AS.001.219 · Fall 2026 · Johns Hopkins University
What does it mean for the world to get better? This seminar examines the history, economics, and ethics of progress — who benefits, who is left behind, and what we owe future generations.
Humanity has seen astonishing improvements in health, wealth, and knowledge over the past two centuries. Life expectancy has more than doubled. Extreme poverty has fallen from the near-universal condition of humankind to affecting less than a tenth of the world's population. Literacy, once a rare privilege, is now approaching universality. And yet progress is uneven, contested, and fragile.
This seminar asks: What drives progress? What threatens it? And what makes progress genuinely good? We draw on economics, history, philosophy, and data to take these questions seriously — approaching them not as settled but as live problems that students will grapple with throughout their lives.
Baltimore is our laboratory. We explore the city as a site where the history of progress and its limits are visible on every block — from the industrial waterfront to the biomedical research corridor, from the legacy of redlining to the ongoing work of community development.
Defining and measuring progress. GDP, wellbeing, the Human Development Index. Long-run data and the case for optimism — and its limits.
How do institutions shape the possibility of progress? Property rights, incentives, and the economics of technological change.
Inequality, race, and the distribution of progress. The history of exclusion in Baltimore and beyond. What reparative progress might look like.
Great inventors, systemic forces, and the question of inevitability. Who gets to drive change? The role of ambition, luck, and institutions.
Climate change, pandemic risk, AI, and the possibility of catastrophe. Can progress be sustained? What does stewardship require of us?
Student presentations. Synthesizing the course. What kind of progress will you be part of making?
"Progress is not an accident but a necessity… What we call evil and immorality must disappear. It is certain that man must become perfect."
— Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (1851) — and why we should be skepticalThe seminar is deliberately skeptical of easy optimism. We read thinkers who celebrate progress alongside those who identify its costs and contradictions. Students leave with a more nuanced, evidence-based framework for thinking about human improvement — and their own place in it.
Progress is not an abstraction. Every session in this course is connected to a site in Baltimore where the ideas we read about have played out in real lives. We will visit several of these sites during the semester, and the interactive map below shows how the city's history of progress — and its limits — is written into the built environment.