I saw this article on the Atlantic by Jeremy Caradonna, a professor of history at the U. of Alberta. It’s about whether “progress” is good for humanity. The article takes particular aim at “progress” as a concept associated with sustained economic growth since the Industrial Revolution.
The first point to make is that Caradonna mischaracterizes the conclusions that economic historians and growth economists make about the moral character of growth after the Industrial Revolution. None of them, at least the ones I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot of them, have ever suggested that humanity is morally superior for having achieved sustained growth. Here’s the quote he pulls from Joel Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy
Material life in Britain and in the industrialized world that followed it is far better today than could have been imagined by the most wild-eyed optimistic 18th-century philosophe—and whereas this outcome may have been an…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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