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A missing discipline, proposed

ProgressStudies

A call for a discipline studying how and why civilizations accelerate — techno-optimism turned into a research and funding program.

Era
2019 – present
Place
Online / Bay Area
Biome
Horizon & Prophecy
Morphology
Network

The gap the field proposes to study

Fig. 1 · schematic, not data

expected advance observed advance the perceived slowdown the gap the field wants to close early industrial era now rate of progress
A diagram of an intuition, not a measurement. The movement's founding premise is that scientific and material advance has fallen short of its own trajectory — and that the divergence is a researchable object rather than a mood. Everything downstream (the metascience reform, the funding experiments, the abundance agenda) follows from taking that gap literally.
01The proposal

Naming a discipline that did not exist

Progress Studies is a nascent intellectual movement, named in a 2019 essay by economist Tyler Cowen and entrepreneur Patrick Collison, calling for a new discipline devoted to understanding how and why civilizations achieve durable progress — and how to get more of it.

Reacting against a perceived slowdown in scientific and material advance, it studies the history of science, invention, and institutions, and champions reforms to funding, regulation, and metascience. Spreading through blogs, essays, fellowships, and new funders, it overlaps with the rationalist and tech-optimist worlds and the “abundance” agenda in policy. A young, still-forming scene, it represents the contemporary Promethean impulse organized into a research and advocacy program.

  • Patrick Collison
  • Tyler Cowen
  • Jason Crawford
  • Archetype · Prometheus
02Motifs

What it keeps returning to

  1. M.01Studying progress as a discipline
  2. M.02Stagnation and the “great stagnation”
  3. M.03Metascience and better funding
  4. M.04Techno-optimism as agenda
  5. M.05Abundance and building
03Memetic forces

Why it spread

01 · Identity

Naming a “missing discipline” and a hidden stagnation gave restless technologists a cause and an identity.

02 · Mood

Its optimism — that we can and should accelerate — countered a pessimistic cultural mood.

03 · Clout

Proximity to serious money and talent (Collison, Cowen) lent it clout.

04Unifying principle
The premise, stated plainly

Progress is understudied and has slowed; we should study its causes and deliberately accelerate it.

In full: progress — scientific, technological, economic — is understudied and has slowed; we should study its causes and deliberately accelerate it through better institutions, science, and building.

05Engines

What binds it, what pulls it apart

→← Convergent

  • A founding manifesto and the blog/essay ecosystem
  • Metascience funding and fellowships
  • A network of aligned founders and economists

←→ Divergent

  • Vagueness about what “progress” means, and for whom
  • Overlap and tension with EA, rationalism, and the “abundance” agenda
  • Critics charging naive techno-optimism
06Mediums

The forms it works in

A scene with no studio, no lab bench, and no gallery — its instruments are publication and money.

  • the essay
  • the blog
  • the fellowship
  • the metascience grant
07Internal dynamics

How it holds together

A loose, online, elite intellectual network organized by essays, funding, and a few prominent figures; more a sensibility and agenda than an institution.

Morphology: network, not institution

Fig. 2 · schematic

essay funder fellowship
No building, no department, no membership. The scene's shape is a handful of high-degree hubs — an essay, a cheque, a fellowship — each pulling in a loose periphery, with the hubs bound to one another by personal acquaintance. That topology is why it spreads fast and defines itself slowly.
08Impact

What it moved

Shifted elite discourse toward building, metascience reform, and an “abundance agenda”; spawned new science-funding experiments and policy conversations.

Scenius signature

A network that declared the study of progress a missing discipline and turned techno-optimism into a research-and-funding agenda.

09Sources

Keyed to the literature

  • Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen, “We Need a New Science of Progress,” The Atlantic (2019)used for · the founding call
  • Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (2011)

Keyed to the standard published literature on this scene (representative, not exhaustive; not independently re-verified against each edition).

Fate

Young and diffusing into metascience, the abundance movement, and tech policy; still defining what it is.