The Roots of Progress has been recognized as a 501(c)(3) non-profit

Today is Giving Tuesday, so it’s a good time to announce that The Roots of Progress has received its 501(c)(3) determination letter from the IRS, officially recognizing its non-profit status. This means that, in the US, all donations made since May 2021 are tax-deductible. It also allows for donations via vehicles such as donor-advised funds.

Thanks to the generous support of many donors, we’ve exceeded our initial first-year fundraising goal of $500,000, and have raised the target to $750,000–$1,000,000. You can support us via Patreon or PayPal, or get in touch to talk about a larger or one-time contribution via another method. If you’re interested in making a donation via your donor-advised fund and are unable to find us via their tools, please reach out and we will help as much as we can.

Your donation supports my writing and speaking, including this blog and my forthcoming book. It also supports our efforts to build and strengthen the wider progress community, through both online forums and offline events—details to be announced.

See here for links and information on how to support our work. Thank you!

TOMORROW: San Diego community meetup / happy hour

Quick reminder: community meetup and happy hour tomorrow in San Diego. Appetizers will be provided, cash bar. 5:30pm, RSVP for exact location: https://airtable.com/shrNYCVF4xnhjaBaN

New edition of Where Is My Flying Car?

I have repeatedly found myself recommending Where Is My Flying Car?, by J. Storrs Hall, as a work of futurism that paints a bold, ambitious vision of what is possible with advanced technology. So I’m very happy that it has come out in a new, revised edition from Stripe Press.

Here’s what I wrote about the book in my review of the original edition:

Hall sets out to tackle the title question: why don’t we have flying cars yet? And indeed, several chapters in the book are devoted to deep dives on the history, engineering, and economics of flying cars. But to fully answer the question, Hall must go much broader and deeper, because he quickly concludes that the barriers to flying cars are not technological or economic—they are cultural and political. To explain the flying car gap is to explain the Great Stagnation itself. …

There are many writers with optimistic visions of the future. However, the goals I most often hear are all the negation of negatives: cure cancer, eliminate poverty, stop climate change.

This is good, but it is not enough. We should not only cure disease and let everyone live to what is now considered old age—we should cure aging itself and extend human lifespan indefinitely. We should not seek to merely sustain current per-capita energy usage—we should get back on the Henry Adams Curve and increase it. We should not only seek to avoid worsening the climate—we should seek to actively control and optimize it for human ends. We should not merely get the whole world up to Level 4—we should be striving for Level 5.

Aiming only for the former, as some so-called techno-optimists do, is a poor sort of optimism. It is actually calling for very limited progress, followed by stagnation. It is complacency with the status quo, content with bringing the whole world up to the current best standard of living, but not increasing it. In this context, I found Where Is My Flying Car? refreshing. Hall unabashedly calls for unlimited progress in every dimension.

The new edition has everything that made the first edition great, but it’s better organized and more streamlined (my only criticism of the original!) and should be more accessible to a wider audience. If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend picking up a copy.

The bonds of family and community

Poverty and cruelty among Russian peasants in the late 19th century

Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia is an ethnographic account of Russian peasants around 1900. The author, Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia (“Semyonova” for short), spent four years researching in the villages—one of the first to study a people through prolonged direct observation and contact with them.

I was interested in the subject as part of learning, concretely, about the quality of life for people in various places and times and at various stages of development. Although material progress was advancing rapidly at the end of the 19th century, much of that progress had not yet reached the province of Riazan where Semyonova did most of her studies. What was life like there?

In brief, I went in expecting poverty, which I found. I did not expect to also find a disturbing degree of cruelty and abuse.

First, let me share some passages from the book that I highlighted, roughly organized by theme. At the end I’ll discuss how to interpret this and what to make of it.

This is a long post with several images; read the whole thing here: https://rootsofprogress.org/russian-peasant-life