The Long Arc of Human Progress

The list of things to worry about is never short. Poverty, crime, disease, war, political dysfunction, and now the question of how artificial intelligence will impact our world. It is easy to feel discouraged, and harder than ever to look away, because the media rewards conflict and our leaders so often seem locked in a stalemate.

But the problem you are trying to solve is not the same problem Washington is failing to solve. Washington has plenty of problems. They are real, and many of them are serious. They are also, for the most part, different from yours. Your problem is narrower and more personal: invest your money sensibly enough that you do not run out of it, and reach the goals that matter to you and your family. Those two problems get tangled together in the daily noise, and untangling them is most of the battle.

Solving your problem does not require the ability to predict the cycles of financial markets or the next big idea. It requires a portfolio that is built on a few timeless investment principles: owning quality investments backed by enduring businesses, diversifying because the future is genuinely uncertain, and holding the discipline to stay with a sound plan when fear is loudest. That last one is the hardest, and it is where most of the damage gets done.

That is what this series is for. It is less about optimism than about perspective: the steadiness to stay with a sound plan when the news makes abandoning it feel reasonable. Not a promise that everything will be fine, but the grounded confidence that comes from understanding why the long arc has bent toward progress, and why the forces behind it still hold.

Why progress is so easy to miss

One investor put it well: progress happens too slowly for people to notice, and setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore. We are wired to register what is going wrong, not what is quietly going right. A factory that closes is a story. A hundred thousand small improvements that never make the news are not. So our sense of the world skews dark, even as the underlying facts, measured over years rather than days, keep improving.

And measured over years, the record is hard to argue with. Since 1820 the share of the world living in extreme poverty has fallen from roughly 84 percent to under 10 percent. American life expectancy has gone from about 47 years in 1900 to nearly 79. A century ago fewer than one in ten Americans finished high school; today the figure is close to nine in ten. None of this was inevitable, and none of it means today’s problems are imaginary. It means the long arc bends in a direction that the daily feed will never show you.

For the investor, that arc matters more than any single headline. Over the last century, U.S. stocks have compounded at roughly 10 percent a year, including dividends, through the Depression, two world wars, a dozen recessions, the inflation of the 1970s, the crash of 1987, the dot-com collapse, the financial crisis, and a global pandemic. Anyone who abandoned the market because the news was bad had no shortage of reasons to do so. They were almost always wrong to. As Sir John Templeton warned, the four most dangerous words in investing are: this time it’s different.

The pillars beneath the arc

This is the part that is too often left out. It is not enough to point at the past and say history will repeat. History does not owe us anything. The reason to expect the long arc to continue is not that it always has, but that it rests on a set of foundations that are still standing, still doing their work, and in most respects still improving.

This series, which we call the Long Arc of Human Progress, takes those pillars one at a time. Seven of them stand out:

• Freedom and liberty, which let people speak, invent, invest, and associate as they choose
• The rule of law, the invisible infrastructure that makes a contract worth signing and a property worth owning
• Capitalism, the engine that turns ideas into industries and has lifted more people out of poverty than any system in history
• Democracy, the mechanism that gives ordinary people a voice, and allows a society to correct its mistakes without bloodshed
• Education, which turns raw potential into productivity and opportunity
• Scientific discovery, which keeps redrawing the boundaries of what is possible
• Resilience, the underrated capacity to absorb a shock and come back stronger

One clarification before we begin. These pillars are not uniquely American. They are universal forces that lift any society that protects them, and over two centuries they have lifted much of the world. But nowhere have they been combined as fully, or held as long, as in the United States. That is why the American story runs through these pages, and why it bears so directly on your portfolio: the U.S. market is where these forces have most reliably turned into long-term returns.

The goal here is not to argue that everything is fine. It plainly is not. Each of these foundations has real weaknesses, and we will name them rather than pretend they do not exist. Where a pillar is under strain, we will say so, and say what is being done about it. We include less bad news for a simple reason: you already have plenty of sources for that.

There is no shortage of opinion about where the country is headed. But on the narrow question of investing, the historical record is unusually clear. Long-term pessimists rarely prosper. Betting against the resilience of the American economy and the ingenuity of its people has, time and again, been a losing strategy. Not because optimism is a personality trait worth cultivating, but because the foundations that have driven progress are still in place.

Important Disclosures