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C00002 00002	progre[e88,jmc]		Political action for progress
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progre[e88,jmc]		Political action for progress

	The object of this article is to introduce and explore a
simplified and rather abstract notion of progress, and use it to provide
criteria whereby a rational man might allocate the energy he can put
into issue-oriented political activity.

	The above involves certain assumptions I want to make
explicit.

	1. On the whole humanity makes progress, and that's good.

	2. The different forms of progress are highly correlated.
Countries advanced in one respect tend to be advanced in others
as well.

	3. There is no natural barrier to humanity making a lot
more progress in the next hundred years.

	4. Humanity can survive and prosper for many billion
years, but our descendants even a hundred years in the future
will regard our speculations about what they might do as of
purely historical interest, because their capabilities and
knowledge will be as far beyond ours, as ours are beyond
those of Americans of a century ago.
[This needs qualification, because some of what our ancestors
said about political institutions is better than current thought].

	The simplification proposed is the following.  Take advantage
of the correlation among different forms of progress to create
a one dimensional scale of progress.  Using such a scale we can
say that country A is 20 years ahead of country B or that a
certain policy will hold the country back 5 years or that
another policy will get us two years ahead of where we would
otherwise be.  Of course, there are different kinds of
progress, so such a one-dimensional scale won't be accurate,
but it may be a lot more accurate than the unsystematic
way people think about such matters today.

	The analogy is with money.  We can measure our personal
resources as net worth, adding up the values of our houses, cars, bank
accounts, etc.  It's not perfect, because making tradeoffs incurs
costs, but it serves as a first approximation.