That's what I was thinking while reading: the author is just describing economics while ignoring the fact that

> The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account (FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit)

I agree that we don't need a new field, but it seems also that the idea of designing progress is a fool's errand.

I like to think of it as a matter of scale. At a very low scale, a human mind designing a process can be efficient (a specific part of an assembly line, a function, etc.) As you scale, you quickly reach a point where one mind is worse than many, even if those minds are communicating mostly through such apparently low-bandwidth measures as observing the flow of money.

There's a Twitter thread critiquing Progress Studies from a similar angle. This reply in particular caught my eye:

https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/115630161497577063...

It compares the proposed approach to WW2 Abraham Wald airplane bullet pattern analysis [1] and Survivor Bias.

[1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...