Progress Engineering: Innovation as Social Design

A guest post by Garett Jones and Eliah Aronoff-Spencer

Garett is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Chief Economist at Bluechip, a stablecoin rating agency. He is author of the Singapore Trilogy published by Stanford University Press.

Eliah is a Professor of Medicine and Design at UC San Diego’s Division of Infectious Diseases & Global Public Health, and the Design Lab. He directs the Center for Health Design, the CDC funded Resilient Shield, and chairs the Lancet Commission on U.S. Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age.

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In 2019, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen published an Atlantic essay that quietly launched a vital new field. Progress Studies, as they named it, would document the nature of scientific, technological, and economic progress; asking why it sometimes flourishes, why it sometimes stalls. Seven years later, we believe that project is necessary but no longer sufficient. Understanding progress isn’t enough. We need to engineer it.

Progress Engineering, in our vision, will be a discipline devoted deliberately to the practice and principles of designing systems, organizations, and institutions through which innovation moves. It begins where Progress Studies ends: not with the question of what progress looks like, but how we build the conditions that make it possible, reliable, and just.

The difference matters enormously. The great innovations from Gutenberg’s press to steam power to the assembly line to IT and now AI have all involved a massive increase in the returns to scale in key industries, and each of them led to social changes that well-meaning contemporaries struggled to theorize over and to shape for the benefit of humanity.

Yes, there is a role for Hayek-Schumpeter spontaneous order and creative destruction, for innovation fueled by nearly unplanned experimentation. But these past waves of innovation all had their own progress engineers who led ever-larger firms, who shaped ever-growing legal systems, and who created often-fragile political consensuses to create innovation-friendly environments.

This common thread–a rise in the efficient scale of key firms and the need to not-manage-but-engineer the social response to these rapid, visible, and highly-productive increases in economic scale–offers a hope that Progress Engineers can learn from the past to uncover principles that raise the probability of successful, pro-human progress.

What is Progress Engineering?

The field of progress studies creates interdisciplinary research into the nature of human progress, along with policy work that reduces barriers to progress: the research helps people to visualize progress while the policy work encourages and permits progress. We see Progress Engineering as adding a critical third component: a body of practical knowledge–and knowledgeable practice–that goes beyond observing, understanding, or encouraging progress, toward ethically engineering and humanely employing progress itself.

More akin to design thinking, or perhaps even to Buddhist practice, Progress Engineering must be understood as a skill set combined with a mindset. The skill set contains the practical knowledge: but the knowledgeable practice comes from a mindset and experience: rule-shaped but never rule-driven.

Engineering is the right metaphor for this combination. By analogy, Nobel-Laureate Eric Maskin describes mechanism design as the “engineering” side of economic theory, taking resource constraints and self-interested human behavior as given, defining desired outcomes, and then building institutions or incentives to achieve those outcomes to the greatest degree possible.

Similarly, Progress Engineering, taken seriously, helps people choose prudent goals for organizations, localities, and societies: goals that might range from scientific breakthroughs to economic inclusion to system-wide improvements in public health. Progress engineering then supplies the practical knowhow to shape and tend the complex mixes of incentive structures, cultural practices, and institutional frameworks needed to maximize the chances of accomplishing those goals.

This approach would have to combine insights from multiple domains and sectors, drawing on ethics, religion, policy, and law for objective functions and moral guardrails, on mechanism design in economics to navigate, on organizational science for fostering innovation culture, on decentralized science, human centered design, on codesign and service design methods that build in inclusion and stakeholder experience, and on ecology and political science for polycentric governance models that enable fruitful cooperation in harmony with the environment.

If it sounds like progress engineering is almost impossibly multidisciplinary, that’s because it is, just as progress studies already is, having already gone well beyond its origins in economic history to include all forms of engineering, the sociology of organizations, and cultural and philosophical studies of innovation, just to name a few of the fields that progress studies practitioners routinely draw upon. Yes, there will be limits to how much interdisciplinary knowledge experts in these twin fields can be expected to digest, but few fields of study can be ruled out in advance–and knowledgeable practice will convey the limits to multidisciplinarity.

Progress Engineers thus should start where mechanism design ended up. Mechanism design began as pure economic theory but found the need to incorporate lessons from behavioral economics, experimental economics, and computer science to create practical, efficient auctions. Over time, law and public choice also became part of the applied mechanism design toolkit. Progress Engineers should cut to the chase, embracing the obvious need for cross-cutting expertise when searching for the rules underlying humane progress.

Crucially, Progress Engineering is intentional and democratic, living in the actions of all, and working to better their circumstances. Rather than waiting for innovation to emerge serendipitously, it treats progress as a product of stakeholder design. History provides positive outliers that demonstrate this principle in action, from prizes that sparked new industries to corporate cultures that institutionalized continuous improvement. By examining these examples, we can discern the principles of Progress Engineering and see how to apply them to today’s grand challenges.

Progress by Design: Lessons from XPRIZE to COVID-19

1. Incentive Prizes and Engineered Breakthroughs. In 1996, entrepreneur Peter Diamandis launched the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE to spur private spaceflight. The prize created a clear goal and incentive for anyone to solve it. More than two dozen teams poured over $100 million of their own R&D spending in pursuit of the $10 million prize. In 2004, Mojave Aerospace Ventures won with SpaceShipOne. The contest catalyzed an industry. This is mechanism design in practice: the XPRIZE architects designed a competition that harnessed latent talent and capital, effectively engineering a breakthrough by aligning incentives with a bold goal.

2. Digital Infrastructure for Inclusive Innovation. Consider India Stack, a government-led digital public infrastructure comprising identity (Aadhaar), payments (UPI), and data-sharing protocols. This stack was deliberately engineered to be open-access and scalable. Over 1.2 billion Indians obtained a digital ID, giving previously undocumented people a verifiable identity. Using that foundation, India Stack widened access to finance in what was a cash-based economy. According to the IMF, this digital infrastructure is “revolutionizing access to finance” for millions. The architects of India’s digital infrastructure created technological building blocks that others could leverage for innovation. This exemplifies Progress Engineering at a national scale – policymakers designing public goods that unleash collective innovation.

3. Cultures of Continuous Improvement (The Toyota Way). Innovation isn’t only about moonshots; it can be baked into the daily fabric of an organization. Toyota’s leaders deliberately engineered the Toyota Production System (TPS) – a management system obsessed with eliminating waste and empowering workers to improve. Every employee is trained in kaizen, or continuous incremental improvement. Toyota designed an organizational system that harnesses the talents of many. This ethos has been emulated in industries from software to healthcare.

4. Rapid Collaboration in Crisis (COVID-19 Vaccines). The development of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020 compressed a 5–10 year process into about 11 months. This was the result of deliberate coordination, massive funding, and open collaboration across institutions. Scientists shared data, and new partnerships formed. Governments and nonprofits invested tens of billions in vaccine projects in parallel. Operation Warp Speed and advance purchase commitments removed financial risks. This exemplified Ostrom-style polycentric problem-solving. With the right structures – ample funding, agile regulatory coordination, open science – innovation accelerated. It was Progress Engineering under pressure.

5. Decentralized action. As HBS’s Linda Hill has argued, innovation is rarely solo genius; it is built upon intention and collective genius; and nowhere is that clearer than in the spontaneous organizations that emerge under duress. Both the Cajun Navy, which saved lives after Hurricane Katrina, and the Syrian White Helmets, saving lives in opposition-controlled Syria, started from the bottom up, combining local knowledge and local care, each later becoming more organized, more powerful, and more effective. Explaining the success of such organizations at the Progress Engineering level would require explaining the decentralized volunteer organizations that don’t exist, explaining, with a high degree of reliability, why some arise while others don’t. Those explanations, converted into practical action plans, would fill the gap between progress studies and Progress Engineering.

The Stakes: Why We Need Progress Engineering Now

If a combination of AI and robots makes much human labor irrelevant, it could mean a world of capitalists without customers, moving towards a class of AI- and robot-wielding oligarchs segmented from an increasingly impoverished populace. The climate could become more unstable, threatening food, commerce and transport. In that world, the environment and technological innovation both become enemies of progress for communities across the globe.

There is another path; one where the emergence of purposeful AI transforms bioengineering from academic endeavor to programming the natural world; a path to personalized medicines, abundant energy stores, robust crops, environmentally-friendly housing material. Physical AI and self assembling materials zero could the cost of production for housing, sundries and food. AI exploring science may unlock new truths that change our trajectory in the universe, and perhaps provide societies that are more secure, more inclusive, thriving with an abundance of resources.

Engineering this path forward, or even some yet-to-be-imagined better path, will be complex, and will require new ways of thinking, collaborating, and working, new ways of protecting ourselves from the power of our own technologies and our short memories for past atrocities in the name of progress. Like a child running with scissors, or a man sawing his own branch from a tree to gather fuel for the winter, we may be entering a period of accelerating transformation with little foresight and few clear plans for what comes next.

The coming changes bring the potential for global abundance and democratization of essential human needs alongside real risks of collapse of the longstanding environmental patterns and human structures that have underpinned our modern society. AGI and its consequences will require mindful responses from the public, from entrepreneurs, and from governments alike. That mindfulness will look like Progress Engineering: generalizing from past experience, drawing on first principles of human technological progress, and experimenting thoughtfully as problems arise. Regulatory sandboxes, incentive structures for socially beneficial innovation, and collaborative risk monitoring–by firms, nonprofits, and governments–are needed. Again, these are social design problems – Progress Engineering problems.

Finding realistic, politically palatable ways to systematically improve public health–really, public hygiene–is another critical goal for Progress Engineering. Not only do falling rates of vaccination and health surveillance pose risks to American and global public hygiene; more importantly, the rise of AGI will give bad actors small and large, domestic and foreign, greater potential to launch viral and bacterial bioweapons at our citizens. A prepared society will be a stronger society, a healthier society.

As a form of engineering, Progress Engineering will embody the fusion of broad principles, toy experiments, informed hunches, and practical tinkering central to all other forms of engineering. The engineer’s practical approach—“Does the boat float?” “Is the nation innovating more?” — gives a telos, a goal to Progress Engineering, but it will also need an ethos; forms of continuous tending to the moral consequences of progress, continuously reducing the risk that has runaway consequences or devolves into mere collections of facts, studies of the past, theories without applications. Fusing codified, rule-shaped techne with the local, tacit knowledge of metis: that is the path forward.

Progress can be engineered: indeed, progress has been methodically engineered already with varying degrees of success. By studying the Progress Engineers of the past, both those who succeeded and those who failed, future Progress Engineers will uncover principles to succeed robustly.

Moral Hazards and Ethical Guardrails

An essay such as this cannot be written without acknowledgment of past horrors that occurred in the name of improving society or bettering the condition of all of mankind. Nor can we understate the dangers of either weaponized science or well-intended social engineering. These dangers are real and their threats are certain. As such, we say in the strongest terms that these lessons must be deliberately integrated into any form of progress engineering. We cannot and should not stop technological and social change, but we can, as individuals and as a species, direct such change away from negative-sum rent-seeking kleptocratic oligarchy and toward a flourishing, bountiful good.

Conclusion

In 1861, the scientist William Barton Rogers proposed a new kind of research institution dedicated to practical knowledge. He founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joining other reformers who realized that America’s ability to generate progress could be designed and improved. As Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen² note in the Atlantic article that spurred the rise of progress studies, these 19th-century visionaries “engaged in a kind of conscious ‘progress engineering’” by restructuring institutions to spur innovation. Yet even today, progress itself remains under-engineered. Rogers’s MIT of the mid-19th century can serve as a model for the Progress Engineers of our dawning mid-21st century: not just collecting facts and publishing reports, but tinkering with purpose, experimenting without naivete.

Institutions are malleable, and the world’s people crave a sense that we can make progress in this new age. With deliberate design, we can make innovation more reliable and inclusive. It’s time to generalize past successes, be mindful of historic tragedies in the name of progress, and apply these lessons with intention and bravery to the complex, systemic challenges ahead. History shows that with the right frameworks, progress can be continuous and far-reaching. Let’s build those frameworks and then democratize the practice of engineering progress.

Sources:

1. Maskin, E. (2007). Mechanism Design: How to Implement Social Goals. Nobel Prize Lecture.

2. Collison, P. & Cowen, T. (2019). We Need a New Science of Progress. The Atlantic.

3. XPRIZE Foundation (2016). Ansari XPRIZE Overview.

4. Carrière-Swallow, Y., et al. (2021). Stacking up financial inclusion gains in India. IMF Finance & Development.

5. Hill, L. (2014). Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation.

6. Ostrom, E. (2010). Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Systems. AER.

7. RAND Europe (2024). Artificial Intelligence and Biotechnology: Risks and Opportunities.