<ul>
<li>We still need a lot of progress for major challenges. We haven&#39;t yet cured all diseases; we don&#39;t yet know how to solve climate change; we don&#39;t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate natural disasters. </li>
<li>A lot of progress can also come from smaller advances that build upon one another and represent an enormous advance for society. The list of opportunities for improvement is very long.</li>
</ul>
Progress studies would consider the problem widely. They would study successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures, and attempt to create policies and prescriptions to help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.

Why progress studies are important

Leadership

The world would benefit from an organized effort from various disciplines to understand: 
<ul>
<li>How we should identify and train brilliant young people. </li>
<li>How the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas.</li>
<li>Which incentives should exist for participants in innovative ecosystems (scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers)</li>
<li>How much organizations differ in productivity. One recent study found that teaching better management practices to firms in Italy improved productivity by 49 percent over 15 years compared with peer firms that didn’t receive the training.</li>
<li>How scientists should be selected and funded. A recent paper concluded that long-term grants to high-potential scientists made those scientists 96 percent more likely to produce breakthrough work.</li>
</ul>

Benefiting from an organized effort

<ul>
<li>The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University tried to encourage optimistic thinking about the future through fiction and narrative.</li>
<li>An applied history movement is needed to help draw lessons from history and apply them to real-world problems.</li>
<li>In a world with Progress Studies, a new focus on progress belongs to a school of thought that would encourage a decentralized shift in priorities among academics, philanthropists, and funding agencies. This has already happened in climate-science research and the designation of Keynesian economics, which helped economists focus on fiscal policy as a tool for recession fighting.</li>
</ul>

Progress Studies antecedents

In effect, the goal of Progress Studies is to treat, not merely to understand.
The success of Progress Studies will lie in the following:
<ul>
<li>its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions</li>
<li>the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions.</li>
</ul>

The goal of Progress Studies

Humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better.

Progress Studies antecedents

We Need to Do More Research on Honesty

Honesty As A Blind Spot

Lying Is Becoming Mainstream

Dishonesty As a Global Currency