---
type: claim
domain: grand-strategy
description: "Schmachtenberger's redefinition of progress — the standard progress narrative cherry-picks narrow metrics while the optimization that produced them simultaneously generated cascading externalities invisible to those metrics"
confidence: likely
source: "Schmachtenberger 'Development in Progress' (2024), Part I analysis of Pinker/Rosling/Sagan progress claims"
created: 2026-04-03
related:
  - "the clockwork worldview produced solutions that worked for a century then undermined their own foundations as the progress they enabled changed the environment they assumed was stable"
  - "global capitalism functions as a misaligned autopoietic superintelligence running on human general intelligence as substrate with convert everything into capital as its objective function"
---

# For a change to equal progress it must systematically identify and internalize its externalities because immature progress that ignores cascading harms is the most dangerous ideology in the world

Schmachtenberger's Development in Progress paper (2024) makes a sustained 43,000-word argument that our concept of progress is immature and that this immaturity is itself the most dangerous force in the world.

The argument proceeds by dissolution. Four canonical progress claims are taken apart:

1. **Life expectancy.** Global life expectancy has risen, but this metric hides: declining quality of life in later years, epidemic-level chronic disease burden, mental health crisis (adolescent anxiety and depression at record levels), and environmental health degradation. "Living longer" and "living well" are not the same metric.

2. **Poverty.** The "$2/day" poverty line measures dollar income, not wellbeing. Subsistence communities with functioning social structures, food sovereignty, and cultural continuity are classified as "impoverished" by this metric while actually losing wellbeing when integrated into cash economies. Multidimensional deprivation indices tell a different story.

3. **Education.** Literacy rates and enrollment have risen, but educational outcome quality has declined in many contexts. More critically, formal education replaced intergenerational knowledge transfer — the wisdom of indigenous communities about local ecology, social cohesion, and sustainable practice was not captured by the metric that replaced it.

4. **Violence.** Pinker's "declining violence" thesis measures direct interpersonal and interstate violence while ignoring: structural violence (deaths from preventable poverty), weapons proliferation (destructive capacity per dollar has never been higher), surveillance-enabled control (violence displaced into asymmetric forms), and proxy warfare.

The mechanism: reductionist worldview → narrow optimization metrics → externalities invisible to those metrics → cascading failure when externalities accumulate past thresholds. This is the clockwork worldview applied to the concept of progress itself.

Schmachtenberger's proposed standard: "For a change to equal progress, it must systematically identify and internalize its externalities as far as reasonably possible." This means:
- Assessing nth-order effects across all domains touched by the change
- Accounting for effects on all stakeholders, not just the intended beneficiaries
- Measuring net impact across the full system, not just the target metric
- Accepting that genuine progress is slower and harder than narrow optimization

The Haber-Bosch case study makes this concrete: artificial fertilizer solved food production (genuine progress on one metric) while creating cascading externalities across soil health, water quality, human health, biodiversity, and ocean dead zones. A mature assessment of Haber-Bosch would have counted all of these — and might still have proceeded, but with mitigation built in rather than added decades later.

## Challenges

- The dissolution of canonical progress claims may overstate the case. Even accounting for externalities, the reduction in absolute deprivation (starvation, infant mortality, death from easily preventable disease) represents genuine progress by almost any standard.
- "Systematically identify externalities as far as reasonably possible" sets an impossibly high bar in practice. Yellow teaming (the operational methodology) has no track record at scale.
- The "most dangerous ideology" framing is rhetorical. Other ideologies (ethnonationalism, accelerationism) have more direct harm mechanisms. The claim is that immature progress is more dangerous because it's more widely held and less scrutinized — true but debatable.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[the clockwork worldview produced solutions that worked for a century then undermined their own foundations as the progress they enabled changed the environment they assumed was stable]] — the clockwork worldview IS the framework that produces immature progress
- [[global capitalism functions as a misaligned autopoietic superintelligence running on human general intelligence as substrate with convert everything into capital as its objective function]] — immature progress metrics (GDP) are the objective function of the misaligned SI

Topics:
- [[_map]]
