Progress and the Invisible Hand

What is "progress"? In Richard Bronk's analytic study of this concept, he separates the material progress of a nation from the more problematic progress in human happiness and welfare. He wonders how a feel-bad factor can exist in a country with a steadily increasing GDP. Bronk then looks at other times and mind-sets (the Ancient World, the Early Christian, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) to discover why their particular economic progress eventually failed, or (in the case of the Enlightenment) was ultimately successful. Among the conditions which he believes must be met before a belief in, and drive towards progress can result include: experience of positive change in one lifetime; knowledge of, but critical relationship with, the past and faith in the power of human reason and skills to engineer and control change. The text questions many of the basic assumptions behind our headlong pursuit of progress and may provoke and disquiet in equal measure.