The Jungle of the Agora

The marketplace of ideas

Risk & Progress| A hub for essays that explore risk, human progress, and your potential. My mission is to educate, inspire, and invest in concepts that promote a better future for all. Subscriptions and new essays are free and always will be. Paid subscribers gain access to the full archives.

Having traversed a brief history of human progress, it is time to step back and examine a bit more as to “how” it works. We conduct our examination by looking at the three necessary components of progress 1) matter 2) energy, 3) and knowledge. Matter is the clay from which we sculpt the physical world, energy is required to do the sculpting, while knowledge informs us how. Unlike matter and energy, which are finite, knowledge is limitless. Human wealth and progress are therefore limited only by our ability to create new ideas and ever more beneficial counter-entropic forms.

The Economy

The growth of what we call “the economy” closely mirrors the growth of “productivity” (more output per worker) which is a function of the expansion of knowledge. Knowledge informs us to how we can do more with less. It tells us how to combine molecules together to make disease-curing medicines. It tells us how to etch microscopic switches onto silicon to create chips that can think like we do. The more humans that…