Reflections On The Topics of Progress, Technological Growth, and Economics

“It’s always Day 1”

This oft repetitive humdrum anyone remotely familiar with the world of technology is certainly familiar with, Bezos has popularised to promote customer obsession, resisting proxies, embracing external trends & high-velocity decision making.

My plebeian interpretation of this ‘Silicon Valley’ cliché is:

The mentality to withstand the constant change in a dynamic global business environment & the need to innovate & reinvent oneself in order to survive.

This is a weekly newsletter focussing on the story of “Progress”, Technological Growth & the legendary Startups building our Future & moving the needle, ever so slightly.

I will analyze this from the lens of an amateur economist & my experiences working with & building high-growth startups in the SF Bay Area & India.

Thanks for your interest & enjoy reading!

PS: Would appreciate it if you could subscribe to my Substack if you enjoyed this.

John Gast’s magnum opus “American Progress” (1872)*

*Manifest destiny, the cultural belief that settlers were destined to expand West across America & spread democracy & capitalism, fuelled the drive towards a prosperous future & helped create the quintessential notion of “the American Dream”.

Arguably, Silicon Valley as we know it wouldn’t exist if this belief fell through the cracks.

Hello 👋

Welcome to The “Progress” Report.

While I write this, we are still in the midst of a global pandemic, COVID-19, which has brought global healthcare infrastructure, economic systems & most importantly humanity to its knees.

Meanwhile, innovations like mRNA, pioneered by the likes of BioNTech & Moderna actually developed a vaccination to the novel virus in a mere 2 days! Science & Modern medicine FTW(1).

While Innovations, come in many forms, they share something deep with evolution, that they are ‘enhanced forms of improbability’.

Progress can be defined as, ‘development towards an advanced condition’.

Well, a more pedantic definition is:

“ The study of the causes of civilizational progress: the combination of economic, technological, scientific, and cultural advancements that have transformed human life and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.

Therefore, for a more nuanced perspective on “Progress”, one would have to dive deeper into

• Economic Growth; From Industrial Revolution till date
• History of Technology; Right from the Mesopotamians inventing the Wheel to your shiny new Tesla’s FSD (Full self-driving!) mode & everything in between
• Culture & its role in shaping humanity
• Religion; ties to ‘identity politics’ & how it shaped the world as we know it today
• Ancient Knowledge; the shoulders of giants we are standing on today- Aristotle, Plato & the legendary Greek schools of thought

Do we truly understand the following phenomenon?

Some of the ‘big picture’ questions I believe many of us are unfamiliar with today

• What are the conditions under which economic growth thrives?
• What led to the “Age of Enlightenment” & why did major strides in Science & Technology occur primarily in one geographical area?
• How do immigration policies impact innovation?
• Why is Sweden (Population: 10M, the size of Michigan!) of all places, home to the highest Unicorns per capita?
• What is Inflation? How does the mysterious world of Credit work?
• How does trade work? Does increased globalization really result in higher ‘economic growth’ or does it hurt the upward mobility of workers in impoverished countries?
• How famine, plague & war have altered the trajectory of humanity?
• Africa’s Growth Story - Home to a fifth of our population & the cradle of civilisation (Our ancestors Homo Deus can be traced back to Eastern Africa ~70,000 years ago)
• How does Venture Capital growth work? Does every type of business need “VC" money?
• What is “the singularity?" The ramifications of General Artificial Intelligence & beyond

To quote the eminent astronomer Carl Sagan:

You have to know the past to understand the present

Over the next couple of editions, we will grapple with some of the above questions & more.

Progress Studies

Collison & Cowen in conversation with “The Zuck”

Pardon my divergence, returning to the central theme of “Progress” & why this is integral to study & analyze using data-driven methodologies

Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen’s clarion call for “Science of Progress” in the Atlantic initiated my search into this rabbit hole of better quantifying & understanding where technology will direct us in the years to come. In fact, the term “Progress Studies” is often credited to them.

A quick Google search leads one to the “Progress Studies for Aspiring Young Scholars”, an online program of guided self-study in the history of industrial civilization for high school students which boasts of speaker series held by some eminent technologists, the likes of Collison & Cowen included.

Therefore, while there is some minor advancement in this field, I am of the opinion that these are ‘bubbles’ within larger technology enthusiast circles & the average Joe has not given this a single thought, let alone gone out of their way to seek this knowledge.

This newsletter will help resolve that & better educate its readers on the above.

Optimism & Innovation

An instance of innovative technology that is extremely divisive & pervasive is Social Media.

Social Media use has negatively impacted the mental health of Generation Z & things have gotten only worse during the Pandemic. Arguably its merits outweigh these but this is not an argument easily quantifiable.

We know this will impact us in the long run, but alas we are slaves to its divine ability to connect us remotely & build community. This pandemic has only further exacerbated this dependency.

In further editions, we will dive into the history of Online Media right from SixDegrees (wondering what that is?) to Snapchat & further analyze its role in developing community & eventually shaping political outcomes (👀 Trump 2016!)

Entrepreneurship involves systematically & continuously taking on risk. The chances of succeeding are ever so small. Positive outcomes attributed to registered upstarts are now slimmer than ~ 2 in 100.

Our expectations of the future are therefore often unrealistic & ie. we want flying cars & the intergalactic travel

This tweet perfectly infers this:

Survival without oodles of Optimism, is slim.

An ideal stage entrepreneur is practically delusional, thinking of markets that don’t exist, potentially serving customers that may not know they needed a product.

Therefore, there exists a dichotomy between being truly original & building on the existing work of other players.

Mark Twain’s views on this dichotomy resonate well:

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas & put them into a mental kaleidoscope.

Ergo, you are now privy to this author’s mental kaleidoscope. (Meta much?)

Macro Optimistic, micro Pessimistic

Ever wondered why some people are very positive given any situation & others go down a dark, pessimistic hole?

The illustrious physicist David Deutsch sets up some helpful terminology in his groundbreaking book, “The Beginning of Infinity” (highly recommend grabbing a copy!)

Blind optimism: Proceeding as if one knew that bad outcomes will happen; this results in recklessness & overconfidence which can kill a business early.

Blind pessimism: Avoiding everything not known to be safe; results in unexplored paths & not fulfilling one’s potential

Hence, while blind optimism & blind pessimism might not be the ideal attitude, there is a way out:

Be a Macro-optimist & micro-pessimist

ie. In the long run stay hopeful & positive while in the short term, believe everything is out to destroy you.

Sounds crazy? It works.

Optimism = Theory that all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge

Therefore, the pursuit of knowledge is how optimists deal with any challenge be it entrepreneurship or on the personal relations front

I also believe the intersection of rationality x optimism is the sweet spot thereby a “Rational Optimist” is the ideal.

This search for knowledge is found only if it is ‘specific’ to oneself & not generic.

For those unacquainted with Naval Ravikant’s sharp thinking & sheer brilliance, his tweet storm 'How to Get Rich', arguably his magnum opus provides more clarity:

Another prominent philosopher, Rick Sanchez (IYKYK), once said,

To live is to risk it all; otherwise you’re just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you

Therefore, optimism as Deutsch defines it is the pursuit of knowledge, thereby avoiding evils & failures caused by insufficient understanding of a subject.

As I build something new (stay tuned 😊 ), I grapple with several paradoxes & concur with Karl Popper that all knowledge is conjectural & therefore, the quest for knowledge & satiating one’s curiosity reigns supreme.

Isaac Newton’s letter to Robert Hooke (1675) echoes a similar view:

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Alright, see you next week!

Avi

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PS: Thanks for letting me embarrass myself and for reading this far. If you have any feedback/thoughts/advice on what I should be sending out, let me know! I can be reached on Twitter @avjitsingh22