Why Small Gains Can Transform South Africa
(This is the English version of my Afrikaans story in Die Papier on Friday 29 May)
South Africa grew its economy by 1.1% last year. Per capita, once you subtract population growth, that rounds to almost nothing. Life expectancy sits around 65, a full decade below the global average. Unemployment has been above 30% for years. The national mood, across the political spectrum, tends toward fatalism: the problems are too deep, the institutions too broken, the inequality too entrenched. We need a miracle, and miracles are not coming.
But this framing gets something wrong. It misunderstands how progress works, and it understates what modest, sustained improvement can achieve over time.
In 2019, Patrick Collison, co-founder of the payments company Stripe, and Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, published an article in The Atlantic arguing that progress itself is understudied. They defined progress as the combination of economic, technological, scientific, and institutional advancement that has raised living standards over two centuries. Their observation was simple: no broad intellectual movement existed to understand why some societies make rapid advances while others stagnate, or to apply those lessons deliberately. They proposed a new field, “Progress Studies,” and described it as closer to medicine than biology. The goal would be to treat, not merely to understand.
Since then, a growing research community has taken up the challenge, producing new think tanks, publications, and analytical tools. Among the most striking recent contributions comes from Matt Clancy, an economist at the Abundance and Growth Fund. In an April 2026 blog post titled “A Little Progress Is Worth a Trillion Dollars,” Clancy asked a deceptively simple question: what would a tiny, one-off acceleration in progress actually be worth?
His answer, for the United States, was startling. If per capita economic growth rose from 2.0% to 2.1% for just one year before dropping back to normal, and health improvements accelerated by a similar margin, the combined welfare gain would be roughly $1.2 trillion. The logic is that even after the burst ends, the economy operates from a permanently higher base. Think of a runner who briefly sprints before reverting to their usual pace. They remain ahead of where they would have been.
Clancy built a formal model, grounded in the welfare framework of economists Charles Jones and Peter Klenow, and made the code publicly available. I ran the same model with South African parameters: our lower life expectancy (65 years), our slower per capita growth (around 0.5%), our smaller economy and population, and appropriately scaled estimates for the value of a statistical life-year.
The results reframe the South African debate.
Consider a scenario where per capita growth rises from 0.5% to 1.0% for a single year. That half-percentage-point improvement, sustained for just twelve months before the economy reverts to its old trajectory, generates a present-value welfare gain of roughly $121 billion, or about R2.2 trillion. That figure accounts for the permanently higher income base that all 63 million South Africans would work from indefinitely.
Now consider health. South Africa’s life expectancy has climbed from roughly 53 years in 2005, the worst of the HIV/AIDS crisis, to about 65 today. If biomedical or public health progress accelerated enough to deliver one extra year of that improvement trajectory (about 110 additional days of life per person), the welfare value runs to $154 billion, or R2.8 trillion, even with no income effect at all.
Combine modest gains on both fronts and the numbers grow further. A one-year package that adds half a percentage point to per capita growth and accelerates health gains by 50% is worth roughly R3.6 trillion.
The compounding arithmetic tells a similar story in plainer terms. Over 25 years, the difference between 0.4% and 0.9% annual per capita growth is the difference between a country that is 10% richer per person and one that is 25% richer. For 63 million people, that gap translates to about $147 billion in cumulative income. At 1.5% per capita growth, still below what countries like India and Vietnam have managed, we would be 45% richer.
None of these scenarios require a miracle. A half-percentage-point lift in per capita growth could come from fixing port and rail bottlenecks, streamlining municipal approvals for construction, expanding electricity generation, or reducing the regulatory cost of hiring. Each reform is unglamorous on its own. Together, compounded over time, they are transformative.
The progress studies lens offers South Africa something the national debate badly needs: a middle ground between despair and fantasy. We do not need 8% growth to change our trajectory. We do not need a single grand plan. We need a sustained commitment to making things a little better, year after year, on multiple fronts simultaneously.
The mathematics is unforgiving in both directions. Stagnation compounds too. But so does improvement, and the returns to even small gains, spread across millions of people and decades of time, are far larger than our intuitions suggest.
A little progress, it turns out, is worth a great deal.