Archetype
We estimate roughly 2% of people fit this profile — about 1 in 50.
You believe technology and global markets will solve humanity's greatest challenges. Innovation thrives with free trade, open borders, and rapid social change.
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The thinkers whose ideas this type descends from. Most lived in other eras and never identified with it.
1748–1832
Bentham's faith in rational planning, systematic reform, and calculation applied to social problems is the philosophical seed of technocratic progressivism. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is where it's planted.
b. 1946
Draw your moral circle by the capacity to suffer, not by species or borders, and you are reasoning with Animal Liberation and his famine-relief argument. The pull toward evidence-driven benevolence—doing the most good measurably possible—runs straight through effective altruism to his utilitarian premises.
b. 1964
More founded extropian transhumanism by fusing libertarian self-ownership with a faith that technology can extend life and remake the human condition itself. You feel its pull: no limit is fixed, the body included.
b. 1973
Faith in technology carries a shadow: the same power that could remake humanity could also end it — which turns existential risk and superintelligent AI into questions of governance, not science fiction. Bostrom set the long-term future of humanity on your ledger.
b. 1979
When you insist that emerging technologies demand rigorous, probability-weighted reasoning rather than optimism or dread, you are working in the tradition he built. Through LessWrong and his AI-risk writing, he made existential risk and the discipline of calibrated judgment central to how technologists think about the future.
d. 1983
Fuller reframed politics as a global engineering problem: do ever more with ever less, and there's enough for everyone. In that light scarcity is a design failure, not a law of nature — which is exactly how you tend to see it.
Public figures associated with this position today. Listed for recognition, not endorsement.
b. 1986
Abundance, the book Thompson co-wrote, locates liberalism's real failure on the supply side — and you read the capacity to build and produce, not merely redistribute, as the heart of a workable pro-growth politics.
b. 1984
A liberalism that builds housing, transmission lines, and clean energy instead of one that only writes rules. Abundance, the book Klein wrote with Derek Thompson, is the manifesto for that turn, and it reads like a map of your instincts.
Progress isn't merely useful, it's a moral good — that's the claim you carry, and it's the one Crawford built The Roots of Progress to press, staking a moral case for technological and material advance inside the young progress-studies movement.
b. 1958
The Rational Optimist argues that markets and spontaneous order, not central design, are what actually drive human progress — the libertarian strain in your optimism. It runs back through Ridley's case for letting order emerge.
b. 1981
Growth is a progressive value: more people, more housing, more energy. One Billion Americans pushes the argument to national scale, and Yglesias's relentless case for building has been pulling his party toward it ever since.
When you insist that a liberalism worth having must be growth-focused and abundance-minded — refusing both scarcity politics and reflexive anti-market suspicion — you're working Smith's line. Noahpinion is where he keeps drawing it.
b. 1988
"Progress studies" — the field Collison helped launch — insists stagnation isn't neutral: whether a society still innovates is itself a political question. You treat the pace of invention as something to fight over, not wait on.
b. 1985
Transformative technology should be steered toward the common good — governed with regulation, its gains spread through something like a universal basic income — not simply unleashed. You take governing the technology as inseparable from building it.
b. 1954
The conviction that Enlightenment reason and hard evidence of human progress can settle an argument — rather than mood or pessimism — sits at the core of how you read the modern world. Pinker made that optimism a touchstone in the fights over liberalism and modernity.
The intellectual tradition this type is rooted in.
Traditions reached through the thinkers above — the more of them a tradition claims, the more this type leans on it.
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