I’m a little surprised and confused by that comment. It seems a bit like telling Sloan Kettering, “I have misunderstood your vision, which appears to be to create a new branch of biology… I had thought you were interested in trying to figure out how to cure cancer.”
I’m a little surprised and confused by that comment. It seems a bit like telling Sloan Kettering, “I have misunderstood your vision, which appears to be to create a new branch of biology… I had thought you were interested in trying to figure out how to cure cancer.”
Certainly, I am ultimately interested in sustaining and accelerating progress. (I would be whether or not it had stalled—indeed, I was skeptical of the stagnation hypothesis until I was a couple of years into this project.) I think that in order to do that, we need intellectual work to better understand and appreciate progress.
I wouldn’t call it a new branch of history, but maybe an interdisciplinary area that combines history, economics, and philosophy.