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Steve Newman's avatar

Loved this! The idea had never occurred to me, but once pointed out seems blindingly obvious – the hallmark of the best insights.

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Michael Magoon's avatar

Excellent article. I agree wholeheartedly with your claim that understanding long-term trends is far more important to history than names, dates, and events (which how history is usually taught). I also believe that Progress Studies can make contributions to understanding the origins and causes of these trends.

I recently published an article very similar to yours as well as a larger series of articles that enables us to tie together the trends of long-term material progress to history in general:

https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-fundamental-constraints-on-human

https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/my-theory-of-human-history-a-series

https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/all-of-human-history-in-one-graphic

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Kevin Kohler's avatar

Thank you for sharing! Will take a bit to properly digest everything but the progress-oriented history series with focus on feedback loops looks excellent

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Nisrine Iovine's avatar

Could not agree more! It’s essentially looking at the ‘bigger picture’. We can use this macro theory when looking at ourselves too - instead of zooming in on who we are now and what our problems are now, we should zoom out and see the bigger picture of our lives…where have we come from, what are the genes running through our bodies, what were the stars doing when we were born, what events lead to this, what would we look like as a graph?

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