Roots of Progress Institute

Meet the 2026 Blog-Building Intensive fellows!

We are seeking a Development Coordinator, to own our fundraising process and all grants/donations. You will report directly to Jason Crawford, and work closely with him to fuel the work of our fantastic team towards our mission: to build a culture of progress and restore an ambitious vision of the future. Plus, you will also get to meet some of the smartest, most accomplished, and best-informed people in the world: our donors. https://lnkd.in/gsGzU_zi

The Roots of Progress Institute is hiring a Head of Communications, and a Program Manager for our fellowship! The Head of Comms will own our online audiences (60k Substack, 43k Twitter) and all our launches and announcements, including Jason Crawford's book launch next year. You will work directly with him to broadcast our ideas and amplify the work of our fantastic team. No slop or clickbait allowed. Great for someone in the progress community who is Very Online. Program Manager, Fellowships will take over the excellent Blog-Building Intensive, working directly with the fabulous Emma McAleavy and our 100+ fellows. Great for someone highly organized who also loves helping people grow. Bonus perk of both roles: an invite and free ticket to our annual Progress Conference! https://lnkd.in/gfViSgti

Progress Conference 2026 will again be a main event for the progress community. In the last two months we’ve added 10 more speakers: Bill Gross (Idealab), Dean Ball (FAI, OpenAI), Matt Bateman (Alpha School), Madeline Hart (Palantir), Minn Kim (Lighthouse), Brian Potter (Construction Physics), Noor Siddiqui (Orchid Health), Jacob Steinhardt (Transluce, UC Berkeley), Wojciech Zaremba (OpenAI Foundation), and Devon Zuegel (Esmeralda Land Company)… and a few more still to be announced. Our speaker list is now closed—we’ve started a list for 2027—and we’re excited about lots of attendee-organized sessions too. We’ll record the speaker talks again, so anyone can watch those shortly after the conference. You can see talks from 2024 and 2025 on the RPI YouTube channel. Many thanks to our 11 additional sponsors including: Renaissance Philanthropy, Halcyon Futures, Inclusive Abundance, Stand Together, Human Progress, Kindred Subjects, YIMBY Action, Arboreal Capital, California Institute for Biodiversity, Recoding America Fund, and Sentinel Bio. Sponsorships make events like this one possible. We have just a few more sponsorship opportunities available. This is the third annual progress conference, and we received well over 700 applications to attend, more than any other year so far. Our open application window is now closed and the conference will be sold out any day. With this much interest, it’s clear that the progress movement is growing. There’s more than enough excited, passionate people to fill multiple conferences, workshops, regional events, and so on. We’ll keep working to build the progress community, and we hope to partner with more organizations to create more in-person gatherings. https://lnkd.in/etB8_6dw

Announcing the third Annual Progress Conference! The pace of technological change feels faster this year, and the progress movement is growing too. Gathering people together helps build community and establish a movement’s identity. We want this annual event to continue to connect and inspire people, catalyze new projects, and share ideas. Thanks to everyone who made Progress Conference 2025 great: over 350 people attended, the event sold out in June, and there were hundreds of interested people on the waitlist. Several attendees again said it was the best conference they had ever attended. We shared more of our reflections on our blog, including a list of write-ups from writers like Santi Ruiz, Ruy Teixeira, Ryan Puzycki, and more. We are excited to build on that momentum for 2026: Hosted by: the Roots of Progress Institute, together with Abundance Institute, Foresight Institute, Foundation for American Innovation, Human Progress, Institute for Humane Studies, IFP – Institute for Progress, and Works In Progress. When: October 8–11, 2026. Where: Berkeley, CA, again at the Lighthaven campus that got great reviews the last two years. Speakers: Keynote speakers include Dmitri Dolgov (Co-CEO, Waymo), Tyler Cowen (Mercatus Center), Stephen Winchell (Director, DARPA), John Martinis (Qolab; Nobel Laureate in Physics), and Michael Kremer (University of Chicago; Nobel Laureate in Economics). 20+ additional speakers will share ideas across three tracks: Human Talent & Potential, AI & Robotics, and Security & Resilience. Attendees: We expect ~400 leaders across tech, policy, and culture; builders, founders, policymakers, storytellers, writers, and students. This is an invitation-only event, but anyone can apply for an invitation. Complete the open application on our website by May 31st. Program: Similar to 2025, the main two-day conference will happen all day on Friday and Saturday. Participants will attend talks on topics ranging from AI and robotics to housing construction to psychology and philosophy of builders, organize and run unconference sessions, mingle in the garden, and more. Thursday and Sunday are add-on days, with optional gatherings for interest groups and other activities like factory tours to Bay Area startups. Children under 12 years old are welcome—must be accompanied by a parent at all times (except during childcare). We also plan to have on-site childcare available on Friday and Saturday with progress-themed programming. Sponsors: Special thanks to our early sponsors Coefficient Giving, Astera Institute, Ken Broad, Works In Progress, Halcyon Futures, Inclusive Abundance, LENS, MNX, Archbridge Institute, Good Science Project, Institute for Humane Studies, Circulate Planning & Policy, and Foundation for Economic Education. Sponsorships make events like this one possible. We have more sponsorships available; see the conference info page below or contact us for details. https://lnkd.in/etB8_6dw

This May, the Center for Economy and Society at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the Roots of Progress Institute are co-hosting a workshop in Washington, D.C., with financial support from Coefficient Giving. The goal: help university faculty design courses incorporating progress studies into their own disciplines. Hosted by Steven Teles, Simon Halliday, and Jason Crawford, the Teaching Progress workshop will bring together faculty members from engineering schools, business schools, and social science and humanities departments, along with public intellectuals from RPI and other stakeholders in progress studies. Participants will alternate between presentations by progress scholars and intensive working sessions developing syllabi for their own courses. The workshop will include sessions from: -- Kevin Bryan (University of Toronto) on "Progress, or How Big Things Get Done": A graduate seminar integrating economic history, the history of technology, institutional economics, and philosophy -- Simon Halliday (Johns Hopkins University) and Matt Burgess (University of Wyoming) will respond, presenting their undergraduate courses designed for students encountering these ideas for the first time. Simon’s course includes experiential components like factory visits and industry guest speakers. Matt’s course "American Economic Success" integrates progress studies with foundational readings from Pinker, Henrich, Koyama & Rubin, and others. -- Ohid Yaqub (University of Sussex) will lead a discussion on industrial policy, bringing an international perspective on how governments fund and organize progress. -- John Handel (Baylor University) and Lee Vinsel (Virginia Tech) will present complementary views on “Maintaining Progress”, discussing what happens as technologies move from breakthrough to implementation at scale and the bottlenecks, second-order effects, and longer-run problems as new systems grow and decay. ... and more. Participants will leave with draft syllabi, curated reading lists, and pedagogical strategies ready for implementation. Our goal is that the workshop produces publicly available resources—model syllabi, case studies, and teaching guides—that other faculty can adapt. Details: May 21–24, 2026 (Memorial Day weekend), Washington, D.C. No cost to participants (travel stipend, hotel, and food included). This workshop is made possible by generous support from Coefficient Giving. Interested in participating? We have room for a few more attendees at this invitation-only event. If you teach at the university level, can commit to teaching a course on progress in your discipline by the end of 2027, and are interested in attending, we'd like to hear from you. Please email us at teaching-progress@rootsofprogress.org with what you teach and why you'd like to be invited, no later than April 17th, 2026. https://lnkd.in/gBSZsNVq

Applications are now open for the 2026 Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive! This 10-week program helps aspiring progress writers start or level up their blogs. Last year's fellows are now leading conversations on immigration, housing, transportation, and more, with work appearing in major outlets like NYT and WSJ. They helped write the U.S. AI policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology (Dean Ball), they are co-authoring books on reindustrializing America (Madeline Hart) and helping to steer major U.S. cities towards housing abundance (Ryan Puzycki).  This year, our fourth cohort of fellows will learn from an all-start line-up of speakers, including Tyler Cowen, Virginia Postrel, Eli Dourado, Greg Lukianoff, Alice Evans, Brian Potter and and other leading progress intellectuals, writers and experts. What you'll get: — Launch a blog/Substack with professional guidance — Develop consistent writing habits — Receive feedback from a professional editor and the RPI team — Connect with progress studies leaders — Attend an in-person retreat in Pennsylvania (outside of D.C.)  — Receive a ticket to the Progress Conference Special tracks this year: Security & Resilience and Human Talent & Potential. Writers on any progress topic are welcome, however. Who should apply? Anyone passionate about progress studies who loves to write. The program runs July 27–Oct 2 with no cost to participate. Applications close June 1st with rolling admissions. Link to apply below! What questions do you have about the program? Drop them below! 👇 https://lnkd.in/gF7PDPMr

“Sorry I [haven’t replied to your email / couldn’t make your event / have been ignoring your texts]. I’ve been vibecoding” https://lnkd.in/ekSxscZ4

“Some kind of turning point,” Elon on Dwarkesh, a social network for AIs, and lots more in the latest links digest: https://lnkd.in/e6D8H43W

Progressives used to believe in progress. The old left was not just the party of science—it was a party of science, technology & growth. Today’s progressives must embrace all three if they want to become the champions of abundance https://lnkd.in/esbSDJXi