Progress trap

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A Progress trap is a situation in which the inevitable negative long-term consequences of an action outweigh the gains of that action perceived as progress because it solved a problem in the short term. The term was coined by Daniel B. O'Leary, whose copyright for the book: "The Progress Trap - and how to avoid it" was registered in 1991. However it first gained notoriety from the historian and novelist Ronald Wright's 2005 non-fiction book "A Short History of Progress", elaborated from his 2004 Massey lecture.

While the idea not new, Wright locates the central problem as being one of scale, the error often being to extrapolate the positive expectation of what works well for long on a small scale until for example resources are overstretched or environmental damage becomes untenable (overpopulation, erosion, greenhouse gases etc.). The book sketches world history as a succession of progress traps.

Thus even in early stone age, perfecting hunting techniques already resulted in the extinction of prey species. The only viable alternative, agriculture, in time proved even more progress trap-prone. Almost any sphere of technology can prove a progress trap, even medicine: for example, eliminating natural selection had already caused an enormous increase in genetic risks.

The example he states as the first ultimate one on a global scale, weapon technology reaching the treat of total nuclear destruction, is perhaps a bad one: is military technology as such progress, or rather neither good nor bad in se, and would the alternative not have been an apocalyptic World War III instead of the Cold War? Ultimately, Wright strives to counter the modern notion that progress is unconditionally a good thing.

[edit] Sources and references

• British socialist newspaper review by Brian Precious
• Zealand Listener review by David Larsen
• Escaping the progress trap, by D.B. O'Leary