In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and Marginal Revolution author Tyler Cowen called for a new discipline of Progress Studies, whose success will come from its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions. In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.
The response of academia was less than constructive: claims that there was already a substantial body of work on this topic tended to be references to either commentaries on the evils of Big Tech, hand-waving allusions to “substantial literatures” (minus actual citations) or, worst of all, lazy accusations that “two tech bros” thought that they had had re-invented Science and Technology Studies, or even just history.