Progress Studies

In Kyle’s corpus, Progress Studies is the intellectual movement diagnosing techno-scientific stagnation and asking how to restart it. The clearest statement is in Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation (Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber), which Kyle reads as diagnosing stagnation — “declining TFP, diminishing research returns, the reproducibility crisis” — and prescribing bubbles as the exit ramp, against the backdrop of Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation thesis. Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time To Build is treated as “a foundational text” for the broader build/progress movement, its “want and build the things we need” framing helping catalyze it.

The movement threads through several adjacent interests. The Man From The Future connects it to von Neumann’s 1955 “Can We Survive Technology?” frame (“for progress there is no cure”). Kyle’s Open-Source Knowledge - Research notes pull in Matt Clancy’s work on free knowledge and innovation, linking Progress Studies to Wikipedia, Academic Research, and the historical-futurism idea that public knowledge accelerates innovation. And the charter-cities / city-building strand (Mark Lutter, Charter Cities, City Building) is filed here as the institutional-experimentation wing of the same project.

Context: “Progress Studies” was named in a 2019 Atlantic essay by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen calling for a new field studying what actually drives scientific, technological, and economic progress — and how to get more of it. It has since become an umbrella for writers and builders concerned with stagnation, growth, and the institutions of innovation.

Quick Capture links — June 18, 2026

Links Kyle saved to this topic on June 18, 2026 (manual capture batch).

• https://soundcloud.com/user-580979201/mark-lutter-on-progress-studies-and-charter-cities — Mark Lutter on progress studies and charter cities (SoundCloud podcast). Charter Cities City Building Mark Lutter

Where this appears

• Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation — diagnoses stagnation (declining TFP, reproducibility crisis); bubbles as the exit ramp
• It’s Time To Build — a “foundational text” for the build/progress movement
• The Man From The Future — von Neumann’s “Can We Survive Technology?” / “for progress there is no cure”
• Open-Source Knowledge - Research — Matt Clancy on free knowledge and innovation; ties to Wikipedia and academic research
• Charter Cities / City Building — the institutional-experimentation wing (Mark Lutter)