Key takeaways:

• Growth has allowed humanity to conquer privation and disease – but discontent remains, and prosperity hasn’t solved the deeper question of what progress is for.
• Abundance doesn’t necessarily lead to a sense of agency; many people still feel that impersonal systems shape their lives without their consent.
• The 21st century will continue to be defined by growth and prosperity, but the center of gravity will shift to the developing world.
• The defining question of our era may well be whether humans can direct their attention toward what truly matters in an era when there are increasingly competing claims to it.

By almost any measure, the last two centuries delivered astonishing leaps in human prosperity. We live longer, healthier, safer lives than almost any generation that came before us. And yet, the experience of modern life often feels unsettled. People are anxious, politics are brittle, and the promise of progress feels shakier than ever.

Few thinkers have grappled with these contradictions more deeply than Brad DeLong. He’s an economic historian at UC Berkeley and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia, a sweeping account of the “long twentieth century” when technological progress reshaped every aspect of human life.

I invited DeLong onto The Gray Area to talk about the purpose of progress, the tension between getting richer and living well, and whether our politics are capable of stewarding another era of transformation. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you think progress is for? What are the goals we should be pursuing as a society?

One way to answer that is to begin with fear. I had a political philosophy teacher, Judith Shklar, who described liberalism as a response to what we fear about other systems. She wanted to know what kinds of suffering and cruelty liberal institutions are meant to prevent.

I think something similar applies to economic progress. If you look backward, the first thing we should be trying to escape is the old Malthusian world. That was a world in which a huge share of children died before the age of 5, because they were too malnourished to fight off disease. It was a world without real medicine, where childbirth was........

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