Aims and Activities of the Council:

“Flourishing Through Progress.”

The Council promotes transformative enterprise (“progress”) through thoughtful, broad-based discourse. Besides providing material comforts, transformative enterprise enables Aristotelian “flourishing.” Individualistic and competitive as well as organized and collaborative, striving for progress helps unify and civilize human societies. Its reaffirmation is vital at a time when public discourse often disdains progress or is dominated by destructive diatribe.

Yet, trumpeting the virtues of progress is not enough. Thoughtful promotion requires understanding a complex, ever-changing process that siloed scholarship and doctrinaire commitments can obscure. We therefore promote discourse across many disciplines and scholarly communities and between abstract thinkers and active doers.

Unlike think tanks, we promote no ideology or public policies. We will provide a crucible for ideas that, then expressed by individual discoursers, will speak for themselves. The crucible will also help form an epistemically diverse community that is thoughtfully but not blindly committed to progress.

We are inspired by the now defunct Center on Capitalism and Society, that Edmund Phelps (who won a Nobel in economics in 2006) had started in 2001. Unlike Phelps’s Center, however, we place more emphasis on a sympathetic understanding of scientific, technological, and artistic advances than on reforming economics.

The Council will be entirely virtual, operating without a budget or staff. It will instead rely on the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) for administrative support, including contracting with donors and receiving and disbursing donor funds. The NYAS will also provide intellectual support. The Council and NYAS will jointly sponsor and support annual conferences hosted by a rotation of institutions and centers interested in understanding progress.

Our conferences will be small, serious, and resolutely apolitical. Moreover, while acknowledging the interaction of scientific, technical, and artistic progress with questions of equality, social justice, property rights and so on, our conferences will not make such questions their main target. There are abundant venues for such questions; there is no gap for us to fill.

Concretely, we envision an inaugural conference in 2027 on “Human Flourishing Through Progress” and a 2028 conference on “Organizing and Financing Technological Advances.”  Subsequent conferences could cover more specific influences on progress[1] or mark anniversaries of landmark advances.[2]

 While annual conference will be our flagship activity, the Council/NYAS partnership could eventually start a publication program (including working papers, conference volumes, and reviving Capitalism and Society) and educational projects.

Notes:

[1] Conference topics after 2028 could include the role of individuals (“Do ‘exceptional’ individuals matter?”), legal systems, social and religious beliefs, long-distance trade and migration, foundational technological advances (such as steam and electrical power, telegraphy, telephones, the internet, and genetic engineering), and the media and creative arts.

[2]  Anniversary conferences could mark Pasteur’s rabies vaccine, the trans-Atlantic wireless cable, Marconi’s radio transmission, the eradication of polio and smallpox, Timothy Berners-Lee’s web browser, and the launch of the iPhone.

Funding and Membership Disclosures (as of May 2026):

Don Gogel, who has been a “hand’s on” supporter of prominent civic institutions, particularly in medical research and health care, is the Council’s lead donor. Don has committed to funding five annual conferences @ $250,000 per conference. Don’s gift will be made to the NYAS, and not the Council. Paul De Rosa and Amar Bhide have contributed approximately $250,000 and $270,000 respectively to a Donor Advised Fund which will similarly direct funds to the NYAS.  

About 50 distinguished thinkers and doers have agreed to join the Council. Membership is free and in the interest of maintaining a low profile, not actively publicized. However, this policy may change if the non-disclosure of members becomes controversial.

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