State of Progress
Progress Studies · from the Global South

State of Progress

The state can enable progress — or hold it back.
State capacity in low- and middle-income countries

Progress Studies asks what makes progress possible. The field began in 2019, when Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison called for a new science of progress in The Atlantic, and it has answered mostly from developed, high-income countries. We ask the same questions from low- and middle-income countries.

EN · ES To help the ideas of progress travel further, this site is published in English and Spanish, and we translate key pieces.
What this is

A study of the state as a force of progress.

The study of progress — why it happens, what accelerates it, what holds it back — has become a serious field in recent years, developed by Jason Crawford and the Roots of Progress Institute, the magazine Works in Progress, the Institute for Progress, and a growing community of writers and researchers, among others. It is a conversation carried on almost entirely in English, and shaped by the concerns of rich countries.

We take that tradition as our starting point and extend it to the contexts it has least examined.

The state in low- and middle-income countries. States in these countries often cannot hire, plan, build, or deliver at the scale that progress requires. We call this state capacity, and we study it in both directions — as a force that can accelerate progress, and one that can hold it back.

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What we publish

State of Progress publishes articles and notes on state capacity — the state's ability to enable progress. New writing goes out on Substack and by newsletter.

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A public resource: the reading that informs this work, and an invitation to read along — a way to follow the conversation.

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