It's true that the ability to coordinate and harness human talent is the fundamental task of civilization, but I think the author is missing a step where they accurately link that to successful left wing policy. The author doesn't appear to address counterexamples.

Using his own 'man landing on the moon' scenario. Why did the USA beat the USSR to the moon? Then subsequently pull ahead technologically? Was the USA in the 1950-1980s more or less left wing than the USSR? Was East Germany more or less 'left wing' than West Germany?

Has China's swift rise coincided with a shift to the left in their economic system or a shift to allow market forces?

>I am writing this on a laptop produced by a chain of activity stretching across the planet. Thousands of people were involved in turning sand, rare metals, aluminium ore, petroleum and electrical energy into the slab of silicon, metal and plastic sitting in front of me. Engineers designed its processors. Miners extracted its materials. Factory workers assembled its components. Software developers wrote the systems that allow me to use it. No single person knows how to turn the raw materials into a computer. Once again, no one needs to.

No one needs to, because it's much easier to coordinate a market economy according to self-interest than it is to centrally plan every step of the process. "I, Pencil" is usually a defense of market economies, and their ability to coordinate the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

Apollo is a funny choice of example here, because if you trace the technology backwards you don't get a progressive story, you get V-2 rockets screaming across the sky towards London.

Beyond the fundamental developments in rocketry, the majority of the stuff that made Apollo possible was developed through WWII and to serve the purposes of the Cold War: radar, telemetry, semiconductor electronics, integrated circuits, etc. The Saturn program itself grew out of the ballistic-missile/ICBM programs.

Sure, Apollo required an extraordinary amount of cooperation, but I'd hardly call it prosocial, international, or universal. Much of the predicate capability was produced by states competing to build increasingly effective ways of killing people and only incidentally for peace for all mankind.

Mistaking progress in the logistics of state violence for cosmopolitan cooperation is a very deadly error; it's what allows authoritarian orchestration to escalate unhindered because its true purpose is fundamentally masked by good vibes.

Inclusion is an orthogonal metric to whether a society is progressing. Totalitarian societies can be inclusive--anyone can be made a tool for the purposes of the State. And if people are concerned more with expanding who wears the jackboots, the less concerned they are with actually getting rid of the jackboots.

The history leans to the left is the core underpinning of communist parties everywhere, hence the coopting of the term progressive and progress.

The role of the communist party wherever it resides is to accelerate the historical forces to the proletariat utopia they believe lies at the end of history.

This is of course ridiculous, there is no end state of history, other than everyone died.

And of course the author confuses liberalism with the left as many in the Anglosphere do, mostly because they have lived in places where the "left" party is usually some sort of social democrats at their most extreme.

Ah, yes. That's why Germany transformed from abject poverty after losing WWI into a superpower under the left wing management of the National Socialists.

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Short answer is --- "Yes", hstory shows that reality has a liberal bias.

Historically, "societies that waste human capacity through exclusion and conflict" end up poorer as a result.

And the proof is smacking you up the side of the head as we speak. "America First" (aka Israel First) is about regressive isolation, threats, intimidation, open conflict, increased taxes (aka "tariffs") and economic contraction.

Deny it if it makes you feel better about yourself but the cold, hard results will continue to speak for themselves.