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-six sessions across six modules. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30–11:45 AM. First class: September 1. Last class: 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
TBD — Homewood Campus
Canvas
canvas.jhu.edu

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
Add/drop deadline
Monday, Sep 11 (noon)
Last day to drop
Monday, Oct 12
Thanksgiving week
Nov 24 & Nov 26 — no classes
Last class
Thursday, Dec 10
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?" No assigned reading for today. Baltimore Video groups assigned; sites chosen by Thursday.
  • Recommended Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, Chapter 4: "Progressophobia" (2018) — why do intellectuals and the media systematically resist evidence that the world is getting better? Pinker traces the cultural and psychological roots of progress-denial. Pairs well with Rosling.
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why experts score worse than chimpanzees on basic facts about the world, and why the developing/developed binary is an outdated map of reality.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: Capitalism and Transformation
  • 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?
  • Required Jason Crawford, "Fish in Water," Chapter 1 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto (2024, ~2,500 words) — industrial civilization has become invisible to us precisely because it has solved so many problems. A short provocation on why we take prosperity for granted, and why that matters.
  • 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.
In-class responseUOE 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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. [PDF via 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 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. 7 (2023): 1737–1781 — 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 library]
In-class response
Thu Sep 17
Session 6 · Innovation, Incentives, and Technology
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.
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 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 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
Reading TBD — a short piece on Baltimore's industrial history, deindustrialization, and contemporary reinvention. Students watch their Baltimore videos before class (with a brief written reflection due that morning) and bring a discussion question. Class opens with the Baltimore reading, 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 Reading TBD — an institutional perspective on why institutions, not just prices, shape who benefits from liberty. Options: Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Ch. 1 (1990); Deirdre McCloskey, "The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice," JEP (2019).

We have seen what capitalism produced (S4) and how innovation incentives work (S6). This session asks what the prior conditions were — the institutional and political foundations without which those mechanisms cannot function.

In-class response
Tue Oct 6
Session 11 · Escaping the Poverty Trap
  • Required Yuen Yuen Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, Chapter 2 — how do poor societies bootstrap growth, and what does this mean for the role of the state?
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) — 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.

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 · Baltimore: Industrial History and the Limits of Progress
Field visit — Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI). Reading TBD — background on Baltimore's industrial and labor history.
BMI field visit
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.

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
Session 16 · Progress and the Labor Market: Work, Wages, and What Has Changed

How do workers find jobs, and what determines wages? From the structure of labor markets to the networks that shape opportunity.

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 Oct 27
Session 17 · 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?
  • 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. [PDF via library]

Together: was Watt inevitable?

In-class response
Thu Oct 29
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. [PDF via 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.

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 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.

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 20 · 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 21 · Guest: Contemporary Science Policy
Guest speaker from the Institute for Progress (IFP) — Heidi Williams (Director of Science Policy, IFP; Professor of Economics, Dartmouth) or Santi Ruiz (IFP Senior Editor, Statecraft), subject to availability.

IFP works at the intersection of academic research and policy practice. Come with a specific claim from the Williams reading you want to push back on — or a funding delay story of your own.

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 22 · 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.
In-class response
Tue Nov 17
Session 23 · When Progress Ends — and What We Must Maintain

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 24 · Catastrophic Risk: Pandemic, AI, and Existential Threats
Reading TBD — options: Nick Bostrom excerpt; post-pandemic review article; AI safety short reading. Discussion: what obligations does anticipated risk create?
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 25 · 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 26 · Data Project Presentations (Part 1)
Six presentations, ~10 minutes each + Q&A. No advance reading assigned.
Data project presentations
Tue Dec 8
Session 27 · Data Project Presentations (Part 2)
Six presentations, ~10 minutes each + Q&A. No advance reading assigned.
Data project presentations
Thu Dec 10
Session 28 · 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.

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.