In a recent Substack essay, “The progress movement needs a better theory of progress,” Brink Lindsey argues that the progress movement has settled for too thin a vision. It focuses on wealth creation and technological advance, he says, when it should adopt a “fuller conception of progress”—one that promotes “spiritual welfare” and thicker accounts of the good life.
It’s an eloquent piece. Lindsey is a serious thinker, and I’ve long admired him and his work. But here his prescription would pull the movement in the wrong direction. The intellectual tradition he draws on also carries a troubling recent track record in policy.
(Lindsey refers throughout the essay to his recent book, “The Permanent Problem” (2026), which I haven’t yet read. What follows comes with an obvious caveat: the book may address some of these arguments, and I may be judging his views based on a necessarily truncated version of them.)
Liberalism Isn’t Morally Empty; It’s Morally Humble
Lindsey describes the progress movement as a “shriveled liberal faith”—“bloodless and technocratic” and allergic to “making substantive moral judgments about how people choose to live their lives.” He calls for “value rationality”: a framework that not only expands human capabilities but also takes a stand on what people ought to do with them. We should “lift up and improve the ends that we try to achieve,” he writes, and increase “the number of individuals living excellent, admirable, rewarding lives.”
That critique brushes aside too much of liberalism’s intellectual history. The classical liberal tradition that animates much of the progress movement is not morally vacant. It rests on one of the most demanding moral commitments in political thought: human flourishing requires decentralized, plural conceptions of the good life, and no authority—no matter how wise or well-intentioned—knows enough to dictate the right ends for others.
Friedrich Hayek made this point with characteristic depth in “The Constitution of Liberty” (1960). Lindsey invokes Wilhelm von Humboldt’s line—“the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity”—as evidence that liberalism once embraced a more substantive moral vision. John Stuart Mill placed that line at the head of “On Liberty.” And Hayek quotes it, too, giving it the final word in “The Constitution of Liberty” before his famous postscript, “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”
But both Mill and Hayek deploy the line to reach a very different conclusion. The emphasis falls on “human development in its richest diversity.” For Hayek, that insight cuts against the kind of moral project Lindsey advances. We need liberty because we cannot know in advance which ways of living—which experiments, values, and pursuits—will foster human flourishing. Progress, on this account, is evolutionary. Individuals try different paths. Most fail. Some succeed in ways no planner could have predicted.
James Buchanan, the Nobel laureate in economics (public choice), put the point starkly:
To lay down any “social” purpose, even as a target, is to contradict the principle of liberalism… that leaves each participant free to pursue whatever it is that remains feasible within the limits of the legal-institutional parameters.
This isn’t a narrow, technical claim about markets. It’s the core commitment of the liberal tradition. A progress movement that adopts “value rationality”—that takes positions on which ends people should pursue—would not deepen liberalism’s moral content. It would undercut liberalism’s defining insight.
None of this makes moral values unimportant. Like Lindsey, Hayek recognized that shared norms help sustain a functioning society. As he wrote in “The Constitution of Liberty”:
We understand one another and get along with one another, are able to act successfully on our plans, because, most of the time, members of our civilization conform to unconscious patterns of conduct, show a regularity in their actions that is not the result of commands or coercion, often not even of any conscious adherence to known rules, but of firmly established habits and traditions. The general observance of these conventions is a necessary condition of the orderliness of the world in which we live, of our being able to find our way in it, though we do not know their significance and may not even be consciously aware of their existence (p. 123).
But Hayek also stressed that trying to impose a preferred set of such rules is a mistake, in part because
they require knowledge which exceeds the capacity of the individual human mind and [because], in the attempt to comply with them, most men would become less useful members of society than they are while they pursue their own aims within the limits set by the rules of law and morals (p. 127).
The most relevant passage concerns the flexibility of voluntary norms:
There is an advantage in obedience to such rules not being coerced, not only because coercion as such is bad, but because it is, in fact, often desirable that rules should be observed only in most instances and that the individual should be able to transgress them when it seems to him worthwhile to incur the odium which this will cause. It is also important that the strength of the social pressure and of the force of habit which insures their observance is variable. It is this flexibility of voluntary rules which in the field of morals makes gradual evolution and spontaneous growth possible, which allows further experience to lead to modifications and improvements. Such an evolution is possible only with rules which are neither coercive nor deliberately imposed—rules which, though observing them is regarded as merit and though they will be observed by the majority, can be broken by individuals who feel that they have strong enough reasons to brave the censure of their fellows. Unlike any deliberately imposed coercive rules, which can be changed only discontinuously and for all at the same time, rules of this kind allow for gradual and experimental change. The existence of individuals and groups simultaneously observing partially different rules provides the opportunity for the selection of the more effective ones (pp. 123–24).
A progress movement that precommits to any single vision of the good life would shrink the diversity Humboldt celebrated and Hayek treated as the engine of progress. The movement’s allegedly “thin” framework—remove barriers to innovation, grow the pie, let people choose—is not an absence of moral commitment. It is the moral commitment: the conviction that human flourishing emerges from freedom and experimentation, not from imposing any particular vision of the admirable life.
When ‘Human Flourishing’ Becomes Policy Power
This might sound like an abstract philosophical dispute. It isn’t. We don’t have to guess what happens when policymakers swap measurable welfare standards for vague appeals to “human flourishing.” We can watch it unfold—most clearly in antitrust, the policy domain most closely tied to economic growth and consumer welfare.
Shortly after taking up his post as a newly confirmed Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in May of 2025, Mark Meador published a broadside expounding his moral vision of antitrust, entitled “Antitrust Policy for the Conservative.” The essay defines conservatism as “the political, religious, and cultural project in the West of pursuing the just ordering of society that best facilitates human flourishing.” It “prioritized tradition and custom over newness for newness’s sake, and beauty and virtue over cold, calculated efficiency.” Antitrust should “reaffirm[] these first principles,” Meador writes, “to provide clarity and certainty around what antitrust law is and how the law should be enforced.”
In Meador’s framework, antitrust does more than protect competition. It advances a moralized vision of the economy. The promotion of free markets “is a legal and moral choice—not just an economic choice.” Innovation is no longer presumptively beneficial (“not all that is innovative is good”). Large firms are presumptively suspect (“big is bad”). And economics itself takes a back seat, because “[a]n obsessive preoccupation with efficiency is… incompatible with a humane way of living.”
The resulting approach to antitrust would entail a meaningful shift. As Gus Hurwitz and I have noted before:
This view contradicts the past century’s worth of experience and learning. It would require jettisoning the crown jewel of modern antitrust law—the consumer welfare standard—and returning antitrust to an earlier era in which inefficient firms were protected from the burdens of competition at the expense of consumers. And doing so would put industrial regulation in the hands of would-be central planners, shielded from any politically accountable oversight.
The parallels to Lindsey’s call for “value rationality” are hard to miss. Both seek to move beyond “purely materialist” measures. Both draw on classical and theological traditions. Both treat welfare maximization as morally thin. And both run headlong into the same critical question: whose vision of human flourishing governs?
As Corbin Barthold has observed, Meador’s antitrust is not neutral inquiry. It is “national conservatism, if not flat-out Christian nationalism” dressed up in antitrust clothing. Meador describes human beings as “embodied souls seeking communion with their fellow man and their Creator.” He declares short-form video “bad for the soul.” He speaks, Barthold writes, “with complete confidence in his own superior vision for the tech industry”: “The man is, apparently, a prophet.”
More troubling still, Barthold argues that Meador’s concerns are not really about products, but about people:
People shouldn’t like short-form video. The government, Meador seemed to suggest, must protect them from themselves. You might say that Meador wants to replace the consumer-welfare standard, under which the FTC protects markets that work to give people what they want, with a moral-welfare standard, under which the FTC pushes markets to give people what they are supposed to want—as determined by Mark Meador.
This mindset has already shaped policy.
In February 2025—just before Meador joined the agency, but under Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who shares his worldview—the FTC issued a Request for Public Comment Regarding Technology Platform Censorship. The agency framed it as an effort to “understand how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.”
The political subtext was obvious. Denial and degradation were assumed. The “speech or affiliations” in question were “conservative” ones. The question was not whether this assumed conduct violated the law, but “how.” As Dan Gilman and Ben Sperry observed:
It took little imagination to wonder whether an inquiry into “censorship” and how “technology platform” conduct “may have violated the law” may have skewed submissions to the agency and, perhaps, biased the inquiry itself. Encouraging input from “[t]ech platform users who have been banned, shadow banned, demonetized, or otherwise censored” (but no others) did not seem a neutral solicitation of public comment on the potential costs and benefits of platform conduct. Indeed, some of the Commission’s commentary seemed ominous. The FTC’s press release stated that “[c]ensorship by technology platforms is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal.”
The true intention may have been discernible (if obscured), but the legal authority was absent, as it must be: The First Amendment protects private speech from government interference. Yet here is an agency signaling it may coerce private platforms to carry speech the government favors—despite lacking statutory authority, and likely constitutional authority, to police the political content of private speech.
Later in 2025, after Meador had joined the FTC, the agency announced its Omnicom–IPG merger settlement. It allowed two large advertising firms to merge—but only if the combined company agreed not to base advertising decisions on a publisher’s political or ideological views. Again, the subtext was clear. As Barthold writes:
[t]he settlement is a transparent assault on advertising firms’ First Amendment right to boycott publishers on grounds of social or ideological principle. It is also a nakedly political effort to redirect advertising dollars toward right-wing outlets.
The agency has also waded into gender medicine. It held an all-day conference titled “The Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors” and launched a public inquiry. As Barthold notes, “[t]he FTC is not a medical regulator; it has no expertise in this area. But transgender issues are at the center of the culture war, so the agency could not resist weighing in, thumb firmly on the scale for the political right.”
This is the risk of any effort to “thicken” the progress movement’s moral commitments. Lindsey’s vision of the good life is thoughtful and humane. Meador’s is, at best, contestable. But the institutional framework Lindsey proposes offers no way to distinguish between them.
Once policy turns on moral judgments about flourishing rather than economic criteria, those judgments track political power, not philosophical reflection. As Hayek warned in “The Road to Serfdom” (1944):
Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity (p. 209).
And despite Meador’s claims to be implementing a “conservative” antitrust, there’s arguably nothing at all conservative about it. As James Cooper and Thom Lambert have written:
In short, the FTC’s crusade against “big tech censorship of conservatives” risks converting antitrust and consumer protection law into tools for ideological regulation. That transformation would be bad policy, bad law, and a troubling departure from the principles of limited government and private ordering that conservatives themselves have long championed.
It is striking that these arguments have gained traction in the Age of Trump. Classical liberals (and even some conservatives) have long warned that empowering government to pursue moral ends also empowers it to decide which ends to pursue. You may not like the answer when your side loses.
Meador’s approach—however dressed up—amounts to politicized enforcement. In principle, it differs little from the more overtly partisan uses of state power seen elsewhere in the Trump era. It is hard to believe that advocates of a “less narrowly economic” policy framework—including Lindsey—had this in mind.
With respect to antitrust, Lazar Radic and I develop this critique at greater length in “Competition and Competition Law in the Classical Liberal Tradition” (forthcoming in the “Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism” (2026)). The central mistake behind projects like Meador’s, neo-Brandeisian antitrust, and the European Digital Markets Act is a conflation of standards and goals. Standards assess whether market processes work. Goals prescribe outcomes. Classical liberal systems rely on the former and resist the latter. As we put it there:
A classically liberal antitrust law does not contort market processes to achieve the government’s preferred policy outcomes. It sets out a general framework and employs standards to gauge market processes but does not impose “goals.”… Attaching any end goal to this inquiry vitiates its outcome and misconstrues the law’s purpose.
Once you import a “thick” moral vision—“value rationality”—antitrust becomes unavoidably discretionary:
[I]ll-defined, value-pluralistic antitrust law inevitably bestows enormous discretion on enforcers who, in weighing incommensurate goals and values, are ultimately required to act as regimenters and social planners…. [H]ow does one assess the welfare effects of conduct adjusting for all the possible facets of human well-being across different groups, all of which are presumably deserving of (varying degrees of) special protection?
A progress movement that takes positions on what counts as an admirable life—what ends matter, how to balance work and leisure—opens the door to an almost limitless range of moralized interventions. Each new commitment becomes a lever for rent-seeking and rent extraction. Interests aligned with the favored vision will push for subsidies and protections. Those that are not will face pressure and penalties.
A thinner, growth-focused agenda resists capture precisely because it offers less to grab onto. A thicker, value-laden one is an open invitation.
If Growth Is the Culprit, the Evidence Didn’t Get the Memo
At this point a sympathetic reader might object: fine—but what about Lindsey’s strongest claim? Growth, he argues, has decoupled from well-being for large segments of the population. Social atomization is rising. The progress movement shrugs.
Fair enough. Lindsey is pointing to something real.
Deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol abuse among working-age Americans—what Anne Case and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton called “deaths of despair”—more than tripled between 1992 and 2017. Loneliness isn’t imagined. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory found that roughly half of American adults reported feeling lonely even before the pandemic. Marriage rates have fallen. Community institutions have weakened. Life expectancy gaps by education have widened.
These are serious problems. Ignoring them would be willful blindness.
But the implied causal story—that a myopic focus on economic growth and the market order caused these pathologies, and that fixing them requires reorientating the progress movement’s goals—doesn’t hold up.
Start with deaths of despair. Christopher Ruhm’s paper, “Deaths of Despair or Drug Problems?,” finds that changes in economic conditions explain less than one-tenth of the rise in drug mortality between 1999 and 2015. The main driver was not economic “despair,” but changes in the drug supply—overprescribed opioids, followed by a surge of cheap heroin and fentanyl.
The pattern fits. The epidemic hit hard in relatively strong economies like Massachusetts. It didn’t recede as economic conditions improved. And it didn’t appear in other developed countries facing similar patterns of economic stagnation.
Case and Deaton themselves reject the simple story. “Like Ruhm, we directly contradict the idea that deaths are related to economic conditions from 1999 to 2015,” they write. Mortality rose steadily through the Great Recession, largely unaffected by the downturn. European countries with comparable economic distress saw no similar spike.
Their broader argument—that long-term institutional decline damaged working-class communities—is more plausible. But it’s also harder to test and far less clearly connected to any growth-versus-values reframing of policy.
The loneliness epidemic poses a similar problem. Its suspected causes are all over the map: technology, urbanization, the erosion of civic life documented by Robert Putnam, changing family structures, and the COVID-19 pandemic, among others. But the actual directional arrow of causation remains murky. Does growth produce atomization? Or do both reflect deeper, independent shifts?
The global data complicate the story. Loneliness rates are higher in low-income countries—about 24% versus roughly 11% in high-income countries, according to the World Health Organization’s 2025 Commission on Social Connection. If material progress drove disconnection, you’d expect the opposite.
Even the standard narrative of economic stagnation looks shakier when you examine living standards, rather than income. Bruce Meyer and James Sullivan find that while income inequality rose about 25% since the early 1960s, what they term “consumption inequality” rose only about 7%. Consumption—because it reflects taxes, transfers, borrowing, and assets that living-standard measures miss—better captures what people actually experience.
Meanwhile, Bruce Sacerdote finds that real consumption for families at the 25th percentile rose 164% between 1960 and 2015. That’s not a story of broad material stagnation.
None of this denies that social fragmentation, status anxiety, and weakening institutions are real problems. But the diagnosis matters enormously for the prescription.
If the drivers of these pathologies are primarily “supply-side” defects including drug-policy failures, housing constraints, bad urban design, and the disruption that comes with rapid social change—as the evidence suggests—then the response looks familiar: targeted, institutional reform. Remove barriers. Expand opportunity. Let people build the lives they want.
Indeed, as Paddy Maher argued recently in The Argument, financial distress is one of the most significant predictors of loneliness. If loneliness is your target, the best thing you can do may be to promote abundance, not to try to “fix” the morality of the market:
To be lonely is to be in need, and the loneliest group in society is young people who are about to miss rent. The new political focus on affordability is perfectly timed for anyone who wants to make a dent in loneliness and suicides; helping more people maintain economic security is one of the best levers we have.
From Policy to Lifestyle Policing
To see how quickly “value rationality” turns political, consider Lindsey’s own wish list. He writes:
We need to recover the physical fitness that once came naturally from an active life; we need to reclaim our attention spans and cognitive acuity from screen-addled brain rot; we need to revitalize neighborhoods and communities withered by atomization; and we need to re-center marriage and parenthood as cornerstones of normal adulthood.
Each of these claims carries normative baggage. Each depends on empirical assumptions that are far less settled than the essay’s confident tone suggests.
Take “screen-addled brain rot.” The research on screen time is, by most accounts, a mess—“conceptual and methodological mayhem,” as one comprehensive review puts it. That meta-survey finds little support for the standard narrative. There is no “undeniable evidence” that social media is broadly toxic. At most, “time spent on social media does not have a strong effect on the well-being of its users.”
The idea of widespread “social media addiction” is similarly shaky. Experts disagree on whether it exists, how to define it, and how to measure it. Once you account for the main drivers of well-being, social media use appears to be a negligible factor.
Much of the literature is correlational, which makes causal claims precarious. Do screens harm children? Or do children who are already struggling gravitate toward screens? Emily Oster puts it bluntly: “All of the studies we see of screen time are deeply flawed.” Different screen habits track different family environments, and those underlying differences, not the screens themselves, likely explain the observed effects.
None of this proves screens are harmless. But “screen-addled brain rot” reads more like a moral panic than settled science—the kind of contested claim a progress movement should hesitate to enshrine.
The call to “re-center marriage and parenthood as cornerstones of normal adulthood” raises similar issues. Stable two-parent families may benefit children, though even that literature is contested (see, among others, here and here). But declining marriage also reflects expanded choice, particularly for women.
Sociologist Andrew Cherlin describes marriage as having undergone “deinstitutionalization.” It is no longer a mandatory social arrangement, but one option among many. Whether or not that framing is complete, attitudes have clearly shifted. Many feminists and sociologists interpret declining marriage rates as a sign of greater autonomy, not social decay. Others—such as the Institute for Family Studies—see costs.
The point is not that marriage doesn’t matter. It’s that “re-centering” it as a policy goal reflects one contested moral vision among many. In practice, it would alienate large constituencies. Even among conservatives who share Lindsey’s instincts, there is little agreement about what government should actually do to raise marriage rates.
A growth-focused agenda sidesteps these fights. It expands people’s options and lets them decide what kind of lives to build.
When Moralism Gets in the Way of Living
Perhaps the strongest objection to this broader project comes not from libertarians, but from thinkers who share much of Lindsey’s worldview.
The essay takes aim at amoral “techno-capitalists” for believing that “[a] brighter future thus consists of better and more absorbing paid employment, not increased leisure to be filled with non-commercial pursuits.” But philosophers like Michael Sandel—the furthest thing from a free-market fundamentalist—offer a different moral vision. He emphasizes “the dignity of work,” arguing that “[w]ork is not only a way of making a living; it is also a way of contributing to the common good and earning social recognition and esteem for doing so.”
So which moral vision should prevail?
That question is not hypothetical. The debate over artificial intelligence is testing it in real time, and the evidence thus far cuts against the less-work ideal. A Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI survey of 1,500 workers found that 94% prefer AI that augments human labor rather than replaces it. Workers want tools that free them up for higher-value tasks—not tools that eliminate work altogether. A Harvard Business School study finds similar resistance to full automation, even when AI can outperform humans at lower cost.
Many people value work itself, not just the income it produces.
Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate and no market fundamentalist, makes the point plainly in his exchange with Sandel: “I completely agree that the market is not a perfect anchor. But I worry that the alternative would simply be what intellectual elites value.”
He offers an example that gets at the heart of the problem:
Let me give you an example that has long bothered me. Opera is often treated as high art and is heavily subsidized, even though it is largely consumed by the well-educated and the wealthy. Meanwhile, heavy metal, which came out of working-class pubs, is not. That is a judgment made by intellectual elites, and it translates into policy.
So, I’m always afraid that if we give intellectual elites too much power to decide, we’re going to end up with a lot of situations like this. You might like opera, but many people like heavy metal.
Timothée Chalamet may have put it more bluntly, but the point stands.
Acemoglu is echoing a much older warning emanating from the liberal tradition. Adam Smith captured it in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759) with his famous critique of “the man of system”:
The man of system… seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he does not consider that…, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it (Part VI, Section II, Chapter II).
Thomas Sowell later described “the anointed”—elites whose vision of progress resists empirical challenge. Frédéric Bastiat warned of “manipulators of society” who would reshape human life by force.
The critique is consistent across centuries. When elites define “human flourishing” and try to impose it through policy, people bristle. They have their own preferences, values, and plans. Lindsey’s vision—more stable families, stronger communities, healthier lives—is appealing. But it is still just one man’s vision. Building a political movement around it risks turning that movement into yet another group of “men of system,” rearranging the chess board.
This is the “who decides?” problem in its clearest form. And it connects directly to the Meador example. Once you build institutions that impose substantive moral visions, those institutions will be run by elites—and they will reflect elite preferences. Maybe that yields Lindsey’s humane vision. Maybe it yields something else: religious revivalism, nationalist priorities, social-justice maximalism, or whatever else happens to dominate politically. Meador’s “human flourishing” antitrust offers a preview.
You can see the dynamic even in smaller, more personal contexts.
Consider Lindsey’s call to recover “the physical fitness that once came naturally from an active life.” We are in the middle of a revolution in treating obesity and diabetes. GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic and Mounjaro may be the most significant advance in metabolic medicine in decades.
And yet, a moralistic stigma persists. Users are often seen as taking an “easy way out.” Many people—including physicians—still frame weight loss as a test of personal discipline and view pharmaceutical help as “cheating.” As former Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar has noted, there is little stigma around taking statins for cholesterol, but GLP-1s carry a moral taint.
I’ve seen this firsthand. My own doctor initially resisted prescribing a GLP-1 medication for my diabetes—not because of medical concerns, but because he believed there was something more virtuous about managing it through diet and exercise alone.
That is “value rationality” in practice. And it’s not benign.
I told him that I had spent decades failing at the “virtuous” path. I wasn’t going to suddenly succeed. The real choice wasn’t between doing it the “right” way or the “easy” way. It was between taking the medication or accepting a shorter life. That ultimately persuaded him.
There’s no virtue in dying of a preventable metabolic disease because you lacked the time, willpower, genetic luck, or simply the desire to meet an idealized standard. The virtue is in living. If a drug makes that possible, that is progress—full stop.
The nostalgia for fitness “that once came naturally” is not just historically naïve—the lives that produced it were often harsh and short. When translated into policy or medical practice, that kind of sentimentality can delay the adoption of life-saving innovation.
Apollo Shows the Problem with ‘Thick’ Progress
Lindsey points to the Apollo program—and the public’s eventual indifference to it—as evidence that technophiles are “mutants” who need a broader vision to win support. The descriptive point is fair. Most people aren’t technophiles. The progress movement has to show how its agenda improves ordinary lives.
But a “thick” agenda doesn’t solve that problem. It makes it worse.
Apollo is the perfect case study. It was driven by exactly the kind of value rationality Lindsey favors: a substantive vision of what was admirable and inspiring, tied up with national prestige and civilizational ambition. The result was extraordinary—and unsustainable. The public eventually saw it for what it was: a significant government expense, disconnected from everyday concerns.
As Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl put it, Apollo “pursued glory without regard to cost or practicality…. Glory is a dangerous goal, and when it is pursued without regard to pragmatic utility, much damage is done.”
A thinner progress agenda does a better job of motivating support because it delivers tangible gains. It focuses on investments in science and technology that generate broadly useful knowledge and lower costs across the board. Housing reform that lets people build. Energy policy that makes power cheaper. Regulatory reform that gets new medicines to patients faster.
These improvements don’t require anyone to buy into a particular vision of the good life. They expand options and let people decide for themselves.
Jason Crawford makes this point directly. The progress movement, he argues, should offer “a moral defense of material progress”—not chase prestige projects, but understand how progress happens and how to accelerate it:
What technology and wealth can do is empower us to pursue the goals we have chosen. When we view material progress this way, it is something much grander than a generator of comfort and leisure: it is the great liberator allowing us to pursue rich, full lives.
Crawford’s focus is practical. Remove institutional barriers. Enable discovery and diffusion. Not because of abstract ideology, but because that’s what actually improves lives. As he notes,
more lives have been saved and suffering relieved by efforts to pursue general growth and progress than direct charitable efforts…. A root-cause analysis on most human suffering, if it went deep enough, would blame government and cultures that don’t foster science, invention, industry, and business.
The unglamorous work of clearing those obstacles is what delivers results. Not moonshots chosen for their symbolic appeal. Not moralized agendas reflecting the tastes of whoever holds power.
Dystopia Is What Happens When Someone Decides for You
Lindsey invokes “Wall-E” and “Brave New World” to argue that a materialist theory of progress “can’t distinguish between eutopia and dystopia”—and is therefore “worse than useless”:
Both of these dystopias feature impressive technological advances—but advances twisted into the service of human degradation. Humanity’s collective capacities may have expanded, but individuals’ opportunities to develop and exercise their own personal capacities have been crushed.
But this misses the mark. No one in the progress movement is arguing for a world of passive consumption and automated complacency. The case for material progress is about expanding choice sets—not dictating how people use them.
Jason Crawford, for example, advocates “techno-humanism,” the view that “science, technology, and industry are good—because they promote human life, well-being, and agency.” That is a moral claim. But it differs sharply from Lindsey’s “value rationality.” Crawford does not prescribe a particular vision of the good life. He defends a framework in which people can pursue their own:
A better guide to well-being and human progress is whether people can achieve their goals and fulfill their values. The good life is one of constantly discovering, pursuing, achieving, and maintaining values.
Now look more closely at Lindsey’s dystopias. What do they actually have in common? Not too much technology, but too much control. In both worlds, a central authority has decided what the good life should be—total leisure in “Wall-E”; pharmacological contentment in “Brave New World”—and imposed it across society.
In other words, they depict exactly the kind of “thick,” substantive vision of flourishing Lindsey wants to import into policy.
The lesson is not that we need more “value rationality.” It’s that we should be wary of anyone who claims to know, in advance, what ends other people ought to pursue.
The Moral Case for Keeping Progress ‘Thin’
Lindsey worries that a vision of progress grounded in material advance alone is too thin. That concern is understandable. But his alternative—a progress movement that takes substantive positions on how people should live—is worse. It invites political capture, fractures coalitions, and accelerates the kind of moralized policymaking already distorting key domains.
The social problems he highlights—atomization, weakening institutions, the erosion of shared meaning—are real. He is right to push the progress movement (and everyone else) to take them seriously. But the most effective response is not to prescribe better lives. It is to remove the barriers that prevent people from building the lives they want: build more housing, reform drug policy, fix permitting, expand access to medical innovation. These reforms improve lives without requiring anyone to sign on to someone else’s vision of the admirable.
Adam Smith, as reported by Dugald Stewart, captured the core insight in 1755:
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.
It would be a mistake to read Smith as a mere instrumentalist about wealth. As Jacob Viner observed, Smith’s defense of laissez faire also rested on moral grounds: it preserved the “natural system of liberty” to which individuals have a right. He likely would have resisted extensive state direction even if it increased aggregate wealth.
Hayek was explicit in “The Road to Serfdom” that liberalism rests on individualism and personal liberty:
Economic liberalism… regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority (p. 110).
Milton Friedman, when pressed in the final episode of Free to Choose (1980) on whether he would trade freedom for prosperity, chose the “human and ethical and moral values” of the former.
This is the answer to the charge that a growth-focused agenda is “bloodless and technocratic.” The classical liberal case has always been consequentialist and moral—a double helix running from Smith through Mill, Hayek, Friedman, and others.
The progress movement inherits this tradition. Its agenda is not thin because it lacks moral content. It is thin because its moral content—growth, diversity, self-direction—requires restraint. A plurality of ends is not a problem to solve; it is the engine of progress.
Grow the pie. Let people decide for themselves what to do with their slice.
