Grow the Pie, Skip the Sermon
In a recent Substack essay, “The progress movement needs a better theory of progress,” Brink Lindsey argues that the progress movement has settled for too thin a vision. It focuses on wealth creation and technological advance, he says, when it should adopt a “fuller conception of progress”—one that promotes “spiritual welfare” and thicker accounts of the good life.
It’s an eloquent piece. Lindsey is a serious thinker, and I’ve long admired him and his work. But here his prescription would pull the movement in the wrong direction. The intellectual tradition he draws on also carries a troubling recent track record in policy.
(Lindsey refers throughout the essay to his recent book, “The Permanent Problem” (2026), which I haven’t yet read. What follows comes with an obvious caveat: the book may address some of these arguments, and I may be judging his views based on a necessarily truncated version of them.)