• Mission 300, a collaborative effort by the World Bank, the African Development Bank, The Rockefeller Foundation, and other public and private partners, has connected over 50 million people in Africa to electricity since launching in 2024. The initiative intends to connect 300 million by 2030.

Energy & Environment

• According to data compiled by the US Energy Information Administration, China’s nuclear energy generation capacity nearly doubled between 2016 and 2026, growing from 31.4 gigawatts to 58.7. The EIA also reports that 36 reactors, totaling another 38.9 GW of capacity, are currently being built in China, making up 49 percent of all global nuclear energy construction. All that development has led to learning; nuclear power plants in China are completed in an average of six years, three years faster than the global average.

• Loggerhead sea turtles are nesting in record numbers on the beaches of Boa Vista, a large island in the Cabo Verde archipelago. According to a recent study, nesting activity increased 80-fold between 1998 and 2024. The research also found that during peak years, some Boa Vista beaches contained over 22,000 nests per kilometer of shoreline—an incredible density compared with other major nesting sites.

• In the early 2000s, a population of flamingos began making the Venetian Lagoon their winter home. Since then, the annual population peak has risen to nearly 24,000 birds. The Associated Press quotes an ornithologist who claims the lagoon is now “one of the most important wintering spots in its entire habitat range.”

Food & Hunger

• Solar-powered cold storage systems are helping farmers save more of their produce in Africa, where many rural areas lack reliable electricity. SoKo Fresh, a Kenyan firm that leases space in solar cold rooms, claims its customers have cut spoilage from as high as 50 percent to under 2 percent.

Health & Demographics

• Doctors in Ontario recently used an experimental treatment to help treat a burn victim’s face. Instead of skin grafts, which can cause disfiguring scars, the doctors obtained a compassionate-use authorization to treat her face with exosomes, microscopic particles released by cells that carry repair signals to damaged tissues. After two treatments, her facial burns healed without grafting.

• An AI tool may have saved a man’s life in New York City. In a recent case report, a patient came to an emergency room with shortness of breath and was discharged with a presumed asthma flare-up. In reality, his heart was failing. Luckily, an AI model being trialed at the hospital analyzed his electrocardiogram, a routine test of the heart’s electrical activity, and flagged a high risk of structural heart disease. The patient was then called back and ultimately received a heart transplant. Pathway Labs, the company commercializing the AI software, plans to make it available for free to any physician who uses OpenEvidence, its free medical AI platform.

• CAR-T immunotherapy, which has so far been used mostly against blood cancers, is beginning to move into solid tumors. This week, a CAR-T immunotherapy called satri-cel became the first approved CAR-T therapy for solid tumors after receiving a green light from Chinese regulators.

• In England, zero women aged 20 to 24 died of cervical cancer between 2020 and 2024, the first recorded five-year period during which that has happened. Recent research associates the achievement with widespread HPV vaccination.

• Like the US, Canada is also seeing a large decline in overdose deaths. According to federal data, opioid-related deaths in Canada fell 23 percent between 2024 and 2025, while stimulant-related deaths fell 31 percent.

• The share of adults in India who use tobacco halved between 2000 and 2022, dropping from 50 percent to 24 percent.

Science & Technology

• Researchers involved in the Vesuvius Challenge have used detailed X-ray scans and machine learning to digitally “unroll” and read the surviving text of an entire carbonized Herculaneum scroll. The researchers had already used similar methods to read parts of other carbonized scrolls, but this recent work marked the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll had been read end to end. Unfortunately, because earlier attempts to physically unroll the scroll damaged its outer layers, only fragments of the original text are legible.

• “SpaceX has now launched more satellites than the rest of humanity, combined.”

• PepsiCo is operating a fleet of 35 driverless trucks in Arizona in what The Wall Street Journal describes as “the first major U.S. consumer-goods company to disclose the real-life, large-scale use of autonomous trucks on public roads.”

• A recent analysis of taxonomic history finds that the rate of species discovery has accelerated, with the annual number of new species descriptions rising above 16,000 between 2015 and 2020 and surpassing the previous peak in the early 1900s. The researchers also estimate that about 15 percent of all known species have been formally described in the past 20 years alone.

Read more news stories on our website

In his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon, the classic science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein explores the problem of nihilism or aimlessness that can befall a prosperous civilization. The cover of the book’s first edition reads, “The intriguing novel of a future Earth when science and technology have solved all problems – except the ‘why’ of life.”

This predicament of material prosperity combined with moral aimlessness is at least as resonant today as it was when Heinlein wrote in the mid-20^th century. What some researchers describe as a “crisis of purpose,” as well as my own personal knowledge of many of my peers, suggests that many people in developed society struggle to find a strong basis for moral conviction. Some cannot accept theological dogmas themselves but hope for a religious revival to rescue civilization from encroaching nihilism. Some believe that humans must agree on a set of broad humanist morals even while admitting an inability to offer firm grounding for such morals. Others advocate and celebrate the abolition of moral norms and standards altogether.

Heinlein imagines a different path forward.

When Hamilton Felix, one of the main characters in Beyond This Horizon, is offered the opportunity to contribute to the human race’s sustained prosperity, he questions why he should bother. An official named Mordan explains to Felix that by participating in a largely costless program he can aid in humanity’s far-future survival, but Felix replies, “Even so, I know of no reason why the human race should survive… There’s no point to being alive at all. I’m damned if I’ll contribute to continuing the comedy.” After Mordan continues attempting to persuade him, Felix replies, “Survival! What for? Until you can give me some convincing explanation why the human race should go on at all, my answer is ‘no.’”

Later in the book, Felix is again called upon to hear out Mordan. This time, Mordan has devised a response to Felix’s question about the “why” of it all. “I don’t propose to give you an answer here and now,” Mordan admits. But he asks, “Would you be willing to cooperate if you knew that a serious attempt was being made to answer your question?”

Mordan explains that, “Such a research might not be completed in years, or in our lifetimes. But suppose I declare to you that such a research were to be attempted, seriously, hard headedly, all out, and no trouble spared, would you then consent to co-operate?”

I shall not needlessly spoil Felix’s response, except to give away that this “Great Research” does eventually begin, and the characters of the novel realize that its scope and scale must be very grand in order to rise to the vastness of the project of searching the universe for moral truth. The narrator explains:

The Great Research in its opening phases seemed to fall into half a dozen major projects, some of which interested him more than others because they gave some hope of producing results during his lifetime. Some, however, were almost as colossal as the building of the Grand Eidouranion. The distribution of life through the physical universe, for example, and the possibility that other, nonhuman intelligences existed somewhere. If there were such, then it was possible, with an extremely high degree of mathematical probability, that some of them, at least, were more advanced than men. In which case they might give Man a “leg up” in his philosophical education. They might have discovered “Why” as well as “How.”

This fictional “Great Research” project of an epistemically mature, non-dogmatic civilization bears striking resemblance to a real prescription from leading moral philosophers in the 21^st century. The University of Oxford philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, founders of the highly influential effective altruism movement, have advocated what is often called the “Long Reflection” (a term coined by MacAskill).

These philosophers admit that, relative to the grand timescale of human history, humanity may not have made much progress yet in developing robust moral theories. But rather than conceding to nihilism, they point out that moral questions may not be impossible to answer even if they are so difficult that little to no progress has yet been made. Moral philosophy may still be in its infancy, like physics before Newton or biology before Darwin. In 1790 Immanuel Kant famously declared that “there will never be a Newton of the blade of grass,” failing to imagine that something as chaotic and complex as biological life could ever be subjected to a rigorous scientific theory. Darwin arguably proved him wrong less than a century later, and likewise, some future moral theorists may prove the nihilists and dogmatists wrong in ways not yet conceived.

Thus, the Oxford philosophers propose the Long Reflection: a hypothetical period of centuries, millennia, or longer for humanity to investigate moral questions instead of calling off the search for moral truth. As Ord explains it in his 2020 book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity:

During the Long Reflection, we would need to develop mature theories that allow us to compare the grand accomplishments our descendants might achieve with eons and galaxies as their canvas.

Present-day humans, myself included, are poorly positioned to anticipate the results of this reflection. But we are uniquely positioned to make it possible.

…

While moral philosophy would play a central role, the Long Reflection would require insights from many disciplines. For it isn’t just about determining which futures are best, but which are feasible in the first place, and which strategies are most likely to bring them about. This requires analysis from science, engineering, economics, political theory and beyond.

In his 2022 New York Times bestselling book What We Owe the Future, MacAskill elaborates:

I think we should accept that we don’t know what the ideal state would be; the primary question is how we can build a society such that, over time, our moral views improve… What we want to do is build a morally exploratory world: one structured so that, over time, the norms and institutions that are morally better are more likely to win out, leading us, over time, to converge on the best possible society.

As Heinlein depicts in his novel, and as Oxford philosophers Toby Ord, William MacAskill, and Nick Bostrom are now contending with, the post-Enlightenment scientifically sophisticated modern world is one in which no religious dogmas or naively adopted moral philosophies can be relied on to guide civilization. While plenty of radical sects still uphold their dogmas and fight for their causes, the baseline skepticism and belief siloing of the culture at large have become so strong that it is hard to imagine any one set of moral dogmas recapturing vast swaths of hearts and minds without a stronger philosophical basis than any already existing ideology has yet demonstrated.

But in such a society it is understood that the most important truths about the world are likely not yet discovered. Nihilism, like any other moral theory yet developed, should be considered too premature to win the day. Thus, epistemically mature society must not succumb to moral aimlessness. Rather, it must be devoted to the moral pursuit of expanding Enlightenment and expanding the scope and scale of human knowledge.

• A new study finds that economic liberalization is not at odds with protecting the environment. After examining 49 cases of sustained economic liberalization since 1970, economists Justin Callais, Vincent Geloso, and Alicia Plemmons found that, compared with similar countries that did not liberalize, reforming countries saw GDP per capita rise 16 percent within ten years, no effect on total greenhouse gas emissions, and a modest decline in air pollution deaths."

• Kangaroo Island, a large island off the Southern coast of Australia, has been fully cleared of invasive feral pigs, setting the stage for a recovery of native species.

• Recent research led by the Wildlife Conservation Society identified 64,000 square miles of coral reef that may be able to survive rising ocean temperatures. After identifying 42 variables that predict how well reefs weather climate change, such as proximity to cold water currents and cyclone exposure, the researchers used a machine learning model to comb through 45,000 coral field surveys and estimate which reefs are likely to retain their coral cover through 2050. The result is a global map of resilient reefs that could help conservationists determine the areas they should prioritize protecting.

Food & Hunger

• India, the world’s largest rice exporter, is entering a potentially poor monsoon season with its granaries full. Following a series of strong harvests, India has accumulated more than five times its target level of national rice reserves, giving the government a large buffer if future harvests disappoint.

• Despite increased demand (particularly from voracious children), berries are becoming more affordable in the United States. The economist Jeremy Horpedahl finds that between 2013 and 2023, median wages in the United States grew much faster than berry prices, reducing the working hours required to afford the fruits.

  

Health & Demographics

• According to provisional CDC data, the US infant mortality rate fell to an all-time low in 2025, reaching fewer than 5.4 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.

• A recently published analysis of data from the Global Burden of Disease study found that annual deaths from intestinal infections fell by 66 percent between 1990 and 2023, from 3.69 million to 1.27 million. The researchers credit wider vaccination, improved water and sanitation systems, and broader access to oral rehydration therapy.

• A new mosquito-breeding facility in France is producing 1.5 million sterile mosquitoes per week to help control the population of invasive tiger mosquitoes, which can carry diseases like dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. The owner, a startup called Terratis, plans to scale up production to 40 million mosquitoes per week within two years. For comparison, Brazil’s large Wolbachia-infected mosquito factory can produce 100 million mosquito eggs per week.

• Scientists have developed a maternal blood test that can detect thousands of serious fetal genetic conditions by analyzing DNA fragments in the mother’s bloodstream. In a study of 565 pregnancies, the test found more than 97 percent of the clinically relevant genetic variants detected by more invasive prenatal testing, suggesting doctors may be able to get much of the same information without sticking needles into wombs.

• Midjourney, a firm best known for AI image generation, has announced that it is developing a full-body ultrasound scanner that can map the entire human body in about 60 seconds, potentially turning advanced internal imaging into a routine service.

Science & Technology

• Currently, imaging satellites function as orbital sensors: they collect vast amounts of data and beam it back to Earth for interpretation. Artificial intelligence could turn them into orbital analysts. In a recent demonstration, a satellite with a vision-language model onboard was able to analyze imagery in orbit, hinting at a future where satellites autonomously “watch” the Earth for meaningful changes, such as wildfires, floods, crop failures, or troop movements.

• The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is now operating the country’s first dedicated space-weather satellite, which will help forecasters track solar phenomena that can disrupt power grids, communications, aviation, satellites, and space travel. The new satellite, called SOLAR-1, will observe the sun continuously and send images back to Earth within 30 minutes, much faster than the roughly eight hours required by older instruments.

• Most of the molecular machinery inside cells cannot be directly observed by humans. The most advanced cryo-electron microscopes can reveal the structure of about 10 percent of human proteins when they are isolated, and only about 1 percent when looking inside real cells. That may soon change. Researchers at Biohub and UC Berkeley have demonstrated a new method that dramatically boosts the contrast of cryo-electron microscope images, making faint biological structures much easier to see. The researchers estimate that the technology could make more than half of functionally important proteins visible.

Violence & Coercion

• Child marriage and domestic violence continue to decline in India. A recently published national survey found that 20.1 percent of women aged 20-24 were married as children in 2023 and 2024, down from 23.3 percent recorded in the previous survey conducted between 2019 and 2021. The same survey found that the share of married adult women who reported experiencing spousal violence dropped from 29.2 percent in 2019-21 to 22.3 percent in 2023-24.

Read more news stories on our website

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced an initiative last week to reduce the overprescribing of psychiatric medications, especially among children. In what’s being called a national mental-health crisis, psychiatric diagnoses in almost every category are reaching all-time highs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that autism now appears in 1 in 31 children, a 381% increase since 2000. Childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnoses nearly doubled between 1997 and 2022. Childhood anxiety diagnoses rose 54% between 2016 and 2022. Past-year prevalence of any mental illness among adults reached 23.1% in 2022, with young adults at 36.2%.

But much of the supposed surge in mental illness can be explained by a broadening of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria in recent decades and financial incentives for diagnosing more. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, extended by the Affordable Care Act in 2010, required health plans to cover mental-health services at parity with medical and surgical care. That addressed a genuine inequity in coverage, but made it so clinicians are paid more when they diagnose more cases.

The result is what economists call supplier-induced demand. Ideally, increased spending on mental-health care would yield better mental-health outcomes. Instead we have seen the opposite. Between 2000 and 2021, mental-health care spending in the U.S. more than tripled, from $40 billion to $140 billion, while mental-illness rates grew almost as dramatically.

Defenders of mental-health parity argue that spending and diagnoses are rising to meet previously unmet needs. But psychiatry is more subjective than other branches of medicine. No objective cutoff distinguishes ordinary worry from clinical anxiety, or grief from clinical depression. Findings are prone to distortion under the influence of nonpsychiatric factors.

When the National Institute of Mental Health says that half of all American adolescents have experienced mental illness, that isn’t psychiatry advancing as a field. It’s the result of various incentives for pathologizing ordinary struggle.

Wasteful spending and panic over a possibly nonexistent mental-health crisis would be bad enough. But psychiatric overdiagnosis creates an even more serious problem: overmedication. Roughly 1 in 6 American adults, an estimated 44 million people, are now on antidepressants. In young adults, those numbers are even higher. Thirty percent of college students take psychiatric medication, up from 9% in 2007.

For adults with mental conditions resistant to therapy, psychiatric medication can be effective. But we don’t understand the long-term consequences of many psychiatric drugs, particularly on young brains. We are running a large uncontrolled experiment on the developing brains of millions of young people, and we won’t know the full results for decades.

Meanwhile, the reimbursement architecture makes overmedication practically inevitable. Once a patient is on a drug, side effects are often addressed with a second drug rather than with a reassessment of the first. Clinicians call this the “prescribing cascade”: An antidepressant causes insomnia, so a sleep aid is added; a stimulant causes irritability, so a mood stabilizer follows. Each new prescription generates a billable visit, while tapering a patient off an ineffective drug takes time, monitoring and follow-up, which the billing system frequently doesn’t reimburse. Adding a prescription is the fastest, most reimbursable response at every stage of care.

The new HHS initiative rightly recognizes the harms of overprescription and the potential for negative side effects from long-term psychiatric medication in young people. It includes new reimbursement for clinicians who help patients taper off drugs, a “Dear Colleague” letter urging informed consent and regular reassessment, and a technical expert panel to develop formal tapering guidelines this summer.

These are sensible steps, but they don’t address the root cause. The fundamental problem is that federal law created an incentive structure that makes psychiatric medication the default for tens of millions of Americans who might be better served by therapy, lifestyle intervention or no clinical intervention at all.

To get physicians to stop overprescribing, the institutions that shape their choices should offer a greater reward for prescribing sparingly. In addition to new billing codes for deprescribing, what’s needed is a serious examination of whether the coverage mandates and reimbursement structures the ACA put in place are producing the outcomes they promised.

The mental-health system has improved over the past half-century. Effective treatments are more widely available, and people are more willing than ever to seek help. But the same mandates that have increased access to mental-health care have made overdiagnosis and overmedication the path of least resistance for a generation of clinicians and patients.

This article was originally published at the Wall Street Journal on 5/10/2026.

• The New York Times recently profiled the growing intra-African tourism industry, made possible by rising incomes, growing flight coverage, and loosening visa requirements.

• A new review process could help alleviate one of the biggest bottlenecks to building new power plants in America. Federal regulators have approved a plan to speed up interconnection reviews—the studies that determine whether new plants can safely connect to the grid—for large projects in PJM, the country’s biggest grid market. The new process will let PJM consider up to 10 major projects per year, with the goal of connecting qualifying plants to the grid within three years. Recently, the median time from filing an interconnection request to reaching commercial operation has stretched to over four years.

• Georgia is opening more licensed jobs to people with criminal records. Under a new law, licensing boards can no longer deny applicants based on vague “moral turpitude” standards; they must show that a conviction is directly related to the job. More than one in five jobs in Georgia requires an occupational license, including many in fields such as health care and childcare.

Energy & Environment

• Global mangrove forests are recovering. A recently published analysis of Landsat satellite imagery found that, although the global area of mangrove forests declined between the 1980s and 2010, it has since expanded massively, resulting in only a small net decline (−0.5% ± 1.4%) over the full forty-year period.

• US drinking water seems to be getting cleaner. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research analysis of 266 million drinking water readings found that the share of readings with levels of regulated pollutants that exceed current health standards fell by half between 2003 and 2019.

• Amazon says that its data centers are using water much more efficiently. According to a company report, Amazon’s data centers used just 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of compute in 2025, about one-seventh of the industry average and less than half of Amazon’s rate of 0.25 liters in 2021.

• The Northeastern Bulrush is no longer considered endangered in the United States following a more than elevenfold increase in the number of distinct populations.

Health & Demographics

• The FDA has approved a new sunscreen ingredient for the first time in 20 years. The reform is a long time coming—the ingredient, called bemotrizinol, has been available in Europe for decades—and should make sunscreens more effective. Bemotrizinol can effectively block both UVA and UVB rays, both of which can cause skin cancer, while sunscreens available in the US have historically been poorer at blocking UVA rays.

• A hospital in Tampa is using software from Palantir to rapidly detect cases of sepsis. The system aggregates data from health records, lab results, clinician notes, and bedside monitors to quickly flag potential sepsis cases, which the hospital claims are now treated within an hour (when it comes to sepsis, rapid treatment is crucial). Since the system was deployed in August 2022, sepsis deaths in the hospital have fallen 68 percent, saving an estimated 886 lives.

• Saloni Dattani and Niko McCarty have written another great roundup of recent innovations in biology, including more cancer treatment highlights, a potential cure for hepatitis B, and a major advancement in pharmaceutical production.

Science & Technology

• The crew of the US Army helicopter that went down near the Strait of Hormuz was rescued by an autonomous maritime drone, the first reported US military rescue operation using the technology.

• Amazon has developed a warehouse robot that can be assigned tasks using plain conversational English (and haul around carts weighing up to 400 kilograms).

• Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on treating age-related diseases, has begun the first human trial of a cellular anti-aging therapy. The treatment, which is being tested in patients with optic nerve damage, uses gene therapy to briefly activate a set of genes that, in mouse models, restored more youthful function to aged and injured cells.

Read more news stories on our website

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, economic historian Brian Domitrovic joins our managing editor Chelsea Follett to discuss why the conventional story of the Gilded Age is incomplete, how industrialization made ordinary Americans better off, and what we can learn from the triumphs of the Gilded Age.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

Below is an edited and abridged transcript featuring some highlights from the interview.

You have a recent piece in Law & Liberty called “Gilded Glory.” It starts off by noting that the Gilded Age is having something of a political moment. People are very interested in this time period, and they keep comparing it to our present one. What is going on with that?

Commentators are making a historical analogy between the Gilded Age—which refers to the post-Civil War generation and a half, maybe 1865 to 1910—and the present. The term “Gilded Age” implies that there were fantastic fortunes being made, and everyone else was scrambling. And it seems maybe that’s what we’re going through today with Elon Musk and everyone else.

Now, I think there’s a little bit of a misunderstanding about what the Gilded Age was all about. It is absolutely true that fantastic fortunes came about in that period; this was when the American economy took off like a rocket. But it was also the introduction and the perfection, I might say, of the phenomenon of mass prosperity. So, my first reaction was, well, to call this a new Gilded Age is arrogant. We’re some little whippersnapper trying to say we’re the best economy in the history of the world, because that’s really what the Gilded Age was.

You write, “The American economy in the quarter century after 1865 remains, without exaggeration, the greatest example of material development and the expansion of mass prosperity in world history.” Tell me about that.

The American economy became the largest in the world during the greatest boom of what we call the second Industrial Revolution. Your head spins if you look at the statistics. The two greatest decades of American economic growth, if you look at the blunderbuss GDP statistics, are the 1870s and the 1880s. Six percent growth per annum, and off a high base too. Ours is 2 percent today, if we’re lucky. So, we’re talking about triple the current rate of economic growth for 25 years. It’s just stunning to me that we would say, “Oh, we’re just like that.” No, we’re stagnating compared to that.

It really is difficult to conceptualize that rate of economic growth, but you make it concrete in the piece by pointing out how that affected the material standard of living.

Tell me about what was going on with housing during that time period.

I draw on a remarkable book called The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which Robert Gordon, the great economic historian, published about 10 years ago. It’s an absolutely comprehensive statement of what happened to the standard of living after 1865. One of Gordon’s points, and he has a ton of them, is that the housing stock in the United States completely turned over after 1870. And he points out how exceptionally high quality these structures were, including, astonishingly, the tenements of New York City. A tenement was defined as a building that had three or more living units. And in New York City, these things sprang up like crazy. They were networked for plumbing, for heating, and then soon for electricity and communication systems. Before, these services were almost unheard of—there were maybe a few places in cities that had that stuff—but they became de rigueur from 1870 through 1900. So, we hear that we’re in a new Gilded Age and our big vexation today is that young people can’t afford homes, but that is completely different from the Gilded Age. The Gilded Age pioneered the concept of young people being able to afford homes. There was a massive amount of new housing, it was cheap and high quality, and everyone bought it.

You also explore what was going on with food and clothing production during the Gilded Age.

The United States after 1865 moved decisively away from having to preoccupy itself with the rude necessities of life. Clothing had been mass-produced since the 1810s, but all of a sudden, closets had to be added to homes because people started to have so many ready-made outfits. And food is another section entirely. One might say that the greatest economic advance of the Gilded Age came from farm engineering. The mechanization of agriculture essentially eliminated the problem of food production.

You claim in the piece that the mechanization of agriculture enabled both ecological conservation and a rebirth of architecture Tell me about that.

The American people needed every ounce of land that they had, dating back to the colonial period, in order to push crops out of the ground and to raise livestock. In the original aerial photography of this country from the earliest days of aviation, you can see these incredibly large distances that are just clear-cut. And that was what caused the ecological disasters of the 19th century, the elimination of species and all that stuff. Well, mechanization and other scientific advances in agriculture reversed that after 1865. The number of farm plots sank like a stone. And then you just had land available for whatever you wanted to do with it. Some of it was preserved in the national parks, Yosemite and so forth. Some was built upon. The plat books of this time are amazing; all these farms were zoned into housing and buildings. And then the third option was you could just let it reforest. There was a great reforestation in the 20th century that coincided with suburbanization, and that process got started in the Gilded Age.

And the thing I have to say about architecture is, boy, was the architecture good.

American architecture owes its origin to the fantastic economic successes of the Gilded Age. The newly available land and the development of an urban society, which required huge agricultural production, enabled American architecture. I mean, what are the American architectural highlights prior to 1865? Really, they’re almost confined to the colonial and federal period, which was kind of hardscrabble. That’s not the case after 1865. After 1865, you have a society that can confidently feed itself, develop the land, and build not only monuments to itself, but great spaces to live and conduct its business.

Now, this is a very counterintuitive narrative of the Gilded Age, but you do have some serious caveats in your piece, right?

Yeah, there’s absolutely no reason to romanticize the Gilded Age. I mean, the economy was fantastic, which is why so many immigrants came to the United States during that period, but all societies have their problems. There were often employers and businessmen who were rapacious, and that did give a fillip to an unproductive labor movement, government employment, and other alternatives to the market economy. Political corruption was the name of the game in many ways, and the solutions to the political corruption were not ideal.

You also make a big distinction between the period up through the 1880s and the 1890s, and you say that, actually, the 1890s might be a fair comparison to our current era. Why is that?

Yeah, there was a big depression in the 1890s that was completely engineered by the federal government. They passed a huge tariff in the 1890s and had no idea what to do with their monetary system. So economic growth collapsed for a little while there in 1893, and it was kind of a slow crawl back, and that’s when you had the real labor agitation. So, I’ll take that as a comparison to 2008.

You also write some interesting things about what you call “the self-discrediting system of taxation and civil service that they had at the time.”

Can you explain what was going on with taxation and the civil service at that time, and how that system was self-discrediting, and why you nonetheless have a sort of optimistic view about how things were functioning under that system?

Two major ways that the government taxed and spent in the old days before 1913 had, at their core, self-discrediting mechanisms. And I think that was very important for the success of the country at large. What I mean by that is the tariff, which is duties on imported goods, always openly advertised itself as a favor-trading machine. Captains of industry always said, “Oh yeah, I’ve bribed a congressman so I can get this tariff on sugar, so I don’t have a competitor.” And it was always clear that these congressmen were being paid off by lobbyists because of the tariff. So, the assumption was that the tariff is dirty, and therefore it should be small. Maybe we have to tolerate it for government revenue, but because it’s so nasty, it should be small. And what did it reel in? Two percent of GDP. Government was three percent of GDP. Small government, great economy.

I think the same thing applies to how the government spent its money. It was self-discrediting. It spent its money on government employment, which had an absolutely terrible reputation in the 19th century. In the first entry in American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, the entire opening chapter is dedicated to how unimpressive it is to work for the government. I sense that opinion was global in American history in the 19th century. So, government employment was self-discrediting; it advertised itself as not an impressive thing to be doing. Therefore, the economy did not demand a lot of it. Just like with the tax system. Oh, the tax system’s lousy, have a little bit of it. The government spending system’s lousy, have a little bit of it.

Now, we have the opposite situation where the tax and the spending system are not self-discrediting but self-praising. The income tax presents itself as moral; we’re taking from the rich and giving to the poor. And the spending system sees itself as necessary and good, almost noble. Of course, our economic performance has been much worse since 1913 than it was before. So, I think it would be very useful for the United States to reintroduce itself to the idea of self-discrediting tax and spending systems.

Another big difference between the Gilded Age and our current era, besides different rates of economic growth, would be the sense of optimism in society. How do we recapture that sense of optimism that characterized the Gilded Age?

Yeah, the funny thing about the Gilded Age was that, while it certainly was optimistic and can-do, it was also somber. As Mumford says in his book The Brown Decades, its mood was autumnal, which may be why all the colors of the architecture and the art were so russet, so deep red and brown. And that darker mood came from the Civil War, which killed 660,000 people in the United States. Everybody in the Gilded Age had a shelf full of daguerreotypes and photographs and portraits of their relatives who were killed in the war. So, there was that somberness. But there was also an optimistic streak. In Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, the narrator is this woman in the attic who just sits there and mumbles through the 1890s about all the terrible events that happened during the war. However, that’s not what happened at large in the country. In general, people took the hit of the Civil War. Lincoln said, “the Almighty has his own purposes.” They took the hit and said, “Okay, let’s be somber, but let’s get down to what we can control. And we can control having the greatest economy and the greatest culture, so let’s go.”

Read the full transcript

The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Senator Josh Hawley’s Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act. The bill would require every American to verify their age before using a generative AI chatbot and would bar anyone under eighteen from using a “companion” chatbot at all. In the room during the markup were the parents of children who died by suicide after conversations with AI products. Their grief is unimaginable, and their motives are beyond reproach. But concerningly, such a policy might quietly cost rather than save lives.

The strongest claim animating this bill is the belief that restricting minors’ access to AI chatbots will prevent suicide. On the available evidence, that claim is closer to a hypothesis than a finding—and a hypothesis that runs against several decades of data on how young people die.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American suicide rate began climbing around the year 2000—before ChatGPT, smartphones, or social media even existed. It accelerated through the 2010s, then, contrary to popular narrative, plateaued and modestly declined after 2018—even as generative AI moved from research labs into the pockets of nearly every teenager in the country. If chatbots were a meaningful driver of adolescent suicide, the curves should have moved together. They have not, and, importantly, suicide rates among young Americans remain the lowest among any age group.

While any loss of a young life to suicide is a tragedy, whatever is killing young Americans predates the technology that lawmakers now propose to ban them from using.

What the GUARD Act’s sponsors do not seriously consider is the other side of the ledger. There are cases where AI could help Americans of all ages when it comes to mental health. Roughly half of Americans with a diagnosable mental health condition never seek professional help; stigma, cost, and fear of involuntary intervention keep them silent. For some of them—especially adolescents in households where therapy is unaffordable, unavailable, or unsafe to disclose—a chatbot is their most reliable form of emotional support.

In a survey of over 1,000 adolescents and young adults, 13 percent had used a chatbot for mental health support, and more than 90 percent of those found it helpful. In another study of over 1,000 users of Replika, a popular AI chatbot, 30 reported without solicitation that their artificial companion saved them from suicide.

We do not know how many lives generative AI has saved by improving access to mental health care. But for every incidence of AI psychosis or suicide, there may be dozens of unobserved positive outcomes. Policy that presumes only the worst outcomes also prevents the best.

The consequences of the proposal could also dissuade investment or chill speech that would make better options available. Faced with $100,000 per-violation penalties, providers will not invest in better suicide-detection models and instead likely remove any content that could be related to such a topic, thus limiting resources to crisis hotlines for those who are struggling. It would also limit the availability of information for those seeking to understand a deeply traumatic event or help a friend who may be struggling. Clinicians have known for decades that abrupt treatment referrals without first building rapport can deepen shame and shut down disclosure. The best science suggests suicide-prevention frameworks place trust-building before resource provision precisely because the order matters. A regulatory regime that punishes providers for nuance will produce less of it.

Beyond being bad policy, such laws are almost certainly unconstitutional. The underlying policy is not based on a compelling government interest nor is it narrowly tailored. It impacts the speech rights and anonymity of all users of online tools, not just minors, on the basis of justifications that are far from accepted. The compliance regime is broad enough to capture homework helpers, customer-service chatbots, and search engines that produce conversational responses, placing a “papers, please” approach to a broad and growing swath of the internet. To enforce it, every American adult would have to upload a government ID or submit to biometric scanning to ask a question, complete a customer service interaction, or practice a foreign language.

More measured and better policy responses are available if policymakers want to support parents and teens who may encounter difficulties with AI chatbots or generative AI. That includes training and providing appropriate resources for law enforcement to go after the bad actors who abuse technology to create or solicit sexual content from minors. Investment in AI literacy, of the kind Idaho recently codified into its public schools, equips young people to use these tools the way they will inevitably need to use them as adults and can include information on what to do if they encounter problems.

Far from being a problem, liability shields modeled on Section 230, paired with safe-harbor incentives for providers that invest in better mental-health detection, would reward the kind of careful development the current bill punishes. None of those would deliver the cathartic clarity of a ban, but all of them are more likely to save lives. Importantly, they also empower parents and other trusted adults, not policymakers, to be the ones who determine what makes sense when it comes to kids and teens’ AI use.

The bill’s sponsors are not acting in bad faith. The cases motivating them are real, and the impulse to protect the vulnerable is one of the more honorable features of our political instincts. But the pattern is familiar from earlier moral panics over comic books, rock music, and video games. Each was sincerely felt. Each rested on weak social science amplified by strong public emotion. Each produced a policy that aged poorly.

The GUARD Act asks us to trade a measurable loss of liberty and privacy for an unmeasured, and possibly negative, impact on safety. The forces that drive people toward suicide—isolation, family conflict, untreated illness, loss of meaning—operate on timescales and through mechanisms that no technology policy will address. To pretend otherwise is to offer grieving families a consolation that policy cannot honestly deliver while quietly closing a door through which other young people, less visible to us, are still walking toward help.

This article was originally published at Cato at Liberty on 5/5/2026.

Energy and natural resources:

• Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 microreactor has become the first reactor to reach criticality in the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, which aims to accelerate the development of new reactor designs.

• Much of the world’s lithium is extracted from brine, but abundant deposits—such as those in the Appalachians—also exist in hard-rock ore. The problem is that extracting lithium from hard rock is expensive and energy-intensive; it typically requires baking the ore above 1,000 degrees Celsius and prolonged chemical leaching. In an attempt to make hard-rock lithium more economical, a group of researchers has developed a lower-temperature process for extracting lithium from spodumene, the main source of hard-rock lithium. The researchers estimate their process could cut hard-rock lithium extraction costs in half, and they are now working on commercializing the technology.

Pollution:

• Microfibers are one of the most common forms of microplastic pollution, and washing machines send large quantities of textile fibers into wastewater. A number of companies have now developed filters designed to catch microfibers, and The Guardian reports that some appliance manufacturers are beginning to integrate them into their washing machines.

Conservation and biodiversity

• Sixty years ago, the Dartford Warbler, a plump-looking, long-tailed songbird, had nearly vanished from the UK. Today, thanks to extensive habitat restoration, the population has risen to an estimated 4,100 breeding pairs.

• The rough popcornflower, a wetland plant found only in the Umpqua River Basin of Oregon, is no longer considered endangered after its population increased to more than 2 million plants.

• Crested ibis are being reintroduced to the Japanese mainland, where they were extirpated in the 1970s.

Health & Wellbeing

• Self-reported freedom reached a record high in 2025. According to a recently published Gallup poll, 82 percent of people surveyed across 138 countries reported being satisfied with their freedom to choose what to do with their lives, up from 71 percent in 2006, when the survey began. Some of the largest gains came from countries in the former Eastern Bloc. Gallup notes that this result is more closely associated with other metrics of subjective wellbeing than with formal measures of political and personal freedom.

  

• The American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference has wrapped up, leaving behind a long list of hopeful cancer headlines. The star of the show was daraxonrasib, which received a standing ovation for its unusually strong results against metastatic pancreatic cancer. Some other promising results include:

  • A radioactive wafer implanted at the site of surgically removed brain tumors that nearly doubled two-year survival rates in a randomized trial.

  • A genomic test that helped many breast cancer patients safely skip chemotherapy.

  • A multiple-myeloma immunotherapy that kept nearly 70 percent of patients progression-free for 18 months, compared with about 27 percent of those on standard treatments.

  • A targeted cancer drug that, when combined with standard immunotherapy, cut the risk of cancer progression or death by nearly two-thirds in patients with the most common form of lung cancer.

Science & Technology

• Merlin Labs, an aerospace and defense tech firm, is developing an autonomous piloting system intended to handle all stages of flight across a wide range of aircraft, from single-engine planes to commercial cargo jets. After completing a series of reviews by the US Special Operations Command, the system will now be tested on C-130J transport aircraft and may eventually make its way to commercial cargo carriers and other civil aircraft.

• In a recent live-streamed demo, humanoid robots developed by Figure AI autonomously handled packages for 200 hours without any serious reported errors.

Read more news stories on our website

In December 2022, just a month after the release of OpenAI’s Large Language Model ChatGPT, an ominous meme began circulating that is still with us today. It is a cartoon illustration of the Shoggoth, a mysterious and deadly cosmic monster from the early 20^th century classic horror author H.P. Lovecraft.

“The Shoggoth meme has gone viral in the small world of hyper-online A.I. insiders,” explains New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose. He documents in his article “Why an Octopus-like Creature Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.” that the meme has become a popular symbol in AI-related essays, X posts, and message boards. Elon Musk even posted the meme and then deleted it, Roose reports.

The “RLHF” on the meme stands for “reinforcement learning from human feedback.” Roose explains that the initial version of the meme, posted by @TetraspaceWest, is “an image of two hand-drawn Shoggoths — the first labeled ‘GPT-3’ and the second labeled ‘GPT-3 + RLHF.’ The second Shoggoth had, perched on one of its tentacles, a smiley-face mask.” Other later versions of the meme have just depicted one Shoggoth with RLHF and a smiley-face.

“It’s the most important meme in A.I.,” Roose quotes one AI executive as saying.

So what is the meme’s significance?

Roose gives a simple account:

In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model. …some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath.

This explanation is illuminating as far as it goes, but a broader message can also be gleaned from a closer look at the work of H.P. Lovecraft. His cosmic horror monsters such as the Shoggoth represent an anti-Enlightenment anxiety—a general pessimism about the consequences of the growth of knowledge—that strikingly resembles the fears of modern AI critics. Lovecraft’s underlying assumptions about the consequences of scientific and technological discovery are relevant to the AI debate, making the Shoggoth meme’s salience far broader than mere R.L.H.F.

Yudkowsky’s Fear of Technological Knowledge

Perhaps the most prominent extreme AI critic is Eliezer Yudkowsky. Widely regarded as a founder of the field of artificial general intelligence alignment, he is the co-author (with Nate Soares) of the 2025 instant New York Times bestseller If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.

The book argues that, “All over the Earth, it must become illegal for AI companies to charge ahead in developing artificial intelligence as they’ve been doing.” This proposal is hard to argue with if you accept the central claim of the book: “If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.”

The problem, as they see it, is that AI will not automatically care about sentient life such as humans. They argue that such a caring must be specially built in, which we don’t currently know how to do. “The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else,” Yudkowsky argues in a 2023 Time Magazine article titled “Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down.”

Yudkowsky’s vision of the fruits of technological advancement strikes, as we will see, a rather Lovecraftian tone. “To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow.”

This reflects some of the symbolic intent behind the Shoggoth meme. Roose write that he was told by @TetraspaceWest that, “I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.”

To ensure that we “shut it all down” as Yudkowsky demands in his Atlantic article, he proposes that governments around the world:

Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike. … Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.

Powerful political figures have expressed fears of similar magnitude. For example in the Wall Street Journal, US Senator Bernie Sanders published an article in which he asks, “How can we rush forward when leading scientists warn that AI poses an existential risk to the human race?” He announces in the article that he has “…introduced legislation, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to impose a federal moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until strong national safeguards are in place.”

Lovecraft’s Fear of the Growth of Knowledge

Lovecraft is widely regarded as one of literary history’s most significant horror authors. Stephen King has called him “The 20^th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” His work contains a bizarre and phantasmagorical pantheon of interrelated cosmic sci-fi/fantasy monsters. Cthulhu is the most famous one, and the Shoggoth is one of dozens that are more obscure.

His work is so unique and influential that it created an entire horror subgenre, known as “Lovecraftian horror” or “cosmic horror.” This subgenre focuses on fear of the cosmic danger and vastness of the unknown. I regard Lovecraft as an anti-Enlightenment figure, because most of his stories are about science uncovering horrible truths that should never have been discovered and cannot be unlearned. The unmistakable moral of Lovecraft’s writing is that the universe’s most profound knowledge should remain unknown.

The opening passage from The Call of Cthulhu(1928), probably Lovecraft’s most famous story, illustrates his anti-Enlightenment ethos well:

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

These sentiments can be almost perfectly analogized to Yudkowsky’s fear of AI. Yudkowsky acknowledges that we live on a placid island of ignorance—hence the delta between our intelligence and that of superhuman AI, and our ignorance of how to control or withstand superintelligence. Yudkowsky presumably acknowledges that AI has hitherto harmed us little, but agrees with Lovecraft’s narrator that “some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein” that cataclysm will strike. Therefore, Yudkowsky advocates anti-Enlightenment policies such as outlawing vast swaths of technological research and being willing to bomb datacenters—explicit calls to destroy knowledge and halt its growth. It is therefore apt, if hyperbolic, to note that Yudkowsky would have us “flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

These same basic messages are present in almost every story Lovecraft wrote. In his 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness, which contains the first appearance of the Shoggoth, he writes that, “It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”

Lovecraft also wrote nonfiction in which he expressed precisely the luddite sentiments that you would expect from a thinker so focused on the horrible consequences of discovery and science. His 1933 essay “Some Repetitions on the Times” laments automation leading to mass unemployment, closely reflecting contemporary AI animosity.

“For several generations the man-displacing effect of the machine has been realised by a few, yet the momentary ability of new industries to absorb displaced labour was enough to blind nearly everyone to the consequences inevitable after the end of this plainly temporary absorption,” Lovecraft claims. He goes on that, “It is by this time virtually clear to everyone save self-blinded capitalists and politicians that the old relation of the individual to the needs of the community has utterly broken down under the impact of intensively productive machinery. Baldly stated—in a highly mechanised nation there is no longer enough work to be done, under any conceivable circumstances to require the services of the entire capable population if each individual is worked to his maximum (even an humane and rational maximum) capacity.” Invoking the frightful mentality present in his fiction, he concludes that the government must dispense with laissez-faire “political and economic orthodoxies, if the peril of an unfathomed revolutionary abyss is to be averted.”

Essentially these exact fears are presented as novel dangers of 21^st century AI by powerful Republicans and Democrats. US Senator Josh Hawley has advocated for banning self-driving cars to protect the jobs of car and truck drivers. In addition to the existential fears expressed in Senator Sanders’s abovementioned Wall Street Journal article, he also declares that AI “kills jobs” and he has posted on X that, “Trump wants to deregulate AI and let the richest people on earth do whatever they want. Unacceptable. It will make the oligarchs richer while millions lose jobs and income.”

Nick Bostrom’s White Balls

The disastrous outcomes of mass death, destruction, and economic disruption predicted by AI critics are real possibilities. But they are not unique threats of artificial intelligence. Rather, they are examples of the danger of intelligence generally.

Long before the breakthroughs that put AI at the center of anti-technological rhetoric, people thought up countless possible destructive consequences of the growth of knowledge. Many feared that nuclear scientists would bring about technological Armageddon by creating a chain reaction that would destroy Earth. Throughout the cold war and subsequent war on terror, media and government institutions spread numerous fears about governments and terrorist groups causing mass destruction by creating chemical or biological weapons. There were several widespread hysterias throughout the 20^th century that economic development would cause apocalyptic resource collapse before the end of the century. While most of these fears turned out to be unfounded, it was never impossible that they might come true.

By its very nature, the discovery of new knowledge can accomplish amazing things, for good or for ill. As science and technology continue to overturn the stones of reality, new possibilities will be revealed and old barriers to action will be outgrown. The consequences of these new discoveries can never be fully predictable in advance, because to predict them you would have to already possess the knowledge discovered, and all related knowledge. Therefore, there will always be a nonzero chance of mass destruction resulting from new knowledge.

The question is: Is intelligence worth the risk?

Nick Bostrom, University of Oxford philosopher and founder of the Future of Humanity Institute, embarks on a frightening exploration of this question in his 2019 paper “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.” In it, he offers an analogy called “the urn of creativity.”

One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent possible ideas, discoveries, technological inventions. Over the course of history, we have extracted a great many balls–mostly white (beneficial) but also various shades of gray (moderately harmful ones and mixed blessings). The cumulative effect on the human condition has so far been overwhelmingly positive, and may be much better still in the future…

What we haven’t extracted, so far, is a black ball: a technology that invariably or by default destroys the civilization that invents it.

Such black balls may include the genocidal AI of Yudkowsky’s nightmares, the cosmic horrors awakened in Lovecraft’s phantasmagorical visions, or any number of other yet-unimagined catastrophes.

The longer we keep pulling new balls out of the urn, Bostrom argues, the more likely we are to eventually stumble upon a black ball, ending the human project forever.

But while Yudkowsky, Lovecraft, Hawley, and Sanders all share this fear of the growth of knowledge, there is another perspective—an Enlightenment perspective—which contradicts them. Defenders of the core principles of the Enlightenment hold that, for generalizable reasons, the costs of scientific and technological advancement are well worth the benefits.

Intelligence Is a Virtue, Whether Organic or Artificial

The renowned University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch argues that the urn analogy only captures one side of the coin of the effects of knowledge on existential risk.

In his book The Beginning of Infinity, Deutsch explains that knowledge, rather than merely being dangerous, is what allows humans to survive their ever-changing environment. He refutes the “Spaceship Earth” conception that many tacitly hold, according to which Earth’s natural environment is a life support system: hospitable by default, unlike outer space or an Earth drastically altered by anthropogenic change.

“…I am writing this in Oxford, England, where winter nights are… often cold enough to kill any human unprotected by clothing and other technology,” Deutsch writes. “So, while intergalactic space would kill me in a matter of seconds, Oxfordshire in its primeval state might do it in a matter of hours – which can be considered ‘life support’ only in the most contrived sense.”

He explains that, “There is a life-support system in Oxfordshire today, but it was not provided by the biosphere. It has been built by humans. It consists of clothes, houses, farms, hospitals, an electrical grid, a sewage system and so on.”

So how did people and other animals survive for so long without modern technology? Generally, they didn’t. As recently as 1900, and for all of history before that, human life expectancy was around half what it is today. Humans were constantly dying of famine, disease, and other ailments that could have been solved by the right knowledge. Other species almost all got wiped out entirely. It is estimated that over 99 percent of species that ever existed on Earth are now extinct.

But modern technology has only just scratched the surface of solving all the deadly problems that are likely to befall humanity. Like the people of Oxfordshire need clothing and other technologies to survive today, humanity will soon die unless it gains new scientific and technological knowledge to protect against exogenous threats such as asteroids, supernova explosions, the expansion of the sun, and countless others, most of which have probably not yet been discovered. To maximize its chances in the arms race against an ever-changing environment, humanity must constantly expand its horizons of research and discovery into the infinite unknown.

In an interview with Dwarkesh Patel, Deutsch explains the implications of this circumstance with respect to Bostrom’s urn of discovery: “Nick Bostrom’s jar with white balls, and there’s one black ball, and you take out a white ball, and white ball, and white ball, and then you hit the black ball and that’s the end of you. I don’t think it’s like that, because every white ball you take out and have reduces the number of black balls in the jar.”

When an asteroid caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction 66 million years ago, wiping out about 76 percent of all species on the planet at the time, those species effectively hit the inverse of a “black ball”—they needed asteroid defense technology, which humans have recently developed, but they didn’t have it. And similar stories could be told about all the other mass extinction events in Earth’s history, and the future mass extinctions that are bound to come if humans don’t advance technology fast enough.

While increasing intelligence, artificial or otherwise, poses serious threats to humanity, stagnating or declining intelligence is an even surer death knell.

AI of the sort powerful enough to wipe out humans is likely also a panacea for discovering and preventing virtually infinite other existential threats, biological, cosmic, and otherwise.

While existential risks create especially salient examples of the possible upsides and downsides of intelligence, the same logic applies to morally virtuous action generally. If there are moral truths to be discovered and known, general intelligence should be able to know them no matter what substrate it exists on. Knowledge is knowledge, whether encoded in brain chemicals or silicon chips.

As Deutsch argues in an interview with Sam Harris, “…the problem of AIs is the problem of humans. …humans are dangerous, and to that extent AIs are also dangerous, but the idea that AIs are somehow more dangerous than humans is racist.”

I think Deutsch’s racism charge is lobbed somewhat jokingly, but it also points to a deep similarity between bias against the agency of foreign peoples and that of mysterious artificial intelligences. Lovecraft has been widely accused of racism for his fearful treatment of foreign cultures and peoples, which seems of a piece with his general fear and distrust of the unknown. There is no reason to assume that perceptions of AI entities would not sometimes be shaded by the same underlying prejudices, which have their utility as protection against unknown threats but which can also lead people to dark and destructive attitudes and behaviors.

If people should be pessimistic about the consequences of artificial intelligence, they should also be pessimistic about the consequences of intelligence generally. Conversely, if optimism is warranted about human agency, which is fundamentally a matter of human intelligence, then optimism about artificial intelligence is warranted also.

• Global jet fuel supply chains are adapting to wartime turmoil. In April, the head of the International Energy Agency warned that Europe had “maybe six weeks or so (of) jet fuel left” if oil supplies remained disrupted by the Iran war. Instead, imports from the United States, India, and Nigeria, drawn by higher prices in Europe, have staved off shortages so far.

• According to a recent industry report, US home internet has become much faster and cheaper over the past decade. Inflation-adjusted prices for popular broadband plans are down 43.6 percent since 2014, while average download speeds have improved by 145 percent.

• Competition between online retailers is making our lives even more convenient. In certain locations, Amazon and Walmart are now offering 30-minute delivery for a set of everyday goods.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• A mother puma with three kittens was recently spotted in Minnesota, the first evidence in over a century of pumas breeding in the state.

• Florida’s wildlife agency reports that there are 82 percent more loggerhead sea turtle nests in the state this year compared to the same period of 2025, the latest good news in a broader story of sea turtle recovery.

• Biologists have discovered a thriving deep-sea coral reef off the coast of Argentina. The scientists are still measuring the extent of the reef, but it may turn out to be one of the largest cold-water reefs in the world.

• Deforestation in Brazil’s Atlantic forest—the large coastal biome home to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—fell to its lowest level in at least 40 years in 2025, according to an NGO report.

• Ecologists in Namibia are testing whether satellite-linked animal tags can be used to detect sudden changes in wildlife behavior. By studying how the animals react to simulated hunting threats, they hope to train algorithms to recognize “animal panic” from satellite data and alert rangers to poaching incidents.

Energy and infrastructure:

• The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning has doubled over the past three years, reaching an estimated 4 million.

• As part of Tuvalu’s ongoing coastal adaptation work, engineers have reportedly expanded the land area of Fongafale, the country’s most populous islet, by more than 10 percent.1

Health & Demographics

• A gene therapy from Verve Therapeutics sharply reduced LDL cholesterol, a major causal risk factor for heart disease, in an early human trial. The treatment, which turns off the PCSK9 gene, lowered LDL cholesterol by 62 percent at the highest-tested dose. Drugs that block PCSK9 are a well-tested method of lowering cholesterol, but this new treatment aims to achieve the same effect with a one-time infusion.

• The FDA has approved the first treatment for chronic hepatitis D, a rare but dangerous liver infection that previously had no approved treatment options.

Science & Technology

• Emergency services dispatchers in Snohomish County, Washington, are using an AI system to triage non-emergency calls in an effort to reduce wait times and prioritize callers with urgent problems.

• Biohub, a biomedical research nonprofit, has released an AI-generated database of more than one billion predicted protein structures. For context, AlphaFold, the best-known AI protein-prediction system, includes a public database of 214 million predicted structures. Biohub says its much larger database could help scientists compare obscure proteins and generate new leads for medicine and drug design.

• Chinese researchers have sent human embryo models into space to study how microgravity and radiation affect early human development. The models are lab-grown stem-cell structures that mimic early embryo development, but cannot grow into viable fetuses.

• The Ocean Census, an international research project dedicated to accelerating the discovery of marine life, claims to have identified 1,121 likely new marine species in a single year, well above the usual pace of discovery. Much of the acceleration seems to have come from better coordination; 728 of the species were identified by researchers analyzing existing collections, and the Ocean Census also credits a new database that centralizes records of potential new species while they await formal scientific description, a process that typically takes over a decade.

Read more news stories on our website

As a member of Gen Z, I have studied the effects of social media on adolescent mental health from a perspective most psychology researchers lack: I grew up under its influence.

Between ages 12 and 17, I was obese, socially isolated and addicted to the fantasy video game RuneScape. I was home-schooled, lived with just my mother and rarely went outside. I logged over 10,000 hours in that game alone, nearly a third of my waking life during those years.

That doesn’t include countless additional hours I spent on other video games, television and, of course, social media. I made friends through online chatrooms and pen pal websites because I had none in real life. I averaged well over 10 hours a day on devices.

If ever there were a case study for the claim that screens destroy young minds, I would seem to fit it. And yet here I am as a 26-year-old developmental psychologist with a doctorate from Harvard. I am in good mental and physical health, with deep friendships online and off.

Maybe I’m the exception. Or maybe the harms are overblown.

Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” argues that smartphones and social media have “rewired” childhood and caused an epidemic of mental illness. The book has helped inspire social media restrictions in Australia and several American states, and shaped how a generation of parents thinks about technology.

Restricting screen time and social media access are reasonable aspirations for child-rearing. But as a matter of public policy, the case for regulation rests on a scientific foundation far weaker than its proponents claim.

Haidt’s argument relies on the observation that adolescent mental health indicators worsened around 2010, when smartphones and social media apps popular with young people — such as Instagram and Snapchat — started becoming widespread. But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis. Wealthy Western democracies with the highest smartphone adoption rates have also seen expanded access to psychiatric services and a cultural shift toward identifying and labeling psychological distress, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy.”

Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.

Many studies have reported on how social media use is associated with mental health problems among the young. However, a 2024 analysis in JAMA Pediatrics of 143 studies featuring data from over 1 million adolescents worldwide found that links between social media use and poor mental health among youth were small, inconsistent across studies and drawn mostly from nonclinical community samples.

One reason studies report mixed findings is that many fail to account for factors such as personality traits and social support that independently predict heavy screen use and mental distress. For example, social media use may be associated with anxiety and loneliness, not because it causes them, but because socially anxious individuals are more likely to seek out connections online. Statistically controlling for such factors often accounts for the relationship between social media and mental health.

I am not dismissing the possibility that some children are harmed by some content in some contexts. Many in my generation have had online exposure to graphic, violent and sexual imagery that no child should encounter. But the blanket claim that social media use drives generational mental illness does not align with the evidence.

Screens didn’t cause my problems. They were coping mechanisms for preexisting problems: loneliness, family instability, social anxiety, an absent father. The variables that predict youth mental health are not hours spent on social media but social support, resilience and a sense of belonging. To help struggling adolescents, the evidence points toward strengthening those capacities, not confiscating phones.

During my most isolated years, online connections were the only positive relationships I had. Internet forums helped me navigate college applications and taught me about calorie-counting, which sparked a weight-loss journey that changed my life. Even in RuneScape, I built discipline and goal-setting habits that I later transferred to academics and research.

Concerns about social media are well-intentioned. But sincerity is not proof. The dramatic assertions that children’s lives would be transformed by reducing social media exposure are more akin to moral panics over past technologies and obsessions — from radio to comic books to video games — fueled by weak social science and strong public emotion. In the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, youth mental health has been improving recently, despite no change in access to social media. The simplest explanation might be that social media is not as harmful as people think.

This article was originally published at the Washington Post on 4/12/2026.

That critique obscures one of the greatest achievements in human history: modern food production has made food cheaper, safer, more abundant, and more varied than ever before.

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, Adam Omary speaks with political scientist Jan Dutkiewicz about his new book Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How We Can Make It Even Better. They discuss the great achievements of the industrial food system, the panic over processed foods, nostalgia for preindustrial agriculture, and how to make food healthier and more sustainable without giving up the system that feeds us.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

Below is an edited and abridged transcript featuring some highlights from the interview.

I’m pleased to be joined today by Jan Dutkiewicz, an assistant professor of Political Science at the Pratt Institute and co-author of Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How We Can Make It Even Better.

You open the book with this food paradox. What is the paradox?

The paradox is that the American food system has never been better, and it’s never been worse.

The American food system is incredibly abundant. It produces delicious and potentially very nutritious foods at scale within a relatively strong regulatory state. But there are problems. The way we produce food has large environmental externalities, it’s not always great for labor, and it’s not always optimally distributed.

The point of the book is to see how we can address those externalities while leaning into the things about our food system that work.

You got on our radar through your article in The Free Press, “In Defense of Processed Foods.”

Processed foods have been a subject of major controversy recently, particularly with our health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the broader Make America Healthy Again movement. But processed foods, you argue, aren’t the evil that they’re made out to be.

The fact that foods are processed doesn’t tell us much about them. It doesn’t tell us what’s been processed. It doesn’t tell us how it’s been processed. It tells us nothing about nutrition. So, the fact that food processing has become a synonym for unhealthfulness has created a lot of confusion.

One thing I really want people to take away from the book is that the category of “ultra-processed foods” is super new. It comes from a Brazilian public health schema that emerged in the late 2000s called Nova, which is just the Portuguese word for “new.” Basically, these public health researchers wanted to create an epidemiological tool to assess the average diet quality of a given population to correlate health outcomes with dietary patterns.

The way they decided to do that was to create four categories of food. Unprocessed foods are Nova 1. Basic household ingredients like salt, sugar, honey, and oil are Nova 2. Nova 3 are foods that you could create in your kitchen by combining ingredients from 1 and 2, such as pasta, tinned marinara sauce, and what have you. And then you get this category called Nova 4, or ultra-processed foods, which consists of anything that you can’t make in your kitchen, such as foods that use industrial processes to do things like extract or isolate parts of food. They then decided that ultra-processed foods were a primary driver of morbidity, which is true if you conflate all ultra-processed foods with junk food. But that category also includes things like plant-based burgers, baby formula, highly processed vegetables and fruits, and protein shakes. So, the category is really not fit for purpose. We should be focused on the nutrient quality of individual foods, not on how much they have been processed.

Historically, food processing has actually massively improved nutrition. The ability to isolate vitamins and put them into foods allowed us to address malnutrition problems that once affected huge populations. In the early 1900s, something like 70 percent of all children in New York City public schools suffered from rickets, which is a vitamin D deficiency. When the United States drafted for World War I, as many as 30 percent of all drafted men were rejected from service because of physical unfitness, in part due to malnutrition. Pellagra, which is caused by vitamin B3 deficiency, killed hundreds of thousands of people in the South. So early food science and processing—adding iodine to salt, enriching bread, pasteurizing and enriching milk—saved countless lives.

Today, we look back to the past with rose-tinted glasses and say things like “Well, I don’t necessarily want the packaged product. I want things that come from a real farm, from the soil.” In reality, when food production was scattered, small-scale, and poorly regulated, before modern science, transportation technology, and processing, nutrition outcomes for the average American were much worse.

Across the 20th century, there were all of these massive developments. You mentioned improvements in food safety. There have also been large improvements in raw agricultural output. What’s the rough timeline of these developments?

As we enter the 20th century, you’ve got the birth of the industrialization of food processing and food transport with the introduction of long-distance and refrigerated rail, and the centralization of storage in places like Chicago. Following that, you’ve got the rise of superior petrochemical-based fertilizers, superior pesticides and herbicides, and better irrigation technologies. Then, we had the birth of modern plant science. At first, this consists of very meticulous crossbreeding. The famous example is Norman Borlaug’s development of dwarf wheat, which was a more robust and higher-yielding variety of wheat designed to benefit from the industrial systems I just described: fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and high levels of irrigation. From there, we become more proficient at crossbreeding plants and eventually genetically modifying them to achieve particular ends.

Thanks to all this innovation, we’ve seen tremendous increases in yields per acre for staple crops. For the first time in human history, we produce more calories and protein than the average person needs, which is an incredible achievement. Many civilizations before ours have been brought down by a few bad harvests. Now, we have a food system that is relatively robust. There can be shocks, but the shocks don’t short-circuit the entire system.

The COVID pandemic was a good example of that.

Exactly. Other than in a few key industries—for instance, meat production, because meat processing is so labor-intensive—global food production was not seriously disrupted.

Of course, there are still areas in the world that face food insecurity. How much of the excess calories is concentrated, say, in wealthy countries like the United States, where we might see a lot of food waste?

Food waste is very tricky. The largest share of food waste is household food waste; people throwing out food that’s going bad or that they no longer want. Addressing household food waste at the policy level is very difficult. I will say, though, that if you’re thinking about food waste in the sense of poor use of calories and protein within the food system, the elephant in the room is meat production. The average animal that we eat will consume far more calories and protein over its lifetime than it actually yields.

There’s an interesting tension between two concepts you introduce in the book: the meat austerity view you just articulated, and what you call democratic hedonism, or pursuing food because it is pleasurable.

Many people might be willing to pay more and tolerate the waste because meat is tasty.

This is a fundamental question. So much food discourse shies away from the basic pleasures people get from eating. The Michael Pollans and Wendell Berrys of the world basically say that if you enjoy an industrial diet, you’re suffering from false food consciousness, and you would be far happier eating heirloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market. Well, that’s an empirical question, and I think lots of people genuinely prefer burgers and Doritos.

People who make arguments for veganism from an ethical standpoint will say, well, the pleasure you get from meat should not outweigh the suffering of animals. But even if you buy that argument—and I personally buy that argument—it hasn’t done a lot to minimize meat consumption.

We think that a central principle of making a better food system is providing people with food that they enjoy, and that reforms to the food system should maintain access to that pleasure even as we address negative externalities. We spend a chapter directly focusing on the meat question. All peer-reviewed research points to the fact that people in high-consuming countries like the United States need to eat less meat if we’re to have a more sustainable food system. How do you do that? Well, you can tell people to eat less meat, but I think that giving alternative proteins another chance or long-term investment in cellular agriculture could potentially achieve that goal while preserving the pleasure people get from food.

Throughout your book, I kept coming back to these interesting psychological issues at play with how we approach food.

There’s been a lot of discussion about evolutionary mismatch, particularly when it comes to the obesity crisis. We have an innate taste for high-fat, high-sugar foods that were rare in our ancestral environments, and now, when they’re hyper-plentiful, it’s easy to go overboard. You don’t usually see the same evolutionary logic applied to meat. It makes sense that ancestrally, even for hunter-gatherers, meat would be relatively rarer and account for, in most societies, only a minority of total calories.

I think that’s absolutely right. Part of our abundant food system is that there’s an abundance of things that we probably should eat less of. There are some well-tested policies, such as sugar taxes, that could marginally increase the cost of things we know are bad for us. We can try to steer diets to be healthier or more resource-efficient.

There’s another elephant in the room, which is that, in the United States, unhealthy foods are often subsidized indirectly through subsidies and SNAP benefits.

In the United States, unlike in Europe, farmers don’t get direct cash handouts. Subsidies are mostly indirect in the form of things like crop insurance. The government supports cheaper crop insurance, especially crops that can be produced at large scale, like wheat, corn, and soy. I think it would be a good idea to get rid of subsidies for any food that isn’t used for human consumption. If something gets burned for ethanol or ground down for animal feed, it shouldn’t be subsidized because it doesn’t advance nutrition or lead to more efficient land use. I also think that, to the extent that there are farm-level subsidies, they should apply to any crop for human consumption, including crops grown in smaller quantities.

We also need to think about subsidies that send signals to producers. When it comes to government spending, those come from SNAP and school lunches.

School lunches are a much-maligned part of the American foodscape, but in the wake of the Obama administration, school lunches have actually become relatively healthy. What gets reimbursed by school lunches is an incentive to producers, and under the new guidelines, a lot of that is actually fruits and veggies, which is great.

SNAP has been attacked because it doesn’t restrict what you can spend money on. Somewhere around 10 percent of SNAP money gets used for soda. The argument in favor of doing away with soda from SNAP is that the government is basically subsidizing the Coca-Cola Corporation and incentivizing poor nutritional outcomes. On the other side, food security activists will say that the point of SNAP is to address food insecurity by stretching household budgets, and if you remove soda from SNAP, people receiving SNAP will probably still buy soda, they’ll just use the scarce funds that SNAP is meant to protect. That’s an empirical question that should be tested.

How would you say the USDA is currently performing?

I am reticent to talk about what’s happening because it’s in such flux. Earlier, we would have said, well, surely they’re going to crack down on glyphosate. Instead, they’re supporting glyphosate production. It’s very mercurial.

I will say that a big part of public health related to the food system isn’t the content of what people eat, but the regulation of food production. A lot of that is being hacked away. Most recently, there was a really good piece in Vox by Kenny Torella about the push to simultaneously increase line speeds at chicken slaughterhouses and also reduce oversight for things like products tainted with salmonella.

When it comes to the new nutritional guidelines, I think it’s more show than substantive difference, other than the foregrounding of red meat and protein. If you look at the rest of those guidelines, they’re still saying Americans should eat more fruit, veggies, and whole grains.

Occasionally, you see a high-profile case of a contaminated ingredient in a large production chain. Maybe it’s contrarian, but when I see that kind of news, I feel pleasantly surprised. Every single day, we’re feeding millions of people across the whole country, and only rarely, maybe once a year or less, do we see high-profile incidents of something going wrong.

Absolutely. The fact that a tainted food scandal makes the news shows you how rare it is. And again, it’s because the industrial principles we have in our food system create food that is remarkably safe.

It shocks me sometimes the extent to which people critique the modern food system when you can go to the average supermarket and get a bounty of food for a relatively low price and not worry about whether or not it will make you sick.

It’s valid to critique the environmental impact of food production and to seek to reduce it. It’s valid to try to address remaining food insecurity. I just think that once we identify those problems, we have to think about ways to address them at scale. In much American food writing, even people who identify the problems correctly point towards these anachronistic, non-scalable solutions. So rather than saying, for instance, that addressing food insecurity just means more SNAP benefits or better school lunches, they’ll start talking about how every school lunch needs to contain regeneratively fed beef.

Similarly with individual diets, there’s this obsession with bodily purity and supplements. A few years ago, it was gluten. Now there’s the question of protein and processing. And these things shift with the tides. What I find unfortunate is that these neuroses tend to push people away from fantastic technological innovations. We see this in the complete reticence to eat genetically modified organisms, even though many genetically modified organisms are very beneficial technologies.

The rainbow papaya in Hawaii was genetically modified to protect it from the ringspot virus, which threatened the state’s entire crop of papayas. All the genetic modification does is make it possible to grow papaya in Hawaii. That papaya is delicious and healthy. Arctic apples from Washington state have been genetically modified to not oxidize as quickly, which reduces food waste and keeps them crunchy and looking good after they’ve been sliced up.

You also see this with critiques of plant-based meats like Impossible Burgers. People will panic about their ingredient lists, completely missing the fact that all this processing is pretty benign, and that peer-reviewed research shows that a soy-based Impossible Burger is actually heart-healthier than a red meat burger. So, a lot of this has to do with scaremongering, which takes advantage of both relatively low levels of scientific literacy and this idea that food should be pure and come from the land.

There’s also an argument that in the effort to make produce bigger and higher yielding, the nutrient density has gone down. How do we think about that tradeoff?

We should talk about that on a product-by-product basis. I don’t think we see that tradeoff in staple crops. The wheat we get, if we eat it as whole wheat, is super nutritious. We do see some minor variation in the quality of nutrients between small-scale and large-scale production of produce. Many people will also say they prefer the taste of the farmer’s market tomato to the hothouse tomato at Trader Joe’s.

I have nothing against people going to the farmer’s market, but we can’t pretend that these perceived losses of flavor or a tiny bit of nutrition outweigh the fact that it’s only large-scale industrial production that makes produce, meat, and staple crops widely available at any time of year.

Read the full transcript

• President Trump’s decision to waive the Jones Act, a century-old law that restricts domestic shipping to US-built, US-flagged, and US-crewed vessels, is generating valuable information about the costs of maritime protectionism. Because compliant tankers are scarce and expensive, the law often makes it uneconomical to ship petroleum products by sea between US ports. Removing that constraint revealed how much trade the law had been suppressing. In the first 50 days after the waiver took effect, foreign-flagged tankers moved record quantities of petroleum products between the Gulf Coast and the West Coast. They also carried propane to Puerto Rico, where the Jones Act typically makes domestic shipments so expensive that buyers rely on foreign imports from as far afield as Chile. A better world is possible!

Education

• Harvard faculty have agreed to cap the share of A grades to 20 percent to control grade inflation. It’s not a perfect fix, as all lower grades, including A minuses, remain uncapped, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• Journalists are increasingly using satellite imagery and machine learning to detect illegal resource extraction in remote rainforests, where on-the-ground investigations can be difficult and dangerous. The Pulitzer Center and the nonprofit Earth Genome have used these tools to create systems that monitor the Amazon and tropical forests in Africa, flagging suspicious changes for reporters to investigate.

• A small population of critically endangered Raffles’ banded langurs is recovering in the treetops of Singapore, growing from 40 individuals in 2011 to at least 80 today. The recovery has been aided by citizen scientists, who have tracked the monkeys for years and helped conservationists identify good locations for rope bridges and food trees.

Energy and infrastructure:

• The Hormuz crisis is straining global energy markets, but also showing the resilience of the system. The Economist notes that, despite the loss of 14 percent of global petroleum output, crude oil prices have so far stayed far below the extreme levels that some analysts predicted. One reason for that development is that exports from outside the Gulf have surged, particularly from the US, where crude oil exports recently hit a record-high 6.5 million barrels per day.

• There are also signs of longer-term adaptation to oil supply risks. A second pipeline in the UAE, expected to begin operating next year, would bypass the Strait and potentially double the country’s non-Strait export capacity to 3.6 million barrels per day. And worldwide, electric vehicles are adding a small but growing buffer against future oil shocks.

• West Africa is making progress toward a regional power grid. A World Bank-financed program has built more than 4,000 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines connecting the grids of 15 countries. Eight percent of the region’s electricity is now traded across borders, helping improve reliability and reduce costs.

Health & Demographics

• Eli Lilly has announced the main results of a phase 3 trial for retatrutide, its new GLP-1-based weight loss drug. In the trial, obese adults without diabetes lost an average of 28 percent of their body weight on the highest dose, broadly confirming an earlier result Lilly reported in December. That exceeds the results of the pivotal obesity trials for semaglutide (Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Zepbound), which produced average body-weight losses of roughly 15 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

• There’s more evidence that the US obesity rate has entered a sustained decline. Recent data released by Epic, an electronic health records company, indicate that the obesity rate has been falling since 2021. The increasing uptake of GLP-1 weight loss drugs is one plausible explanation.

• Four recent observational studies have found that people taking GLP-1 drugs tend to have better cancer outcomes, including lower rates of tumor progression and mortality, as well as lower rates of breast cancer diagnosis. The studies do not attempt to show causation; they are simply promising observations and signals for further research.

• A new analysis of Global Burden of Disease data across 204 countries and territories found that, from 1990 to 2021, the global age-adjusted prevalence of substance use disorders fell by 16.9 percent.

• The US has made commercial airline travel extraordinarily safe. The harder, albeit smaller problem is general aviation—think small aircraft, helicopters, and private jets—where the fatal accident rate is roughly two orders of magnitude higher. However, even this riskier part of aviation seems to be getting safer. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there were 0.68 fatal general aviation accidents for every 100,000 hours of flight time in 2024, the lowest rate since the agency began tracking its current series in 2009, and likely the lowest rate in US history.

Science & Technology

• Waymo continues to expand its robotaxi service. The company says it has begun growing its service area in Miami, with expansions in Austin, Atlanta, Houston, and the San Francisco Bay Area close behind. Over the next few weeks, Waymo expects to cover more than 1,400 square miles across 11 cities.

• An OpenAI general-purpose reasoning model has produced a counterexample disproving a long-standing conjecture posed by the mathematician Paul Erdős. Unlike earlier AI-related progress on Erdős problems, where human mathematicians used AI tools largely as research assistants, the core conceptual work behind this new result appears to have originated from the model itself.

• Humanity has not lost the ability to create magnificent stone structures. Around the world, modern Hindu temples are being built with load-bearing stone, intricate hand carving, and design principles inherited from ancient architectural texts.

The Works in Progress Newsletter

Modern Hindu Temples

This article appeared in Issue 23 of Works in Progress magazine, which print subscribers received last month. Issue 24 will be released early next month. Not yet a subscriber? You can sign up for the magazine here…

Read more

a month ago · 74 likes · 5 comments · Works in Progress

Read more news stories on our website

by Aditya Goyal

Somewhere right now, an oil slick is spreading across a coastline that no one is watching. A patch of rainforest the size of a football field is being cleared while the nearest ranger sleeps fifty miles away. A lake is quietly choking on algal bloom, its water drawn by thousands of families who have no idea what is in their glasses. These are not hypotheticals. They are the daily consequences of a world that generates a lot of pollution, but monitors barely a fraction of the ecosystems that suffer damage.

Consider the numbers. More than 3 billion people rely on water whose quality is completely unknown due to a lack of monitoring. More than 80 percent of the ocean remains unobserved. A landmark 2025 study in Science Advances revealed that only 0.001 percent of the deep seafloor has ever been visually surveyed. That amounts to an observed area roughly the size of Rhode Island, despite the deep ocean covering two-thirds of our planet. Sub-Saharan Africa has just one air quality monitor per 15.9 million people, compared to roughly one per 100,000 in Europe. Humanity has spent billions launching satellites that photograph every square meter of Earth’s surface, yet we lack the capacity to meaningfully analyze most of what they capture.

That is the paradox of our age: we are drowning in Earth-observation data but starving for environmental intelligence. It is a paradox I set out to solve. Earlier this year, from my apartment in Fargo, North Dakota, I launched CleanSentinels, an AI-powered environmental intelligence platform that deploys specialized “sentinels” to detect pollution, deforestation, oil spills, coral bleaching, and other ecological threats from uploaded images. Think of each sentinel as a tireless expert whose sole job is to analyze a photograph (whether satellite imagery, drone footage, or even a snapshot from your phone) and tell you exactly what’s wrong and how severe it is.

Blue Sentinel monitors water pollution, detecting everything from plastic debris to algal blooms. Green Sentinel watches forests for illegal logging and disease. Brown Sentinel analyzes soil degradation. Black Sentinel detects oil spills and industrial runoff. Teal Sentinel assesses coral-reef health. Three more (Gray for air quality, Red for wildfires, and Yellow for hazardous waste) are coming soon. Together, they represent what I believe is the next great democratization: putting environmental-monitoring capabilities that once required million-dollar infrastructure into the hands of anyone with an internet connection.

The raw ingredients for planetary-scale environmental monitoring already exist. NASA’s Earth-science data archive surpassed 123 petabytes in 2024 and is projected to reach 600 petabytes by 2030. The Copernicus program hosts more than 80 petabytes of freely available Sentinel satellite data, totaling 100 million individual products, all of them open-access. Google Earth Engine holds more than 90 petabytes of analysis-ready imagery and continues to grow at roughly a petabyte per month. The Landsat archive alone has seen more than 200 petabytes downloaded since it became freely available in 2008.

The bottleneck was never the data. It was the analysis. Allen AI’s Skylight ocean-surveillance platform illustrates the gap perfectly: a single day’s worth of ocean-monitoring satellite imagery would take a human analyst 800 hours to review. Skylight’s AI does it in eight. That is the kind of compression that transforms monitoring from a luxury into a utility, and it is the principle at the heart of CleanSentinels.

What makes this moment possible is a convergence of collapsing costs that would have seemed fantastical a decade ago. CubeSats now cost roughly $500,000 to build and launch, a thousand-fold reduction from the $500 million price tag of a traditional Earth-observation satellite. GPS evolved from a $5 billion military program into a $1.50 chip in nearly every smartphone. Satellite imagery has shifted from classified intelligence to free and open access, with Sentinel-2 providing 10-meter-resolution data to anyone on the planet at no cost. And AI inference prices have plummeted at a pace that outstrips even Moore’s Law: the cost of GPT-3.5-level intelligence fell 280-fold in just two years, from $20 to $0.07 per million tokens.

That trajectory follows Wright’s Law, the empirical observation that costs decline predictably as cumulative production scales. The Santa Fe Institute has validated this pattern across 62 technologies. Solar panels decline by roughly 20 percent in cost with every doubling of manufacturing capacity. DNA sequencing fell from $100 million per genome to roughly $200 — a 500,000-fold collapse. Environmental AI is riding the same curve. The question is no longer whether AI-powered monitoring will become ubiquitous, but how quickly.

If the technological case for AI-powered monitoring is compelling, the economic case is self-evident. The Deepwater Horizon disaster cost an estimated $65 billion in direct costs, with academic analyses placing the true figure closer to $145 billion. The Flint, Michigan water crisis showed how a water quality problem that went undetected for 18 months ultimately cost more than $1 billion in remediation. Those are powerful reminders of what earlier monitoring might have prevented.

The pattern is consistent across domains. Research shows that a one-hour reduction in wildfire response time reduces the frequency of large fires by 16 percent. The January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, the costliest in American history, caused up to $250 billion in economic losses. Global deforestation costs between $2 trillion and 5 trillion per year in lost ecosystem services. Coral reefs provide $150 billion annually through tourism, fisheries, and coastal protection. Every hour of delayed detection risks turning a containable incident into a catastrophe. Every dollar spent on early-warning systems returns up to ten dollars in prevented losses.

The monitoring gap represents an enormous opportunity. Of the 76,000 water bodies reported globally, only 1 percent were located in the world’s poorest countries. Africa’s air-pollution death rate is 155 per 100,000 people, nearly double the global average — yet the continent has only 156 ground-level air-quality monitoring stations for 1.4 billion people. Even in the United States, studies show that low-cost air-sensor coverage remains uneven across communities, meaning the areas that would benefit most from monitoring often receive the least coverage.

That is why democratization matters. When monitoring requires $100,000 instruments and PhD-trained operators, only wealthy nations and institutions can afford to watch. When it requires only a smartphone and an AI sentinel, the calculus changes entirely. With 7.4 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide, nearly 80 percent of the global population now carries a GPS-enabled, high-resolution camera. The potential sensor network already exists. What was missing was the intelligence layer. That is what CleanSentinels provides.

Pessimists argue that the scale of environmental destruction outpaces any technology’s ability to keep up. But critics once said the same about acid rain, the ozone hole, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire. The historical record tells a different story. Since 1970, the United States has reduced combined emissions of six major air pollutants by 78 percent while GDP has quadrupled. The bald eagle population recovered from 417 nesting pairs to more than 316,000 individual eagles. The global rate of net forest loss has more than halved since the 1990s, and 36 countries are now gaining more tree cover than they lose.

Each of these victories followed the same pattern: first we learned to see the problem, then we learned to measure it, and then we solved it. CleanSentinels is not the only platform operating in this space, nor should it be. Google’s FireSat constellation is detecting wildfires too small for current satellites to identify. NASA and IBM’s Prithvi foundation model is helping make geospatial AI open source. Global Forest Watch’s GLAD alerts have compressed deforestation detection from months to days. What unites these efforts is a shared conviction: that environmental monitoring should not be a privilege of the wealthy, but a right of the exposed.

From Fargo, I see the contours of a future in which every coastline has a Blue Sentinel watching for oil spills, every forest has a Green Sentinel watching for chainsaws, and every community, regardless of income or geography, has the tools to see, measure, and demand action against the threats in its environment. The same trajectory that transformed GPS from a military secret into a free utility in every pocket, and satellite imagery from classified vaults into open data, is now reshaping environmental intelligence.

We already possess the satellites, the data, the AI, and the smartphones. What we have lacked is the connective tissue that transforms raw pixels into actionable knowledge, and the determination to make that knowledge universal. The planet has always been speaking to us. We are finally building the tools to listen. That is human progress at its finest.

Author: Aditya Goyal, a graduate student pursuing an MS in environmental engineering and a PhD in materials and nanotechnology at North Dakota State University. Outside his academic research, he independently founded CleanSentinels, an AI-powered environmental intelligence platform.

• Sweden, long treated as a model of democratic socialism, has spent the past three decades moving toward freer markets. Following a period of economic stagnation and a financial crisis in the early 1990s, the country cut taxes, restrained public spending, opened parts of education and healthcare to private providers, and generally liberalized the economy. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, Sweden’s growth prospects now look unusually strong by European standards, with projections roughly equal to those of the United States and about twice as high as those of France and Germany.

• America’s productivity growth is recovering after years of post-financial-crisis stagnation. The Economist reports that US productivity has grown by about 2 percent a year over the past five years, up from 1 percent in the 2010s. Reflecting that welcome news, the Federal Reserve recently raised its median estimate of America’s long-run GDP growth rate from 1.8 percent to 2 percent.

Energy & Environment

• The United States set a new energy production record in 2025, the fourth consecutive year of growth.

• Mountain bongo antelope are returning to Kenya’s forests after nearly disappearing from the wild. The Associated Press reports that fewer than 100 wild mountain bongos remain, but a breeding program at the Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy now maintains a large captive population that is gradually being reintroduced to protected forest habitat.

Health & Demographics

• Tunisia has been recognized by the World Health Organization for eliminating trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma is a bacterial eye disease that can cause blindness after repeated infections.

• A four-year evaluation of the RTS,S malaria vaccine pilot in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi has found that introducing the vaccine led to a 13 percent reduction in mortality among eligible children and a 22 percent reduction in severe malaria hospitalizations, despite incomplete coverage.

Science & Technology

• Ramp, a corporate payments platform, has been tracking AI spending from its clients since 2023. In its April 2026 AI Index, the company reported that more than half of the businesses on its platform paid for AI tools in March, up from 35 percent a year earlier.

• Atoco, a company building machines that harvest atmospheric water, recently showed Bloomberg its latest prototype ahead of a planned commercial debut. The company was founded by Omar Yaghi, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist whose work helped pioneer metal-organic frameworks, which the device uses to pull drinking water from the air. Atoco says the machine can produce up to 4,000 liters a day, and while it will be more expensive than desalinated water, it could be useful inland or in places without reliable water infrastructure. The company is also developing a version that produces less water but runs on ambient sunlight.

• India’s Department of Biotechnology is funding a major effort to catalog the country’s genetic variation. So far, the survey has sequenced the genomes of 9,768 people and identified 44 million genetic variants that were absent from global scientific databases. The initiative aims to eventually sequence one million genomes, which would greatly expand the genetic map researchers use to study disease, ancestry, and human biology.

• The FCC has loosened rules that constrained low-Earth-orbit internet satellites by limiting the strength of the signals they could send to customers on the ground. Under the new rules, satellite networks such as Starlink could use up to eight satellites to serve a given area and frequency band simultaneously, up from one under the old limits, allowing the networks to serve more users at once and potentially improve internet speeds.

Violence & Coercion

• Crime continues to fall across the United States. According to data from 67 major police departments, homicides were down 17.7 percent in the first three months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025. The same comparison shows a 20.4 percent decline in robberies, a 7.2 percent drop in rapes, and a 4.8 percent fall in aggravated assaults, continuing the post-pandemic drop in violent crime.

Read more news stories on our website

by Walker Wright

In earlier essays, I argued that trade makes us richer, more trusting, more honest, more fair, and more tolerant. In this final essay, I will show that trade also promotes peace and mitigates the outbreak of war. Distrust, corruption, unfairness, and intolerance can often erupt into violence. By undermining these less-than-desirable attitudes and behaviors, trade can help reduce violence as well. But it may be even more straightforward than that: it’s simply not a good idea to maim or kill your customers or suppliers. War is bad for business. When you rely on others to buy your product or supply your needs, rocking the relational boat seems suboptimal. As economist Christopher Blattman wrote in his book Why We Fight,

Interdependence doesn’t eliminate the risk of war. There could still be a commitment problem, uncertainty, or unchecked leaders that push our two groups to fight. But because of entwined material interests, these forces must now overcome even more powerful incentives for compromise than usual. The gravitational pull of peace has grown stronger.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard’s psychology professor Steven Pinker documented the worldwide decline in violence throughout history. One major contender for the driver of this more peaceful trend is known among international relations scholars as the democratic peace theory. As explained by Pinker, “Democratic government is designed to resolve conflicts among citizens by consensual rule of law, and so democracies should externalize this ethic in dealing with other states.” Trust in the procedures of democracy consequently builds trust between democratic governments. “Finally,” Pinker notes, “since democratic leaders are accountable to their people, they should be less likely to initiate stupid wars that enhance their glory at the expense of their citizenries’ blood and treasure.”

While the liberal peace theory remains influential, a growing wave of empirical research over the last three decades suggests that markets may play a bigger role than the ballot box. This shift in consensus toward what’s known as the capitalist peace theory posits that trade openness and economic interdependence are among the primary forces that mitigate war. Of course, scholars continue to debate over how much trade and economic freedom contribute to peace. But liberal peace theorists now include economic interdependence as an essential element within the broader liberal peace project. Economic interdependence is “part of the glue that cements the ‘liberal peace’ together.” As trade has grown worldwide, so has peace (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. Growth in Global Trade

Figure 2. The Rate of Wars Worldwide

French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote that trade barriers “create isolation, isolation gives rise to hatred, hatred to war, war to invasion.” And an abundance—and I do mean abundance—of empirical studies have shown Bastiat to be correct: trade indeed reduces interstate military conflict (see Figure 3). Other studies further solidify the adversarial relationship between trade and international violence: while trade reduces conflict, international conflict in turn reduces trade. One pair of scholars put it succinctly: “The positive relationship between economic interdependence and peaceful relationships is so well established that research now focuses on the conditions that cause variations.”

Figure 3. Trade and the Reduction of Conflict

Of course, these conditions and variations matter. For example, one study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution found that trade overall reduces conflict, but the pacifying effects vary by industry: trade in manufactured goods has a stronger pacifying effect than agricultural trade or trade in raw materials. Thus, trade in some industries yields more peace than others. Also, mere membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or the World Trade Organization does not appear to reduce conflict. Countries must actually trade.

Civil war is also less likely to break out where trade is present. A 2012 study controlled for a number of variables, including income per capita, growth rates, total population, ethnic fractionalization, and oil exportation. It found that higher levels of economic globalization—including foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, import barriers, tariff rates, and the overall extent of trade—reduce the risk of civil war. A 2016 study demonstrated that secure property rights, high-quality legal institutions, sound money, and free trade lower the probability of civil war. Covering the period between 1970 and 1999, political scientists Katherine Barbieri and Rafael Reuveny found that international trade, foreign direct investment, and foreign portfolio investment reduce the risk of civil war in all states observed.

As is well known, civil wars are more likely to take place between different ethnic groups. In many cases, ethnic groups silo themselves off from one another, escalating distrust and hostility toward out-groups. Trade barriers play a role in this siloing. It turns out that barriers to trade entry can produce what economist Saumitra Jha has labeled as ethnic cronyism: a set of “ethnic trading networks” often “based upon personal and community ties.” Jha’s analysis of South Asian medieval ports demonstrated that trade and low barriers to trade entry made these areas five times less prone to religious rioting between Hindus and Muslims in the period from 1850 to 1950. During the same period, these areas were 25 percentage points less likely to experience any religious rioting. Between 1950 and 1995, these areas were still less than half as likely to experience ethnic rioting.

Violence does not mean traditional interstate or civil wars alone; it often begins with how states treat their citizens. The closing and centralization of the economy is, to borrow from economist Don Lavoie, the militarization of the economy. Militarized central planners tend to wage war on their own citizens. Crucially, trade openness acts as a check on this central power, keeping potentially violent governments at bay.

Barbara Harff, a leading expert in the study of genocide and political mass killings, examined incidences of genocide between 1955 and 1997. One factor that decreases the risk of political mass murder, she found, is economic interdependence. Political scientist Clair Apodaca has also shown trade to be “advantageous to guaranteeing human rights,” with foreign direct investment being “favorable for human rights.” Emilie M. Hafner-Burton of UC San Diego summarized the state of the scholarship well: “One of the key discoveries of the past few decades is that it is possible to promote human rights by encouraging economic openness and growth through trade and investment…Market-oriented economic development…is correlated with better protections for human rights.”

Over two centuries ago, German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, “The spirit of trade cannot coexist with war, and sooner or later this spirit dominates every people. For among all those powers (or means) that belong to a nation, financial power may be the most reliable in forcing nations to pursue the noble cause of peace[.]” Others echoed this sentiment. “PEACE,” Montesquieu argued, “is the natural effect of trade.” In Rights of Man, American revolutionary Thomas Paine described commerce as “a pacific system, operating to unite mankind, by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other…If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable of, it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a revolution in the uncivilized state of governments.”

These philosophers and revolutionaries were correct. In the end, trade steers us away from war and brutality and toward peaceful cooperation. If we care about a future that is richer, freer, and more humane, then keeping markets open and people connected through trade is one of the surest paths to a more peaceful world.

Author: Walker Wright, the manager for Academic Programs at a public policy think tank in Washington, DC, and an adjunct faculty member at Brigham Young University-Idaho. His forthcoming book, In Trade We Trust: How Commerce Makes Us More Social, will be published by Bloomsbury.

McDonald’s operates in over 100 countries worldwide. Since 1986, The Economist magazine has published the Big Mac Index, built on the theory of purchasing power parity (PPP)—the idea that exchange rates should equalize the price of an identical basket of goods across countries. The following shows the dollar price of a Big Mac in each country, sorted by price:

But we can go one step further.

Instead of comparing currencies, we can compare time.

We start with the nominal price of a Big Mac in each country, converted to U.S. dollars, and then compare it to average hourly earnings. Since average hourly earnings data are not available for all countries, GDP per capita divided by annual hours worked serves as a reasonable proxy for relative wages between countries.

This transforms the question from “What does it cost?” to “How long do you have to work to get it?” A Big Mac can be more expensive in money but less expensive in time, depending on where you live.

A Big Mac in Taiwan costs only $2.38, compared to $7.99 in Switzerland, but after adjusting for hourly earnings, the time prices are very similar. In Pakistan, a Big Mac costs $3.77, but hourly earnings are $0.86, putting the time price at 4.4 hours. In Denmark, the price is $5.49, but hourly earnings are $57.60, so the time price is under six minutes. For the time it takes a worker in Pakistan to earn enough to buy one Big Mac, workers in Denmark can buy more than 46.

The Big Mac doesn’t just measure currencies; it measures the spread of knowledge.

What looks like inequality in dollars is often a difference in productivity, learning, and institutional capacity. The real divide is not between rich countries and poor countries—it is between places where knowledge compounds and places where it is constrained.

When a sandwich falls from four hours of work to four minutes, something profound has happened—not to the burger, but to the growth and sharing of knowledge.

The story of abundance is not written in dollars. It is written in time.

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

• A common concern about data centers is that they burden local communities with noise and higher electricity demand without giving much back. Loudoun County, Virginia, offers a strong counterexample. The affluent jurisdiction was an early center of data-center construction and will soon get nearly half of its tax revenue from data centers, helping lower the homeowner property-tax rate by about 40 percent over the past decade.

• For years, governments have mostly agreed not to put tariffs on digital trade, meaning countries do not tax cross-border downloads, streaming media, software, and other electronic products the way they tax some physical goods. That arrangement recently came under pressure, with Brazil and some other countries reluctant to extend the measure because they worry it limits future tax revenue. Now, 19 countries including the United States have agreed among themselves to keep digital trade duty-free, helping preserve a small but important piece of open commerce.

Energy & Environment

• The Asiatic wild ass, which vanished from Mongolia’s Eastern Steppe in the mid-20th century after the Trans-Mongolian Railway fenced off its migration routes, is beginning to return thanks to targeted fence removals along the railway.

• Until recently, the Victorian grassland earless dragon was thought to be extinct after farms and suburbs destroyed almost all of its native habitat. Then, in 2023, scientists found a surviving wild population on a single private grazing property. Melbourne Zoo is now breeding the lizards, with the ultimate goal of returning a restored population to the wild.

Health & Demographics

• The World Health Organization has prequalified the first malaria drug designed specifically for newborns and small infants, clearing the way for UN agencies, donors, and public health systems to buy and distribute it in highly malarial countries.

• In a randomized controlled trial, an experimental pill helped men with pattern baldness regrow significantly more hair than a placebo. After six months, men taking the drug reportedly gained about 30 to 33 hairs per square centimeter of scalp, compared with about seven for men on placebo.

• The World Health Organization says that Sudan and South Sudan have eliminated maternal and neonatal tetanus, an infection that can kill newborns within days without proper care. Note that Sudan’s validation relies on data collected before its civil war began, so it is uncertain how that achievement is holding up.

• The government of Burkina Faso is reporting a major drop in malaria cases and deaths after adding the malaria vaccine to a broader prevention campaign. Recorded malaria cases fell 32 percent between 2024 and 2025, while deaths fell 44 percent, though officials note that the gains came from several tools working together, including vaccines, bed nets, seasonal prevention drugs, and insecticides.

Science & Technology

• Japan Airlines is testing humanoid robots as baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, starting with the hard physical work of moving luggage and cargo on the tarmac.

• In a recent blog post, Jack Clark, one of the founders of Anthropic, argues that AI systems may soon be capable of performing AI research by themselves, citing major improvements in their ability to code, conduct research, and manage other models. If he’s right, it would raise the possibility of “recursive self-improvement,” a milestone that could dramatically accelerate AI progress.

Violence & Coercion

• New York City has recorded just 76 murders over the first four months of the year, the lowest number for that period in the city’s history.

• Jamaica recorded 673 murders in 2025, the lowest number since 1993 and a 40 percent drop from the year before. The country’s national security minister credits the decline partly to an increase in tips to police, which have risen nearly tenfold over the past decade.

Read more news stories on our website

One side waves away the risks, while the other treats warming as an existential crisis requiring degrowth, austerity, and sweeping political control.

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our editor Marian Tupy speaks with Roger Pielke Jr., professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, about what the latest climate research really says.

They discuss rising temperatures, hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, ocean warming, sea level rise, the decline of worst-case warming scenarios, and why climate policy must be rooted in energy abundance, adaptation, and honest risk management rather than panic or moral crusades.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

Below is an edited and abridged transcript featuring some highlights from the interview.

Today I’m joined by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., a Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of influential books like The Honest Broker and The Climate Fix. He’s a leading voice on the politicization of science and climate policy, and his scholarship is known for being rigorous, data-driven, and impartial.

I want to spend most of our time talking about climate change and global warming, but let’s start by looking at the extremes of the climate change debate.

People who are critical of the dominant view that climate change is a crisis or even a problem will say things like CO2 concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere are much lower than they were in the distant past, or that CO2 is vital for life, it is plant food, so there is nothing to worry about. What is wrong with that point of view?

Science supports global greening and the fact that CO2 levels were higher in the past. Where that goes away from scientific understanding is the “nothing to worry about” part.

The late Steve Schneider, who was a famous climate scientist and climate activist, once said that the fundamental challenge of climate change is that outcomes could be very benign, or they could be very serious, and we won’t know the difference during the time that we need to prepare. So, both extremes—the apocalyptics and the “don’t worry, be happy” folks—are guilty of selectively interpreting evidence. The reality is that both outcomes are in the spectrum of possibilities, but smart decision-making has to consider that entire spectrum, not just one tail of the distribution.

Is there such a thing as an optimal amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?

The simple answer is, as a risk management problem, the emission of carbon dioxide through the burning of fossil fuels has risks associated with change. And those risks could be profound. So, limiting the rate of change is much more important than whether 425 parts per million is better than 350 or 575.

There is also the question of trade-offs. For example, by emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere, we are making the world much richer. So, even if we do emit a lot more CO2, society in the future will be much richer and much more technologically advanced than we are, and they’ll be able to take care of any problems.

Humans are a fantastically inventive species. And it’s absolutely true that fossil fuels, which have the side effect of emitting carbon dioxide, have been central to human progress. One data point, a trend that I don’t think many people are aware of, is that the carbon dioxide intensity of economic activity—carbon dioxide per unit of GDP—has been dropping for decades. So, as we’ve become wealthier, we’ve also become much less carbon-intensive. As a species, we really like getting more output for less input, and we like cleaner-burning fuels. So, if that trend were to continue, we do at some point go over the hump of increasing carbon dioxide emissions, and they start going down.

In fact, right now, over the last decade, emissions have plateaued. There are small increases, but they’re within the margin of error measurement. So, there is a background force of decarbonization that has nothing to do with climate policy. I know it’s not as fast as some would like, and it could be faster, but decarbonization is just a fundamental reality of human civilization.

Now let’s address the other side of the extreme: people who believe that climate change is an existential crisis, and to avert it, we need to shrink the global economy. What’s wrong with that picture?

The big problem with that view is that the vast majority of people on this planet have no interest in degrowth. There are not very many politicians able to win an election by campaigning on making people poorer. The reality is that any successful path to decarbonizing the economy has to be accompanied by greater growth and wealth for most people. There are 5 or 6 billion people who do not enjoy anything close to the energy consumption that people who are watching this podcast get to enjoy every day. So, the world’s going to consume more energy no matter what degrowthers say.

What do you think about the very out-there techno-optimist view, which is that we should aim to have the technological sophistication and wealth necessary to completely control the climate? That’s a kind of sci-fi scenario that I sometimes hear.

I think we should get as wealthy as possible and be able to make our way through a volatile environment as safely as possible. The idea that there’s going to be a control panel where we can perfect climate conditions is science fiction. I have no expectation we’ll ever be doing that. The track record of humans trying to influence ecosystems is horrible.

We hear about this with proposals to “geoengineer” the climate. And full disclosure, I signed onto a geoengineering non-use letter, because it’s the height of arrogance for us to think that we can control the climate system. It’s like gain-of-function research on viruses. Yeah, maybe you’ll learn something, but maybe you’ll kill 20 million people. So, I’m not a big fan of the “control panel” approach to climate.

I want to now turn to specific concerns that people have when it comes to climate change. Let’s start with the rising global temperatures and extreme heat. What does the latest research say about this problem?

What I normally do—and I think this is a good practice in any area where science and politics meet—is I start with assessments that have been put together by authoritative bodies.

In this case, that’s the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a sprawling, massive thing. It’s got three working groups and many dozens of chapters and hundreds of authors. But it’s a touchpoint for assessing the science. The IPCC gets some things right and some things wrong. But in general, Working Group 1, with its focus on extreme events, has pretty much called things straight over the past 30 years.

When it comes to extreme heat, the IPCC says that there has been an increase in heat waves around the world. It’s been detected, to use their language, and they attribute that increase of heat waves to human causes, including increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

The World Health Organization has argued that with effective adaptation, the number of people who should die from excessive heat is zero. We have air conditioning, we have weather forecasts and good warnings. The challenge is that those adaptations to heat are not well implemented everywhere around the world. If places that are adapted to one level of temperature start seeing a greater frequency of heat waves, they will need to adapt.

The other factor is that ecosystems are far less adaptable than humans are. If it’s 110 outside, I can come inside in the air conditioning. Ecosystems can’t do that. So, material changes in the physical environment can have profound consequences for ecosystems.

Okay, now onto changes in precipitation patterns.

The extreme weather phenomenon the IPCC has the second-highest confidence in is an increase in heavy downpours, which they call “extreme precipitation.”

People have to be careful with that. And the IPCC, to its credit, is very careful. Extreme precipitation is not the same thing as flooding. Here in Boulder, Colorado, if we got 2 centimeters of rain today, that would be extreme precipitation, but it wouldn’t cause a flood. I wish we would get 2 centimeters of rain.

There has been a documented increase in the activity of the hydrological cycle around the world due to increasing temperatures. It hasn’t been detected everywhere, and the numbers are not super large in the context of natural variability, but they’ve been detected and attributed. However, the IPCC has low confidence that flooding has increased globally. Flooding is very difficult to document because we manage so many river basins. We change runoff patterns through urbanization and agricultural irrigation. So, flooding is much more confounded than precipitation itself.

Extreme weather events, especially hurricanes, cyclones, wildfires, and droughts.

We need to take these one by one.

I’ve studied tropical cyclones for 30 years, which includes hurricanes, and the IPCC gets this one right: there is no convincing evidence that there are more hurricanes or more intense hurricanes over the period of record. The IPCC is clear on that, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US is very clear on that.

Hurricanes have become a kind of poster child of climate change. They’re very photogenic. Al Gore had one coming out of a smokestack in his famous movie. However, hurricanes are probably one of the worst places to look for any signals of climate change. There are only 60 to 80 hurricanes on planet Earth in any given year. That’s a small number of events when you compare it to the millions and millions of temperature measurements we take every year.

Flooding, as I said, has no detection or attribution. Drought, for most metrics of drought, again, no detection or attribution. The one distinction that the IPCC makes is soil moisture deficits, basically dry land, which is associated with warming more than it is with precipitation. Winter storms, again, no detection or attribution there.

You have to be careful with wildfires because the wildfire record is very confounded by human land management. While we might be able to tease out trends in wildfires, attributing causality is much more difficult. There are some published studies out there that say that warming, particularly in, say, the western United States, has led to an increase in fire-prone conditions. There is also good research that says before the human settlement of North America, the intensity and scale of wildfires were much, much greater than anything we’ve seen, so we actually have a fire deficit.

Moving swiftly onto ocean warming and acidification.

I’m glad you brought those up. Despite all the arguments that have been made over the decades about the surface air temperature and the location of thermometers and things like that, it turns out that the best place to look for a signal of warming is the oceans. Over the last several decades, there have been very good temperature measurements showing that most of the energy imbalance caused by our emission of greenhouse gases is actually going into the oceans.

Onto acidification. So about half of the carbon dioxide we emit is taken up by the oceans, and that changes the chemistry of the oceans. On the one hand, it’s a good thing that the oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide because then there’s less of a radiative effect in the atmosphere. But on the other hand, it means we’re changing the chemistry of the ocean, and that will have impacts on sea life. If you go through all that math, this is one place that takes you to net zero. To stop changing the chemistry of the ocean, we couldn’t just reduce emissions to the amount that the oceans are taking up; we would have to reduce emissions to zero.

My next concern, melting ice and glaciers, is also tied to the rising sea levels and so forth. So maybe you can talk about that.

Runoff from glacial melt and also melt from Greenland, and to some degree from Antarctica, is contributing to sea level rise. That’s tightly associated with warming and has been attributed to human causes. There are also other factors beyond warming. Something I was fascinated to learn about from one of my colleagues at the University of Colorado was that when we put particulates in the atmosphere, and it precipitates out in snow, it changes the albedo—basically, the snow is a little darker because it has soot in it—and the snow melts faster.

Understood. Let’s talk a little bit about the different climate change scenarios. How much warming have we experienced? What are the worst and the best-case scenarios? And what does the most likely scenario mean for the planet?

That’s a great question.

Using a preindustrial baseline of 1850 to 1900, the world has already warmed about 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The projections are, as you say, scenarios. They’re a function of what we think the global population will be, how big the economy will be, where we’re going to get our energy from, and how we apply that energy in the economy. Last December, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change said that the world is headed to 2.2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. It just so happens that it aligns very nicely with a paper I did with Justin Ritchie and Matt Burgess.

I call this one of the best-kept secrets in all of climate science.

It wasn’t so long ago that those same types of projections were looking at 4, 5, 6 degrees Celsius by 2100. They’ve come down dramatically, not because of anything to do with the physical science of climate, but because our expectation for future emissions has come down dramatically. There was an assumption that coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel, was going to fuel everything around the world. And it turns out we’re not going in that direction.

Another big factor, and one that really hasn’t made its way into climate projections yet, is the changing projections of the global population. The leading climate scenarios still have 12 or 13 billion people on the planet in 2100. And demographers are now seriously talking about the global population peaking under 10 billion and then going down to maybe 7 billion in 2100. Once that gets factored in, projected temperature ranges are going to drop further.

Climate change has morphed from something that was plausibly extreme—I don’t think existential threat was ever the right language, but possibly extreme—to something that looks a lot more manageable. It’s a troublesome condition that will require a lot of action, but it’s not going to be the end of the world.

So, you actually had a paper some time ago where you nailed the trajectory of global warming with great precision. And that fantastic performance didn’t protect you in American academia. Meanwhile, people who wheel out the RCP 8.5 scenario, where everything is run on coal, get columns in major newspapers.

What on Earth is going on?

Extreme results are a lot more attractive to journals. And if you use an extreme climate scenario, you’re going to get extreme results. Journals like to put out press releases, and so the more shocking the headline, the more likely it is that it’s going to get picked up. At the same time, climate advocacy for decades now has focused on the notion of an existential threat, and extreme studies feed that notion.

Another factor is that the climate community updates its scenarios only every 10 to 20 years. Imagine doing economic policy with data from 2006 in 2026. It’s crazy. The energy system modelers update their energy scenarios every year. That’s one reason why it’s easy, I would say, to come up with better projections than you find in the IPCC, because they’re still using scenarios from two decades ago. If you use a more updated scenario, as we did, for energy consumption, population, and GDP, you’ll be much more accurate than one that was based on 2005 data.

It seems to me that the extreme environmentalist viewpoint has begun to come to an end. The break really came in 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting spike in energy prices.

Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I think that’s right. The price shock in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an eye-opener. People really do want action on the environment and on climate, but they don’t want to do it at the expense of their monthly utility bill.

I don’t think that the extreme environmental movement is going to completely disappear. The concern about overpopulation never really ended; it kind of faded away. I think that’s the best model for extreme environmentalism focused on climate. There will continue to be a segment of people, particularly in the scientific community, who emphasize apocalyptic scenarios and existential threats, but policymakers around the world have become much more focused on the security of energy, the price of energy, and energy access. For a long time, energy policy was discussed as if it were a subset of climate policy, and climate policy was the dominant framing. I think that has now reversed. Climate policy is now rightly viewed as a subset of energy policy. But don’t make any mistake: the radical wings on either side are going to remain with us.

Read the full transcript

When Paul R. Ehrlich, the famed Stanford University biologist and author of the bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb, died last month, he was 93 and unrepentant for a lifetime of doom-mongering. In the book he warned, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” In 1970, he predicted, “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come—and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” Over the succeeding decades, he maintained that less-than-cheerful disposition. In 2013, he wrote that “a global collapse appears likely.” In 2018, he stated that a “shattering collapse of civilization is a ‘near certainty.’” In 2024, he gave his last interview, reiterating his position that humans are destroying the planet and committing civilizational suicide.

Ehrlich’s confident and, to some, attractive demeanor made him a television star with more than 20 appearances on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show—a record unmatched by any other individual guest. Slowly but surely, the techno-optimistic 1960s (Star Trek 1966-1969, The Jetsons 1962-1963, Thunderbirds 1965-1966, etc.) gave way to the doom and gloom of the 1970s. Consider the 1973 film Soylent Green, set in an overcrowded and overheated New York City in 2022. Food is scarce, and most people survive on processed wafers made by the Soylent Corporation. A detective played by Charlton Heston investigates the murder of a wealthy businessman and uncovers a horrific secret: Soylent Green, marketed as a new food source, is made from human remains. Its final revelation made “Soylent Green is people!” one of cinema’s most famous lines.

The first Earth Day—April 22, 1970—came during the transition from optimism to doom and gloom, and Ehrlich played a role in that. He served on the steering committee put together by Earth Day founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson and spoke on campuses across the country. So it’s not surprising that, as the Columbia Climate School has noted, Earth Day was infused not only with the usual and more understandable environmental concerns over pollution and carcinogens, but “Malthusian” worries over overpopulation and overconsumption of resources.

The first Earth Day was a massive success. About 20 million Americans participated. Lectures and rallies took place at more than 2,000 college campuses, 10,000 elementary and high schools, and thousands of other locations around the country. Forty-two states adopted resolutions endorsing Earth Day, and Congress recessed so that legislators could take part in activities back home. In September 1970, Congress strengthened the 1963 Clean Air Act. That December, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.Long before Ehrlich warned we were stripping the planet of resources, the English preacher and economist Thomas Robert Malthus wrote in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population that human numbers, if left unchecked, grow geometrically, while food supply grows only arithmetically. From that simple and, as it turned out, badly mistaken idea, he concluded that humanity would always press against the limits of subsistence. If people multiplied too quickly, nature would restore balance through war, famine, and plague. Those were his “positive checks” on overpopulation and overconsumption. He regarded them as awful, but also as inevitable unless societies adopted “preventive checks,” such as celibacy, that limited reproduction. It is easy to see why Malthus’ argument seemed persuasive. For most of human history, harvest failures could ruin entire populations. Malthus looked at that long record and saw a pattern. The problem was that he took a pattern that had held for centuries and assumed it would hold forever. He mistook a long chapter of human experience for an eternal law of nature.

In fact, Malthus had already lost his main argument before his essay even appeared in print. Between 1700 and 1798, the population of England rose from 5.2 million to 8.44 million, an increase of 62.3 percent. Over the same period, nominal GDP per person rose from 12.37 British pounds to 23.97 pounds, an increase of 93.8 percent. The nominal price of a four-pound loaf of bread, a staple that fed much of the poor, rose from 5.2 pence to 7.4 pence, or 42.3 percent. Because incomes rose much faster than the price of bread, the latter became 36.2 percent more abundant, not less. Put plainly, as England added more people, the bread of the poor became easier to afford.

Why did Malthus miss what was happening? Partly because the Malthusian thinking, shared by Ehrlich, reduces human beings to their appetites. It sees more mouths and stomachs, but not more hands and minds. It assumes that each additional person means one more claimant on a fixed stock of food and other goods. What it does not see is the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt. Human beings are not trapped in the same ecological logic as bacteria in a dish or buffalo on a plain. We exchange with one another. We build institutions. We create tools. We improve production methods. We substitute one material for another. We grow more from the same soil—sometimes much more. In other words, we create new knowledge. Atoms without knowledge are mostly useless. New knowledge organizes atoms into fertilizer, irrigation systems, container shipping, refrigeration, or high-yield seeds. That is the variable that Malthus ignored and that led to Ehrlich’s very public humiliation.

Unlike Malthus and Ehrlich, the University of Maryland economist and Cato Institute senior fellow Julian Simon understood that scarcity is not the end of the resource story. It is just the beginning of a human response. Higher prices signal a problem. Those higher prices then encourage knowledge creation, and new knowledge leads to greater abundance. And so it was that in 1980, Simon proposed a 10-year futures-style bet. Ehrlich, along with ecologist John Harte from the University of California-Berkeley and John P. Holdren, a Berkeley scientist who later became President Barack Obama’s science adviser, jumped at the opportunity. The bet ran from September 29, 1980, to September 29, 1990.

Ehrlich’s group chose five metals: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. They fixed the starting value of the chosen quantities at $1,000 in 1980 and agreed to compare the inflation-adjusted value of that same basket 10 years later. If the real price of the basket rose, Simon would pay Ehrlich’s group. If it fell, Ehrlich’s group would pay Simon. The wager, therefore, used prices as a proxy for scarcity. When the term ended in 1990, all five metals were cheaper. Ehrlich sent Simon a check for $576.07, reflecting a 36 percent decline in the inflation-adjusted price of the basket. The check was signed by Paul’s wife, Anne Ehrlich. There was no accompanying letter. Simon replied with a thank-you note and offered to raise the stakes to $20,000 for a future bet, but Ehrlich declined.

The Simon Abundance Index, which Dr. Gale L. Pooley and I publish every year on Earth Day, is named after Julian Simon. It is a deliberate continuation of the quantitative analysis of the relationship between population growth and resource abundance that Simon’s bet with Ehrlich began. Unlike Simon and Ehrlich, who measured the abundance of resources in inflation-adjusted dollars, we look at “time prices.” Money prices are distorted by inflation and disputed deflators. Time prices solve that problem by dividing a good’s money price by hourly income, showing how long a person must work to buy it. They capture both falling prices and rising wages, require no inflation adjustment, and allow comparisons across countries and centuries. Time is universal, cannot be printed, and reflects the real cost people pay: hours of life. Time prices provide a clearer, simpler, and more meaningful measure of resource abundance than money prices for ordinary people.

By this measure, the last 45 years have been a rout for the pessimists. The 2026 report says that the Simon Abundance Index stood at 636.4 in 2025, up from a base of 100 in 1980. That means Earth was 536.4 percent more abundant in 2025 than in 1980. All 50 commodities, including fuels, such as crude oil, coal, and natural gas, food, such as chicken, beef, and lamb, and metals, such as aluminum, copper, and gold (yes, even gold!), in the dataset were more abundant in 2025 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual rate of 4.2 percent, doubling about every 17 years. In the 42 countries tracked by the report—accounting for 85.9 percent of global gross domestic product and 66.3 percent of the world’s population—none saw lower resource abundance in 2025 than in 1980. That is not what a species trapped in Malthus’ arithmetic is supposed to produce.

The mechanics of that gain matter. Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. What required an hour of work in 1980 required about 18 minutes in 2025. The same hour of work that bought one unit of a typical commodity in 1980 bought 3.44 units in 2025. That is a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. At the same time, the world population grew by 85 percent, from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion. Put those two changes together and you get the index’s central finding: For every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent. Resources growing at a faster pace than the population is what Pooley and I call superabundance. It is the opposite of Malthus’ conjecture that each additional person leaves less for everyone else.

The critics sometimes retreat to complaining about the short-term noise, as though any temporary spike in prices confirms the Malthusian creed. Our report addresses that, too. In 2025, 27 commodities became more abundant, and 23 became less abundant. The abundance of oranges rose the most, by 65.6 percent, while coconut oil’s abundance fell the most, by 36.3 percent. But commodity markets always swing because weather changes, disease hits crops, wars disrupt transport, and investment arrives late or early. Simon never argued that every price falls every year in a straight line. He argued that scarcity signals provoke adjustment. A temporary setback is not a vindication of Malthus. It is often the first stage of a correction. That is why the long trend matters more than the annual changes.

Our findings do not show that pollution is imaginary or that every environmental question has been solved. It has not. But environmental problems should be addressed as side effects of human flourishing, not as evidence that human flourishing itself is a mistake. The Earth Day mentality blurred that distinction. It converted planetary stewardship into misanthropy. It taught millions to look at a growing population and see only a burden, never a contribution. It treated the human animal as uniquely destructive when, in fact, people are the only animals who can recognize ecological damage and fix it. It is new knowledge—human knowledge—that gives societies the capacity to clean rivers, regulate toxins, build sewage systems, improve fuel efficiency, and move from dirtier technologies to cleaner ones. A poor society burns what it can find and dumps what it cannot manage. A rich society can afford scrubbers, pipelines, wastewater treatment, research labs, and better rules.

The green extremists often speak as though abundance is the disease, when in fact abundance is usually what makes environmental improvement possible. And so, despite half a century of doomsaying, the Earth is not collapsing under the weight of humanity. It is supporting far more people who can command far more resources with far less labor than their predecessors could. That is not the picture of a planet in terminal decline. It is the picture of a planet made more habitable by the one species clever enough to improve it. The Earth is not a museum piece. It is a working planet inhabited by learning beings who desire and are entitled to flourish.

This article was originally published in The Dispatch on 4/23/2026.