarce that human lives were short and miserable by necessity, not circumstance.
But that's no longer our condition—at least not for much of the developed world. We've achieved what seemed impossible just centuries ago: material abundance sufficient for most people to eat well, stay warm, and survive to old age. Yet we haven't paused to ask the obvious follow-up question: Now what?
The uncomfortable answer is that we've conflated a means with an end. Money, status, and consumption became the goal rather than the tool. We measure individual success by wealth accumulation and career advancement. We measure societal progress by GDP growth. But none of these metrics tell us whether we're actually living better lives.
The Confusion Between Having and Being
There's a peculiar irony in modern abundance. We have unprecedented choice and material comfort, yet the psychological landscape looks increasingly barren. More stuff, more entertainment, more options—but less freedom. Less fulfillment. More anxiety. More of what might be called spiritual poverty in the midst of material wealth.
The problem isn't poverty anymore. It's that we've replaced one form of constraint with another. We're no longer dominated by individual tyrants or overtly oppressive systems. Instead, we're shaped by enormous social systems—markets, bureaucracies, governments, militaries—that push and pull us toward conformity through incentives we can barely see, let alone resist.
These systems aren't evil. They're necessary. Living together requires compromise. But there's a critical difference between the minimal constraints needed for coexistence and the deep psychological dependencies we've developed with our technologies and institutions. We're choosing, or at least appearing to choose, to sacrifice our freedom for things we regard as good in the moment.
The most immediate casualty? Our attention. We've built an entire economy around the monetization of human attention. Companies have become extraordinarily sophisticated at hacking our brains, finding psychological pressure points, and redirecting our focus toward consumption and engagement metrics. That's not incidental to our system—it's central to it.
The Acceleration Problem
Every generation since 1870, human productivity has roughly doubled. Our ability to manipulate nature and organize ourselves cooperatively has expanded exponentially. This constant doubling takes a particular form: four-fifths of the economy gradually improves (things get maybe 25% better), but one-fifth gets completely upended. Entire industries, occupations, and ways of life vanish.
This creates a recurring crisis. Each generation, roughly 20% of the workforce faces complete economic displacement. They were expecting to have reasonable lives doing the same things in the same ways. Instead, all existing structures melt into air. The steam power economy gave way to the applied science economy, which gave way to the mass production economy, which gave way to globalized value chains. Now we're sprinting toward an attention and information economy powered by AI.
The challenge isn't technological change itself—it's managing the human fallout. The 20th century saw how badly we could handle this transition: between 1914 and 1945, we killed 80 million people in the process. Even in the more successful postwar era in the North Atlantic, the disruption created immense suffering for those caught in the margins.
Right now, we're watching white-collar workers—people who lived by their wits, their words, their intellectual labor—suddenly discover it's their turn in the bullseye of creative destruction. AI is coming for fractions of what they do. The response, as always, is anger, backlash, and political instability.
But here's the thing: globally, the tailwinds are overwhelming. Two major events transformed human potential. The death of Mao and rise of Deng Xiaoping in China, followed shortly by Rajiv Gandhi's ascension in India, opened a billion people to the industrial escalator. For the first time in history, the overwhelming bulk of humanity—not just the North Atlantic—gained access to prosperity and material security. Hundreds of millions of people can now worry about existential meaning rather than their next meal. That's an achievement almost impossible to overstate.
The problem isn't that progress is failing globally. It's that progress in the developed world has stalled while the developing world surges ahead. American politics feels broken not because the system is incapable of managing change, but because we're refusing to manage it wisely.
Can Politics Keep Up With Technology?
Technology is developing faster than our politics can accommodate. We're seeing as much fundamental economic and technological change in 30 years as Western Europe experienced between 1000 and 1700. Yet in 1000-1700, politics was admittedly chaotic—the 30 Years War depopulated Germany by a third—but it did eventually accommodate and restructure around the changes.
The question now is whether our democratic institutions can do the same. Madison and Hamilton argued in 1787 that the science of politics had progressed enough to solve the ancient problem of how to get the benefits of democratic government without the cycle of tyranny and anarchy. Separation of powers, limited government, constitutional protection of rights—these innovations seemed to have cracked the code.
They haven't held as well as we hoped. We're watching representation erode, not strengthening. The public sphere has fractured into incompatible information ecosystems. Someone who can figure out how to "flood the zone" with information can manipulate entire populations more easily than ever before.
This is the truly novel crisis of the 21st century. We're not just experiencing technological disruption—we're experiencing disruption at the core of how we decide what's true and how we make collective decisions. Our information environment is simultaneously more democratic (more sources, more voices) and more prone to manipulation (easier to overwhelm signal with noise).
The AI Temptation and the Real Solution
AI could be genuinely transformative. The ability to process information at scale, to classify and analyze complex phenomena, to interface with databases using natural language—these capabilities could help us solve real problems. A firefighter or teacher could access vast knowledge systems to do their work better. We could analyze patterns invisible to unaided human cognition.
But that's not where the investment is going. The major tech platforms are pouring billions into AI because it's an existential threat to their business models and they need to defend their monopolies. Countless others have pivoted from crypto grifts to AI grifts. The result? Massive overinvestment in the wrong kinds of AI, trained on biased data, deployed to make us doomscroll more effectively so we see more ads.
Yes, we'll eventually have data centers full of excellent chips, just as we ended the 2000 internet bubble with dark fiber that eventually brought us broadband. The byproducts will have value. But the primary outcome of this particular investment wave will be inefficiency and waste—extractive rather than generative.
The real solution isn't technological. It's political. We need policy makers willing to:
Attend to the people being displaced. Not with shame or political manipulation, but with genuine recognition that their objections are legitimate and material support for reconstruction of their lives and opportunities.
Rebuild representation. Create political systems where elected officials actually represent their constituents rather than special interests and their own re-election machines.
Protect the information environment. Figure out how to maintain the openness and plurality of democratic discourse without allowing it to be weaponized by those seeking manipulation over truth.
What Success Actually Looks Like
If we get this right, what changes? First, wealth creation might become less obsessive. Once we've achieved genuine abundance—enough for everyone to live decently—endless growth becomes optional rather than mandatory. The question shifts from "how much can we make?" to "what kind of life do we want to build with what we have?"
Second, attention becomes the currency that matters. In a world of material abundance, scarcity shifts from resources to time, focus, and meaning. The defining struggle of the 21st century won't be about economic growth rates. It'll be whether we learn to direct our attention toward things that actually matter—relationships, learning, creation, understanding—or whether we remain captured by systems engineered to hijack our focus for profit.
Third, we might actually become free in a meaningful sense. Not freedom as endless choice between consumer options, but freedom as the capacity to shape our lives according to our values, to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect us, to develop our capabilities without coercion.
This requires something harder than any technology: a political class willing to make collective decisions that prioritize human flourishing over extraction. It requires institutions that can adapt faster than they have. It requires citizens who understand that the real hinge of history isn't economic growth anymore. It's attention—who controls it, who benefits from it, and whether we can reclaim it.