Opinion | We Know Shockingly Little About What Makes Humanity Prosper

When you say progress here, what are you actually talking about? Is it just shorthand for economic growth or G.D.P.? What is progress? For, me it is something along the lines of our success in realizing a liberal, pluralistic and prosperous society, and a sense among people that their offspring can and probably will do better than they themselves h... See more

I think it’s dangerous to take an excessively U.S.-centric perspective here. If you interact with or look at survey data, or otherwise try to assess what’s the sentiment of people in Poland, what’s the sentiment of people in India, or what’s the sentiment of people in Indonesia, they view the internet extremely positively. And I think correctly so,... See more

And at the same time, I think that the group of people who, by luck or by temperament, proved very, very good at using the internet, to some degree, distracts from the many, many, many people for whom the internet is fundamentally a distraction machine, or for whom the internet is creating, because of what we built on it. You know, shorter attentio... See more