The Blind Spot

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” as the French like to say as the Anglosphere likes to imagine the French saying. Sure, we may enjoy previously unimaginable comforts and stimulation, but at the end of the day, people are as ignorant, selfish, judgmental and lonely as ever. The rich and powerful keep getting richer and more powerful while the less fortunate – and nature itself – hang on by a thread. In this gloomy, post-decency climate, you might find yourself wondering whether anything has fundamentally changed over the eons, and whether it’s reasonable at all to expect things can ever truly change for the better.

And yet the question of progress is manifestly on many minds these days, perhaps even more so now that much of what we hold dear appears to be genuinely in peril. One struggles to keep up with the constant inflow of pieces concerned about the fate of modern society and humanity as a whole. If nothing else, this abundance of hand-wringing suggests there are more than just a few amongst us who care about more than just themselves and whatever their feeds insist they ought to.

Of course, the mere feeling that we have anything precious to lose implies that our species has achieved at least something worthwhile over the millennia. Surely, even amongst the luddites and the traditionalists, there must be some acknowledgement that roasting a coffee bean, dividing the octave into twelve, and codifying the rules of sport have proven better uses of our time than clobbering each other to death.

This hasn’t stopped sceptics from questioning the notion altogether. Apparently, you can get published these days on the claim that progress is nothing but a myth because some things are worse now than they were at some point in the past. I’ll admit that I can’t quite bring myself to spend money on a book whose central argument can essentially be reduced to an Onion headline.

For those of us aspiring to a more level-headed and informed understanding of progress, there is no shortage of useful publications offering a deeper dive into the subject. Relatively recent mainstream works such as Johan Norberg’s blandly titled Progress (2016) and Steven Pinker’s cringe-inducingly titled Enlightenment Now! (2018) make a convincing case that human progress has not only taken place, but in fact dramatically accelerated over the last few hundred years. They do this by showing, through troves of data paired with anecdotal evidence, that the most essential facets of quality of life have been improving for just about everyone, just about everywhere. Apparently, things are getting better, faster.

That’s not to say the phenomenon is limited to the period since the industrial revolution (ask any proud Greek), nor that it is uniform (ask any resident of Rio’s favelas) or smooth sailing (ask any former Afghani schoolgirl). As unglamorous as life may have been for a serf in the Middle Ages, by all accounts the experience of a coal miner during the Victorian era appears to have been even more miserable.

Nonetheless, over the period for which reliable data is available, the evidence paints a clear picture of improvements taking place on a grand scale. It’s hard to argue that longer lifespans, rising happiness, increased literacy, improved nutrition, falling child mortality and so on do not translate by-and-large to better lives being lived. And unless someone has a viable proposal for sustaining eight billion people on wild berries and stray antelopes, I don’t see the point in debating whether we were better off during our hunter-gatherer days. As far as I’m concerned, what really matters is that progress, no matter how elusive and brittle, has already been irrefutably shown to be possible.

This may be reassuring to some extent, but the articles, essays and books on progress that I’ve come across have consistently left me wanting, on two fronts.

First, in making their case, they tend to focus on describing what progress looks like and how to measure it. While this helps narrow the definition and objectively assess whether progress has occurred, the authors tend not to delve sufficiently – at least to my taste – into what drives it. We would undoubtedly benefit from a grand unified theory of progress. But if one exists, I’m not aware of it.

Second, even when these writings do touch on some of the core elements contributing to progress, they tend to gloss over the question of institutions – those public and private organizations meant to serve the common good. While their importance is usually acknowledged, most of the time this is relegated to a few passing comments, as if’s too self-evident to be dwelt upon, or that it’s for someone else to worry about.

This sparsity of insights into the function and functioning ofinstitutions, which points to a lack of urgency (and consequently, collective effort) to develop a more sophisticated understanding of their role in society, to pick apart their quirks, and to dig deeper into the root causes of their failings, strikes me as a dangerous blind spot in today’s public debate.

So, what then are the ingredients of progress? As long as we’re preoccupied with improvements in living standards, the first candidate that usually comes to mind is technology, though the term really stands in for the broader domain of knowledge – spanning scientific discovery, technical innovation and practical know-how. Not only does it contribute directly to improved human welfare, but it also serves as a key engine of economic growth – which, in turn, can (under the right circumstances) give rise to improvements in quality of life. (For more on this, consider leafing through Lever of Riches (1990), by Joel Mokyr.)

Yet even if there is some justification for the veneration of scientific and technological advancement as the foremost driver of progress, it also holds true that it cannot be its sole driver. For a start, breakthroughs don’t occur in a vacuum – good luck developing the next generation of supermaterials in today’s gang-ridden Haiti. Shiny new tech doesn’t automatically give rise to progress; nor can it solve society’s thorniest problems. On the contrary, its power to exacerbate inequalities, destabilize societies and precipitate deteriorations in quality of life remains on open display – and that’s before AI-powered enshittification fully takes hold. On a less dramatic scale, we’re endlessly confronted with how easily cutting-edge engineering can be undermined by poor design (I’m looking at you, knob-less kitchen appliances). Technological prowess alone, then, has no chance of delivering a peaceful, prosperous, and fulfilling future for all of us.

In fact, a whole other realm of innovation runs in parallel. Odd as it may sound given the gritty physicality of our existence, much of human progress throughout the ages can be attributed to game-changing abstract ideas. Not only “intersubjective realities,” as Yuval Harari regrettably calls them (as if most people were unaware, deep down, that such things as money, corporations and time zones are anything more than practical conventions), but also ingenious business models, well-balanced governance systems, novel concepts and their accompanying vernacular.

For instance, while the main appeal of the “sharing economy” may be its promise to spread wealth while increasing convenience, its standout value lies in reimagining the microeconomic paradigm to enable society to tap into idle resources. Even if an Airbnb, like most of today’s flagship disruptors, does indeed rest on a heavy dose of tech, at the core it is not based on a unique technological breakthrough but rather a well-calibrated set of clever ideas.

The beauty of these conceptual artefacts is that they have the effect of expanding both possibility and trust. They represent true feats of creativity that introduce beneficial hacks into human nature, be it via finely tuned incentives, more efficient modes of social interaction, or new forms of inspiration. Institutions are one such transformative achievement of human imagination, forming part of the intangible infrastructure that holds society together and makes progress possible – amongst other things, by replacing chaos and threat with order and predictability.

Of course, there’s more to human progress than skill and ingenuity. A society’s trajectory has always been heavily influenced by the combination of beliefs, values and attitudes underpinning it. It sure has taken some serious convincing for people to abandon the assumption that animal sacrifices affect weather patterns, or that mass slaughter and subjugation are divinely ordained.

Inevitably, worldviews evolve as we gain a deeper understanding of the universe and our place in it. But for knowledge and insight to accumulate in the first place, our natural curiosity must translate into a commitment to the pursuit of truth, preferably through reason and introspection rather than superstition and coercion. And while scientific inquiry may help us better understand ourselves and the outside world, we must turn to other sources of insight – art, philosophy, meditation, to name a few – to help interpret our human experience and make sense of it all in ways that science cannot.

Furthermore, you cannot hold ideals if you assume things are set in stone or outcomes are predetermined. Nor can you imagine charting a different course without some sense of agency. If today we can pride ourselves in a less casual relationship with life and death, it is perhaps because merely becoming aware of the potential for improvement gave us a reason to place a higher value on the individual human life. To bring about progress, our disposition towards change itself needed to evolve. Insofar as the increasing sophistication and nuance of our stories (as told through literature, theatre, movies, song, etc.) both drives and reflects cultural evolution, it is perhaps more accurate to say that culture accompanies progress.

Be it the abolition of slavery or the integration of women into the workforce, any deliberate choice to move beyond a rigidly stratified societyis more an expression of moral conviction than of a purely utilitarian or economic imperative. It is therefore useful to consider our moral evolution as the collective wisening of the species. After all, rising above our base instincts – self-domestication, if you will – is essentially what civilization has always been about. So while moral maturation may be an important driver of social and economic progress, it is also arguably progress in of itself.From this perspective, restricting the notion of progress to increased living standards seems too reductive. Rather, it calls for a more encompassing definition, which is why I prefer to conceive of progress as widespread and sustained improvement in the human condition.

Now it should come as no surprise that the realms of knowledge, ideas and culture are intertwined – in the sense that advancement in one enables advancement in another – and that the lines between them are blurry. The interesting bit is that they tend to co-evolve. If we are to believe the engaging opening chapters in the otherwise meandering The Digital Ape (2018), our repeated fine-tuning of tools and our gradual harnessing of the elements not only supported the establishment of human civilization, but also impacted the development of our own biology and modes of social organization in ways that both required and enabled us to fathom and fashion ever more sophisticated tools… in turn, prompting yet further social and cultural adaptations.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter which of these three streams contributes most to economic growth and improved welfare. The point is that they are fundamentally distinct types of forces driving human development in complementary fashion. In other words, advancement along all three axes is necessary for meaningfulprogress to occur. Yet while today’s thought leaders(established and otherwise) pour a great deal of effort intodissecting the various factors affecting progress from every conceivable angle, analysis is comparatively scant and superficial when it comes to institutions. This I find quite puzzling, given that crowd’s attachment to society holding together a bit longer.

That our institutions are lousy is hardly news. Any way you look at them, be it through the lens of macro policy performance indicators, operational cost and efficiency metrics, or simply the experience of interacting directly with public services, modern institutions are, exceptions aside, not up to snuff.

Which begs the question: why do we put up with such mediocrity? There has to be more to it than the (apparently well-researched) fact that people can’t bring themselves to care about something as unsexy as public sector reform, no matter how much it may affect their daily lives. Beyond that, there also seems to be an underlying, if vague, sense that institutions are not all that consequential.

Let’s consider that sentiment for a moment. Couldn’t we just do away with institutions altogether? Well, for a good laugh, have a look at any ultra-libertarian experiment gone wrong, as they all inevitably do. Without fail, rules and committees are promptly codified into existence the very moment ideals are confronted with the reality that people don’t always agree on everything.

Ok, fine. But just as De Gaulle famously quipped that “the cemeteries are full of indispensable men”, you might justifiably point out that no given institution is absolutely essential – or at least, irreplaceable. A century ago, the world certainly marched on as the League of Nations faded into irrelevance, albeit not into humanity’s proudest moment. Yet the need for a formal mechanism for international cooperation remained sufficiently obvious to prompt the creation of its successor soon after. The truth is, institutions big and small usually emerge in response to a real need.

Ok, fine. But couldn’t something other than institutions do the job? Without question, traditional notions of their form and function are already glaringly out of step with the demands of the moment. All the same, I haven’t yet come across a plausible suggestion for what might replace them. Even if you’re convinced old-fashioned institutions are headed for extinction, you’ll still find yourself expecting some form of guarantee that your drinking water is safe, and that there’s someone in charge of issuing your country’s passports only to those entitled to them. Somehow, I just don’t see us consenting to bring our complaints to an anonymous, diffuse, immutable blockchain whenever the lights go out or we get swindled by the mobile operator.

Ok, fine. But we’ve made it this far… Can’t we just continue to scrape by with passable institutions? Perhaps the most well-worn argument against nurturing healthy and effective institutions is that it’s just not worth the cost. But that is little more than a red herring. The fact that trains run on time in Switzerland, and less so in neighbouring countries, has less to do with riches than with cultural and political expectations.

In any case, one look at the state of the Western world today should be enough to shake off the fond hope that we can afford to let institutions merely keep chugging along, however uninspiringly. In the same way that Steve Jobs understood how every minute detail makes a difference in the overall perception of a product, it ought to be accepted doctrine even amongst the most casual of backseat administrators that seemingly trivial aspects of a public-facing service all combine to produce a different gestalt.

In the same vein, it’s a mistake to suppose we’ll succeed in advancing the human condition with institutions that are just barely doing their job, coasting on mandate-shielded inertia. Contrast the pace of evolution in the Wild West that is the current AI landscape, with how slow governmental institutions have been to react and how ill-prepared they are to deal with the monumental risks involved: this is just a foretaste of the looming acceleration of the disconnect between human progress and our institutions’ ability to accompany it.

Worst of all, though, is giving in to a state of learned hopelessness. Institutions are bound to disappoint, goes the logic, because bureaucracies are ineffective by nature, because civil servants are only in it for the perks, or because [your nefarious elite of choice] runs the show anyway. The system is broken; it’s just the way things are. Even the less pessimistic amongst us have become accepting of routine inadequacy, resigned to the idea that dealing with admin must inevitably be painful. Just think of how pleasantly surprised you are when your request doesn’t disappear into a black hole or an infinity loop, or when you actually manage to reach someone helpful at the other end of the line.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If you know anything about coding and web design, you’ll know that the websites out there aren’t awful because of any insurmountable, built-in technological constraint. For the most part, it’s just down to asinine design choices, complacent testing, and all too often, outright contempt for the user. It’s the same when it comes to institutions: we could definitely do better within the existing set of constraints, and we should strive for it. In this day and age, we ought not tolerate the extreme stress and anguish inflicted on our ageing parents for trying to sort out basic paperwork any more than we would accept fellow citizens having to undergo surgery without anaesthetic. Even if it’s impossible to fully engineer away the messiness inherent to human systems, I don’t find it hard to imagine institutions that are lean, mean, and worthy of admiration. If anything, the tragedy in all of this is failing to realize how much further along we could already be.

Clearly, if we aspire to better institutions, we need to get better at understanding them. Yet in those rare moments when public consciousness is turned towards institutions – typically, in the aftermath of a crisis – we tend to squander the opportunity to reform them because the wrong kind of impulses get in the way. It’s always easier to reach for simplistic explanations (“blame the blob!”) and prescriptions (“shut it all down!”) than to roll up our sleeves and come up with the right fixes, no matter how exacting the work or how uncomfortable the facts.

Any populist worth their hair gel can seduce the crowds with the promise that there is cash to be saved in the name of efficiency. But reform and cost-cutting are two different things altogether. Slashing the budget of an inefficient government agency in half doesn’t give you more bang for your buck; it leaves you with half the services, delivered just as inefficiently as before.

Unfortunately, even the more earnest reform efforts also tend to get things wrong, as the act of analysing institutions from the outside reliably blinds observers to their inner workings. From an external perspective, institutions are wrongly seen as homogeneous monoliths – or worse, anthropomorphised. This yields a distorted understanding of how and why decisions are made. The distance also breeds a certain complacency, resulting in too much stock being put in the face value of internal documents and data, which rarely tell the real story. Most importantly, talking to the wrong people makes the onlooker vulnerable to false narratives.

One of the oldest tricks in the public administrator’s book, for example, is to convince everyone that the cause of underperformance is insufficient resources. This is how we’ve wound up with the ludicrous de facto rule of thumb for a place like the World Health Organization that the worse it performs, the more we reward it with additional funding. Obviously, you can always do more with more. But based on what I saw from up-close in the lead-up to the H1N1 “blandemic” of 2011, the organization’s shambolic response was less due to funding shortfalls than hubris, pettiness, complacency, and irresponsible governance. Yet the outside world bought the story, the institution’s emergency budget was duly increased, and some token reforms were performatively launched. Honestly, with incentives like these, who even needs lazy bureaucrats or hiring quotas to blame for the world’s problems?

There are of course other forces that lead to the wrong conclusions. Basic misconceptions contaminate the public debate all too easily. Failing that, political agendas, vested interests and the pressures of public opinion all share a propensity to keep truth at a safe distance. On the inside, it’s not much better: tools designed to suss out inefficiencies and worse, such as corporate audit and risk management functions, or so-called Results-Based Management, have – in their current incarnations – rarely succeeded.

To be fair, part of the challenge is that correctly diagnosing the ills of an institution is genuinely harder than it looks. Like it or not, holding an organization together often entails painful trade-offs: what you thought was the root cause of the problem also turns out to be something you can’t do without. There may be legitimate reasons for doing things in a way that, at first, appear counterintuitive.

Either way, though, by consistently getting the diagnosis wrong, we are condemned to apply the wrong fixes. The resulting free pass also discourages genuine reform and innovation, instead emboldening leaders to maintain the status quo. No wonder, then, that institutions big and small continue to flounder.

If we are to break out of this wasteful cycle, we must move beyond facile analytical shortcuts and the usual platitudes about “effective, efficient and accountable” institutions. For a more sophisticated dialogue, we need to refine the vocabulary used to describe institutional dysfunctions, and to lay down universal principles for how they ought to function. Thankfully, there’s no need to whip up a new kind of Guide Escoffier from scratch – the language of public administration and management theory provide a solid base. But of the many bright ideas already on offer, none are as entrenched as, say, habeas corpus or the Hippocratic Oath.

Digging deeper entails employing greater rigor in the effort to achieve a more granular and precise understanding of institutions’ inner workings – for a start, by going to greater lengths to source information from the right corners. It takes intellectual honesty of the type that recognizes there are no simple answers to complex problems, and sufficient humility to appreciate that there is often more than one plausible way to go about things.

At the same time, the urgency of the challenge calls for being bold in reform. As disgraceful as the chainsaw-wielding fanatics may be, there is some validity to the distaste for half-measures. If we can’t afford institutions to remain two decades behind the curve, then we cannot satisfy ourselves with superficial reforms, and we must be ready to accept some pain. Or at least some fresh thinking. I’ve endured too many self-righteous old-school UN managers, completely out of sync with the evolution of the workplace, who saw the lack of suits and ties in the office as the utmost sign of decay.

In truth, we are rapidly approaching a juncture where fixing broken institutions or merely upping their game may not suffice. We need to reimagine institutions altogether. The very concept, their composition, their ethos, their modus operandi – all must morph fundamentally. This starts by envisioning everyday services that function so seamlessly that it becomes less of a mental hurdle to rekindle trust than not, and a near future in which we’ve found a tenable symbiotic balance between us humans and our machines.

Upon exiting the caves in Lascaux, Pablo Picasso purportedly declared that “we have invented nothing”. I’m not usually one to challenge manifest genius, but that does feel a bit harsh. Whenever I despair over the seemingly pervasive short-sightedness, greed, hypocrisy and other retrograde instincts holding us back, I try to remind myself that something must have gone right along the way since our Cro-Magnon ancestors walked the Earth for unspecial people like me to wind up in such a position of unfathomable luxury by the historical standards of our species – not just getting by, but free to get the most out of life.

If you count yourself amongst the multitudes of not particularly affluent or well-connected people who have nonetheless been spared the constant threat of famine, violence, oppression and disease, it is only because countless strangers before you have devoted themselves to making some slice of existence slightly gentler or more comprehensible for the rest of us – often at great sacrifice, and rarely for massive riches – based on the conviction that life can be improved, not merely coped with. As with so many things, progress is about choices, and sound choices start with clarity and insight.

Above: Person discovering a renewed sense of appreciation for institutions.