Accelerate, Always!
Stepping stones to the future
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. Subscriptions are free, paid subscribers gain access to the full archive, including the Pathways of Progress and Realize essay series.
Despite humanity's advancement over the centuries, the state of affairs remains far from ideal. Hunger, poverty, and human suffering still exist, needless wars are still fought, and many still struggle with medical bills and housing debt. We can do better and we already know how. Yet, for whatever reason, we neglect to take the necessary forward steps. In this section of Pathways of Progress, I will explore ideas for furthering continued human advancement. I recognize, however, that we first require a means to implement and test these ideas on smaller scales to overcome natural human resistance to change.
Mired in Mediocrity
If the answers to our problems are mostly known, why do we accept anything less than optimal? Why do we so frequently acquiesce to half-baked and half-hearted “solutions?” I believe we are often so content with mediocrity because the public is never provided optimal choices in the first place. A carbon tax, for example, is by far the simplest, cheapest, and fastest way to combat climate change, but American policymakers do not even discuss this as an option. There is no election in America today where a “carbon tax” is on the ballot. Instead of a carbon tax, policymakers debated a mix of “doing nothing” and an expensive hodgepodge of contradictory and counterproductive policies known as the 2022 “Inflation Reduction Act.”
In this act, for example, the government began subsidizing electric vehicle purchases to make them more affordable. The most affordable and arguably best EVs, however, are made in China or use Chinese-made batteries. Fearing the optics of fueling “imports,” the government then raised tariffs on imported Chinese vehicles and batteries to make them prohibitively expensive. The net effect, of course, was to shutter the very competition needed to bring down the cost of EVs. Mediocre policy measures of this kind are, at best, akin to running in place, at worst, dumping money into a hole or shoveling it into a furnace.
Good ideas often don’t make the ballot for the usual reasons: political optics, fear, and bureaucratic inertia. In my view, these are terrible excuses to remain mired in mediocrity. We can and we should do better. Luckily, I am not a politician or a policymaker. I am free to speculate, discuss, and research ideas…to chart pathways to a better and more prosperous world, free from the taint of politics or public opinion. In this section, I will leverage what we learned about the origins and perils of human progress. Using this knowledge, I will speculate on possible policy measures and ideas aimed at sustaining and accelerating human advancement into the 22nd century.
Learning from Shenzhen
I may not be a policymaker but I am a realist. I recognize and acknowledge that the recommendations and ideas I present in the upcoming essays are largely theoretical and would encounter significant resistance, especially if implemented at scale. Therefore, the most practical approach moving forward would be to “pilot” them in select zones, or ‘charter cities.’ These zones would be essential for testing, experimenting, and ultimately overcoming resistance to necessary social, economic, and political reforms
Note that I use the terms “charter cities” and “pilot zones” interchangeably here. I recognize that they are distinct concepts, but both offer a similar opportunity to test new ideas and pathways to a better future. See this primer on the different types of economic zones from
for more information. City-sized zones are the smallest sample size that can provide us with useful experimental data. This is because cities, not countries, are the cauldrons of human progress. They are the bustling hives of commerce and innovation. They also tend to be geographically small and relatively uniform, thus they are also easier to govern and nimbler in the face of change and adversity.Charter cities and pilot zones also have a track record of success when used to test and experiment with policy prescriptions that would otherwise be unpalatable (or perhaps too unproven) to implement on a wider scale. Success stories famously include cities like Dubai and Singapore, but perhaps the greatest example of the true potential of a pilot zone to serve as a “stepping stone” to the future is Shenzhen, China. It was in Shenzhen that a new economic system for a nation of over 1 Billion people was carefully and thoughtfully tested.
In 1978, China’s then-leader Deng Xiaoping promoted politically difficult economic reforms by limiting them to experimental pilot zones, known as Special Economic Zones (SEZs). These areas were chosen because they were relatively undeveloped; they had few vested interests that may have been perturbed by policy experimentation. They also contributed little to the tax base, meaning that should the reforms have failed, the financial impact would be limited. The village of Shenzhen was one of the first SEZs and piloted economic reforms that proved immediately successful. The small village exploded into a wealthy metropolis in just one generation.
The lessons learned in Shenzhen were then systematically rolled out in additional pilot zones across China. Taking a page from Shenzhen’s book, economic reforms were launched in more “established” cities like Shanghai in the 1990s. As seen in the photo below, Shanghai also saw similar explosive prosperity, transforming a largely uninhabited swamp adjacent to “Old” Shanghai, known as “Pudong,” into one of the world’s most recognizable metropolises 20 years later.
With policy measures proven successful in the pilot zones, the economic reforms and lessons learned were gradually rolled out more broadly across China. The results are unmistakable today. For over 30 years after 1978, China witnessed economic growth rates averaging nearly 10 percent annually. This pace of growth was and remains unprecedented in human history and rocketed the country to become the world’s second-largest economy. Within a single generation, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty.
Stepping Stones
The successes of China's economic reform and opening program embodies the Chinese concept of 摸着石头过河, or “crossing the river by feeling for the stones.” Instead of sweeping “shock therapy” policy shifts that defined the former U.S.S.R, Chinese policymakers took small calculated steps forward, testing the “waters” in special economic zones first. Pilot zones were the “stepping stones” where lessons learned, both positive and negative, were considered before taking the next step forward. Here, I believe the world can learn from China. Pilot zones or charter cities can reduce the risk of experimenting with new ideas, generate useful data to improve policy concepts, and help overcome the resistance and fear of change that paralyzes social institutions outside the zone.
The Chinese approach makes intuitive sense. Complex systems are rarely optimal on the first go. When Toyota designs a new car, they don’t immediately launch into production and sales directly from computer drawings. Instead, they produce and test dozens and dozens of prototypes to identify defects and ways to improve the final product before mass sales begin. If Toyota couldn’t test prototypes of their vehicles, they would have two bad options: 1) potentially producing poor quality vehicles and losing future customers, or 2) playing it safe and producing the same vehicles they always have. Faced with such a choice, playing it safe is the best option, even if it’s suboptimal.
This is why government policy evolves so slowly when compared with the pace of technological or economic change. We intuitively understand this when couched in terms of product design, but for whatever reason, we fail to extend this logic to our policymakers. Why do we expect policymakers to get something as immensely complex as, for example, healthcare or education reform, right on the first try? Unless able to test their ideas in pilot zones or charter cities first, they too face a similar set of bad options: risk producing bad policy or staying the course with suboptimal outcomes. The latter is almost always preferable, breeding stasis, mediocrity, and resistance to innovation and progress. Pilot zones offer us the opportunity to collect data on a smaller scale with less downside risk.
Additionally, pilot zones can accumulate this data faster. Policy measures like tax design or education reform, for example, would no longer need to be tested sequentially over decades as they are today. Instead, they could be tested in parallel across several different pilot zones. This “natural laboratory” would enable us to compress decades of learning about complex human systems into a few short years. Further, if given some autonomy, charter cities/pilot zones could even compete with one another. People vote with their wallets and their feet. A charter city with strong pro-progress policies will attract talent and capital, forcing others to learn from its success. City-state competition has precedent historically. Indeed, many of the most innovative and dynamic civilizations in human history were loosely aligned but competitive city-states, from ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy.
In the Origin’s section of the Pathways of Progress series, we learned that all human progress is underpinned by growing the collective stock of human knowledge. In the Peril’s section of this series, we learned that civilization’s long-term survival hinges on our ability to accelerate the accumulation of this knowledge. It’s time, therefore, to upgrade our “social supercomputer” to accelerate the total “compute” of humanity. In the upcoming essays, we will discuss policy concepts and ideas that seek to optimize and accelerate progress, unlocking greater human potential, capability, and general prosperity for all.
Accelerate, always.
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