My reaction to this is kind of similar to yours, and sort of in-between a lot of others'. A lot of posts here seem to be nay-saying the piece, but I'm not reall

My reaction to this is kind of similar to yours, and sort of in-between a lot of others'. A lot of posts here seem to be nay-saying the piece, but I'm not really sure that's right or wrong. The problem as I see it is it's not really clear how progress should be defined to address the sort of questions being asked in the article. Maybe someone has convincingly, and the article doesn't convey this, but without a clearer definition things seem to be a non-starter. I have some intuition that the question of the piece is not really nonsense, that there was something about the interwar and postwar period that was different. A lot of advances since then have been powerful incremental improvements on those postwar innovations, but incremental nonetheless. The one exception I personally maybe see is networked communications, which have really revolutionized a lot and are still disrupting things. But outside of that my sense is that life (in the US) hasn't changed in fundamental ways since, say, 1975. Things are really different in a lot of ways, but the basics are the same. Conversely, my sense is things are really different compared to 1915. On the other hand, I'm not sure any of my subjective senses of things are really accurate. I wasn't alive in 1915. So without quantifying anything convincingly this is all some armchair discussion. I do think these kinds of questions are important, and I suspect there's some way of getting at this, maybe with very high-level economic or public health data (I've read that the biggest increases in life expectancy in the last 200 years or so, for example, have not actually come from any medical procedure or tech advances, but rather public health advances). But I agree that the way we define things is critical, and it would be interesting to address the question of the article definitively positively or negatively.