Lukas Althoff

Progress is humanity's defining achievement: the cumulative process of each generation building on the knowledge of the last. It came slowly at first — millennia from foraging to settled agriculture, centuries from agriculture to industry — then astonishingly fast. But progress has not been shared equally. Every great leap forward created winners and losers. In this course, we explore what drives progress, what determines who gets to benefit from it, and what we can do to promote broadly shared progress. We trace the tension between progress and inequality from forager societies to Artificial Intelligence, using tools from economic history, applied microeconomics, and data analysis. Students read frontier research and popular writing. They will work with historical and contemporary datasets. The centerpiece is a storytelling project: using AI tools, you will build an interactive visual essay that brings one aspect of progress to life for a broad audience. You pick the topic. Make it worth reading.

This graduate course emphasizes theoretical and empirical methods for studying long-run economic change, with a focus on the forces that drive progress and the barriers that prevent it from being broadly shared. Drawing on historical evidence and economic analysis, we investigate how societies have generated — and distributed — economic opportunity, and what lessons the past provides for the future. While the evidence will span various periods of American history, the course will not cover those periods chronologically but rather focus on critical analysis of specific questions and mechanisms of change.