Syllabus

Syllabus — FYS: Progress

AS.001.219 · Fall 2026

Syllabus

FYS: Progress — Why now is the best time to be alive (and how we could lose it)

Twenty-seven class meetings across six modules. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30–11:45 AM in Shriver Hall 001. SIS lists the class from August 31 to December 11; the first Tuesday/Thursday meeting is September 1 and the last is December 10.

Course information

Instructor

Simon D. Halliday

Email

simon.halliday@jhu.edu

Office hours

TBD — see Canvas

Meeting time

Tue & Thu, 10:30–11:45 AM

Location

Shriver Hall 001, Homewood Campus

Canvas

canvas.jhu.edu

Device policy

This is a device-free seminar by default. Phones, tablets, and laptops should be put away during class unless I explicitly ask you to use a device for a particular activity. The point is not nostalgia or punishment; it is that seminar conversation, close reading, and the first minutes of handwritten reflection work better when everyone is fully present.

Readings and course packets

The syllabus links to public web readings whenever possible. I will provide binders and printed copies of all readings so that you can read, annotate, and bring the texts to class without relying on a device. Readings that are not freely available online will be provided through Canvas, library reserve, or course reading packets. The first packet covers Weeks 1-3, with later packets added as the semester reading list is finalized.

For Session 1, read Jason Crawford's "The Present Crisis" and "Fish in Water", and spend time with Jordan Dworkin's Ordinary Abundance. The Crawford pieces will also appear in compact packet form, with web footnotes and endnotes omitted to keep printing manageable.

Grades

Assignment	Weight
Baltimore Progress Video (group)	30%
Progress Data Project (individual)	30%
In-class reading responses (handwritten, start of class)	15%
Participation & discussion leadership	15%
Opening & closing reflection	10%

Full descriptions of each assignment are on the Assignments page. AI use is expected and encouraged — each assignment includes an AI log component.

Key dates

First class

Tuesday, Sep 1, 2026

Add/drop deadline

Friday, Sep 11, 2026 (noon)

Last day to drop

Monday, Oct 12, 2026 (4:30 PM)

KSAS Fall Break

Oct 22–23, 2026 — no Thu class

Fall Recess

Nov 23–27, 2026 — no classes

Last class

Thursday, Dec 10, 2026

Module 1

What Is Progress?

We begin with the data. How much has the world actually improved, and how do we know? We then ask what we should even be measuring — and whose definition of progress counts.

Tue Sep 1

Session 1 · Introduction: Why Progress?

Course overview. Opening reflection: "What do you think the world's biggest unsolved problem is, and why?" Baltimore Video groups assigned; sites chosen by Thursday.

• Required Jason Crawford, "The Present Crisis," Introduction to The Techno-Humanist Manifesto — why does progress need a defense now, and what is lost when a society becomes unable to imagine a better future?
• Required Jason Crawford, "Fish in Water," Chapter 1 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto — industrial civilization has become easy to ignore precisely because it has solved so many ordinary problems.
• Required Jordan Dworkin, Ordinary Abundance — an interactive web exhibit on the once-astonishing technologies embedded in an ordinary apartment. Choose one object or service and trace the hidden systems that make it ordinary.

Opening reflection dueVideo groups assigned

Thu Sep 3

Session 2 · How Much Has the World Improved? Data and Instincts

Baltimore Video sites confirmed by end of this week; filming begins.

• Required Hans Rosling, Factfulness, Introduction + Chapter 1 ("The Gap Instinct") — why experts score worse than chimpanzees on basic facts about the world, and why the developing/developed binary is an outdated map of reality.

In-class responseVideo sites confirmed

Tue Sep 8

Session 3 · Progress Getting Better — And What That Means

• Required Hans Rosling, Factfulness, Chapter 2 ("The Negativity Instinct") — why we think the world is getting worse when the data says otherwise; the secret silent miracle of human progress.
• Required Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Chapter 2 (selections) — development is not just income growth: it is the expansion of real freedoms. What does this mean for how we measure progress?

In-class response

Thu Sep 10

Session 4 · The Great Enrichment in One City

Tentative field visit — Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI). We will use Baltimore's industrial history to examine how technologies, firms, infrastructure, labor, and public institutions made the Great Enrichment concrete.

• Required Simon D. Halliday & Luz Marina Arias, Understanding Our Economy, Chapter 3: "Our world transformed" (selections) — how capitalism's institutions produced extraordinary growth, and at what cost.
• Recommended Mark Koyama & Jared Rubin, How the World Became Rich, Chapter 1: "Why, When, and How Did the World Become Rich?" (~10 pp.) — why did sustained growth only begin in the last two centuries, and why did the Malthusian trap persist for so long before that?
• Recommended Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Chapter 7: "The Process of Creative Destruction" (1942, ~10 pp.) — the canonical source. Capitalism, Schumpeter argues, is not primarily about price competition but about the "gale of creative destruction" — new goods, methods, and organizational forms that ceaselessly displace the old. The chapter that gave the concept its name.

Tentative BMI visitUOE Ch. 3

Module 2

Institutions & Innovation

Progress does not happen in a vacuum. Institutions — the rules, norms, and organizations that structure economic life — shape who innovates, who benefits, and who is left out.

Tue Sep 15

Session 5 · Science as a Public Good

• Required Richard R. Nelson, “The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research,” Journal of Political Economy 67, no. 3 (1959): 297–306 — the foundational public-goods-of-science argument: why markets underinvest in basic research, and what institutions fill the gap. [via JHU Library]
• Required Vannevar Bush, Science, The Endless Frontier (1945), transmittal letter + Chapter 3 (~8 pp.) — the report that shaped US science policy for a generation. Why should government fund basic research? [free at nsf.gov]
• Recommended Partha Dasgupta and Paul A. David, “Toward a New Economics of Science,” Research Policy 23, no. 5 (1994): 487–521 — the fullest economic framework for scientific norms and open science. Read pp. 487–497 if you read nothing else. [via JHU Library]
• Recommended Paul M. Romer, “The Origins of Endogenous Growth,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 8, no. 1 (1994): 3–22 — accessible account of why non-rival ideas drive long-run growth; connects Nelson to growth theory. [via JHU Library]
• Recommended Michael Polanyi, “The Republic of Science,” Minerva 1, no. 1 (1962): 54–73 — science as spontaneous order, analogous to a market. The philosophical complement to Nelson. [via JHU Library]
• Recommended Adam Mastroianni, “The Rise and Fall of Peer Review,” Experimental History (2022) — does scientific self-governance actually work? A short, provocative read for students who want a contemporary angle.
• Recommended Jason Crawford, “Innovation is not linear,” Works in Progress — a clear corrective to the simple pipeline model in which basic science mechanically becomes applied technology. Useful for seeing science and invention as reciprocal, iterative, and institutionally entangled.
• Recommended Daniel Gross & Bhaven Sampat, “America, Jump-Started: World War II R&D and the Takeoff of the U.S. Innovation System,” American Economic Review 113, no. 12 (2023): 3323–3356 — how the wartime science mobilisation of 1940–45 permanently shifted the US innovation system toward basic research and university-industry linkages. Context for why Bush’s 1945 report landed when it did. [via JHU Library]

In-class response

Thu Sep 17

Session 6 · Innovation, Incentives, and Technology

• Required Simon D. Halliday & Eric Bottorff, Understanding Our Economy, Chapter 4: "Innovation, incentives, and technology" (selections) — how do incentives shape the direction and pace of innovation?
• Required Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen & Michael Webb, "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" American Economic Review 110, no. 4 (2020): 1104–1144 — read the introduction and conclusion only (~8 pp.). The central finding is striking and completely accessible: the number of researchers required to sustain Moore's Law has grown 18-fold since the early 1970s. Ideas are genuinely getting harder to find even as R&D inputs soar — the empirical backbone for why innovation institutions and incentive structures matter so much. [via JHU Library]

In-class responseUOE Ch. 4

Tue Sep 22

Session 7 · Cities 1: Renaissance Florence and the Geography of Ideas

Field visit: Walters Art Museum, Mount Vernon — Renaissance collection.

• Required Ada Palmer, excerpts from Inventing the Renaissance (2025) — what made Florence a crucible of innovation?
• Required "Florence's wealthiest families in 1427 are still the wealthiest today," Vox (May 18, 2016) — an accessible account of Barone and Mocetti's finding that Florentine surnames linked to wealthy households in the 1427 catasto are still associated with high earnings today; a vivid illustration of how deep and durable economic status can be. [archived version]
• Recommended Dan Chiasson, "Man of the House" (New Yorker, Apr 29 2019) on the Bauhaus — a counterpoint on design, craft, and collective creativity.
• Recommended Guglielmo Barone & Sauro Mocetti, "Intergenerational Mobility in the Very Long Run: Florence 1427–2011," Review of Economic Studies 88, no. 4 (2021): 1863–1891 — matches Florentine catasto records from 1427 to modern tax data by surname; finds that earnings rank persists across 600 years at a rate comparable to single-generation estimates, suggesting economic status is far more entrenched than cross-generational studies typically show. The source behind the Vox piece. [via JHU Library]

In-class responseWalters Art Museum visit

Thu Sep 24

Session 8 · Cities 2: Silicon Valley and Economies of Agglomeration

• Required Andrew McAfee, “A Visualization of Europe’s Non-Bubbly Economy,” The Geek Way (December 2024, ~1,200 words) — two bubble charts that make the US–Europe innovation gap visceral: Europe has produced 14 from-scratch public companies worth over $10B in the past fifty years; the US has produced hundreds, collectively worth almost $30 trillion. McAfee draws on the Draghi report to diagnose why — fragmented markets, restrictive regulation, and a VC ecosystem that lags the US by a factor of five at every funding stage. The sharpest short answer to “why Silicon Valley?” and “why not Europe?” [free, Substack]
• Required AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Introduction (8 pp., 1996) — explains why Silicon Valley recovered from the crises of the early 1980s while Route 128 did not. Saxenian's answer is institutional: Silicon Valley had open networks and fluid labor markets; Route 128 had hierarchical, self-contained firms. The Introduction is enough to grasp both the empirical puzzle and the core thesis. [PDF on Canvas]
• Required Caleb Watney, “Clusters rule everything around me,” Works in Progress — why high-growth technology clusters form, why they are hard to copy, and what policy can do to make them more likely. A contemporary bridge from Saxenian's regional comparison to live policy debates about agglomeration.
• Required Sebastian Mallaby, The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, Prologue (~15 pp., 2022) — how did venture capital as a financing form emerge in California, and why has it proved so hard to replicate elsewhere? Mallaby traces the origins to a small group of investors who chose equity over fees — a structural choice that, compounded over decades, produced the funding ecosystem McAfee’s charts make visible. [PDF via library]
• Recommended John Myers, Sam Bowman & Ben Southwood, “The housing theory of everything,” Works in Progress — a broader argument that housing scarcity blocks mobility, productivity, fertility, and innovation. Best read in selected sections as an extension of the cities-and-clusters argument.
• Recommended Mario Draghi, The Future of European Competitiveness (European Commission, September 2024), pp. 1–15 (Part A executive summary) — the report McAfee is reacting to. Draghi argues Europe faces an “existential crisis” driven by falling productivity growth, underinvestment in deep tech, and regulatory fragmentation. The headline statistics — no from-scratch EU company worth over €100B in fifty years; VC funding lagging the US at every stage by roughly 5× — are all here in primary form. Read pp. 1–15 for the diagnosis; the rest is policy prescription. [PDF, free]
• Recommended Michael Blanding, “The Past and Future of Kendall Square,” MIT Technology Review (August 18, 2015) — a five-act history of how an abandoned industrial wasteland became what the Boston Consulting Group called “the most innovative square mile on Earth.” Covers the role of MIT lab spinouts (Biogen, Genzyme), the arrival of Big Pharma, and the deliberate curation of co-location as an innovation strategy. A Cambridge counterpart to the Silicon Valley story — and a vivid illustration of what Saxenian’s network-based model looks like in life sciences. [free]
• Recommended Scott Kirsner, “The Engine at MIT is revving up the potential of ‘tough tech,’” Boston Globe (February 24, 2020) — profiles MIT’s tough-tech accelerator, which funds companies whose science is too capital-intensive and slow-moving for standard VC — fusion energy, green steel, grid-scale batteries. Companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems were born here. Connects Mallaby’s VC origin story to the question of what happens to breakthroughs that don’t fit the standard venture model. [may require Globe subscription or library access]
• Recommended David Chandler, “MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy,” MIT News (September 8, 2021) — the moment Commonwealth Fusion Systems and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center demonstrated a 20-tesla superconducting magnet — a world record, and the critical milestone on the path to SPARC, their planned fusion demonstration reactor. A concrete example of how a research university spinout can move from a class project to a world-changing engineering milestone — and how that process looks nothing like a standard tech startup. [free]

Silicon Valley exists for reasons — and so does the gap between it and everywhere else. McAfee makes the US–Europe comparison impossible to dismiss; Saxenian and Moretti explain the agglomeration economics underneath it.

In-class responseBaltimore Video due

Tue Sep 29

Session 9 · Cities 3: Baltimore — Progress, Decline, and Video Screenings

• Required Anthony Hiss, “Reinventing Baltimore,” The New Yorker (April 29, 1991) — Baltimore after the Inner Harbor renaissance: Schaefer, Schmoke, population loss, neighborhood decline, and the question of whether a city can become prettier and poorer at the same time. [via JHU Library]
• Required Peter L. Szanton, Baltimore 2000: A Choice of Futures, Morris Goldseker Foundation (1986), Introduction, Preface, and Chapter I, “The Story So Far: Baltimore, 1960–1985” — the civic diagnosis just before the 1991 New Yorker piece. Skim Chapter II if you want to see the report’s baseline forecast for the city. [free PDF]
• Required The New York Times, “Baltimore’s Historic Decline in Murders” (August 17, 2026) — a contemporary report on Baltimore’s recent drop in homicide and violent crime, to read against the older civic diagnoses. [via JHU Library]
• Recommended Santi Ruiz, “How to Rewire City Hall,” Statecraft interview with James Anderson of Bloomberg Philanthropies (February 13, 2026) — municipal capacity, learning across city halls, and Baltimore as a case of governing practice.
• Recommended Odd Lots, “How Baltimore’s Mayor Is Fighting the City’s Vacant Housing Crisis” (May 4, 2026) — Mayor Brandon Scott on vacancy, redlining, deindustrialization, gun violence, and block-by-block public capacity.
• Recommended Urban Institute, “The Black Butterfly” investment-flow feature (2019) — a visual companion on Baltimore’s spatial inequality and the White L / Black Butterfly geography.
• Recommended Ron Cassie, “The Last Autoworker in Baltimore,” Baltimore Magazine (2018) — deindustrialization at worker scale, through the closing world of Baltimore auto manufacturing.

Read these as three moments in one Baltimore story: the 1986 forecast, the 1991 reinvention narrative, and the 2026 claim of a possible public-safety turn. Students watch their Baltimore videos before class, submit the brief written reflection that morning, and bring a discussion question. Class opens with the Baltimore readings, then moves to group video showcase and discussion.

In-class responseVideo reflection due

Thu Oct 1

Session 10 · Liberty, Property Rights, and the Conditions for Progress

• Required F. A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–530 — the canonical argument that market prices aggregate dispersed private knowledge that no central planner can replicate. Why private property and decentralized decision-making are epistemologically necessary, not just incentive-compatible.
• Required Understanding Our Economy 101, Chapter 1: "Cooperation, conflict, and the environment" and Chapter 2: "Changing the rules: Power and fairer bargains" selections — cooperation, conflict, rules, outside options, bargaining power, democracy, and changing the rules of the game. Final packet pages TBD.
• Recommended Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Chapter 1 (1990) — the canonical institutional-economics version of the argument: institutions are the rules of the game that structure incentives, enforcement, and economic performance.
• Recommended Steven N. Durlauf, "How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin and Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong: A Review Essay," Journal of Economic Literature 63, no. 1 (2025): 288–305, especially pp. 293–295 — a bridge from Hayek to DeLong's Hayek/Polanyi frame, asking whether markets, liberty, distribution, and social justice can be separated. [via JHU Library]

Hayek gives the strongest case for decentralized knowledge and market coordination. UOE complicates the claim by showing that liberty is structured by rules, power, outside options, and institutions. The question is not just whether markets need liberty, but whose liberty counts and what rules make progress possible.

In-class response

Tue Oct 6

Session 11 · Escaping the Poverty Trap

• Required Yuen Yuen Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Introduction — how do poor societies bootstrap growth, and what does this mean for the role of the state? Ang's central idea is "directed improvisation": central goals paired with local experimentation, adaptation, and problem-solving. [open access via JSTOR/Cornell]
• Required Robin Grier, “How Mexico built a state,” Works in Progress — a non-China comparison showing state-building as a hard process of bargaining, compromise, coercion, and institutional adaptation rather than the simple adoption of best-practice rules.
• Recommended Yuen Yuen Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Chapter 2: "Directed Improvisation" — the deeper theoretical version of the argument. Read this if you want the full mechanism behind the introduction.
• Recommended Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, Introduction (2025) — a vivid contemporary complement on China as an "engineering state" and the United States as a "lawyerly society." [course-reserve scan or library copy needed]
• Recommended Mark Lutter & Jeffrey Mason, “Build state capacity by building charter cities,” Works in Progress — a more speculative application of the state-capacity question. Useful for thinking about whether new jurisdictions can create institutional room for growth.

Ang gives us the development mechanism: how weak institutions can become adaptive enough to generate growth. Wang supplies the contemporary provocation: what happens when a state becomes very good at building, and what costs come with that capacity?

In-class response

Module 3

Who Benefits?

Progress is uneven. We look at both how much has improved — especially for groups historically excluded from prosperity — and where serious gaps remain. Income, wealth, representation, health: the picture is complicated, and the data matters.

Thu Oct 8

Session 12 · Inequality, Mobility, and the Geography of Opportunity

• Required Simon D. Halliday, Understanding Our Economy, Chapter 5: "Inequality, fairness, and the institutions that shape them" (selections; not yet publicly released) — income and wealth inequality across countries; intergenerational and categorical inequality; the Gini coefficient; experimental evidence on fairness preferences; the efficiency-fairness tradeoff.
• Required Raj Chetty & Nathaniel Hendren, "The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects," Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 3 (2018): 1107–1162 — read the Introduction and Conclusion only (~8 pp.). The evidence that where you grow up causally shapes where you end up: a natural experiment using families who move across counties. [via JHU Library]

UOE Ch. 5 gives the conceptual infrastructure — how we measure and think about inequality, and what makes it persist. Chetty & Hendren show the mechanism at work: neighborhood matters causally, not just correlationally.

In-class responseUOE Ch. 5

Tue Oct 13

Session 13 · Race and Progress in America

• Required Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, Prologue (~10 pp.) — three Black Americans who joined the Great Migration, told as an act of economic agency and hope.
• Required Eric Bottorff, Trevon Logan & Suresh Naidu, "Persistent Racial Inequality in the United States," CORE Insights (2022) — the mechanisms of segregation, discrimination, and political inequality that have slowed convergence.

Together: what did Black progress look like in motion, and why has it remained incomplete?

In-class response

Thu Oct 15

Session 14 · Industrialization, Labor, Race, and the Limits of Progress

Classroom synthesis using evidence from the earlier BMI visit. Reading TBD — background on Baltimore's industrial and labor history.

In-class response

Tue Oct 20

Session 15 · Contemporary Barriers to Progress: Why We’ve Stopped Building

• Required Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen, "We Need a New Science of Progress," The Atlantic (July 2019, ~1,500 words) — the short manifesto that launched Progress Studies as a field. Why has no academic discipline made the causes of progress its central object of inquiry?
• Required Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance, Chapter 1: "The Politics of More" (2025, ~25 pp.) — the political economy of why America has stopped building: housing, clean energy, infrastructure. The argument that progressive politics has become entangled with a politics of restriction.
• Recommended Brian Potter, The Origins of Efficiency (Stripe Press, 2025) — selections from the chapters on housing and construction (~20 pp.). Potter analyses why the production process in construction has not seen the efficiency gains of steel or semiconductors. A complementary, production-side analysis of the same barriers Klein & Thompson identify from the political side.
• Optional extension Eric Bottorff & Simon D. Halliday, Understanding Our Economy, Chapter 10: "Work, Pay, and Power" (selections; not yet publicly released), paired with David H. Autor, "Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 3 (2015): 3–30 — labor markets, automation, and how progress changes work. [Autor via JHU Library]

The course has asked why progress happened. This session asks why, in some domains and in some countries, it seems to have slowed — and what structural, political, and behavioural obstacles have replaced the old material ones.

In-class response

Thu Oct 22

No class — KSAS Fall Break

No class during Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Fall Break.

Module 4

Ambition & Agency

Does progress flow from exceptional individuals or inevitable structural forces? What is the role of ambition, luck, and the systems that enable or suppress it?

Tue Oct 27

Session 16 · Great Men, Great Women, and Inevitable Inventions

• Required Thomas Carlyle, "The Hero as Man of Letters" (extract from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841) — the philosophical case for exceptional individuals as the engine of history.
• Required Mark Koyama & Jared Rubin, How the World Became Rich, Chapter 8: "Britain's Industrial Revolution" (selections, ~15 pp.) — why did sustained technological change first occur in Britain when it did, and not in the Dutch Republic, which shared so many of the same features?
• Required Alvin Djajadikerta & Laura Lungu, “Why science needs outsiders,” Works in Progress — a modern argument that breakthroughs often come from people who are not fully captured by a field's standard incentives, training pathways, and assumptions.
• Recommended Benjamin F. Jones, “The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’: Is Innovation Getting Harder?” Review of Economic Studies 76, no. 1 (2009): 283–317 — innovators today must absorb far more prior knowledge before reaching the frontier; the result is longer training, narrower specialisation, and more teamwork. A structural argument that the age of the lone genius is ending — not because people are less ambitious, but because knowledge has compounded. [via JHU Library]

Together: was Watt inevitable?

In-class response

Thu Oct 29

Session 17 · Ambition

• Required William J. Baumol, “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive,” Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5 (1990): 893–921 — the total supply of entrepreneurs may be roughly constant across societies; what varies — enormously — is how the rules of the game channel them toward innovation versus rent-seeking. A framework that explains why Rome produced lawyers and generals instead of engineers. [via JHU Library]
• Recommended Robert E. Litan & Ian Hathaway, “Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?” Harvard Business Review (June 2017) — written as a tribute to Baumol shortly after his death, this short piece asks whether current US incentives are steering entrepreneurs toward extractive activities (rent-seeking, financial engineering) rather than productive ones. A direct application of the Baumol framework to contemporary America.
• Recommended Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 1: "Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification" (1905, ~20 pp.) — the classic claim that cultural attitudes toward work, thrift, and calling shaped the emergence of capitalism in Protestant societies. Read as a foil to Baumol: are entrepreneurial energies shaped by institutions alone, or also by culture and belief?
• Recommended Samuel Bazzi, Martin Fiszbein & Mesay Gebresilasse, “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States,” Econometrica 88, no. 6 (2020): 2329–2368 — read the introduction and conclusion only (~8 pp.). Uses the historical westward movement of the frontier to show that individualistic, anti-government attitudes persist to this day in counties that were once frontier territory. A striking empirical test of the Weber-style claim that history shapes economic culture. [via JHU Library]

Together: what kind of entrepreneurship does this society actually reward — and is that the kind that produces progress?

In-class response

Tue Nov 3

Session 18 · Guest: Political Economy of Reform

Guest speaker: Professor Steve Teles (Hopkins).

• Required Steven Teles, “Kludgeocracy in America,” National Affairs (Fall 2013) — America’s patchwork of overlapping programmes and indirect policy instruments is not an accident but a structural feature of its political system. Teles coins “kludgeocracy” to name a governing style that is simultaneously complex, inefficient, and redistributive — upward. Essential background for understanding why reform is so hard.
• Recommended Robert Saldin & Steven Teles, “The Rise of the Abundance Faction,” Niskanen Center (June 2024) — argues that a cross-cutting “Abundance Faction” — YIMBY activists, climate builders, healthcare reformers — is emerging as a new political force in American politics, modelled on the Progressive Era coalition. The political complement to Kludgeocracy’s diagnosis.
• Recommended William J. Baumol & William G. Bowen, “On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems,” American Economic Review 55, no. 1/2 (1965): 495–502 — the original “cost disease” paper. Live performance cannot substitute capital for labor the way manufacturing can, so its costs rise relentlessly relative to the rest of the economy. Wide implications for education, healthcare, and government services. [via JHU Library]

Kludgeocracy names the disease; the Abundance Faction proposes the cure. Come ready to push on both: is the diagnosis right? Is the proposed coalition realistic?

Guest speakerIn-class response

Thu Nov 5

Session 19 · Top-Down Innovation: The State, the Market, and Who Decides

• Required Ben Reinhardt, “Why Does DARPA Work?” (~20 pp.) — a careful structural analysis of what makes DARPA, uniquely among government agencies, a reliable producer of breakthrough innovation: programme managers with autonomy, short time horizons, and no bureaucratic overhead. The template against which all government innovation is measured.
• Required Neil Hacker, “Buyers of first resort,” Works in Progress — why breakthrough technologies often need early buyers, not just inventors or investors. A demand-side complement to DARPA, procurement, and Operation Warp Speed.
• Required Anton Howes, “Why innovation prizes fail,” Works in Progress — a historical warning that prizes are often better at incremental improvements than transformative invention, complicating the standard policy toolkit.
• Recommended Heidi Williams, “How Do Patents Affect Research Investments?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 1 (2017): 67–92 — a survey of the empirical evidence on whether and when intellectual property rights increase or decrease downstream innovation. Williams’s own work on the human genome showed that private IP rights over mapped gene sequences reduced subsequent research on those genes by ~30% — a striking finding about how the design of property rights, not just their existence, shapes what gets discovered. [via JHU Library]
• Recommended Santi Ruiz, “How to Replicate Operation Warp Speed,” Statecraft (January 2024) — a Q&A with former HHS Secretary Alex Azar on what actually made OWS work: unlimited crisis funding, the right people, an unprecedented DOD partnership, and brute-force execution of a problem that was already solved scientifically. Azar is candid about why it can’t be easily replicated — “It had to be a miracle. We got a miracle” — and what that implies for how we design government innovation programs going forward.

Case studies: DARPA, Operation Warp Speed, Bell Labs, the internet. What makes government-directed innovation succeed or fail — and how does it interact with the patent system that governs what the private sector investigates?

In-class response

Tue Nov 10

Session 20 · Guest TBD: Contemporary Science Policy

Guest TBD. This session focuses on contemporary science policy, funding delays, and the institutional design questions behind efforts to accelerate discovery.

• Required Heidi Williams, “Funding Delays Are Slowing Scientific Progress,” Institute for Progress (August 2023, ~1,500 words) — scientists wait on average 20 months between submitting a grant and receiving funding. Williams argues this delay is not an administrative inevitability but a policy choice with measurable costs to research output — and that fixing it is low-hanging fruit.
• Required Heidi Williams & Paul Niehaus, “Developing the science of science,” Works in Progress — argues that science policy should learn from development economics by testing which institutions, funding systems, and evaluation methods actually accelerate discovery.
• Recommended Matt Clancy, Dan Correa, Jordan Dworkin, Paul Niehaus, Caleb Watney & Heidi Williams, “To Speed Up Scientific Progress, We Need to Understand Science Policy,” Institute for Progress (September 2023) — a short manifesto arguing that the gap between science policy research and actual policy-making is itself a barrier to progress, and proposing three bridges to close it.

Come with a specific claim from the Williams reading you want to push back on — or a funding delay story of your own.

Guest TBDIn-class response

Module 5

Limits & Risks

Progress can stall, reverse, or create new problems faster than it solves old ones. Climate change, pandemic risk, and technological disruption test whether the optimist story holds.

Thu Nov 12

Session 21 · Environmental Progress: Can We Fix What We Broke?

• Required Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World (2024), Chapter 1: "Air Pollution" (~35 pp.) — the evidence for environmental progress, and where it falls short.
• Required Hannah Ritchie, “The end of acid rain,” Works in Progress — a concrete case of environmental progress: scientific diagnosis, policy action, technological adaptation, and measurable improvement.

In-class response

Tue Nov 17

Session 22 · When Progress Ends — and What We Must Maintain

• Required Derek Thompson, "Why the Age of American Progress Ended," The Atlantic (Jan/Feb 2023) — the case that innovation has slowed and what might explain it. [free, may ask you to create an account]
• Required Andrew Russell & Lee Vinsel, "Hail the Maintainers," Aeon (2016, ~2,900 words) — the counterargument: we celebrated disruption while neglecting the work of keeping things running.
• Required Ben Southwood, “The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab,” Works in Progress — how Bell Labs, PARC, and corporate research institutions helped produce twentieth-century breakthroughs, and why that institutional form declined.
• Recommended Jason Crawford, "Solutionism, Part 1," Chapter 5 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto (2025, ~3,000 words) — from Malthus to the Green Revolution: why the right response to a real crisis is neither complacency nor despair, but active problem-solving. A counterpoint to Thompson.

Is progress failing because we stopped inventing, or because we stopped maintaining? And when it does seem to stall — what does history say we should do about it?

In-class response

Thu Nov 19

Session 23 · Catastrophic Risk: Pandemic, AI, and Existential Threats

• Required Charles I. Jones, "AI and Our Economic Future," Journal of Economic Perspectives 40, no. 3 (2026): 3–22 — AI as both a possible accelerator of economic growth and a source of catastrophic risk. Read the introduction and conclusion if time is tight. [via JHU Library]
• Required Ezra Karger et al., "Forecasting the Economic Effects of AI," NBER Working Paper 35046 (2026) — expert forecasts about AI's economic consequences. Focus on the main forecast results and skim the technical machinery as needed. [via JHU Library]
• Recommended Joshua S. Gans and Avi Goldfarb, "O-Ring Automation," NBER Working Paper 34639 (2026) — a useful complement on automation, complementarities, and bottlenecks. [via JHU Library]
• Recommended Connor Tabarrok, “Rivers are now battlefields,” Works in Progress — China, dams, energy, infrastructure, and geopolitical risk. A useful reminder that engineering capacity creates strategic externalities as well as prosperity.

What obligations does anticipated risk create? This session asks whether the same forces that accelerate progress can also generate risks large enough to require new institutions.

In-class response

Tue Nov 24

No class — Thanksgiving week

No classes this week (Tuesday and Thursday both cancelled).

Thu Nov 26

No class — Thanksgiving

Module 6

Looking Forward

Students present their Data Projects and the seminar closes with reflection and celebration. What has changed in your thinking since September 1?

Tue Dec 1

Session 24 · The Future of Progress

• Required Ted Chiang, "Exhalation" (2019, ~6,000 words) — a meditation on entropy, memory, and what it means to understand. Read slowly. Bring one sentence that you think is about progress, even though the story never uses that word.
• Required Reading TBD — a forward-looking essay or further chapter from Jason Crawford’s The Techno-Humanist Manifesto on what a society that takes progress seriously would look like.
• Recommended Holden Karnofsky, "The Most Important Century" (Cold Takes, 2021) — a careful case that we may be living in the most consequential period in human history, and what that implies for how we think about the future.

The course ends by looking forward. Where does progress go from here — and what kind of people do we need to be to keep it going?

Data project written report due

Thu Dec 3

Session 25 · Data Project Presentations (Part 1)

Six presentations, ~10 minutes each + Q&A. No advance reading assigned.

Data project presentations

Tue Dec 8

Session 26 · Data Project Presentations (Part 2)

Six presentations, ~10 minutes each + Q&A. No advance reading assigned.

Data project presentations

Thu Dec 10

Session 27 · Closing: Celebration and Final Questions

Students share closing reflections (revisiting Week 1's opening prompt). The seminar ends with open questions students have brought from across the semester — the things they still want to know. Cookies may be involved.

Closing reflection due

A note on AI use

I will use, and have used, AI in this course. AI helps me design the website, create assignments, write session notes, find data, think about readings in ways opposed to the way I think about them, and in many other ways that are hard to describe and name. Moreover, given the current milieu, I think it would be unethical for me not to use AI to provide you with the best course I possibly can, while also retaining strong intellectual ownership over the course's contents and its trajectory. Similarly, I think it would be misguided for you not to use AI.

At the same time, it is crucial that you nonetheless learn how to write well, to develop taste, to hone your intuition, to develop a strong bullshit detector. For all of these, you need to read without AI. You need to write without AI. You need to sit and pause and write and think and reflect alone. You need to develop practices for using AI wisely and for clarifying when its use is inappropriate for your own development as a thoughtful and moral person and citizen.

A variety of pieces have informed what I think about this topic, and I have included some of them below.

• Noy, Shakked, and Whitney Zhang. "Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligence." Science 381, no. 6654 (2023): 187–192.
• Mollick, Ethan, and Lilach Mollick. "Assigning AI: Seven approaches for students, with prompts." SSRN Working Paper, 2023.
• Lee, Hao-Ping (Hank), Advait Sarkar, Lev Tankelevitch, Ian Drosos, Sean Rintel, Richard Banks, and Nicholas Wilson. "The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers." In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25), April 26–May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM. DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713778.
• Bjork, Robert A., and Elizabeth L. Bjork. "Desirable difficulties in theory and practice." Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 9, no. 4 (2020): 475–479.
• Kapur, Manu. "Productive failure." Cognition and Instruction 26, no. 3 (2008): 379–424.
• Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance." Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406.
• Hambrick, David Z., Frederick L. Oswald, Erik M. Altmann, Elizabeth J. Meinz, Fernand Gobet, and Guillermo Campitelli. "Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?" Intelligence 45 (2014): 34–44.
• Branwen, Gwern. "Spaced repetition for efficient learning." gwern.net, 2009–2024.

Consequently, I welcome and expect you to use AI tools thoughtfully in this seminar. Assignments are designed so that AI assistance produces better thinking, not a shortcut around it. Every major assignment includes an AI log: a brief account of how you used AI tools, what they produced, and how your own thinking differed from or built on the AI's output.

The goal is not to police AI use but to make it visible, so that you can develop a critical relationship with these tools, understanding both what they can do and what they cannot replace.