“Progress” is a word that often generates both a lot of positive vibes, and also a lot of pushback? Progress toward what? At what cost? So it’s perhaps useful to specify that when I refer to “progress,” I’m referring to an overall movement toward good things of life: in no particular order, longer and healthier lives; a rising standard of living, especially for the poor; more education for more people; environmental protection; leisure time; personal safety, resources of time and money for people to build community with family, friends, neighbors; and more. Addressing these and other problems of society requires “progress.” Of course, the specifics of how to address social problems are always controversial. But I’d argue strongly that if the solutions are envisioned as a zero-sum game–that is, all about taking from some groups to benefit others–lasting progress is hard to achieve. If the resources of a society are growing, and the question is how to guide and shape the fruit of that growth, progress becomes easier.
Joel Mokyr (Nobel ’25) raises these kinds of questions in his Nobel lecture, “The Past and Future of Innovation: Can Progress Be Sustained?” with the video and slides freely available from at the Nobel website, and a text version now published in the July 2026 issue of the American Economic Review (which requires a library or personal subscription for access). Mokyr’s explanations generally defy attempts at condensation, but here are a few points that caught my eye:
What are the basic underpinnings of economic growth?
[G]rowth can be driven by four different economic phenomena. One is simple capital accumulation, which by definition raises income per capita … . Another is what is known as “Smithian growth”—the gains from trade and specialization. A third is “Northian growth” which occurs when institutional change, more efficient factor markets, and improved property rights make the allocation of resources more efficient. … Finally there is “Schumpeterian growth,” driven by technological progress: making goods cheaper, making them better, or coming up with altogether new goods. In practice, of course, there four processes interact in a myriad of ways and in most cases reinforce one another. But at least logically they are separable.
The problem is that the first three sources of growth all run into diminishing returns–that is, they are not sustainable.
The first three share an important characteristic that I will call the “curse of concavity,” which is a poetic way of thinking of what economists have traditionally called “diminishing returns.” For capital accumulation this is immediate under the standard assumptions of almost any reasonable production function. But the same is true for the gains from trade. When trade is opened up between two nations (or regions) that were not trading before, there are immediate gains. As trading costs fall further, trade widens and deepens and further gains are secured, but as trading costs keep falling the marginal gains keep declining and theoretically further gains go asymptotically to zero as trading costs fall further. The same is true for improved allocations: Once a nation already has “good” institutions, further institutional improvements that make the allocation of resources ever more efficient will yield declining rates of growth. Any economy that depends solely on those three forces eventually will experience a slow-down in its rate of growth. Is the same true for Schumpeterian growth? Is there evidence that economic growth driven by the expansion and diffusion of useful knowledge may peter out?
A standard metaphor for those who worry about progress slowing down is that the “low-hanging fruit” has already been picked. A difficulty with this metaphor is that we aren’t picking fruit here. Instead, it is at least possible that scientific improvements might allow picking large quantities of high-hanging fruit.
To return to the metaphor of low-hanging fruits, in the absence of advances in the underlying understanding of natural phenomena, eventually the picking will become leaner and leaner. But advancing science provides ladders to reach higher and higher into the tree, and the high-hanging fruits may be of higher quality. In various fields, discrete scientific breakthroughs have provided opportunities to altogether new technological breakthroughs.
Once you start thinking along these lines, possibilities open up. What possibilities might become possible with quantum computing? Genomics and biotech? Research into clean energy or battery storage? A new idea is often important because it leads to other ideas. The new AI tools may turn out to be less important in the workplace than they are for generating not-previously considered but fruitful ideas for innovation. For a 20th-century example of an innovation leading to many applications, Mokyr offers the laser:
Perhaps the most versatile tool developed in the twentieth century to help do science (apart from digital computers) was the laser, a true scientific general purpose technology (GPT), which was applied to scores of very different areas of research. One of the most notable scientific breakthroughs driven by this technology was the success of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory to confirm the existence of gravitational waves, long predicted by Einstein but not proven till 2015. But the application of lasers to scientific discoveries has been wide ranging, and includes among others MALDI, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (used in mass spectrometry in for instance analytical protein chemistry); LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology that has application in geology, seismology, remote sensing, atmospheric physics and archaeology. Especially versatile is laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). In addition to multiple industrial uses, it is deployed in analyzing deep-sea sediments or hydrothermal vent fluids, studying elemental composition in unusual environments such as the Mars rover rock analyzer, as well as detect trace elements in nutritional, protein analysis, and material sciences.
As Mokyr points out, it’s perfectly plausible that individual people can find it harder to master the extraordinary realms of knowledge. But this problem arises because the amount of knowledge continues to rise, not because knowledge is levelling off. Ultimately, Mokyr is an optimist about the possibilities for progress, but more pessimistic about human institutions. Here’s his conclusion:
Is economic growth sustainable? My answer is that it is not only sustainable but in fact inevitable if humankind is to cope with the threats that are facing it. The threats of climate change and demographic transition, despite their different features, share three characteristics. One is that they are inexorable, relentless, and in all likelihood irreversible. A second is that they are global in nature: These are not local or regional crises but worldwide ones. Of course their severity is heterogeneous, but practically no part of humanity is exempt of some of its effects. The third is that both are in some way an unintended consequence of economic modernization. Beyond that, these threats are similar in that their respective impacts will be extremely expensive, and thus create heavy pressure on government deficits and the fiscal requirements to deal with them. Yet adapting to these shocks can be and will be possible, if their role as focusing devices will lead to accelerated technological change directed to adapt to the urgent needs of a changing world. There can be little doubt that if the appropriate decision makers will recognize the urgency of the needs, the useful knowledge needed to adapt to a changing world can be generated, given the rapidly expanding frontier of science and the possibilities of integrating robotics, machine learning, and similar general purpose technologies. The real question is whether the institutions—both public and private sectors—will recognize the pending disasters in time and respond appropriately. There is no guarantee that they will.
