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 · Reading Workshop: Progress and Freedom

We slowed down to finish breaking apart the Rosling and Sen readings, practise identifying an argument and its evidence, and build the close-reading habits the rest of the seminar will require.

Reading skills

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.

Schedule revised September 17. We will continue with science and innovation on September 22 and 24. The city sequence then resumes: Florence September 29, Silicon Valley October 1, and Baltimore October 6. To make room, the later sequence shifts; the former industrial-labor synthesis and the unconfirmed science-policy guest session are no longer on the schedule.

Tue Sep 15

Session 5 · The Great Enrichment

• Required Simon D. Halliday & Luz Marina Arias, Understanding Our Economy, Chapter 3: "Our world transformed" — focus on capitalism's core institutions, how the rules of the game shape the gains from cooperation and their distribution, and the unequal and environmental costs of transformation.

In-class responseUOE Ch. 3

Thu Sep 17

Session 6 · Baltimore Museum of Industry Field Visit

Confirmed field visit. Meet outside Mason Hall as close to 10:15 AM as possible so that we can leave promptly. We will use the museum's artifacts to connect Chapter 3 to technology, infrastructure, firms, labor, and public institutions in Baltimore. Students should alert professors teaching classes after ours that the FYS trip may make them late.

Confirmed BMI visit

Tue Sep 22

Session 7 · Science as a Public Good

• Required Richard R. Nelson, "The Simple Economics of Basic Scientific Research" — why markets underinvest in basic research and what institutions can fill the gap. [via JHU Library]
• Required Vannevar Bush, Science, The Endless Frontier, transmittal letter + Chapter 3 — why should government fund basic research? [free at nsf.gov]

In-class response

Thu Sep 24

Session 8 · 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?" — read the introduction and conclusion only. [via JHU Library]

In-class responseUOE Ch. 4

From September 29 onward: the dates and session numbers below reflect the revised sequence. Canvas announcements will provide any further changes.

Tue Sep 29

Session 9 · Cities 1: Renaissance Florence and the Geography of Ideas

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

• Required Ada Palmer’s interview on the Dwarkesh Podcast (March 6, 2026) — Required: 28:49–58:12, covering Florence’s republic and the Medici. I strongly recommend listening to about an hour of the interview. After listening, jot down summary notes in your own words to prepare for our opening in-class summary-writing prompt. The episode page includes audio, video, a transcript, and chapter timestamps. This replaces the previously listed book excerpts.
• Required Josh Zumbrun, “The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago,” The Wall Street Journal (May 19, 2016) — an accessible account of Barone and Mocetti’s study linking Florentine surnames in the 1427 tax census to income and occupations in 2011. Read for the persistence of family advantage through centuries of political and economic change. [PDF on Canvas; replaces the Vox article]
• 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 Wall Street Journal piece. [via JHU Library]

In-class responseWalters Art Museum visit

Thu Oct 1

Session 10 · 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] [PDF on Canvas]
• 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, Introduction, “Unreasonable People” (17-page Canvas excerpt, 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 on Canvas]
• 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.

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 explains the agglomeration economics underneath it.

In-class responseBaltimore Video due

Tue Oct 6

Session 11 · 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

Module 3

Who Benefits?

Institutions shape both the gains from cooperation and their distribution. We move from liberty and state capacity to inequality, race, and the barriers that can keep progress from reaching people and places. Income, wealth, representation, health: the picture is complicated, and the data matters.

Thu Oct 8

No class — instructor away at the Progress Conference

There is no class meeting today. The schedule for the next unit will be updated shortly; please do not treat the previously listed readings for this date as due today.

Tue Oct 13

Session 12 · UOE: Game Trees and Changing the Rules of the Game

• Required Understanding Our Economy 101, Chapters 1 and 2 in the course reading pack — focus on game trees, cooperation and conflict, outside options, bargaining power, and how changing the rules changes an interaction.

Please prepare these chapters for Tuesday. We will use them for in-class game-tree exercises rather than treating them as background reading.

In-class exercisesUOE Chs. 1–2

Thu Oct 15

Session 13 · 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 — why market prices coordinate dispersed knowledge that no central planner can collect. [PDF on Canvas]
• Optional companion Russ Roberts, Don Boudreaux, and Michael Munger, "Emergent Order," EconTalk (2017) — a conversational introduction to the coordination problem behind Hayek's argument.

Hayek makes the knowledge argument for decentralized coordination. We will connect it to Tuesday's work on game trees, outside options, and how rules shape who can act on opportunities.

In-class response

Tue Oct 20

Session 14 · 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

Thu Oct 22

No class — KSAS Fall Break

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

Tue Oct 27

Session 15 · Inequality, Mobility, and the Geography of Opportunity

• Required Simon D. Halliday, Understanding Our Economy, Chapter 5, sections 5.1–5.2 — the incomes of the top 1%, income inequality across countries, market and disposable income, and the Gini coefficient. [compact Chapter 5 reading PDF on Canvas, 46 pages; use the same intact chapter for both inequality sessions]
• 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]

Sections 5.1–5.2 introduce inequality and its measurement. Chetty & Hendren show that neighborhoods causally shape opportunity. Keep the same Chapter 5 reading for October 29, when we turn to section 5.3 on accidents of birth. The printed chapter stays intact; extensions and end-matter are omitted.

In-class responseUOE Ch. 5

Thu Oct 29

Session 16 · Race and Progress in America

• Required Simon D. Halliday, Understanding Our Economy, section 5.3: “Accidents of birth: Another lens for studying inequality” — categorical and intergenerational inequality, discrimination, and the institutions that sustain unequal opportunities. Use the same Chapter 5 reading PDF as October 27; the chapter is printed once, intact.
• Required Ellora Derenoncourt, interviewed by Chris Fleisher, “Moving on up?”, American Economic Association Research Highlights (March 2, 2022) — read the full edited interview. Why did moving expand opportunity for Black families, and how did segregation, white flight, and local policy responses limit mobility for later generations? [free online] [PDF on Canvas]
• Recommended Eric Bottorff, Trevon Logan & Suresh Naidu, "Persistent Racial Inequality in the United States," CORE Insights (2022) — optional background on segregation, discrimination, and political inequality. Omitted from the printed pack; selected material may be supplied in the in-class worksheet.

Section 5.3 supplies the framework of accidents of birth; Derenoncourt connects it to migration and opportunity. How did migration expand opportunity, and how did the responses of residents and governments shape whether those gains lasted? The CORE Insight is recommended; any material needed from it for the worksheet will be supplied in class.

In-class response

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 Nov 3

Session 17 · 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 Nov 5

Session 18 · 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 10

Session 19 · 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

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 20 · 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 21 · 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 22 · AI and Catastrophic Risk

• 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 23 · 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 24 · Data Project Presentations (Part 1)

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

Data project presentations

Tue Dec 8

Session 25 · Data Project Presentations (Part 2)

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

Data project presentations

Thu Dec 10

Session 26 · 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.