"Around 2016, Cowen received an out-of-the-blue email from Irish billionaire Patrick Collison... A few years earlier, Collison had cofounded the online payments company Stripe... Stripe’s nearly $100bn (£83bn/€95bn) valuation puts Collison’s net worth north of $11bn (£9bn/€10.5bn)...
"During the pair's meetings, Cowen tells me, "we were both talking about the ideas, finding we had common ideas, and somehow hit upon the notion of an article". So, in 2019, they co-authored an essay in The Atlantic, which argued for "a new science of progress".
"progress studies doesn't desire a world where humans live more harmoniously with nature. As Crawford writes: "Humanism says that when improving human life requires altering the environment, humanity takes moral precedence over nature." It doesn’t necessarily want a world with less inequality and prefers to focus more on growing the pie than on how it’s divided. It also doesn't care much for societal norms that stand in the way of what it conceives of as progress – even ones shared by all cultures..."
This position sounds so self-serving on the part of the billionaire.
To reap the benefits of his wealth guilt-free, where he and people like him can exploit the world as they see fit and dominate others, it would be helpful for him to push a world view like this.
And why would Cowen, who "ranked 17th on a list of the top 100 most influential economists" give the time of day to some rando who just happened to be rich? One word: money.
So it looks like Collison bought himself an economist.
That Peter Thiel is influential in this "movement" (or PR exercise) is also telling.
"Crawford and Cowen, the two leading intellectual figures of the progress community, come from the objectivist and libertarian traditions, respectively. On a panel at AynRandCon, Crawford described progress studies as adjacent to objectivism, the philosophical system outlined in 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand’s fiction."
Well, that just about explains it all..
This whole movement actually has strong echoes of extropianism, which has roots in HG Wells' techno-utopianism, and might be termed neo-Wellsianism, were it not for Wells making a 180 near the end of his life and becoming a dystopian (see his book "Mind at the End of Its Tether"), and for Wells' utopias being socialist, not capitalist ones.
> And why would Cowen, who "ranked 17th on a list of the top 100 most influential economists" give the time of day to some rando who just happened to be rich? One word: money.
Cowen is constantly giving the time of day to randos who are not remotely rich. He answers every non-spam email he gets. He runs a program that gives out small grants to nobodies who are just starting out their careers. He's probably the most pathologically available-for-interview economist alive today.
In the time it took you to write out this conspiracy theory, you could have done even a cursory Google search instead.
> "It also doesn't care much for societal norms that stand in the way of what it conceives of as progress – even ones shared by all cultures..."
Great. That's "we're going to chase our idea of progress, even if the rest of the entire human race doesn't see it as progress".
Real progress is not just economic. In the 19th century, there was much more of an idea that there could be moral progress - an idea echoed today by the progressives. (You don't have to agree with the direction the progressives think represents progress - I don't - but their idea of progress is much more than economic gains.)
Having an environment that isn't polluted is progress compared to having one that is polluted. It may not be worth having people starve to get there, but it's one axis of progress.
And having people not starve is progress. Having them not die of diseases is progress. Having them able to read, and to access information, is progress.
Having them not die from violence would be progress.
It totally is, everybody works towards the things that they care about. There is no objective standard for progress. You don't get to define "progress" for everybody else.
>This position sounds so self-serving on the part of the billionaire
It sounds more self-serving to the author of the article. The single sentence quoted does not necessarily imply what the author says. And rather than ask for clarification, the author goes on to make the assumption that Cowen thinks that humanism is the end-all be-all and does not care about keeping natural systems and environments intact.
"During the pair's meetings, Cowen tells me, "we were both talking about the ideas, finding we had common ideas, and somehow hit upon the notion of an article". So, in 2019, they co-authored an essay in The Atlantic, which argued for "a new science of progress".
"progress studies doesn't desire a world where humans live more harmoniously with nature. As Crawford writes: "Humanism says that when improving human life requires altering the environment, humanity takes moral precedence over nature." It doesn’t necessarily want a world with less inequality and prefers to focus more on growing the pie than on how it’s divided. It also doesn't care much for societal norms that stand in the way of what it conceives of as progress – even ones shared by all cultures..."
This position sounds so self-serving on the part of the billionaire.
To reap the benefits of his wealth guilt-free, where he and people like him can exploit the world as they see fit and dominate others, it would be helpful for him to push a world view like this.
And why would Cowen, who "ranked 17th on a list of the top 100 most influential economists" give the time of day to some rando who just happened to be rich? One word: money.
So it looks like Collison bought himself an economist.
That Peter Thiel is influential in this "movement" (or PR exercise) is also telling.
"Crawford and Cowen, the two leading intellectual figures of the progress community, come from the objectivist and libertarian traditions, respectively. On a panel at AynRandCon, Crawford described progress studies as adjacent to objectivism, the philosophical system outlined in 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand’s fiction."
Well, that just about explains it all..
This whole movement actually has strong echoes of extropianism, which has roots in HG Wells' techno-utopianism, and might be termed neo-Wellsianism, were it not for Wells making a 180 near the end of his life and becoming a dystopian (see his book "Mind at the End of Its Tether"), and for Wells' utopias being socialist, not capitalist ones.