Key takeaways:

• Growth has allowed humanity to conquer privation and disease – but discontent remains, and prosperity hasn’t solved the deeper question of what progress is for.
• Abundance doesn’t necessarily lead to a sense of agency; many people still feel that impersonal systems shape their lives without their consent.
• The 21st century will continue to be defined by growth and prosperity, but the center of gravity will shift to the developing world.
• The defining question of our era may well be whether humans can direct their attention toward what truly matters in an era when there are increasingly competing claims to it.

By almost any measure, the last two centuries delivered astonishing leaps in human prosperity. We live longer, healthier, safer lives than almost any generation that came before us. And yet, the experience of modern life often feels unsettled. People are anxious, politics are brittle, and the promise of progress feels shakier than ever.

Few thinkers have grappled with these contradictions more deeply than Brad DeLong. He’s an economic historian at UC Berkeley and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia, a sweeping account of the “long twentieth century” when technological progress reshaped every aspect of human life.

I invited DeLong onto The Gray Area to talk about the purpose of progress, the tension between getting richer and living well, and whether our politics are capable of stewarding another era of transformation. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you think progress is for? What are the goals we should be pursuing as a society?

One way to answer that is to begin with fear. I had a political philosophy teacher, Judith Shklar, who described liberalism as a response to what we fear about other systems. She wanted to know what kinds of suffering and cruelty liberal institutions are meant to prevent.

I think something similar applies to economic progress. If you look backward, the first thing we should be trying to escape is the old Malthusian world. That was a world in which a huge share of children died before the age of 5, because they were too malnourished to fight off disease. It was a world without real medicine, where childbirth was dangerous and life was dominated by hunger, cold, and constant vulnerability. Poverty did not just mean fewer comforts; it meant short and miserable lives.

Progress begins with escaping that condition. Once you have done that, you face a different question: If we are no longer living under the pressure of absolute scarcity, how much of our time and energy should still be devoted to producing more? And what kind of more do we actually want? At what point do we have enough material security to turn our attention toward living wisely and well rather than accumulating?

There’s a moment at which pursuing more for the sake of more stops making sense. Many of us are already living with enough resources and enough control over our environment that the pursuit of extra possessions is not obviously a path to a better life. The question becomes how to use that abundance to create the conditions in which human beings can flourish.

There’s something hollow about a society that measures progress almost entirely in terms of money and material gain. I know it’s easy for me to say this from a privileged position, but it feels like we’ve confused means and ends. Plenty of people have enough to survive quite comfortably; yet, they don’t seem very happy.

Well, I think it’s useful to distinguish between happiness and what you might call living well with what you have. They overlap, but they’re not identical. And this is where freedom really matters.

A political and economic system should create the basic conditions in which people can become more free and more fulfilled, whatever that means for them. We’re not doing a great job of that. We have more choices and more things to consume, and we have never had more entertainment. But that does not necessarily translate into meaningful freedom.

Many people rightly feel dominated by forces they cannot see or understand. They feel pushed and pulled by bureaucracies, markets, governments, algorithms, all without any real sense of control. Some of that pressure is simply the cost of living with other people. But, some of it is a real constraint. It’s a reminder that material wealth does not automatically produce a sense of agency.

Recovering our attention is one part of the problem. But the deeper issue is the feeling that large impersonal systems are shaping our lives in ways we never consented to. That’s where the unease comes from.

Do you feel like we’re progressing in a meaningful and sustainable way? I realize “meaningful” is a pretty vague term, but I think you know what I’m getting at.

Since about 1870, every generation has seen its productive capacity double or more. That’s a lot. The ability to manipulate nature and coordinate human labor has kept rising at an extraordinary pace. But, this progress is uneven. In most of the economy, things improve gradually. In a smaller part of the economy, everything changes radically within a single generation.

If you’re in that part of the economy, your life can be completely upended. You can’t expect to do what your parents did and live the life they lived. The structures and patterns they relied on melt away. That repeated dislocation is one of the central political and economic challenges of the modern world.

Sometimes we’ve handled it very badly. Sometimes we’ve handled it only somewhat badly. Right now, I would say we are handling it moderately badly. It’s better than the first half of the twentieth century, when societies were torn apart by war and ideological conflict. But, it’s not as good as the decades after World War II, when the North Atlantic found a more equitable balance between growth and security.

Layered on top of this is the existential question: If we have enough material comfort, then what’s our life for? The old religious answers don’t hold the same authority, so we are left searching for purpose in a world that constantly rearranges itself.

Let me ask you this: If you look at the world right now, there are plenty of reasons for optimism. We have cheap, clean energy coming online. We have rapid technological innovation. At the same time, trade is shaky, and democracies are struggling. When you look at all this, do you see stronger headwinds or tailwinds?

For the world as a whole, I see tailwinds. A historian friend of mine once said that, when people in the year 2100 write world history, they may decide that the real turning point was the death of Mao in China and the rise of Deng Xiaoping, followed by India’s turn under Rajiv Gandhi. Before that, most of humanity lived in crushing poverty. Since then, China, India, and much of the developing world have moved onto the escalator of industrial and post-industrial growth.

Hundreds of millions of people have gained access to reliable food, medicine, education, and a wider division of labor. They now have the chance to think about what it means to live well, not just how to survive. The fact that so many people can focus on purpose rather than scarcity is one of the great achievements of human history.

The politics of this transformation are complicated. China is becoming more authoritarian, not less. There are real concerns about the direction of some of these systems. But the material progress is undeniable, and it shifts the entire balance of the global story.

There are people who think AI will save us, that it will boost growth and help us innovate our way out of our problems. Are you convinced?

For me, personally, AI has already made my intellectual life better. I can keep track of far more research than I could a few years ago. Yes, much of what’s being produced now is low quality, but my ability to sift through it has grown. When I sit down to read, having an intelligent tool that can search, and summarize, and clarify is enormously helpful.

So, I think the upside is real. Many people will gain access to tools that make complex reasoning and analysis easier. They’ll be able to classify information, experiment with ideas, and make decisions in ways that were impossible before. That’s all good.

But, there’s a downside. These same systems will be used to target our attention even more aggressively. They’ll be used to keep us hooked on screens, to frighten or outrage us, and to extract value from our eyeballs. That’s already happening, and it will get worse.

We’re also clearly over-investing in parts of the AI space, because a lot of money has flowed in from speculative ventures. The big tech companies have their own reasons for pouring resources into it. Some smaller players are simply chasing hype. We’ll end up with misallocated capital and too many data centers, just as we ended up with too much fiber-optic cable after the dot-com boom.

But buried in all that excess will be real advances that genuinely expand human capabilities. The question is how widely those benefits are shared and whether our institutions can guide them toward the common good.

**So what should we be focusing on? **

We should pay close attention to the people who want to stop technological progress or warp it for their own advantage. Some people resist change, because they want to preserve their monopolies or their control over certain flows of money and power. Others resist because their ways of life are under genuine pressure, and they’re being treated unfairly.

Politics has to respond to both groups. It must help repair the lives of those who are hurt through no fault of their own and also prevent powerful actors from dressing up self-interest as legitimate grievance.

We’ve dealt with versions of this problem since the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes we’ve managed it reasonably well. Other times, we’ve failed — with terrible consequences.

But, there’s another challenge that’s newer. We’re not just dealing with economic disruption. We’re dealing with disruption to the systems we use to decide what’s true and how we should act. Our information environment is now so vast and so open to manipulation that it’s harder than ever to sustain a shared sense of reality.

Madison and Hamilton believed a well-designed constitutional system could channel public passions without descending into chaos or tyranny. That assumption feels less solid today. Figuring out how to rebuild trust in representation and how to create an information environment where citizens can actually understand what’s happening is essential.

Give me a word or two that might come to define the 21st century in the way the word “growth” defined the 20th century.

I’ll give you two.

First, growth, but growth centered in what used to be called the developing world rather than in the old industrial core. The 21st century will still be a century of rising prosperity, but its center of gravity is shifting.

Second, attention. The defining question of our era is whether human beings can learn to direct their attention toward what truly matters rather than toward whatever powerful actors want them to look at. Reliable information used to be scarce. Now, claims to reliability are so abundant that they overwhelm us.

Whether we learn to navigate that environment may be the most important story of the century.