• 76 percent of humanity used the internet this year, up from 44 percent in 2016, according to the latest figures from the International Telecommunication Union. Over the same period, the share of internet users nearly tripled in low-income countries, growing from 11.5 percent to 32.3 percent.

• About one-third of US states passed deregulatory housing reforms in 2026, according to a new analysis by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The measures vary by state but include loosening zoning restrictions, eliminating parking requirements, streamlining permitting processes, relaxing staircase and elevator requirements, and legalizing accessory dwelling units, all of which could reduce construction costs and help expand the housing supply.

Energy & Environment

• The breeding population of Peruvian diving petrels on Chile’s Choros Island has grown 7.5-fold since 2013, when invasive rabbits were eradicated from the island. Free from the rabbits, which had stripped the island’s vegetation and damaged the petrels’ burrows, the colony reached an estimated 90,000 breeding pairs in 2024, up from around 12,000 in 2013 and 300 in 1980.

• The Bangka slow loris, a venomous primate listed as “possibly extinct” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, has been confirmed to survive on Indonesia’s Bangka Island. Scientists had not formally recorded the species since the 1930s, but a new study shows that the lorises never disappeared but simply went undocumented. Coauthored by staff at the island’s Alobi Wildlife Rescue Center, the study reports that the center took in more than 90 Bangka slow lorises between 2015 and 2025 and released 86 of them back into the wild.

• British conservationists and forestry researchers have completed Britain’s largest-ever woodland bat survey with the help of artificial intelligence. Using recording devices placed across hundreds of English woodlands, researchers collected roughly 90,000 hours of audio, which was then reviewed by AI for the presence of bat calls. The researchers estimate that analyzing the recordings manually would have taken over 30 years.

Health & Demographics

• Barbados has eliminated mother-to-child HIV transmission, according to a recent announcement from the World Health Organization. Between 2022 and 2024, there were no reported cases of mother-to-child HIV transmission, 98 percent of pregnant women were tested for HIV, and 98 percent of pregnant women with HIV received antiretroviral treatment.

• The US Food and Drug Administration has tentatively approved the first generic version of lenacapavir, a groundbreaking HIV drug that prevents infection with just two yearly injections. Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, an Indian pharmaceutical company, developed the generic formulation and has pledged to sell it for $40 per person annually. The “tentative” approval means that the drug meets FDA standards but cannot be sold in the United States because of existing patent protections. However, because many foreign regulators rely on the FDA’s assessments of new drugs, the approval should accelerate the drug’s distribution abroad. Under a 2024 licensing agreement with Gilead Sciences, lenacapavir’s original developer, generic versions can be sold in 120 low- and middle-income countries.

• In an early-stage trial involving three patients with drug-resistant epilepsy, an experimental gene therapy cut monthly seizures by about 90 percent. The treatment used viruses to deliver a gene to neurons in the part of each patient’s brain responsible for their seizures. The gene made those neurons sensitive to the drug clozapine, which was then administered at low doses to suppress the neurons' activity.

• Early studies from England and Argentina, which began vaccinating pregnant women against RSV in 2024, are showing substantial reductions in RSV-related hospitalizations. A recent meta-analysis found that infants under six months old whose mothers received an RSV vaccine while pregnant had a 74 percent lower risk of being hospitalized for an RSV-related lung infection. Separate research found that RSV-related infant hospitalizations were 63 percent lower than expected in England and 34 percent lower in Buenos Aires, Argentina, following the introduction of maternal RSV vaccination.

Science & Technology

• The sites of Germany’s nuclear power plants, which were unwisely shut down during a phaseout completed in 2023, may get a second life hosting AI data centers. The German energy company PreussenElektra has announced that it is working with Nvidia to assess whether former nuclear plant sites could be repurposed for computing, taking advantage of their existing grid connections, land, and industrial infrastructure.

• The autonomous drone delivery company Zipline is rapidly expanding its US operations. The company, which pioneered medical drone deliveries in Africa, has raised $1.5 billion to grow its US business and signed an agreement with Walmart to establish 300 new drone delivery sites, in addition to the 21 sites the companies currently operate together.

• Pangram, a leading provider of AI-detection software, has released new tools for identifying AI-generated images and videos. According to the company’s own tests, its new image detector achieved 99.96 percent accuracy on a dataset containing images from 12 leading AI image generators, while its video detector decisively outperformed competing tools on an AI video-detection benchmark.

• Artificial intelligence continues to spot security vulnerabilities in widely used software. In a recent announcement, Anthropic reported that an unreleased, internal research model discovered serious security flaws in Chrome, Safari, Android, Windows, and Linux. Separately, OpenAI has announced that its new cybersecurity model, GPT-6 Cyber, identified hundreds of security vulnerabilities in the Linux operating system and 81 flaws in the Firefox web browser. Both companies have been sharing their findings with the relevant software developers, and OpenAI’s model helped prepare some of the necessary patches. Anthropic has also released a plugin for Claude Code, its AI coding assistant, that automatically checks the code it writes for security flaws.

Read more news stories on our website

by Steve Davies

Today marks the second installment of a new series of essays on HumanProgress.org written by Dr. Steve Davies titled “Critiques of Progress.” Each of the fifteen essays in this monthly series will examine the origins, nature, and validity of recurring critiques of the modern world. This essay examines the old complaint that modern life has drained the world of meaning and argues that, where this complaint holds at all, it is a result of prosperity and freedom. You can read the first part of this series here.

One of the recurring arguments made against the modern world is that it is marked by an intensifying loss of meaning. The argument is not that the natural world or human life and society are actually objectively emptied of meaning but that they are increasingly perceived and understood as such. This is, in other words, an argument about a pervasive state of mind and mental outlook, supposedly produced by the experience of living in the modern world and by the impact of modernity’s essential and predominant ways of thinking on the collective mentality of people. The argument is that people increasingly experience what is often called “anomie” (literally “normlessness”), a state of mental exhaustion, drift, and feeling that nothing means anything and that there is no point to life or to any human action or choice.

That, it is argued, has extensive and harmful effects on the way people live and act, and on the wider culture and ways of life. Anomie creates paralysis and lassitude that are paradoxically combined with restlessness and agitation. The feeling of futility and pointlessness leads to harmful and destructive actions and behaviors such as suicide or substance abuse, producing what are now called “deaths of despair.” Anomie is often claimed to be the source of reluctance to have children or to commit to the future. In culture and the arts, anomie is seen as producing work that is either trivial and shallow or dark and tormented.

The diagnosis of this widespread state of mind and the actual term anomie was classically formulated by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his 1897 book Suicide. That book, however, was inspired by an earlier work in 1881, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilisation by Thomas Garrigue Masaryk (later the first president of Czechoslovakia). Masaryk argued that suicide was an individual response to a wider crisis of meaning and purpose in modern civilization. The main cause of anomie for Masaryk and Durkheim was the breakdown of structures and rules that constrained personal choice, combined with a loss of belief in formal religion, which meant that the idea of the universe as a whole and particular entities within it having a telos or goal that determined people’s proper existence (the final cause in classical philosophy) disappeared. Instead, they argued, people faced an overwhelming range of choices with no structure to guide them, and no idea of life’s ultimate purpose other than their own personal preferences or choices.

Durkheim and Masaryk were only two of many who arrived at this diagnosis. Other authors made similar cases in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after which this kind of argument became a standard part of the anti-modernist repertoire. Prominent examples include Fyodor Dostoevsky (notably in The Brothers Karamazov but also elsewhere), Friedrich Nietzsche, and Thomas Hardy. Anomie is also a main theme in the work of French philosopher Albert Camus, particularly in The Stranger. Interestingly, not all of the authors saw the loss of meaning as the inevitable and inescapable result of living in modernity. Both Nietzsche and Camus, for example, believed that one could escape anomie through conscious choice at the individual level, although neither thought there was a collective solution to the problem. Masaryk, by contrast, thought that such an escape could be achieved through the development of new forms of collective purpose. Most, however, followed Durkheim in concluding that the anomic state of mental affairs was an inevitable result of how people now lived and of the disenchantment of the world by rationalism and utilitarianism.

How and why, though, was this state of despair and lack of meaning connected to the modern world, for its diagnosticians? Their answer was that anomie was the inevitable result of core features of the modern world. The main one for many such features was loss of religious faith and its supplanting by materialism and (in moral philosophy) utilitarianism. However, several other reasons were given. A prominent one was urbanization and the way that cities supposedly cut people off from the natural and the sublime. Another was the artificial routine produced by modern work, which forced people into a repetitive way of living that had no obvious goal or purpose for most, since it was work oriented towards someone else’s purpose — that of the capitalist, for example. One common argument was that the modern world was too comfortable and lacked challenge or danger, since the latter truly gave life meaning.

This argument led to positions and arguments in the later nineteenth century that will now strike many as bizarre or wrongheaded. Most notably, it led to a valorizing of war as something that created meaning for those caught up in it, even if it came at the cost of death or injury. One classic exposition of this view was German soldier and author Ernst Jünger’s account of his experiences on the Western Front, Storm of Steel, but he was one of many. Another example was the Irish patriot and revolutionary Patrick Pearse, who argued (in 1915!) that young men were lucky to have been born at that time because they had the chance to escape the stultifying boredom and meaninglessness of bourgeois society for the danger and heroism of war. Even after the horrors of the World Wars and other conflicts, authors such as Michael Easter and Anna Lembke still argue that modern life lacks challenge and, therefore, meaning.

In addition to secularization, two other arguments were made. First, that the modern world created too many choices between options that had no substantive difference, so that the choice itself had no real consequence. This range of choice overwhelms people, and the effect of being confronted with choices with no significance (such as choosing between 23 different types of deodorant, in Bernie Sanders’ famous quip), it is argued, undermines the very idea of meaningful or purposive action. Second, that the modern condition both created and valorized individualism and personal autonomy. For the critics, that meant that people were no longer part of a social structure that provided them with meaning and purpose, even though by its nature this social integration also restricted individual expression. That was Durkheim’s principal argument, although, interestingly, he also argued that too much integration and collective rules would ironically produce similar results to the lack of rules. This argument, of meaninglessness as a product of a lack of generally accepted rules and norms, is why the term anomie came to be widely used.

What to say about all that? One obvious comment is that the phenomena in question fall under the heading of what we now call “first world problems.” Worrying about a lack of meaning produced by too much choice and comfort, and the lack of clear rules, is not a problem for those wondering where their next meal is coming from, how to get food and shelter, or living under the kind of strict rules enforced historically by religious authorities and the state. Much of the argument can be described fairly as “luxury complaints”: the kinds of difficulty one might face when actual serious and life-limiting or threatening problems have been dealt with. In other words, to the extent that many people do feel that their life is lacking in meaning or purpose, we can fairly describe this as a problem of success — the kind of problem that it is good to have in many ways.

Second, it is not at all clear that there is anything particularly modern about anomie. Philosophers and religious thinkers from the Stoics and the Buddha onwards have been making the point about the lack of inherent or transcendent meaning in life and the world and suggesting ways of dealing with it. The psychological phenomena described were extensively written about by ancients and Christians under the heading of “accidie,” a term that interestingly is making a comeback in popular psychology as well as theology and moral philosophy. The Christian sin of sloth also corresponds to the feeling of pointlessness and the state of lassitude that it produces (a sin because it rejects the joy and purpose that God offers). In the seventeenth century, before modernity, Robert Burton examined the state of mind described earlier in his massive 1621 work The Anatomy of Melancholy. Clearly, this kind of state of mind and being was not unknown before the modern world.

The critics’ response, of course, is that it has now become more widespread, even normal, as opposed to unusual and pathological. Even if, for the moment, we grant that, it does not follow that anomie is inescapable as a cost of modernity, much less that anomie is a ground for rejecting the benefits of modernity. As several of the authors who diagnose this malady argue, there are ways of dealing with it, most of which involve either simply accepting the lack of transcendent meaning and getting on with living (this was English philosopher Bertrand Russell’s position, for example) or creating meaning in life through one’s own deliberate choices and valuations (the view of Nietzsche and existentialists such as Camus, for example).

The last is the key point. What these complaints share is the belief that human beings are not equipped to bear the burden of full autonomy, and that meaning can only ultimately come from outside the individual, either from God and revelation, or from a collective entity (which mysteriously turns out to consist of flesh-and-blood humans who do the actual choosing). There is actually no reason to accept the case granted pro arguendo above that this existential anxiety is widespread. Most people seem to feel that their life and their relations are perfectly meaningful and do not suffer the angst described. We should remember that suicide, which Durkheim and Masaryk treated as the ultimate expression of a supposed crisis of meaning, is a rare event that’s becoming rarer in most rich countries. Quite simply, the modern world is in many ways founded upon the belief that it is choice and purposeful action by individuals that is the source of meaning, along with relations with other people. The thesis that meaning can only come from outside the individual is rejected. The empirical evidence that secular and open societies are happier supports this view.

Modern life values personal choice and increases the range of choices open to ordinary people. In modernity, the quest for meaning and purpose is fulfilled through individual and voluntary collaborative action. As such, we should reject the complaints of anomie and, to the extent that they have a foundation, regard it as a problem of success.

Author: Steve Davies, a Senior Education Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs and an Advisory Board Member at Human Progress.

In this episode of the Human Progress Podcast, Kristian Stout, Director of Innovation Policy at the International Center for Law and Economics, joins Chelsea Follett to explain the costs of slowing AI innovation and the obstacles already standing in its way. They discuss why AI could create more jobs than it eliminates, how excessive regulation could leave the United States dependent on Chinese AI technology, and how conflicting state laws, local zoning restrictions, and infrastructure bottlenecks threaten to slow the industry’s growth.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

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

Joining me on the Human Progress podcast today is Kristian Stout, Director of Innovation Policy at the International Center for Law and Economics. His work addresses competition, telecommunications, and artificial intelligence policy—very big topics these days.

Let’s start with a big-picture overview. Can you sketch out the history of AI and data centers for us before we dive into the current debates?

AI feels like something very new. When the computer starts talking to you, that’s unusual. But it’s really part of a longstanding trend in computer science. As far back as the 1940s, there were researchers trying to understand how you could model, for instance, human neurons inside of computers.

So, the whole project of computing is trying to introduce more intelligence to computing, and what we have today is the result of compounding developments over many decades. In the 1970s, you started getting some more sophisticated algorithms being deployed. The ones that consumers are most familiar with are things like autocomplete and search engines. Those are all forms of artificial intelligence.

Then, around 12 years ago, we started really focusing on machine learning. For a long time, the news was about “big data.” All of the investment money was going to big data and different machine learning techniques. That was artificial intelligence. Nobody was writing news articles about it as artificial intelligence. There were some anxieties surrounding it about, for instance, what that augmentation meant for labor and the future of work. But we didn’t frame it in terms of Skynet taking over. Today, because you can interact with the computers in a way that feels very human-like, it’s become popular to think about AI that way.

It’s a similar story with the data centers. Data centers have been with us since the 1950s, albeit at a very small scale. IBM’s mainframe model, where researchers would share information over long distances with phone lines, was an early form of data center. The data centers that we think of now as “the cloud” really started being built around 2005, when the scale of the internet really was taking off, and we needed a lot more computing support. So what we’re dealing with, when it comes to both AI and data centers right now, is a scale difference, not a kind difference.

That scale difference has brought with it some interesting political debates. The public’s view of data centers has seemingly soured even as people are using AI more and more. And we’ve been seeing more and more political moves to ban or restrict the construction of data centers.

What is your take on this development?

I think all of your viewers are going to be familiar with the idea that people’s true feelings do not always match what they say in public opinion polls. You will get a different result if you ask something like, “What do you think about data centers?” versus “How do you feel about an industrial project in your area that might bring jobs and might have these costs and benefits?”

It’s the same thing with AI. The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, goes out and says something about how AI could kill us in 10 years. So when you poll people, “What do you think about AI?” well, “I would like it not to kill me in 10 years.” But if you then had a poll asking something like, “How would you feel about a computer technology that enables you to do all of your week’s work in two days?” you might get a more positive result.

Part of it is a categorical thinking problem. As human beings, we look at the environment and create groups of things that allow us to make very fast decisions. That decision-making process is often not complete enough for us to actually answer complicated modern questions. I think most people, if you actually drill down into the questions with them, have a more nuanced opinion about these technologies.

I think that there are understandable concerns about what AI will mean for the future of work. Personally, from the research I look at and from interacting with these technologies, I don’t think AI is going to cause mass layoffs. I think employment will go up. Workers will be expected to be even more productive, and we will invent new forms of consumption that we need to satisfy.

However, it is very hard to predict what that future economy will look like. AI is what researchers call a general-purpose technology. It’s like electricity. It’s a platform that people are going to use to develop new ways of doing things. So we won’t know exactly what AI will be used for until the market discovers it. That creates some understandable anxiety. But one of the nice things about this particular technological revolution is that it helps us have cognitive adjuncts. AI itself can help us figure out how to onboard more people more quickly and more seamlessly into this new intelligence revolution in a way that previous technological revolutions couldn’t.

You said that you believe with AI, employment will go up. Can you elaborate on that?

If you take human nature seriously, we have an unlimited amount of desire. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have been looking at their environment and thinking, “I can do a little bit better. I would like to eat more; I would like to have more mating opportunities. I would like to have more of everything.”

There are tons of spiritual traditions around the world that try to help us learn how to tame those desires. So far, they have not been very successful. Instead, when a new opportunity presents itself, our desire fills the volume you provide to it. So if there’s a technology that lets you finish your workweek in a day, I don’t think people are going to stop working on Monday.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we’re status-driven creatures. The reason why we value money or other resources is not just the resources themselves, but also the status that those resources provide us relative to other people. That means there’s never enough. If someone else is perceived as having more status, we’re always going to want to increase our own status.

Modern wealthy people in the United States compete on their investment in their children, right? When I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, no one went to anybody’s practices. Now, sports and extracurriculars are a kind of social event where people vie to be the most involved. AI is going to lead to something similar. It’s going to enhance our productivity, but the things that we value are going to expand in turn, and we’re going to fill that time with more value-seeking opportunities. And that might not look like sitting at a desk for 40 hours a week, but it will still exist, and there will still be employment and resource opportunities within those new activities.

Some of the anxiety around AI is inspiring policies that could slow down the industry. There’s a big difference, for example, between Europe’s technology industry and the relatively less regulated technology industry in the US. Could you talk a bit about how the policy environment affects the ability of the AI industry to continue to innovate?

The European area, before it was the European Union, was one of the leaders in pharmaceutical production throughout the 20th century. They’re still developing these drugs and they’re still innovative, but over the last 30 years, because of policy choices they’ve made, America has just blown past them because we have a relatively pro-innovation regulatory environment when it comes to pharmaceuticals.

There’s definitely a similar risk with AI regulation. First off, China is becoming a very innovative place, and I don’t believe they’re going to slow down AI innovation. They’re standing up their own chip producers to get around our export controls, and some of the early returns on their chips look very promising. I myself run a lot of the open-source models that come out of China. They’re fantastic. They do a great job.

In Europe, they’re largely a consumer of our technology products. They don’t need to be. There are brilliant people in Europe. They’re constrained by the regulatory environment. The cost to Europe is that they’re six months behind us, say. The United States gets a product first, and then a team of lawyers has to figure out how to deploy it in Europe. And then Europeans eventually will get some form of it.

That’s a serious cost. I read a lot of science fiction as a kid, and I really loved cyberpunk novels. One of the concepts in those novels was that everyone had personalized AI defensive measures. Your AI is essentially supposed to go out and be your agent, to go out and do the things you need it to do. And part of that is defending you from the bad AIs.

The future could look something like that. You may have an AI agent whose job is to protect you and advance your interests. It might check your identity theft exposure, check your financial risk exposure, go out and make sure that the opportunities in your professional life are being maximized, and so on. If we lose the race to AI because we have bad policy, the cost could be becoming de facto citizens of Chinese AI infrastructure in the future.

I want to get your take on the recent AI Safety Accord. So this is a matter of self-regulation. Some have critiqued it because it’s non-binding. What’s your take on the AI Safety Accord and this idea of industry self-regulation?

There’s no such thing as self-regulation anymore. We do not live in a laissez-faire environment. We live in a highly regulated environment, even in the United States. And regulation is not just someone at the FTC sitting down and designing a code of conduct. The legal system itself is a regulatory apparatus. The United States has a common-law approach, where we have adjudication through different court levels. And we also have pseudo-courts within the regulatory system. That backdrop means that there are liability rules operating in the background of every firm that will potentially destroy your company if you run afoul of them.

But I guarantee you AI companies have counsel inside warning them to be careful. You could see negligence liability emerging based on the way consumers use these products, the way you’re selling them to people. There are all kinds of exposure for liability. It’s only a matter of time before you start to see more settlements and cases emerge.

So by saying we’re encouraging them to do self-regulation, we’re not saying AI companies can get away with whatever they want. We’re saying they need to take the first crack at helping us understand how to understand AI and how it fits in society. And when something goes wrong, a court or regulator is going to look at what their efforts were and whether they were good enough. If they weren’t, AI companies are going to face massive liability.

What do you see as some of the most damaging roadblocks, even in the United States’ relatively pro-innovation environment, that could potentially cost us the AI race?

Great question. There are two broad classes of problems right now. The first one is the state versus federal distinction. The second one would be the data center pushback.

Because the federal government has not been able to enact something like a federal framework for how we want to think about AI regulation, we are seeing a lot of states rushing to fill the gap. If states end up having different requirements for training a model, safety testing a model, and offering it to consumers, that would definitely put the brakes on AI development.

The received wisdom right now is that Chinese models are about six months behind American frontier models. Maybe a little less in some areas. If you were able to introduce enough regulatory friction in the United States that major labs felt like they needed to severely slow down their deployment, you could easily see China match us or even start to outpace us at the frontier level.

The other major roadblock is data center permitting.

One problem is zoning at the local level. A hyperscaler or somebody who wants to build a big data center comes into a community, and the local council is like, “What questions do I ask? What data can you give me?” The public processes that the states have in place can be opaque, and it’s not clear how to get the exact answers. At what point do the jobs that the data centers bring in materialize? How do you judge those things? Frequently, local councils don’t know how to answer these questions.

I think state governments need to create a regular process that someone who wants to build a data center has to go through to expose all of the information that the local communities need. Without that information, some residents will be like, “Why would you do this? You’re trying to do some shady backroom deal.” It’s usually not, but without that information, it’s hard to justify.

The other side of it is the permitting side. We have this long-standing problem in the telecommunications area where providers need to go in and get permissions in each locality they operate in to deploy their infrastructure. Energy suffers from a similar problem. Right now, in some areas, connecting a new data center to the grid can take up to seven years, which is why a lot of these places are starting to look at putting in their own on-site energy production.

So we have a very fragmented and inefficient way to get the energy into these data centers. We have a fragmented and inefficient way to build the necessary telecommunications networks. And then we have the legitimate problems at the local level.

What are you most optimistic about regarding AI or AI policy?

So Meta has these Ray-Ban glasses with the cameras and the AI that you can talk to, right? People get upset about them because they don’t want to have their picture taken in public, and we’re still working through the privacy issues there. But think about what this does for people who are visually impaired: they now have, on their face, something that helps them navigate the world. This person can now participate in society in a way that they couldn’t before.

It’s the same thing with AI. People of below-average intelligence do okay in life. They’re able to scrape by. Now they have a personal assistant who helps them understand the incredibly complicated modern world. So AI is obviously going to help us do even more impressive stuff at the frontier of human knowledge and capability. But it’s also going to allow more people to participate more fully in society. That can only be for the benefit of society, in my opinion.

Read the full transcript

• There’s a common misconception that the substantial long-term decline in global poverty shows up only when poverty is measured against a very low income cutoff, such as the World Bank’s $3-a-day extreme poverty threshold. Our World in Data recently produced a beautiful visualization correcting that mistaken view: between 2000 and 2024, the share of humanity living in poverty fell at every threshold.

Energy & Environment

Energy production

• A recent report from the World Bank and GOGLA, the global off-grid solar industry association, conservatively estimates that 149 million people were using off-grid solar power in 2025, up from about 101 million in 2021.1 Of those 149 million, most of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa, 98 million had systems capable of powering at least basic lighting and phone charging, including 15 million with enough power to run appliances such as televisions and fans.

• After years of delays, the British government has allowed production to begin at the Jackdaw natural gas field in the North Sea. The field is expected to operate for up to 11 years and, at peak output, the field would raise UK gas production by about 6 percent.

• Finland has granted an operating license for the world’s first permanent disposal site for spent nuclear fuel. The facility will bury the fuel deep underground in corrosion-resistant canisters, allowing its radioactivity to diminish undisturbed for tens of thousands of years. Posiva Oy, the company in charge of the site, expects to begin operations soon, following final tests and regulatory approvals.

Conservation & biodiversity

• Low-lying atoll islands, the small sandy islands that form on ring-shaped coral reefs, are widely considered among the places most vulnerable to rising sea levels. In reality, atoll islands will not inevitably erode into the sea. A 2019 review of 709 atoll islands found that nearly 9 in 10 had remained stable or grown over recent decades despite rising seas, thanks in part to sediment accretion: the buildup of sand and coral rubble carried ashore by waves. A new study in Science Advances suggests that protecting seabird populations can help speed up that process. Seabird guano fertilizes both native plants, whose roots stabilize island sediment, and the surrounding reefs, boosting coral growth and the production of sediment that waves carry ashore. Because rats eat seabird eggs and chicks, rat-free islands tend to have more seabirds. The study, which combined ecological data from 28 islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, estimated that reefs around rat-free islands produce between two and three times as much sediment as reefs around rat-infested islands.

Health & Demographics

• The FDA has approved a new treatment for chronic hepatitis B that can allow some patients to stop long-term antiviral medication. After a 24-week course of the new drug alongside existing antivirals, followed by another 24 weeks on antivirals alone, 19 percent of recipients across two trials still had no detectable virus six months after stopping all treatment. Chronic hepatitis B typically requires years of antiviral treatment, sometimes for life, to keep the virus under control.

• An experimental immunotherapy has shown lasting benefits in a small trial involving people with stiff person syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that causes debilitating muscle stiffness and spasms. One year after a single treatment, 8 of the 12 patients who initially needed walking aids could complete a 25-foot walking test unaided, and 24 of the 26 participants remained off other immunotherapies used to manage the disease.

• Peptides, which are short chains of amino acids, perform many functions in the body and are widely used in medicine. Examples include insulin, GLP-1 weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, and oxytocin. A growing number of people also take unapproved peptides in the hope of building muscle, increasing stamina, recovering faster from injuries, or sleeping better. The US Department of Health and Human Services has now proposed allowing small compounding pharmacies, which prepare customized medicines to fill individual prescriptions, to make six of these unapproved peptides. The reform could make it easier and safer to try experimental peptides by letting licensed pharmacies, which would have to meet ingredient-testing and safety-reporting requirements, compete with existing gray-market suppliers.

Science & Technology

• OpenAI has announced another set of AI-generated proofs addressing longstanding problems in mathematics, computer science, and theoretical physics. Independent researchers are now verifying the proofs.

• According to Waymo’s latest safety data, the robotaxi company has sustained its impressive safety record over 271 million driverless miles, with Waymo vehicles involved in 82 percent fewer injury-causing crashes per mile than human drivers in the areas where the company operates.

• Tesla has announced that it has begun manufacturing humanoid robots at its factory in Fremont, California.

Violence & Coercion

• Serious violent crime in the US fell sharply in 2025, according to preliminary results from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The combined rate of rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault fell 25 percent compared with 2024, from 9.9 to 7.4 per 1,000 people aged 12 or older. Simple assaults, which involve neither a weapon nor serious injury, held roughly steady. The NCVS is based on interviews with a nationally representative sample of US households, so it captures crimes that were never reported to police. That makes these results a useful complement to recent FBI crime statistics, which found a 9.7 percent drop in the violent crime rate over the same period based solely on reports from law enforcement.

Read more news stories on our website

Last Thursday, Tesla demonstrated a prototype Roadster capable of briefly flying through the air. Elon Musk’s AI company, now part of SpaceX, recently introduced Grok Bot, autonomous agents that run on a shared persistent cloud computer and that can collaborate with one another and execute scheduled tasks in users’ apps while they are offline.

Meanwhile, SpaceX continues developing Starship, the largest rocket ever built, with the ambition of making space travel cheaper and more routine.

On Friday, Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary, Musk, opened nationwide. The film presents Musk as a deeply flawed man whose wealth and power have become dangerous. There is plenty of evidence for the first part of that judgment. But the documentary raises a larger question. How much offensiveness should society tolerate from people who push the technological frontier forward?

My answer is quite a lot.

Musk insults journalists, politicians, and critics. He promotes conspiracy theories, makes extravagant promises, and sometimes treats employees harshly. His interventions in politics have alienated former admirers, including environmentalists who once championed Tesla. His management of X has angered advertisers and free-speech advocates alike. His involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency antagonized many, and government auditors questioned its claimed savings. He can be arrogant, impulsive, vindictive, juvenile, and spectacularly rude.

But Musk’s failings should be weighed against his contributions to human progress.

Consider SpaceX. When Musk founded the company in 2002, rockets were largely disposable. SpaceX developed boosters that could land and fly again, helping reduce the cost of reaching orbit and enabling more frequent launches. Its Dragon spacecraft restored America’s ability to launch astronauts from U.S. soil after the space shuttle program was retired. Its Falcon rockets transformed the satellite-launch industry. Starship could eventually make it possible to transport much larger payloads at lower cost, opening new opportunities for scientific research, manufacturing, and exploration.

Perhaps SpaceX’s most consequential achievement for ordinary people is Starlink. By the end of 2025, the satellite internet service had more than 9 million customers across more than 155 countries and markets. In remote communities where laying fiber-optic cables is prohibitively expensive, Starlink provides access to online education, telemedicine, banking, and commerce. Rural schools in Alaska have used it to improve educational access. After Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the American Southeast in 2024, emergency responders deployed Starlink terminals to restore communications.

In Ukraine, Starlink and its military counterpart, Starshield, have been especially important. Russian attacks destroyed or disrupted much of the country’s communications infrastructure. Satellite connections helped Ukrainian soldiers coordinate operations, operate drones, and communicate with commanders. Civilians also benefited from access to the internet when conventional networks failed.

The recent restrictions on Ukraine’s Starshield service illustrate the dangers of relying heavily on a single provider, as Musk has blamed the disruption on the White House and reporting over the weekend suggested it was Musk’s idea. Such uncertainty strengthens the case for competition and clear rules governing essential infrastructure. It also demonstrates just how valuable the underlying technology has become.

Musk’s contribution to electric vehicles has been similarly consequential. He did not invent the electric car, joining Tesla after its 2003 founding. But he helped transform electric vehicles from a niche product into a serious competitor to gasoline-powered automobiles. Before Tesla, EVs were often viewed as slow or purely utilitarian. By prioritizing high performance, cutting-edge technology, and sleek design, Musk helped make electric cars highly desirable and genuinely “cool.” Established automakers responded with massive investments of their own. Because of this massive shift in consumer demand and industry standards, it is fair to argue that Musk has done more than any other individual to accelerate the global transition away from the internal combustion engine. Tesla also helped advance battery technology and large-scale electricity storage.

Neuralink, Musk’s neurotechnology company, is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces designed to translate neural activity into digital commands. By using thousands of microscopic electrodes surgically implanted into the brain, the device has recently enabled individuals with severe paralysis to control computers, move cursors, and play video games using only their thoughts. While the technology remains experimental, its potential medical benefits, such as restoring communication, mobility, and independence for patients with severe neurological conditions, are considerable.

Not every Musk venture will succeed. Grok Bot remains an emerging technology. The flying Roadster is an engineering demonstration rather than a practical transportation solution. Starship faces substantial technical challenges. Musk’s ambitious timelines have often proved unreliable. Yet technological progress requires people willing to attempt things that others consider impractical.

Musk did not personally invent every technology associated with his companies. But he helped assemble the engineers, capital, factories, and organizations needed to make difficult technologies work at scale.

History provides useful parallels.

Thomas Edison was combative, fiercely competitive, and sometimes ruthless. During the battle over competing electrical systems, he backed animal electrocutions to demonstrate the supposed dangers of alternating current. Yet his work on practical electric lighting, sound recording, and industrial research helped transform modern life.

Henry Ford was a notorious antisemite who promoted conspiracy theories through his publications. Yet his application of mass-production techniques brought automobile ownership within reach of ordinary Americans. The price of a Model T fell from $850 in 1908 to $260 by 1925. Ford helped democratize personal mobility. Furthermore, his perfection of the moving assembly line revolutionized global manufacturing. By establishing a blueprint for unprecedented efficiency, Ford’s methods were quickly adopted beyond the automotive sector, driving massive productivity gains and transforming industrial production worldwide. Perhaps paradoxically, the assembly line helped the Allies defeat Hitler by turning America into the arsenal of democracy.

Steve Jobs was famously demanding and could be cruel to colleagues. His perfectionism made him difficult to work with. Yet he helped bring personal computers, smartphones, and other transformative technologies to mass markets.

None of these examples proves that unpleasantness causes innovation. Many disagreeable people accomplish nothing, and many important innovators are personally decent. But the historical pattern raises an uncomfortable possibility. Some characteristics that make innovators successful also make them difficult to get along with.

Psychological research lends support to that possibility. In a 1998 meta-analysis, psychologist Gregory Feist found that highly creative people tended to be more open to new experiences, less conventional, more independent, more self-confident, and more ambitious than their peers. They also showed higher levels of hostility and impulsivity. The research concerned scientific and artistic creativity rather than entrepreneurs specifically, but it suggests that creativity and social agreeableness do not always travel together.

Here lies the real trade-off.

We would prefer brilliant innovators who are modest, considerate, politically inoffensive, and easy to supervise. Some undoubtedly fit that description. But if the psychological traits associated with exceptional creativity sometimes accompany arrogance, impulsiveness, and hostility to convention, society cannot assume that it can select for the former while eliminating the latter.

A society that places a high premium on conformity, deference, and social approval may discourage some of the very people most willing to challenge established technologies and institutions. The price could be slower innovation, fewer experiments, and delayed benefits for everyone else.

That does not mean suspending ordinary standards of behavior. Musk should be held accountable for violations of the law, misleading claims, and genuine harms caused by his decisions. His companies should face competition and the same legal obligations as their rivals.

But there is a difference between enforcing standards of conduct and expecting that innovators possess socially acceptable personalities. We should be especially reluctant to turn personal dislike or political disagreement into a reason to dismiss their achievements or obstruct legitimate enterprise.

That matters because innovation creates benefits that extend far beyond the innovator. Cheaper access to space helps researchers and entrepreneurs who will never meet Musk. Better batteries help consumers who will never own a Tesla. Satellite communications serve people whose lives may depend on reliable connections. Competitors imitate successful technologies and improve upon them. The resulting gains can continue accumulating for generations.

Of course, other entrepreneurs might eventually have developed many of these technologies. The question is how quickly. Bringing useful innovations to market years or decades earlier creates substantial value. Those gains should count when we evaluate the people responsible.

Gibney is entitled to criticize Musk’s character, conduct, and exercise of power. But the documentary’s emphasis on his failings risks obscuring the extraordinary advances he has helped bring about.

I would prefer a Musk who was more considerate, more restrained, and less inclined to insult everyone who disagrees with him. But I cannot assume that the same man, stripped of his unconventional temperament, would have pursued the same extraordinarily difficult ambitions with the same determination.

The real choice is therefore not between praising Musk and condemning him. We can do both. It is whether society remains willing to accommodate difficult, unconventional people whose talents can produce enormous benefits for everyone else.

This article first appeared in The Dispatch on 10/20/2026.

In one scene in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, set in Oklahoma in the mid-1930s, a tractor arrives, and one man on a machine suddenly does the work of a hundred people. Families of farm workers, like the Joads, the novel’s protagonists, are driven off the land, and tragedy follows as the family heads west, where promised work proves scarce to come by. Today, as AI spreads across the economy, the old fear of machines putting humans out of work is running high once again.

However, technology has advanced for centuries, shuffling workers among occupations, industries, and regions without making human labor obsolete. As machinery pushed millions of Americans away from farming over the past century, most workers moved to factories, towns, and cities. They ended up with more comfortable lives than their predecessors plowing the fields. The AI economy will likely follow the same path: destroying jobs while creating better ones.

In the vocabulary of AI engineering, a “human in the loop” is a person who reviews, approves, or corrects what an automated system does. The phrase also fits a much larger pattern. Tools and machines keep saving human labor, yet humans stay in the loop, doing what machines still can’t, and more work remains as machines raise total output. The economist Joseph Schumpeter called the process of technology destroying old jobs, firms, and industries while creating new ones “creative destruction.” Workers in a dynamic economy need to be adaptable, yet history gives us reason to feel more excitement than fear about AI-driven job loss.

The Great Declines in Farm and Factory Work

Technological job loss is real, and farms are Exhibit A. In 1800, about three-quarters of American workers were farmers. The farm share of the workforce fell over the 19^th century, but the number of farm workers continued rising, reaching 11.6 million in 1910 in one historical series. Then farm employment entered a long decline. Between 1948 and 2017 alone, it fell 81 percent, even as agricultural output nearly tripled. By 2022, direct on-farm employment accounted for just 1.2 percent of US jobs. Americans today eat more and spend far less of their income on food. In 1929, buying food accounted for 23.4 percent of an average person’s disposable income and only 9.7 percent in 2025.

Three forces drove declining farm employment. Technology was the biggest: tractors, combine harvesters, better seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer let farms grow more with far less labor. Rising wages sped things up. As factories bid up labor costs, machines that were too expensive when hired hands were cheap became a bargain. Rising demand for food pulled in the opposite direction, toward the need for more farm jobs, but only mildly. People buy more food as they get richer, but not that much more, because there’s only so much a person can eat, and more of each food dollar goes to factory processing and restaurants.

Steinbeck’s story captures a real collapse in the farming sector, but the Joads’ miseries owed less to tractors than to the Great Depression, which technology didn’t cause. Milton Friedman traced its severity to a catastrophic monetary contraction in 1929–1933. Jobs in town disappeared. Farm employment actually rose in the early 1930s as jobless city dwellers retreated to the land. In normal times, farm workers drifted steadily into factory and town jobs that were more comfortable and better paid.

Manufacturing followed a similar path decades later. Factory employment peaked at 19.6 million in 1979, drifted down until 2000, and then fell by nearly six million jobs in a decade, driven by trade and productivity growth. However, it has since regained about one million. One Ball State University study attributed about 88 percent of the decline in US manufacturing employment between 2000 and 2010 to productivity growth, rather than foreign trade. Factories have become Exhibit B for technology-driven job loss.

These transitions weren’t painless. Some displaced workers never regained their former earnings, and some towns have emptied. My grandmother grew up in Osgood, Idaho, then a community of potato farmers. When I visited in 2024, little of that community was left. But most displaced workers, and especially their children, went on to do better-paid and more comfortable work somewhere else.

Who’s next? Self-driving vehicles may take millions of drivers’ jobs, and AI is already displacing substantial amounts of customer service work. What’s new about AI is that it threatens highly educated workers who never expected to be automated. Software engineers, writers, and translators are feeling the disruption now, and doctors, lawyers, and professors are wondering whether a machine could do their jobs better. But the disappearance of particular jobs does not mean the disappearance of work.

Where the Lost Jobs Go

To see why work will remain, follow the money. When technology cuts costs on the farm, food gets cheaper, and people buy more of it, but they also have more money left to spend on something else, like health care, travel, restaurant meals, education, and new gadgets. Jobs multiply in sectors with elastic demand or slower productivity growth.

Looking only at the industries that shed workers and concluding that work is disappearing is what economists call a “fallacy of composition.” What’s true of some of parts of the economy may not be true of the whole. The typical pattern is for technology to shrink employment in one industry, or several industries, even as the purchasing power it releases supports jobs elsewhere, and the total number of jobs increases.

Since 2000, as the United States lost about 4.6 million factory jobs, just four sectors added nearly 24 million. New jobs in health care and social assistance, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and warehousing and storage have far outpaced factory job losses. Employment in all of these sectors grew faster than population growth, jointly adding more than five jobs for every factory job lost (Figure 1).

Figure 1

How Jobs Get Better

Jobs don’t just return; they improve over time. When a major new technology raises productivity across many industries at once, as AI is expected to, the whole economy grows richer. As real incomes rise, demand grows fast enough that many industries sell far more and need more workers, not fewer. Because each worker produces more, employers can and must compete harder for workers, offering higher pay, shorter hours, and safer, more pleasant conditions.

Henry Ford’s Model T is the classic example of this dynamic. Its nominal price fell from about $825 in 1909 to under $300 by the mid-1920s, and sales soared into the millions. In inflation-adjusted terms, the price drop was even steeper. In 1914, Ford famously doubled wages to $5 a day to attract and keep workers. From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, as railroads, cars, electricity, telephones, and assembly lines spread through the economy, many industries followed that pattern. For workers, the result was dramatic: far higher pay for far fewer hours of work (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Pay and hours aren’t the only gains from creative destruction. Work has also grown far safer: by the time the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created in 1971, worker fatalities had already fallen by roughly two-thirds from their pre-World War I levels. Machines have taken over much of the drudgery, leaving people with more work that calls for judgment and creativity.

Measured wage growth slowed beginning in the 1970s, along with productivity growth, though HumanProgress’s time-price analysis finds that an hour of work still buys about 20 percent more goods and services than it did in 2000. That statistic, along with Figure 2, likely understates recent gains because both use the Consumer Price Index, which likely overstates inflation. Still, the fast wage growth of the mid-20th century hasn’t returned. A powerful new general-purpose technology like AI should, if anything, end what economist Tyler Cowen calls “the Great Stagnation” and bring fast wage growth back.

The Future Flourishing of Human Labor

In May 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10–20 percent within one to five years. Goldman Sachs estimates that 15 million workers, or nine percent of the workforce, will be displaced over the next decade. History casts doubt on these forecasts. Still, displacement over a decade differs from unemployment at any one time. Workers move on to new jobs.

Humans will stay in the loop for two reasons. First, AI still depends on people for initiative, judgment, creativity, and critical thinking. Second, as the roboticist Hans Moravec observed, computers find tasks that are intellectually “hard” far easier than physically “easy” tasks that almost anyone can do. Right now, investment in AI training data centers is creating thousands of construction jobs. A 2024 study from Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission estimated 35,000 direct jobs from AI, mostly in construction, supported by the data center industry. Similarly, a Goldman Sachs analyst forecast 500,000 net new jobs by 2030, especially for construction workers and electricians, as power-generation capacity expands to meet the needs of growing data centers. The Economist reports an AI jobs boom. As AI makes the economy richer, the wealth it creates keeps pulling workers back into the loop at higher wages.

Steinbeck’s story deserves to be remembered, not as a prophecy or even a cautionary tale, but as a reason to be grateful that we’ve left it behind. The Joads took to the road in search of work, a home, and a better future for their children, and found only disappointment. Today’s workers face much better fortunes, even if a few surprises and setbacks are likely. Despite everything, human labor is already thriving as never before, and the work of the future will be even better.

• According to new government statistics, the number of child laborers in Brazil fell by nearly 29 percent between 2016 and 2025, from 2.1 million to 1.5 million.

• Vietnam has signed a free-trade agreement with Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, and Liechtenstein, the four members of the European Free Trade Association. The Norwegian government says roughly half of the country’s exports to Vietnam will become duty-free when the agreement takes effect, rising to more than 98 percent within seven years.

Energy & Environment

• A new sewer tunnel beneath London has dramatically reduced sewage overflows into the River Thames, according to a report from Thames Water, London’s primary water utility. In 2025, the tunnel’s first full year of operation, around 3 million cubic meters of sewage-contaminated water entered the river. That’s 86 percent less than the 2020–2023 baseline average, and 81 percent less than the volume discharged in 2022, a year with a similar level of rainfall to 2025.

• Annual deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon has fallen to its lowest level since at least 1988, when systematic satellite monitoring began. According to satellite estimates from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, 3,335 square kilometers of the forest were cleared between August 2025 and July 2026, down 42 percent from the previous year and 27 percent below the previous record low in 2012.

• Stanford researchers have found that corals can rapidly recover from bleaching by touching healthy, genetically identical clones. When healthy corals touch damaged coral, their tissues fuse, allowing the microscopic algae that provide them with food to pass from the healthy coral into the bleached one. In laboratory experiments, all five bleached coral fragments placed in contact with healthy clones recovered within eight weeks, while five fragments kept slightly apart failed to recover.

Health & Demographics

• A recent analysis of birth records and household survey data found that the global birth rate among girls aged 10–14 fell by 76 percent between 1990 and 2023, dropping from 4.5 annual births per 1,000 girls to 1.1. Among girls aged 15–19, the rate fell by 48 percent, from 74.7 annual births per 1,000 girls to 39.

• More than 1.5 million Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes have been released in Barcelona to control the city’s mosquito population. The released mosquitoes are all male, meaning they don’t bite, and the bacteria they carry prevent eggs from hatching when they mate with wild females. The release marks Europe’s first large-scale urban deployment of the technique, which has successfully reduced mosquito populations in cities around the world.

• The FDA has approved an immunotherapy that could allow some rectal cancer patients to avoid chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. The drug, called dostarlimab, helps the immune system attack tumors with a certain genetic defect. In a clinical trial involving 154 patients whose tumors had this defect, 71 percent needed no additional cancer treatment and showed no signs of disease progression after a median follow-up of around two years.

• Radical Numerics, a biotechnology startup, says it has used AI-designed viruses to treat a human patient for the first time. The company reportedly used artificial intelligence to modify bacteria-eating viruses to attack the patient’s E. coli infection, which had resisted antibiotics and existing bacteria-eating viruses. According to the company, a cocktail containing the modified viruses killed samples of the patient’s bacteria in laboratory tests and was then administered under FDA authorization, though it’s not yet known whether the treatment succeeded.

Science & Technology

• More than 2,500 aircraft are now equipped with an autonomous emergency landing system developed by Garmin. If a pilot becomes incapacitated, the system can automatically select a suitable airport, navigate there, communicate with air traffic control, and land the aircraft. In December 2025, the system completed its first real-world emergency landing, safely bringing a Beechcraft King Air down in Colorado after a cabin pressurization failure.

• Over the past two weeks, three research teams have reported advances toward more powerful and reliable quantum computers.

  • Researchers at Google have developed a better method for producing “magic states”, special states of qubits that quantum computers consume to perform some of their most demanding operations.1 Producing these magic states reliably has been a major challenge because they are highly vulnerable to errors. Google’s method reduced the error rate of its resulting states roughly 40-fold. If it can be scaled up, the method could also reduce the computing resources needed to produce magic states, leaving more capacity for actual calculations.

  • Quantinuum, a quantum computing company based in Colorado, has demonstrated a major advance in quantum error correction. By distributing information across multiple qubits to protect it against errors, the company reduced its already exceptionally low error rate by a further tenfold in tests of quantum memory. The researchers also demonstrated improvements in the reliability of certain quantum operations.

  • In England, University of Oxford researchers entangled qubits in two separate quantum devices and sustained that fragile connection for about 10 seconds. Entanglement links the quantum states of particles so that measuring one can reveal information about the other, even when they are physically separate. Preserving entanglement for longer periods could make it possible to combine multiple quantum computers into one larger and more powerful machine.

Read more news stories on our website

• An analysis from The Economist finds that in the vast majority of wealthy countries, millennials have higher inflation-adjusted incomes than previous generations did at the same age. There were just three exceptions in the 32-country sample: Greece, Italy, and Japan. The Economist also notes that while in some countries, such as Australia, France, and the United Kingdom, intergenerational income growth has slowed, it has accelerated in faster-growing economies like the United States and Poland.

• Undernourishment has become rare enough in the Dominican Republic that the country has officially left the Food and Agriculture Organization’s “Hunger Map,” which tracks the prevalence of undernourishment around the world. According to government figures, the share of the population that is undernourished fell from 21.3 percent in 2006 to less than 2.5 percent in 2025.

Energy & Environment

• A reactor in Bangladesh’s first nuclear power plant has reached criticality, achieving a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction for the first time. The reactor is now operating at low power while engineers conduct further tests, and is expected to start providing electricity to the grid as early as next month. Once fully operational, the plant’s two reactors will have a combined generating capacity of 2,400 megawatts, enough to meet roughly 11 percent of Bangladesh’s electricity demand.

• ALERTCalifornia, a public safety program based at the University of California San Diego, operates a network of more than 1,200 cameras that monitor wildfires and other natural disasters. Since 2023, when the program introduced an automated fire detection system, that network has increasingly been monitored by artificial intelligence. According to the program’s director, 51 percent of California wildfires are now first detected by AI, allowing firefighters to respond more quickly and potentially stop small fires from growing into major disasters.

• A recently published analysis of satellite images finds that the Antarctic ice sheet may be more stable than previously assumed. Scientists have worried that when exceptionally tall ice cliffs collapse, they expose still taller cliffs behind them, triggering a chain reaction of collapses that rapidly erodes the ice sheet. This new research found that glaciers tend to self-stabilize following a cliff collapse, indicating that this particular mechanism of ice loss may be less severe than previously thought.

Health & Demographics

• Human rabies deaths have fallen 47 percent in Guinea over the past three years, according to Khaité Sall, the country’s Minister of Health and Sanitation. Sall credits a massive vaccination campaign that has immunized more than 290,000 dogs against the deadly virus since 2023.

• Great Ormond Street Hospital in London has implemented same-day metagenomic testing for critically ill children. Unlike conventional targeted diagnostic tests, which look for a limited, predetermined set of pathogens, metagenomic testing sequences genetic material in a sample, allowing doctors to identify a much broader range of infections. According to research on the testing system published in The Lancet Microbe, the metagenomic tests detected organisms missed by routine diagnostics in 24 percent of samples. In one case, highlighted by the hospital’s press release, the test identified the pneumonia-causing bacterium infecting a 10-year-old girl and revealed that it was resistant to the antibiotic she had been prescribed. Doctors were able to change her treatment, and she recovered from the infection.

• University of Maryland researchers have developed an experimental antivenom that’s roughly 10 times more potent by weight than an existing commercial treatment. The researchers combined proteins naturally found in rattlesnake blood that protect the snakes against their own venom. The antivenom has not yet been tested in humans, but in experiments with mice, it completely neutralized the lethal effects of western diamondback rattlesnake venom and provided protection against several other viper species.

• Mauritius, a country with one of the world’s highest diabetes rates, has made substantial progress against the disease. Among adults aged 25 to 74, the age- and sex-adjusted prevalence of type 2 diabetes fell from 23.3 percent in 2009 to 19.9 percent in 2021, according to a recent analysis published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. Although the causes remain uncertain, the improvement coincided with declining obesity, increasing physical activity, and government-imposed “sin” taxes on the sugar content of sweetened drinks.

Science & Technology

• University of Washington researchers have created artificial enzymes capable of cutting proteins at precisely chosen locations. Unlike conventional drugs that bind to proteins to block their activity, these enzymes can cut a protein, release it, and repeat the process thousands of times. That means much smaller doses could potentially destroy large quantities of harmful proteins, such as viral proteins, bacterial toxins, or abnormal proteins that accumulate in the brain. In lab tests, the enzymes cut proteins implicated in Alzheimer’s disease and ALS, and some enzymes worked in living human cells.

• Recent research has found that OpenAI’s flagship AI model, GPT-6 Astra, is capable of driving a car, albeit badly. Researchers equipped a Toyota Corolla with a driving computer and software that allowed AI models to control its steering, accelerator, and brakes using camera images. Four models were tested on a short course in an empty parking lot. Only Astra managed to finish, taking about five minutes to complete the course, which the researchers say a human could navigate in less than one. That is a remarkable result for a general-purpose model that was not trained to drive.

• The UK government has identified and addressed more than 1,000 potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a recent announcement. The government plans to extend the program across the public sector.

• A group of physicists recently tested five leading AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, and Z.ai on a set of 50 unpublished, research-level theoretical physics problems. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra correctly solved 49 of them. Remarkably, researchers initially marked Astra wrong on several problems, only to discover that their reference solutions contained errors and Astra was correct.

Read more news stories on our website

by Alexander C. R. Hammond

Last week, OpenAI published more than 370 mathematical results spanning algebra, theoretical computer science, and mathematical logic. Most came from a single prompt and about three hours of computing time. “If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked,” wrote Alex Kontorovich, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University.

In his 1981 book, economist Julian Simon called people “the ultimate resource” because nothing else can create new ideas. Simon argued that new human ideas lead to innovation, and innovation drives economic growth and underpins modern prosperity. Forty-five years on, and with announcements of AI breakthroughs dominating headlines almost every week, it’s easy to be skeptical of Simon’s claim.

OpenAI announced last month that after 88 hours of work, its AI had cracked the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness puzzle, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems that has baffled mathematicians for almost a century. On the same day, Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, which maps the predicted molecular effects of all nine billion possible single-letter changes to human DNA. If the nature of innovation is changing, are we still “the ultimate resource”?

Ideas, as the science writer Matt Ridley wrote in 2010, “have sex.” In The Rational Optimist, Ridley argued that innovation is not the work of solitary geniuses but happens when human minds come together. As societies become increasingly open and specialized, more people with different expertise meet, discuss, and recombine ideas. The result is what Ridley called the “collective brain”: the knowledge spread across society that no individual holds.

For recent AI breakthroughs, every system runs on humanity’s collective brain. OpenAI’s agents worked from a cached copy of the internet, and AlphaGenome was trained on thousands of experiments on human and mouse DNA, all of it somebody’s lab work. For years it was implied – simply because no alternative existed – that for ideas to have sex, both partners had to be human. If ideas no longer need two human minds to have sex, as Ridley put it, one might conclude the collective brain has found a replacement for humans altogether.

That assessment is overly pessimistic, however. Since these breakthroughs recombine ideas humans had already written down (albeit at inhuman speeds), the machines look less like second parents and more like a very fast medium through which human ideas meet and get down to business. One-nil, humans.

Beyond depending on existing human knowledge, OpenAI’s breakthrough also relied on human methods. To tackle Navier-Stokes, OpenAI ran about 10,000 agents at once, divided into groups that explored different areas and talked among themselves. As groups made progress, the most useful insights were consolidated and fed back to the other agents. Roughly 2.7 million messages were exchanged before an answer emerged.

Many rival agents working in parallel, immense specialization, most of them failing while the rest built on what was most valuable. Free market galore!

Humanity is surely better off with the additional knowledge AIs produce. Yet whether it is agents creating mathematical proofs that could solve centuries-old problems, or my own AI delivering thousands of words of research reports I haven’t found time to read, the bottleneck to innovation still lies with us.

In DeepMind’s case, AlphaGenome Atlas can predict what genetic variants can do, but it doesn’t comprehend the biology beneath them. A list of predictions settles nothing on its own. A human mind must decide which subset to study, and Atlas’s predictions are not findings until somebody in a laboratory confirms them. Knowing that a DNA variant matters isn’t the same as knowing why.

In OpenAI’s case, mathematicians worldwide are still assessing the proof’s validity. Three days after the announcement, without naming any company, 25 Fields Medal winners published an open letter about AI and the discipline of mathematics, noting that “solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight.” The signatories note that AI can accelerate mathematical work, but human understanding produces the next question worth asking.

The gap between output and understanding predates AI. The economic historian Joel Mokyr, who won the 2025 Nobel, distinguishes two types of knowledge. “Prescriptive knowledge” is knowing that something works. Think Edward Jenner knowing that exposure to cowpox provides immunity against smallpox, long before anyone knew why. “Propositional knowledge” is understanding why something works, such as comprehending the underlying science or natural laws. Mokyr’s answer to why the Industrial Revolution did not stall like earlier golden ages is that Europe got both types of knowledge moving together.

The latest wave of AI discoveries could make one pessimistic about humanity’s role in the future of innovation. But Mokyr’s point is that the two types of knowledge should move together, and understanding why something works matters just as much as knowing that it does. Candidate proofs are not theorems, and predictions are not findings.

AIs can crunch statistical correlations, draw on what humans already know, and generate prescriptive knowledge far faster than any human mind can convert the output into something verified, trusted, and useful. That is why we need more educated minds, not fewer. The scarce resource, indeed the ultimate resource, is still us.

A version of this article was first published in the Washington Examiner on 10/13/2026.

Author: Alexander C. R. Hammond, the deputy editor of Human​Progress​.org and a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

In his latest book, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, Seligman argues that agency, the belief in our ability to shape the future, has been a powerful driver of innovation and human progress.

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our research fellow Adam Omary and Cato Institute senior fellow Johan Norberg speak with Seligman about the historical role of human agency, its relationship to freedom and optimism, the psychology of learned helplessness, why pessimism can undermine progress, and whether artificial intelligence will strengthen or weaken our ability to shape the future.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

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

Adam Omary: I’m Adam Omary, a research fellow at HumanProgress.org. I’m honored to be joined by Dr. Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Seligman is widely credited with founding the modern positive psychology movement and has been called by my graduate advisor, Steven Pinker, “perhaps the world’s greatest living psychologist.” He’s the author of many books, including, most recently, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, which we’ll be speaking about today.

I’m also joined by my colleague, Johan Norberg, a senior fellow in the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute and a historian of human progress.

Being a psychologist myself, I plan to discuss agency with Dr. Seligman from the psychological perspective, and Johan will discuss human progress from the historical perspective. Before we start our panel, Dr. Seligman, I’d love to hear an overview of the book from you.

I’m trying to found a new field, Adam, the field that Isaac Asimov called psychohistory. And it has two aims: to show that psychological states profoundly influence historical events, and then to use what we know about history to try to predict the future. And the psychological state I deal with in this book is agency.

Agency for me has three components. The first is efficacy, the belief that you can accomplish your goal. Optimism, the belief that you can do this into the distant future. And imagination, the range of goals that you can possibly achieve. And the historical hypothesis is that progress and innovation occur when civilizations believe in human agency, and when that belief is absent, we see stagnation and regression. The book culminates with AI. Is AI going to destroy us, or is it the most technologically important aid to human agency of my lifetime? I believe the latter.

Adam Omary: I’m excited to get to AI, but I want to begin with conceptions of progress. As you describe in Agency, and as we outline with data on HumanProgress.org, we’re living in the most extraordinary time of human history. We’re wealthier and freer. Lifespan is longer than ever. Disease and mortality rates are falling. And yet, despite these improvements, so many people seem pessimistic about the future. Why is that?

I think there are at least two answers. One is ideological. It’s become beneficial politically to argue that we’re in one crisis after another, and that only I, the political candidate, can solve that crisis. And the other is journalism. A hundred years ago, if you were a farmer in Nebraska, you might find out a month later that the Titanic went down. Right now, if you watch CNN all day long, you’re going to hear about one horrible thing after another. If it bleeds, it leads. So I think that political ideology and journalism are two of the factors that lead people to believe that progress is a myth.

Johan Norberg: I thank you for this incredibly important book. I recommend it to everyone. I think you’ve documented the rise and fall in the belief in human agency throughout history very well. But societies with a widespread belief in human agency, such as ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic, Britain after the Glorious Revolution, and the American Experiment, also had other things in common. They were, compared to other contemporary civilizations, relatively free and open, and had relatively limited governments. And I have yet to find one example of a very despotic, regimented society with high levels of agency.

So, is agency really the independent variable, or might it be that agency is what we observe when people are more or less liberated and have the incentives to create, adapt, and change?

Great question.

I want to speculate about the relationship between freedom and agency. Freedom is a fact about the world, and agency is a belief about oneself. Now, when we live in a relatively free world, technology advances, science advances, literature gets better, quality of life gets better, more progress occurs, and that impacts agency itself. That is, it makes you believe you can do more, and if you believe you can do more, that produces more freedom in the world. So I think the relationship is reciprocal. Agency increases freedom, and freedom increases agency.

Adam Omary: Dr. Seligman, you’re famous for your work on learned helplessness, which is essentially the opposite of agency. Again, paradoxically, despite living in the freest and most prosperous time in history, we see a lot of this learned helplessness, especially among young people and especially on social media. Do you worry that certain cultural trends are reducing our sense of agency?

Victimology really gets in the way of agency. So learned helplessness is the belief that nothing I do matters. And quite a lot of ideology about why suffering occurs in the world, why inequality occurs in the world, very easily leads to the belief that you’re a victim of a malign environment or a malign system. Under that assumption, when things go wrong and when we suffer, it’s not because of our character or our decisions or actions; it’s because we’re victims.

Adam Omary: From an evolutionary perspective, it seems strange that people could even have learned helplessness. Could it be what social psychologist Rob Henderson calls a luxury belief? In other words, only in a society that is prosperous enough for one to get away with learned helplessness can we see that type of mindset evolve?

No, I wouldn’t go that far. Learned helplessness is not only quite real in the laboratory and in real life, but over the last 25 years, my colleague Steve Maier, who died recently, was able to trace out the brain circuitry for learned helplessness. And to simplify it, there is a structure in the human brain called the dorsal raphe nucleus. And when it fires, that’s when you see passivity and giving up. That seems to be the default response to bad events. However, when we learn hope and mastery, that triggers a set of circuits in the forebrain which inhibit the dorsal raphe nucleus. So helplessness is a very real phenomenon, and if it’s not inhibited by hope, it leads to profound passivity, cognitive deficits, poor health, and premature death.

Johan Norberg: Why is that? What’s the evolutionary benefit of giving up?

Well, if you’re a reptile or a bird and a predator jumps on top of you, you don’t have a lot of cognitive mechanisms to deal with it. And by curling into a ball and giving up, you conserve energy. As mammals, we’ve inherited underneath our frontal cortex a set of biological mechanisms that incline us to give up. And it requires a belief in agency, a belief in hope, an experience of mastery and coping to turn off that reptilian tendency.

Johan Norberg: You also have a wonderful way of explaining our negativity bias. You write that we inherited a bad weather brain. Our ancestors who were anxiously looking towards the horizon for bad weather or predators probably survived and passed their stressed-out genes to us, so we pay more attention to what’s bad than what’s good. On the other hand, you also document that political candidates who are more hopeful and optimistic about the future usually win.

Why is it that we want bad news but hopeful politicians?

Another good question. Let’s see if we can make sense of it.

So first, there is a negativity bias, and it comes from our ancestors in the Ice Ages. Pessimism comes naturally to us. And we are attracted to optimism, empirically. I could run an experiment where I give you a speech to deliver on the telephone, either in a highly depressive cadence or in a very chirpy cadence. Just wait to see how long it takes for people to hang up on you during your depressed speech. Misery loves company, but company does not like misery. We’re attracted to optimistic people. I’m not sure I can say more deeply why.

Politically, this also seems to be the case, at least in American elections. We’ve looked at the last 120 years of elections, and for the most part, the more optimistic candidate wins. We looked deeply at that in the Trump-Harris election. You might think that Trump was the more pessimistic candidate. He was the darker candidate. He cites four times as many bad events as Harris. But we decided to look at how he explains those bad events versus Harris, and we tracked this throughout the campaign. During the first debate, Trump and Harris are equally pessimistic, and Trump cites more bad events. But right through October 31st, Trump gets more and more optimistic. And by the end, he’s massively more optimistic than Harris. And we put our prediction about the election in a sealed envelope, and we sent it to our reporter friends, and we predicted a Trump victory. So humans like optimists, and we want to be led by them.

Adam Omary: How do you distinguish agency from ambition? What does high agency look like in an individual who chooses to live a quiet life centered on family?

Good question. I’ve never been asked this before, so I’m winging it.

So the first component of agency is that you believe that your actions will produce results. Well, to be ambitious, you’d have to have that. To be agentic, you also have to believe that you can succeed at your goals in the far future. And again, to be ambitious, you have to believe that as well. And thirdly, to be agentic, you have to entertain a large range of possible goals. And being ambitious, merely desiring fame and fortune, by no means guarantees imagination. So that’s the difference. Ambition is shallow.

Johan Norberg: One thing that keeps me awake at night is the problem that you write about: pessimism and despair seem to be self-fulfilling. If you think that there’s nothing to be gained from trying, you don’t try. Similarly, if people don’t understand that objective indicators of living standards are improving, that could undermine progress.

Can you talk to us about the importance of understanding past progress for agency and for human flourishing?

It’s crucial to believe in human progress. I’m in a constant struggle with my English department and my history department at the University of Pennsylvania, both of which are pervaded by the belief that human progress is a myth. And the cost of not believing in human progress is not trying. The cost of alarmist pessimism, for example, about the climate, is not trying to do something about the climate.

For me, this has to do with education. We have to teach history differently. Human history is not just the history of victims and suffering; it’s the history of the rise from illiteracy, poverty, and death to literacy, wealth, and long lives. There’s been a huge increase in human well-being, measured by any objective measure of human well-being I know. And the measures that defy that trend are measures of depression and pessimism. And that’s one way of naming, Johan, the problem with misteaching the history of the world.

Adam Omary: Dr. Seligman, you began this conversation by pointing towards artificial intelligence as the next major step of human progress. Artificial intelligence increasingly allows us to delegate decisions and tasks that once required our own knowledge and effort. When does that delegation expand our freedom, and when does it weaken our confidence or ability to act for ourselves?

I am delighted to address that question. I deal with Claude and ChatGPT roughly six hours a day. In fact, I’m so excited by them, I feel like I’m 21 again. Let me give you two examples from my life in which AI hugely expands my own agency.

AI has produced more love in my life, contrary to those who say it’s dehumanizing. I have two four-year-old grandsons, Denny and Max. I’m 80 years older than they are, and I noticed, starting at around age two, that I was becoming invisible to them. They walk faster than I can run. I can’t throw a football around with them. So I went to Claude and to Chat, and I said, “Help me write stories in which Max and Denny are the guardians of the world and the heroes.” And now I’m on volume six, chapter 24: Max and Denny tour the solar system. Well, I’m visible to them now. I have more love in my life.

Number two, and much more importantly, AI has increased my own creativity. Let me just give you one example of a discovery that I made with Claude that no human being could have made. This is the paradox of the Axial Age. Across the globe, around 1000 BCE, Greece, Israel, Persia, India, and China were backwaters: villages, illiteracy, minimal technology, etc. Five hundred years later, all of those cultures are thriving. What happened during those 500 years across the globe?

Well, I had a hypothesis, and that was that they invented new words. They conceived, for the first time in human history, words about human agency, as opposed to divine agency. Well, interesting hypothesis, but I knew no human being could test it. There’s no human being who knows ancient Sanskrit, ancient Persian, ancient Chinese, ancient Hebrew, and ancient Greek. But Claude and ChatGPT do. So I gave them a hypothesis. We worked for a day together, and sure enough, the words don’t exist or barely exist in the five cultures in 1000 BCE, but by 500 BCE, they’ve invented the words.

So, for example, in Hebrew, the word teshuva is invented. It’s not in the Torah. It’s invented later on. Teshuva means repentance. It means you can actually do things to change your life. And once you have new words, new things can occur. Take sexual harassment, for example. People were harassed sexually in the office for generations, but there was no word for it until about 1970. Once there was a word for it, it opened up lawsuits, mandatory training, and ways of counteracting it. So when we have new words, we invent new things. And that’s an example in which AI made a discovery that could not have been made by human beings.

Adam Omary: There is some concern that, if we are having agents think for us, particularly for young students, it will harm our own ability to think. Do you think of agency like a muscle? Certainly it can be developed, but is it also a matter of ‘use it or lose it’?

That is one doomsayer hypothetical I agree with. They call it de-skilling. Let’s take writing. So I’ve been writing for 70 years. I’ve made hundreds of thousands of decisions between “perhaps” and “maybe.” And so at age 84, I’ve got the skill of writing, and I’m delighted to have Claude, who writes better than I do, help me along and edit. It’s not de-skilling me. But if, starting at age six, I have my writing done by the machines, I’m never going to learn how to write.

Adam Omary: Another audience question. How do different philosophical ideas, such as religious versus secular worldviews and individualist versus collectivist ethics, drive the cultural adoption or rejection of agency?

Let me give two examples.

I’ll start with the obvious Marxist one. Believing that history unfolds as a result of historical forces that are beyond our control is a recipe for passivity. And it suggests that Marxism is an ideology that leads to passivity, a sense of victimhood, and a lack of progress.

In terms of religion, I spent a lot of the book documenting different religious views. Let’s take early Catholicism and early Christianity before Augustine. So early Christianity after Jesus, up to about 300 AD, is very optimistic. You can become holy, and in fact, your encounter with God after you die is about, “Did you do the things that would make you acceptable for salvation?” Under that kind of belief, you get agentic action. Then Augustine comes along and says, “Hold it, that’s Pelagianism.” Pelagius believes that you can contribute to your own grace. Augustine says that’s nonsense. Any time you do something good, it’s only by the grace of God.

That’s the opening gate for the stagnation of the Middle Ages. Then, after the Renaissance, Catholicism once again becomes highly agentic. Erasmus argues that we’re like toddlers. When we fall down, God lifts us up, but we have to have motive power of our own to be so lifted. Luther says that’s nonsense, and in his retort to Erasmus on the bondage of the will, he tells us about predestination, about the lack of human will, and Calvin even goes further. With the Restoration and the influence of Arminian Protestantism, which believes you have to assent to grace, progress gets resuscitated.

So, that’s a long-winded way of saying that your ideology and religious faith modulate your agency, and most importantly, the achievement of entire cultures.

Read the full transcript

• The World Trade Organization has more than doubled its forecast for this year’s growth in global merchandise trade volume, from 1.9 percent in March to 3.9 percent, despite disruptions to energy supplies and shipping routes caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran. The revision was driven largely by a surge in trade in AI-enabling goods, such as semiconductors and servers.

• The latest Distribution of Household Income report from the Congressional Budget Office finds that average inflation-adjusted household income in the US grew for every fifth of the income distribution between 1979 and 2023, both before and after means-tested transfers and federal taxes. The richest fifth of households saw their incomes grow the fastest, but households in the bottom and middle fifths also enjoyed substantial gains. Among households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, average real annual income rose by 50 percent before means-tested transfers and federal taxes and 108 percent after.

• Argentina’s economy is on track to grow for three consecutive years (2025 to 2027) for the first time in nearly two decades, according to a new World Bank forecast. The country’s real (inflation-adjusted) GDP grew 4.5 percent in 2025 and is projected to grow 2.1 percent in 2026 and 3 percent in 2027. The World Bank attributes the growth to “fiscal consolidation, tax reforms and a more open economy.”

Energy & Environment

• The population of giant tortoises on Seychelles’ Aldabra Atoll is now estimated at 183,000, the highest figure on record for the atoll, according to a recently published survey. The population fell below 1,000 in the 19th century because of overhunting but had recovered to an estimated 100,000 by the late 1990s.

• Australia’s endangered bogong moths are returning in greater numbers after a devastating population crash in 2017 and 2018 that reduced their population by an estimated 99.5 percent. Researchers have confirmed more than 1,600 moth sightings since the beginning of September 2026, compared with 1,089 during all of 2024.

• New Zealand’s wētāpunga, believed to be the world’s heaviest insect, is recovering from near-extinction thanks to a captive-breeding program that began in 2008. Once common in northern New Zealand, the species was reduced by the 1990s to a single population on Little Barrier Island near Auckland because of habitat loss and predation by invasive rats. Since 2010, conservationists have released more than 11,000 of the insects into protected habitats, resulting in self-sustaining populations on at least two islands.

Health & Demographics

• The five-year relative survival rate for US cancer patients rose from 49 percent for patients diagnosed in 1975–1979 to 71 percent for those diagnosed in 2016–2022, according to a recent report from the American Association for Cancer Research. Relative survival adjusts for deaths from causes other than cancer by comparing patients with the general population.

  

• In 2023, for the first time in history, communicable diseases were responsible for fewer than half of all deaths in low-income countries, according to the World Health Organization. Communicable diseases are infectious illnesses that can spread between people, directly or indirectly, such as tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera.1 The milestone reflects long-term progress: thanks to better medical care and rising prosperity, more people are surviving infectious diseases and living long enough to die of noncommunicable diseases like cancer and heart disease.

• The US Department of Health and Human Services has launched a new research program aimed at dramatically reducing the cost of clinical trials. The initiative, called SURPASS, aims to develop new trial methods that require fewer patients than conventional trials, combine traditional trial phases, reduce administrative overhead, and make greater use of artificial intelligence. To develop those methods, the agency is seeking trial design proposals from research teams to evaluate drug candidates using their proposed methods.

Science & Technology

• An experimental cellular anti-aging therapy tested on patients with glaucoma has shown encouraging early results in its first human trial. Developed by Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on treating age-related diseases, the treatment uses gene therapy intended to restore more youthful function to damaged cells. In an initial trial involving three patients with glaucoma, two showed improvements in their vision after eight weeks, and Life Biosciences reported no serious treatment-related side effects.

• A California startup called Parallel Systems is developing autonomous, battery-powered freight trains capable of carrying several tons of cargo up to 500 miles per charge. The hope is to make short-distance rail freight competitive with short-haul trucking, which could reduce shipping costs, traffic congestion, and transport emissions.

• OpenAI has published a collection of more than 700 AI-generated mathematical research papers containing proposed solutions to over 300 open problems. While the papers have not yet been fully verified—in fact, at the time of writing, three have been withdrawn—hundreds of the results have been reviewed using computer proof software, and mathematicians say several could represent major breakthroughs. Some of the apparent advances concern three of the Millennium Prize Problems, a set of notoriously difficult, longstanding problems at the frontier of mathematics.

Read more news stories on our website

by Steve Davies

Today marks the launch of a new series of essays on HumanProgress.org written by Dr. Steve Davies titled Critiques of Progress. Each of the fifteen essays in this monthly series will examine the origins, nature, and validity of recurring critiques of the modern world. This introductory essay distinguishes between two broad critiques of modernity and explains which one this series will address and why.

Today’s world is one of liberal modernity, the result of a transformative process dating back to the end of the 17^th century. This process has brought enormous benefits to everyone alive today, as well as many who lived during the three centuries leading up to today. The most obvious benefit is the dramatic rise in average incomes over that period, especially globally. This rise in real incomes (and therefore living standards and material conditions) has no precedent in human history. It also started slowly and in a limited part of the globe, but it has accelerated and spread to almost every location, not steadily, but nonetheless in a progressive fashion.

However, while liberal modernity has improved human life, rising living standards are foundational but not the most important. More significant are the second-order consequences of economic growth and rising living standards, which are related but distinct. Second-order effects include a dramatic increase in the range of life options and ways of life available to ordinary people, a decline in crime and violence, a transformative change in the status and life experience of women, and improved health outcomes for people of all ranks and positions. Independent but related benefits include the enormous increase in our knowledge about, and understanding of, the natural world, and the increased sociability that comes from the shift from a rural society where most lived in small communities to a majority urban society where an increasing share of the global population lives in large cities or towns.

All of that is a transformation in the extent and variety of human flourishing. It is, by many ethical standards, the biggest improvement in human life in recorded history. Nevertheless, the modern world has as many critics as celebrants, in fact even more so. For every author or artist celebrating that things are better for most people than ever before, several complain and paint the contemporary world, or parts of it, in dark colors. At first glance, this chorus of criticism might seem united and singular, but a closer look reveals something more interesting.

On examination, criticisms of the modern world fall into two broad categories. The first are those we could call “Yes, but…”. In these arguments, critics accept the modern world as good, or at least better than what came before. Critics argue that, despite that, the modern world is deeply flawed: it is marked by deep inequality or injustice, harms the environment, or is plagued by persistent poverty, for example. In these arguments, the positive agenda is to say that the modern world needs to do better or radically reform in some way to realize its promise. It is better than the pre-modern world but has a foundational flaw that needs correction (private property and capitalism are the most common examples, but critics also cite the continued existence of the state and systemic advantages and disadvantages). These criticisms of modernity can be described as radical (or, in their milder versions, reformist).

The obvious example is Marxism. For the German philosopher Karl Marx, capitalist modernity was undoubtedly progressive at first and a clear improvement on feudalism, let alone slavery. He saw the modern world of his time as transitional, moving toward a truly liberated future where all human potential would be realized. The point of his criticisms of bourgeois society and modernity was that they had inherent contradictions and injustices that would be resolved through a dialectical process of historical development. That made the modern world unjust and flawed but also necessary and, in many ways, progressive. It was the contrast between the actuality of the modern world and what he saw as its potential that sparked his ire. He never had anything but the deepest contempt, forcefully expressed, for the apologists of the pre-modern world (as also for those whose objections to the modern world were founded in ethics rather than a ‘scientific’ approach like his own).

However, from the very first intimations of the modern world in the 1690s and 1700s, a second category of critiques emerged, of a very different type. These analyses and polemics argue that something about modernity is at least deeply regrettable, or (more often) profoundly bad. They argue that key aspects of modernity, including the ones listed earlier, should be morally condemned because of their harmful consequences for people and the natural world. The point is that these arguments don’t argue that the modern world is good but flawed, or potentially good but failing to realize that potential. Instead, they reject the modern world tout court and see the modernization process as a tragic wrong turn for all of humanity. That is a much more fundamental critique than the first type.

This second category is also more widespread, though you might not realize it because these critiques and the movements they inspire either attract little attention from scholars or are misrepresented as belonging to the first category. In reality, critiques, movements, and analyses of this kind appear in every society that begins to modernize and seem to be one of the most universal responses to that process. What is striking is how the same specific themes and arguments recur across contexts and societies that are otherwise wildly different. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit captured that in a remarkable little book, Occidentalism, published in 2004. They framed their work as a response to Edward Said’s Orientalism and presented the ideas and movements they analyzed as driven by a negative stereotype of “the West.” In reality, what they identified was the recurring tropes and arguments of anti-modernity (their framing came from the notion that modernization was identical to westernization – understandable but incorrect).

Buruma and Margalit captured how movements such as anti-imperialism, Japanese nationalism, 19th-century romanticism, and fascism, as well as individual intellectuals of many kinds, produced similar arguments against the world the modernization process produced and even employed similar rhetoric. This suggests that the shock of modernity triggers a similar response and analysis across traditional or pre-modern societies, regardless of how different those societies might be. These responses and arguments are not limited to political arguments and polemics. In fact, they are even more widespread in literature, historiography, and the arts. Many of the most important cultural figures of the last two centuries are associated with them; one could point to Wagner, Dostoyevsky, Ruskin, and T. S. Eliot, for example. In more popular culture we could cite authors such as Lovecraft, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, or any number of writers of fantasy and adventure fiction.

The point is that this second category of criticisms of modernity attacks the very idea and foundational features of the modern. What most people, including the first kind of critic, would celebrate is seen as something to regret or deplore. A common theme is that the modern world, or main and essential aspects of it, are incompatible with human nature, with what it is to be human and to live a truly human life. If the more familiar kinds of critique can be labelled “radical” then these can be described as “conservative” or “reactionary.” We should be cautious about those terms, however. Although many of the exponents did indeed see themselves as conservatives or reactionaries, many did not. They are not often seen as radical opponents of the status quo – although increasingly, as time passed, that is what they were. Many also regret modernity but see it as irreversible and argue for “reactionary modernism,” in which high technology and science combine with deeply anti- or pre-modern beliefs and social structures. This kind of view is found in people as varied as fascists and Nazis, ante-bellum fire-eaters, and many nationalist movements.

What are some examples of the family of arguments we are speaking of here? To give a few: that the modern world is godless and denies the transcendent; that it degrades the nature and meaning of personal relationships, making them ephemeral and insignificant; that it destroys the concept of honor and a whole range of virtues, replacing them with base materialism; that it undermines true connection between people and true community for a deracinated individualism; that it destroys excellence in the name of bland equality and uniformity; that it separates humans from the natural world; that it destroys true masculinity and femininity and the proper relations between men and women; and that it cuts the connection between people and places, rendering all of us rootless.

Over the next fourteen essays, we will explore the second kind of critique of progress and other arguments, examining what lies behind them, the forms they take, and why they are sometimes factually incorrect and usually grounded in false moral principles. We are familiar with the first kind of critique, but increasingly we need to address these more foundational and fundamental ones.

Author: Steve Davies, a Senior Education Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs and an Advisory Board Member at Human Progress.

In his new book, Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided, psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert argues that the mental health profession may be partly responsible for that paradox.

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our research fellow Adam Omary speaks with Alpert about psychiatric overdiagnosis, the rise of therapy culture, the benefits and dangers of mental health labels, and how a stronger sense of personal agency can help people become happier and more resilient.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

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

I’m Adam Omary, a psychologist and research fellow at Human Progress. Today I’m joined by Jonathan Alpert, the author of Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided.

I should begin by mentioning that, although the subject we’re talking about today, psychiatric overdiagnosis and the therapization of culture, is a problem in America, particularly in terms of mental health spending and psychiatric medication, we’re seeing similar trends across the developed world. I’ve termed it the psychological paradox of progress.

However, many people, when they see rising rates of depression and anxiety, might say, “Well, historically there was so much stigma around mental illness, and people were underreporting their mental suffering.” So how much of these rising rates of depression and anxiety might be due to greater awareness?

It may simply be that there’s more awareness, more people are open about their mental health issues, and we have better ways of detecting or diagnosing mental illness, and therefore the rates are higher. That’s one possibility. The other possibility is that we actually are sicker.

There certainly is greater awareness and less stigma than there once was around mental health issues. But my profession, I worry, has contributed to some of the pathology that we’re seeing. I argue in that book that therapists have pathologized ordinary life experiences.

The University of Michigan, for example, has decided to eliminate grades for freshmen in certain programs. Instead of using letter grades, those courses will be pass or fail. And the reason they’re doing that is, they say, because of a mental health crisis created by grades. I think that’s a perfect example of an institution that is pathologizing what I would consider a normal college experience. Sometimes we do poorly in classes, and that’s part of growing up and learning. I see this in a lot of areas in our society.

It is useful to think about the context in which we talk about these ordinary struggles. My colleague here at Human Progress, Chelsea Follett, has a book coming out, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to Pre-Industrial Life. And she talks about how throughout most of human history, the levels of suffering were much greater than anything most people, certainly anyone with the luxury of being able to listen to a podcast like this, would face.

It’s interesting to frame that from an evolutionary psychology perspective. If we have these innate threat detection systems that are configured to our early environment, we’re gonna have a stress response to what is bad, not in objective terms, because this is fundamentally a subjective measure, but relative to our normal day-to-day baseline. And paradoxically, as much as that baseline has gotten dramatically better, ordinary discomforts, such as getting a bad grade, can really induce this sense of anxiety.

Yeah, and we’re not helping young people or even older people by pathologizing experiences such as getting a bad grade or having a conflict with a colleague or a significant other. Spend five minutes on social media, and you’ll likely see terms such as “PTSD” or “trauma” or “borderline” or “toxic” being thrown around. These terms have just become part of our everyday lexicon; people now label their friends or significant others with these very serious clinical terms. I think that’s creating some fragility and some pathology in our society.

When people self-diagnose or identify with their diagnosis, they sometimes say it’s very validating. It helps them understand and describe their struggles. Sometimes they say it helps them find community, especially online. But as you mentioned, it can also contribute to fragility or a sense of victimhood. As a psychotherapist, how can you tell when a diagnosis is going to help someone versus leave them more anxious?

When a diagnosis is accurate, it can be helpful. But all too often I think the diagnoses are being inaccurately applied. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a really good example. There are certain criteria that need to be met in order to be diagnosed with PTSD. One thing that needs to be evident is the threat of death, having experienced the threat of death or at least having perceived the threat of death. That might describe someone who was in a bad accident, or someone who experienced war.

But what we’re seeing lately is people just labeling themselves or therapists labeling their patients as suffering from PTSD if they had a fight with a boss or a bad housemate. That’s not usually perceived as life-threatening. So that term has been loosened. One danger in that is people who identify as having PTSD might actually become weaker. The other danger is that it waters down the diagnosis, meaning people who are deeply suffering may not get the level of attention they need. That’s very concerning to me.

I tell a story in my book about an accident that I had a few years ago. I was biking and got hit by a car. It was an awful experience, but I can walk, I can bike, and I’m okay now. But after the accident, when I would see a big black SUV, the kind of vehicle that hit me, I would get a little tense and anxious. That’s not clinical PTSD. It wasn’t life-threatening. But a lot of therapists would probably be willing to label it as PTSD.

In principle, there’s no upper limit to your mental health, your social functioning, your career functioning. So could everyone benefit from therapy, or is there a limit?

I think therapy should be used properly. If you’re depressed, if you’re anxious, if you’re having trouble in a relationship or managing your stress, those are probably good reasons to seek professional help. But if you’re just going to a therapist to vent and get stuff off your chest and feel better in the moment, you could vent to a friend and save a whole lot of money. So there should be an actual problem that’s being addressed.

You also say that, aside from therapy or the therapeutic culture sometimes backfiring with respect to mental health, it’s also left us more divided. How is that happening?

Yeah. I see a lot of therapists doing more than they were trained to do. When Donald Trump entered the scene as president, therapists were not maintaining neutrality in their practice.

Therapy should be a safe space for people. Whether you voted for Trump or Biden or Harris, you should feel comfortable and safe speaking to a therapist. All too often, and I’ve heard countless stories about this, people are made to feel ashamed of how they voted. I’ve heard cases where therapists refused to treat someone if they voted for Trump. That’s a violation of ethics.

We should not be discriminating against patients. We should look at the person as an individual. But a lot of graduate schools these days are categorizing people as rich, poor, oppressed, or oppressors. And in my profession, therapists love to put people into these boxes instead of looking at the person as an individual.

There’s a sense that greater awareness of mental health is a good thing. It’s a good thing that people can name their problems and seek out support. But that can also backfire. It can backfire at the level of the individual if they seek out these disordered labels in a way that fuels a sense of victimhood. And there are also perverse financial incentives to keep the patient in treatment for longer.

In the United States, in the last 20 years or so, mental health spending has tripled, and rates of depression and anxiety continue to rise. So could the mental health industry be fueling the mental health crisis? And if so, what do we do about that?

Yeah, there’s the paradox.

I think therapists can start to make some adjustments and changes. I think we can start to make sessions more about outcomes, hold ourselves responsible, and maybe do a proper assessment of the patient. We could set goals early on, in collaboration with the patient, and really understand what they hope to accomplish.

Cognitive behavioral therapy works great with things such as anxiety and depression. It’s also a form of therapy that’s widely studied, and we have good data on it. With cognitive behavioral therapy, we may rate how the patient feels, so there’s some quantifiable information that we can use. That kind of outcome-oriented approach could help make therapy less of a lifestyle and more of a tool.

An interesting set of data we’ve seen worldwide is that, on average, in most countries, suicide rates and self-harm rates have remained flat or decreased across much of the world. But the United States is a bit of an outlier; suicide rates, particularly among young people, have increased in the last several decades.

Why do you think that is?

I’m not entirely sure. Social media might be playing a role by normalizing feeling bad. You can also more easily learn ways to take your own life. We’ve seen some tragic cases of people, especially young people, utilizing AI as a therapist and being terribly misguided. I think connecting with people is key; having a sense of community and feeling comfortable enough to speak to a family member or a teacher or a friend about these struggles could help prevent some of these suicides.

A lot of the hypotheses that you’ve named, whether it’s technology, lack of community, or pathologizing ordinary struggle, we also see across other wealthy developed nations. And mental health trends are similar across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. And yet again, if you look at the mental health data referenced against the suicide data, they’re inversely correlated across much of the developed world except for the US.

Some people will say it’s because we have more guns or more opiates, but that doesn’t account for the increase in youth suicides. Most are not by firearms, and most of the opiate-related deaths are among middle-aged men rather than teenage girls, among whom we’re seeing a lot of this increase in self-harm.

Yeah, I don’t think we can pin it to one factor. We have a society where there’s a lot of unhappiness. People have lots of grievances about wealthy and successful people. I don’t think that’s helping us to be healthier. I’m not saying this causes suicide, but it does create unhappiness. And we’ve seen this play out in terrible ways. Luigi Mangione has become sort of a poster boy of this grievance culture. And he admitted to killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare because he had his complaints about the health insurance industry. We’ve seen it play out with the assassination attempts on President Trump, the killing of Charlie Kirk. These people had their gripes with society and took matters into their own hands. People dislike corporations, so they justify stealing from stores. So there’s a lot of unhappiness, a lot of blame, and a general lack of accountability and self-sufficiency that might be contributing to the collective unwell of society. And again, I’m not saying that causes someone to be suicidal, but it certainly isn’t making a person healthier and happier.

On that last point, outside of your book, you’ve also written about the psychological appeals of socialism despite its repeated failures. Is there some emotional logic behind a lot of that political and economic discussion today?

Yeah, I think socialism to some people is very seductive. If you think the government will provide housing and buses and grocery stores and make your life better, you might be looking to the wrong people to improve your life.

There’s a concept in psychology known as locus of control. What that means is, “To what degree do you feel like you have control over your fate, your destiny, and to what degree do you feel like others do?” So one would be an internal locus of control; the other would be external. A lot of people who are embracing socialism have an external locus of control. They feel like their fate is determined by other people. And that’s where you start to see the hate towards wealthy people or billionaires. They feel like certain people are interfering with their success. Instead of looking at what they have control over, such as getting an education or starting a business or getting a better job, they’re just relying on the government.

Much of this seems to relate to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You have at the base of the pyramid needs for food and shelter. And above you have needs for belonging and community, then for autonomy, fulfillment, self-actualization. And those more material goods, one can, in principle, imagine the government solving for you. But the further up the pyramid you move, the more those needs can only be met by oneself.

I wonder how much of this paradox of prosperity is driven by the fact that we’ve seen this remarkable progress in material abundance. Most people across most of the world don’t have to focus on their day-to-day survival. So as much as you would expect that we’d be celebrating that, we have a tendency to just price in the good things and focus on what remains to be attended to. And as adaptive as that’s been for survival, it can leave us with this sense of, “Okay, what’s next?” And if what’s next is this monumental task of self-actualization, and if you’re expecting that that’s gonna be solved for you, it is not surprising that in the best time in history to be alive, we’re seeing this paradoxical rise of discontent.

Yeah. And so much can be accomplished if you look at notable figures in our country who went from rags to riches. Dolly Parton just passed away. She grew up dirt poor, one of, I believe, 11 or 12 kids in a small house. She went on to become a global superstar who will be known for centuries, hopefully. She’s a great example of someone who probably didn’t spend her time hating the world and coming up with excuses. We need more people like that, whether it’s in industry and science or academia or athletics or music. We need more people in the world who see challenges not as obstacles, but as opportunities to work harder or reinvent themselves.

But there are some people in this world, in this country, who just need someone to hate. They’re consumed by it. And I try to work with some of those people and get them to shift their thinking. Sometimes I’m successful, other times I’m not. But I do think the people who sit in that hate and misery are not doing well.

Closing advice, Jonathan, for improving one's internal locus of control, sense of optimism, and mental health?

Really try to focus on what you actually have control over, and be reasonable and realistic in your expectations.

You don’t go from wanting to run a marathon to actually running 26 miles in a day. You start with a mile and add to that incrementally. And that’s true with most things in life.

Read the full transcript

• Despite the war with Iran and its associated oil-supply shock, consensus forecasts compiled by the World Bank predict that the global economy will grow by around 2.6 percent in 2026, roughly equal to forecasts at the start of the year.

• Idaho has cut its state administrative code nearly in half since 2018. Under a “zero-based regulation” program, rules that agencies did not identify as necessary were allowed to expire, while the remaining rules were reviewed chapter by chapter for their necessity, legal authority, costs, benefits, and whether less burdensome alternatives were available. By July 1, 2026, the state had eliminated 4,201 pages of regulations compared with 2018, reducing the length of its regulatory code by 49.1 percent.

• The United States and China have agreed to lower tariffs on goods worth about $60 billion in annual trade between the two countries. Each side's list covers roughly $30 billion of imports from the other, based on 2024 trade figures. China plans to cut tariffs on US agricultural products, seafood, wood products, cosmetics, and medical devices, while the United States plans to cut tariffs on Chinese consumer goods such as small appliances, toys, holiday decorations, and children's car seats.

Energy & Environment

• Sea turtles have nested on the US West Coast for the first time in recorded history, with two olive ridley turtles laying eggs on beaches in Orange County, California last month. It’s not yet known whether the nests were isolated events or signs of a northward shift in nesting patterns.

• In Utah, Fervo Energy’s Cape Station enhanced geothermal power plant has started selling electricity to the grid, with its first 33-megawatt block built and commissioned in just 23 months. Fervo plans to expand the plant to 100 megawatts by early next year. Unlike conventional geothermal plants, which depend on naturally occurring reservoirs of hot water, enhanced geothermal power plants create fractures in hot rock and circulate water through them, making it possible to generate geothermal power in many more places.

• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a construction permit for a commercial small modular nuclear reactor, authorizing the Tennessee Valley Authority to build a 300-megawatt reactor near Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Small modular reactors are designed to be simpler, more standardized, and easier to build than conventional nuclear plants, potentially reducing the cost of expanding nuclear power. The permit is the second issued for a US commercial reactor this year, following TerraPower’s Natrium reactor in Wyoming in March.

Health & Demographics

• Life expectancy in the Americas has reached a record high. According to the Pan American Health Organization’s Health in the Americas 2026 report, life expectancy at birth rose from 73.2 years in 2000 to 77.1 years in 2023, surpassing the pre-pandemic peak of 76.7 years reached in 2019.

• Researchers have developed an epigenetic-editing therapy that could eventually offer a functional cure for chronic hepatitis B, meaning long-term control of the virus without ongoing treatment. Using a CRISPR-based tool that chemically tags the virus’s DNA to switch it off without cutting it, the treatment left 90 percent of mice on the highest dose with no detectable signs of hepatitis B in their blood. A human trial of the therapy is now underway.

• By combining its weight-loss drug tirzepatide with eloralintide, a new drug that mimics a hormone involved in signaling fullness, Eli Lilly helped people with type 2 diabetes lose an average of 23.3 percent of their body weight over 48 weeks on the highest dose, compared with 14.8 percent for patients taking tirzepatide alone.

Science & Technology

• Nvidia has launched a new system designed to keep AI agents from taking unauthorized actions. The system combines software that limits what an agent can access with an independent monitor that watches the agent and can block or quarantine it if it crosses those boundaries. The monitor runs on a separate processor from the one hosting the agent, putting it beyond the agent’s direct control.

• Google DeepMind has developed a way to watermark AI-designed proteins while preserving their biological function. According to DeepMind, the watermark could confirm that the genetic sequence for an unfamiliar protein came from a known AI system, letting trusted designs pass through biosecurity screening more quickly so that screeners can focus on genuinely suspicious ones.

• An AI model has surpassed the best human players at the game of Stratego. The strategy game, which includes a “fog of war” mechanic that conceals crucial information about the opponent’s pieces, has long posed a difficult challenge for artificial intelligence because players must make decisions with incomplete information. In 2022, a previous model called DeepNash was able to reach the level of top human players but did not demonstrate clear superiority over the very best. This new model, Ataraxos, won 38 out of 40 games against top players during demonstrations at the Stratego World Championship and won 15 out of 20 games against Pim Niemeijer, the strongest human player.

• In its latest test flight on September 28, SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink satellites. The satellites are designed to add a combined 26 terabits per second of capacity to the Starlink network, roughly 10 times the capacity added by a typical launch of Falcon 9, SpaceX’s longstanding workhorse rocket.

Violence & Coercion

• According to data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, vehicle thefts in the US fell 21 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year. The bureau previously reported that vehicle thefts fell more than 20 percent between 2024 and 2025, reaching their lowest level in decades.

Read more news stories on our website

by Radek Stefanski

In 1548, the government of England’s 10-year-old Edward VI issued a proclamation against those who “doeth innovate.” Offenders would “suffer imprisonment, and other grievous punishments.” The target was unauthorized change to church ceremonies, but for more than two centuries, the word “innovator” remained an accusation. My research suggests that the gradual decline of this hostility to novelty helped the West turn new ideas into sustained economic progress.

An innovation is a new idea put to use: a better plow, a new crop rotation, a vaccine. Such ideas matter because, unlike a loaf of bread, they can be used by many people at once without being used up. A farmer who gives a neighbor a loaf no longer has it, but if he teaches the neighbor a better way of growing wheat, both can use the knowledge. Each farmer still needs his own land, seed, and labor, yet the method need only be discovered once; after that, others can adopt it, and later generations can improve it. Resisting the new method can deny its benefits to people far beyond the farm where it began.

But a useful invention can put someone out of work. The Roman historian Suetonius tells how an engineer offered Emperor Vespasian a cheap way to haul columns to the Capitol. The emperor paid him well but declined the device, saying he had to feed his poor. Seventeen centuries later, English textile workers known as Luddites smashed the machines they blamed for cutting their wages, and their name became a byword for technophobia. Today, leading mathematicians warn about AI’s effects on their profession. While their concerns about how mathematicians are trained and how the field builds understanding are serious, no profession enjoys contemplating its own replacement. Resistance cannot be dismissed as ignorance when the losses are immediate and personal, while many of the gains go to strangers or future generations.

How a society responds to innovation depends partly on its culture, the beliefs and values people learn from one another and pass between generations. An unfamiliar method can put a farmer’s crop at risk and, in a culture suspicious of novelty, his standing with his neighbors. Where obedience is prized, a scholar’s challenge to established teaching may be treated as insolence before anyone considers the evidence. When challenging accepted views becomes less costly, the same effort can yield more discoveries, and because each discovery becomes material for the next, the gains can compound over centuries.

To trace how attitudes toward innovation changed over time, I looked at what earlier generations praised and condemned in more than 23,000 books in the Western literary tradition, available in English or English translation through Project Gutenberg. They preserve the views of a literate minority, but one with an outsized role in teaching, government, and innovation.

First, I adapted a framework the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede created to compare national cultures. Using AI, I scored each book on cultural values from the framework, focusing on the four most relevant to innovation: deference to authority, discomfort with uncertainty, individualism, and what I call patience, which covers saving, planning, and adapting inherited practices to changing circumstances. The AI read passages of several thousand words from each book and judged whether each passage endorsed, rejected, or took no clear side on each cultural value. Each book’s score reflects the share of passages supporting a value minus the share opposing it. Because the AI judges what each passage argues, rather than tallying how often it uses words linked to a value, the method distinguishes what a book endorses from what it merely depicts.

Fourteen scholars of literature and classics at the University of St Andrews compared pairs of books chosen for strong contrasts, judging which book in each pair leaned further toward a given value, without seeing the AI’s scores. Leaving aside cases where a scholar did not know both books or judged them about equal, they agreed with the AI 93 percent of the time. If you know the books, you can see whether you agree with the AI.

I then combined the four cultural values into a resistance index that rises with deference to authority and discomfort with uncertainty and falls with individualism and patience. Earlier books remain in the index as new ones appear, but gradually receive less weight. The index shows that resistance to innovation fell by about half between 1000 and 1920. I repeated the exercise on roughly 5,000 books from four collections outside Project Gutenberg and again found declining resistance between 1500 and 1890.

What might explain the decline? The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey argues that printing, religious reform, and political upheaval gave ordinary people a greater voice, so that commerce and innovation came to be admired rather than scorned. The Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr points to a related change among Europe’s educated elite, who began to challenge inherited authority and to share what they found. The motto of the Royal Society, founded in 1660, translates as “take nobody’s word for it.”

The books broadly support this timeline but suggest the change began earlier. The index fell sharply between about 1130 and 1230, centuries before the printing press or the Royal Society, though the early evidence is thin and that fall was partly reversed later. Most of the lasting decline came after 1500, with deference to authority retreating fastest in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

Did invention rise as resistance fell? To find out, I grouped books by country of origin and built a separate index for 13 countries. Between 1500 and 1900, countries whose index fell earlier or further produced more notable scientists and inventors, even after allowing for the fact that larger populations have more potential innovators. The pattern fits the cultural story, but it is an association rather than proof of causation, since prosperity and institutions can also change attitudes toward new ideas.

How much might these changing attitudes toward innovation matter for living standards? Suppose population had grown exactly as it did between 1000 and 1920, but the resistance index had stayed at its year-1000 level. My growth model, which depends on assumptions about how strongly culture affects invention, suggests that by 1920 productivity would have been about 44 percent lower, leaving the same workers and equipment to produce little more than half as much. The model attributes about two-thirds of the speed-up in productivity growth between 1500 and 1700 to falling resistance to new ideas.

Vespasian turned down the engineer’s device to protect the poor. Yet through cheaper food, better medicines, and less exhausting work, the poor have been the great beneficiaries of innovation. Nobody has to improve a crop to eat a cheaper loaf or understand a vaccine to be protected by it. We all gain from a culture in which “innovator” is no longer an insult.

Author: Radek Stefanski, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of St Andrews, a researcher at the University of Stavanger, and an external research associate at the University of Oxford.

• India is rapidly increasing its number of trade agreements. Since February 2021, India has signed seven free trade agreements covering 10 countries, bringing its total number of signed free trade agreements to 17. India has also concluded negotiations on a trade deal with the European Union, though it has not yet been signed, and is currently negotiating a trade agreement with the United States.

• After years of negotiations, the European Union is closing a series of trade deals with Southeast Asian countries. The EU has reached substantial agreement on a free trade deal with the Philippines, Indonesia plans to sign a trade deal with the EU in October, and negotiations with Thailand and Malaysia are expected to wrap up early next year. If those timelines hold, the EU could have negotiated trade deals with six of the 11 Southeast Asian states by mid-2027. The EU already has free trade agreements in place with Singapore and Vietnam.

Energy & Environment

• The black robin, a threatened songbird recently named New Zealand’s Bird of the Year, has rebounded from a population of just five birds in 1980 to around 350 in 2025. Conservationists rescued the species by moving the remaining birds to a predator-free island and using another species, the Chatham Island tomtit, to foster their eggs, allowing the robins to lay multiple clutches each breeding season.

• China’s crested ibis has recovered from the brink of extinction. In 1981, just seven known crested ibises remained in the wild. Today, after more than four decades of captive breeding, habitat protection, and reintroduction, the estimated crested ibis global population—including wild and captive birds—exceeds 10,000.

Health & Demographics

• The European Union’s age-standardized suicide rate fell to 10.4 suicides per 100,000 people in 2023, down from 12.2 in 2013, a decline of almost 15 percent.

• The share of American drinkers who say they sometimes overindulge has fallen to a record low. In a July 2026 Gallup survey, 13 percent of US adults who drink alcohol said they sometimes drink more than they think they should, down from a high of 35 percent in 1989. The share of US adults who drink at all remains at a record low of 54 percent.

• Reported leprosy cases continue to decline worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, 167,356 new cases were reported globally in 2025, down 3.1 percent from 2024 and 23.3 percent from 2016.

Science & Technology

• The cost of AI performance is falling at an exceptional rate, according to a new report from Epoch AI, a research nonprofit. Epoch tracked how much it costs for AI models to achieve given scores on five tests, covering mathematics, hard sciences, and games of skill such as chess puzzles. Across all five tests, Epoch estimates that the minimum cost of reaching a given score has fallen about 47 percent per quarter since 2023, a roughly 13-fold decline each year. According to Epoch’s analysis, that’s about four times faster than the fall in DNA sequencing costs, one of the fastest price declines in history.

• An autonomous aircraft has completed a multi-leg flight across the United States. Using Joby Aviation’s autonomous flight technology, the converted Cessna traveled 3,199 miles from California to North Carolina, handling taxiing, takeoff, navigation, and landing without control inputs from its onboard safety pilot.

• A recent Gallup survey found widespread international optimism about artificial intelligence. In 32 of the 37 countries surveyed, AI-aware adults who expected the technology to improve their daily lives outnumbered those who expected it to make their lives worse. And in 34 countries, more AI-aware adults reported feeling at least one positive emotion about AI—curiosity, happiness, or excitement—than reported a negative emotion—worry, sadness, or anger.

Read more news stories on our website

by Peter Goettler

It was not in his celebrated oath but rather in Of the Epidemics that Hippocrates wrote: “As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm.”

That principle reflects a basic truth of medicine: The misdiagnosis of a disease can be worse than no treatment at all. A serious illness—thought to be something minor—can progress untreated until the patient suffers serious damage or mortality. And mistaking one condition—or no condition at all—for another can result in treatment that is ineffective at best and dangerous at worst.

The same logic applies to what is happening today in the United States and other major countries around the world. At a time of unprecedented prosperity, technological advances that continue to make lives better and longer, and unparalleled distributions of these benefits to every corner of the globe, we endure a constant drumbeat of negativity that tells us this progress is an illusion. The public is persistently told that “the system is rigged” against them, that they are becoming poorer rather than richer and that their children will be the first generation in centuries to be worse off than their parents. The “American carnage” cited by US President Donald Trump in his first inaugural address is the very embodiment of this mindset.

It’s not true. By virtually any measure—income, longevity, hours at leisure, the harnessing of technology for convenience and entertainment, and the diminishment of extreme poverty around the world—today is the best time ever to be alive as a human being nearly anywhere on the planet.

In other words, humanity today is in better health than it has ever been. Populists, in response, are recommending chemotherapy.

And like any misdiagnosis, this one carries big risks of doing harm. It has stoked a populist backlash threatening to move us away from the freedom and openness that have been the engines of our success. It also increases the likelihood that we will double down on bad policies and unhelpful government interventions that are themselves the source of many economic challenges.

Age of Abundance

Humorist P.J. O’Rourke was fond of reminding us that the ordinary men and women of today’s world are freer and enjoy more material benefits than at any time since the beginning of civilization. If we were to think there was a golden era of the past in which we’d rather live, P.J.’s famous quip sobers us up with one word: dentistry.

The point is not that the past lacked virtues, but that we often overlook the quiet improvements that make life much better. Extreme poverty has disappeared for much of the world. In 1981, 42 percent of the world’s population lived on less than $3 per day. Today, that has fallen to less than 10 percent. And in the developed world, incomes and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita continue to grow nearly every year.

Innovation doesn’t just make us richer. Medical breakthroughs are removing barriers to longer, better lives: Smallpox has been eradicated; polio is on the ropes; HIV is now treatable for many; and vaccines prevent millions of deaths every year. Since 1990, the global mortality rate for children under five has fallen more than 50 percent, enabling millions more children every year to survive to adulthood.

Time, they say, is our most precious resource, and medical innovation, better nutrition and more comfortable living conditions are creating much more of it. Since 1900, global life expectancy has more than doubled from about 32 years to more than 73 years today. And just recently we learned that life expectancy in the United States likely reached another record high of nearly 80 years in 2025.

Have these data been cherry-picked? Jump into these extensive datasets and explore trends in longevity, income and wealth, medicine, nutrition, violence and tolerance, the environment and more. Decide for yourself. It won’t take long for you to be convinced that human well-being has never been greater in a world that is freer and more peaceful than ever before.

Engine of Prosperity

The tremendous progress of the past 300 years has created the extraordinary living standards and conditions we enjoy today. Before this, the human condition had barely changed for thousands of years.

Freedom and openness, exemplified by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the values of the American Revolution, created the conditions under which this improvement could occur. As absolute government gave way to self-government that better protected citizens’ rights and liberties and as freedom allowed entrepreneurs to reap the benefits of their hard work and novel ideas, an incentive structure was created that encouraged individual initiative and innovation.

Meanwhile, freedom and individual liberty engendered the openness by which innovation and progress could flourish: open trade, freer migration and greater receptiveness to new ideas and experimentation. The experience of these last few centuries is a vindication of Adam Smith’s contention that “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice”.

Smith’s formula captured the essential conditions for sustained progress. Peace provides a positive environment for trade, migration and the sharing of ideas. Easy taxes ensure that entrepreneurs, workers and investors retain enough of the rewards of their efforts to encourage risk-taking innovation. And a tolerable administration of justice preserves the individual rights and freedoms on which markets depend.

As with today’s living standards, this can also be confirmed with data. In the Economic Freedom of the World: 2025 Annual Report, co-published in the United States by the Fraser Institute and the Cato Institute, the degree of economic freedom is calculated and compared for 165 countries. Economic freedom is measured by reference to the size of government, the protection of property rights, monetary soundness, the freedom to trade and the amount of regulation.

Based on the 2023 data used in the report, the correlation between freedom and income is compellingly strong. The world’s countries are divided into quartiles from least free to most free. Measured by per capita GDP, people in the 25 percent most-free countries earn on average in excess of six times more than people in the 25 percent least-free countries.

And the advantages of living in a free country go well beyond money. Compared to those in the least-free quartile, those in the most-free quartile live an average of 17 years longer and work nearly 17 percent less. In the least-free quartile, the poverty rate is 25 times higher, and the rate of infant mortality is nearly 10 times higher compared to the most-free quartile.

Cognitive Dissonance

So, if things are so good, why are we reluctant to believe it? Why are we willing to listen to populists on both sides when they tell us that things are bad and life is getting tougher?

The first reason is that there’s a market for bad news. If The New York Times proclaimed on its front page: “115,000 People Worldwide Escaped from Extreme Poverty Yesterday”, would it sell more newspapers? Probably not. Or at least not as well as a political scandal, natural disaster or other tragedy. But that astounding statistic is, in fact, the average daily drop in extreme poverty over the past 25 years.

Second, without a doubt, life can be difficult. It’s natural to focus on one’s daily challenges and not consider how well off we are in the context of history. Even today, certainly the best time to be alive, earning a living and raising children aren’t easy. And as well off as we may be, there will always be someone more fortunate or some item of consumption that’s out of our reach. This makes us feel worse off.

Many middle-class Americans, while living better than their parents and grandparents, can feel strapped by the high costs of housing, health care for their families and higher education for their children. Ironically, the challenge of accessing these key products has stimulated government interventions that have greatly increased their costs and exacerbated accessibility challenges.

In each of these sectors, policies have been pursued that have restricted supply (for example, through licensing requirements, zoning and land-use regulations or accreditation) while subsidizing demand through a variety of mechanisms. Any economics undergraduate should recognize that simultaneously restricting supply and subsidizing demand will generate price inflation. Yet when it does, the policy response is often not to unwind these counterproductive approaches but to double down and further subsidize demand. Thus, policies that are well-intentioned at best—or politically motivated at worst—can create what is perceived as an affordability “crisis”.

Do No Harm

To believe things are getting worse when they have, in fact, never been better is a classic misdiagnosis. And like a medical misdiagnosis, it risks ill-advised treatment when a popular groundswell for government intervention encourages populist leaders happy to oblige. Yet such policies will always have the opposite effect—exacerbating the problems they’re intended to address.

By far the most worrisome dynamic is that these interventions could move us away from the freedom and openness that have been the source of our prosperity and well-being, compromising the beautiful trendline of progress and rising wealth that has persisted for more than two centuries. And the continuation of that trend is not a foregone conclusion. This misdiagnosis fuels zero-sum thinking that motivates attacks on the very things—such as freer trade and migration—that have contributed substantially to our benefit.

Already, this is happening. The index of global economic freedom highlighted in the Economic Freedom of the World: 2025 Annual Report hit an all-time peak in 2019. It has since declined sharply, particularly in the wake of the heavy-handed policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. (But the rise of economic populism and discontent in developed economies has likely also played a part.) The index of economic freedom in the United States has steadily eroded since 2000 and has dropped sharply since 2017.

But beyond any index, we can see these threats clearly in the policy environment, particularly in the backlash against immigration in much of the West, the turn against open trade and the imposition of high and erratic tariffs in the United States. The US political arena has also experienced a stoking of class warfare, attacks on entrepreneurs as “oligarchs” and agitation for the imposition of wealth taxes. Antipathy toward technology companies exists on both extremes of the political spectrum. And this sentiment is spreading to technology itself, as exemplified by the growing resistance to artificial intelligence (AI) and attendant infrastructure such as data centers.

It’s nothing short of dangerous when public sentiment turns against innovation and innovators and against the very openness and freedom that have created our wondrous modern world. And it’s ironic when this is driven by misperceptions about the true state of the world and the economy. As Daniel Hannan, a notable British advocate for openness and trade, observed, “Open markets lifted billions from poverty, added decades to our lives, gave us powers that previous generations attributed to wizards or gods. And we never noticed.”

It’s time for us to take notice and to defend the principles that have brought us to this point. This is how the upward march of progress and prosperity will continue, creating the brightest possible futures for those who come next.

This article originally appeared in International Banker on 9/15/2026.

Author: Peter Goettler, the president and CEO of the Cato Institute.

• According to new data from the Census Bureau, US inflation-adjusted median household income reached a record high of $87,460 in 2025, surpassing the previous record of $85,320, set in 2019.

• You may see some negative reporting about US poverty. According to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), the poverty rate was 13.1 percent in 2025. That was statistically unchanged from 2024 and above the pre-pandemic level of 11.7 percent. However, that figure requires context, as the SPM is not a fixed yardstick. Unlike a fixed absolute poverty measure that adjusts for inflation, the SPM’s poverty thresholds are based on what middle-income households spend on food, clothing, shelter, and utilities, so they can rise when living standards rise, not just when prices do. Because the threshold can rise in real terms, a family can become materially better off while its position relative to the poverty line stays the same or even worsens. Indeed, a Census Bureau working paper finds that, if poverty thresholds had been adjusted only for changes in prices, the SPM poverty rate would have declined in 2025 rather than remaining stable.

• So far, the AI boom appears to be adding far more American jobs than it is eliminating. An analysis by The Economist finds that industries and occupations closely tied to AI and data centers have added about 1 million more US jobs than broader employment trends would predict. Around 320,000 of those above-trend jobs are in data-center-related construction and manufacturing, and 730,000 are in the occupations closest to AI development, such as engineering, software development, mathematics, and data science. By comparison, The Economist counted roughly 200,000 layoffs attributed to AI since mid-2023.

• China has opened the Pinglu Canal, a new waterway that shortens the shipping route from parts of southwestern China to the sea by over 560 kilometers.

Energy & Environment

Conservation & biodiversity

• Nepal’s critically endangered white-rumped vultures are making a rapid comeback. A new analysis of roadside vulture surveys estimates that the population has grown by an average of 12.7 percent per year since hitting a low in 2012. The recovery follows Nepal’s efforts to eliminate veterinary use of diclofenac, a livestock painkiller that poisons vultures when they feed on the carcasses of treated animals.

• When the Joro spider, an orb-weaver from East Asia, was first recorded in the United States around 2014, many feared it would threaten native spiders. However, a new study suggests that Joro spiders are not strongly competing with native spiders for food. After analyzing the stomach contents of more than 200 Joro spiders and 140 native orb-weavers across Georgia and South Carolina, the researchers found that the two groups' diets differed significantly, with Joros eating a different set of prey than the native orb-weavers. They also found no detectable difference in native spiders’ diets between sites with and without Joros.

• The Northern cod stock off Newfoundland and Labrador has officially recovered. After collapsing in the early 1990s, the stock has now returned to what Canada’s fisheries department classifies as a “healthy zone.” The commercial fishery reopened in 2024 after a 32-year moratorium, and this year officials raised the allowable catch by 55 percent, from 38,000 to 59,000 tonnes.

• Conservationists are reestablishing bison herds in northern Mexico. According to reporting in Yucatán Magazine, the effort began in 2009, when 23 bison were brought from South Dakota to establish a conservation herd in Chihuahua. That population has since grown large enough to seed additional herds, including two in the state of Coahuila and one in Sonora.

Energy production

• A recent report from the World Nuclear Association found that nuclear reactors generated a record 2,702 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, up from 2,667 terawatt-hours in 2024, the previous record. The vast majority of that growth occurred in Asia. China is engaged in a particularly large nuclear buildout: the country has connected five gigawatt-scale nuclear reactors to the grid during the past year and is home to 38 of the 80 nuclear reactors currently under construction worldwide.

• According to a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association, the United States added 11.4 gigawatts of solar capacity in the second quarter of 2026, up 45 percent from a year earlier. The report estimates that installed US solar capacity can generate as much electricity annually as more than one-third of American households consume.

• The Energy Information Administration predicts that US crude oil production will average a record 13.8 million barrels per day in 2026, with high crude oil prices and new offshore projects contributing to the increase.

Food & Hunger

• A fully automated lettuce farm in Norway is delivering lettuce to supermarket shelves. Phys.org quotes a researcher at SINTEF, a Norwegian research nonprofit, who says that no one touches the lettuce from the moment it is sown until the customer opens it at home.

• Recent research from Colorado State University quantified the land-sparing impact of US irrigation systems. The researchers estimate that irrigation raises US crop production by 3 to 39 percent, depending on the crop, and that without those productivity gains, around 32 million hectares of forest and 7 million hectares of other natural vegetation worldwide would need to be converted to cropland or pasture. Combined, that’s an area slightly larger than the state of Montana.

Health & Demographics

• The FDA has approved the first treatment for Sanfilippo syndrome type A, a rare but brutal neurodegenerative disease most aptly described by its nickname: “childhood Alzheimer’s.” The one-time gene therapy delivers a working copy of the SGSH gene, which is faulty in people with the disease.

• Papua New Guinea is starting to vaccinate girls against HPV. The first phase of the program will offer a single dose free of charge to around 60,000 girls aged 9–14, before gradually expanding across the country.

• Definium Therapeutics reports that its LSD-based drug has now succeeded in three phase 3 trials: two for anxiety and one for major depressive disorder. In the latest anxiety trial, 32 percent of treated patients saw their anxiety scores fall by at least half, compared with 14 percent of placebo recipients.

• Kindred Companion Sciences, a biotech company, reports that it has created two hypoallergenic beagles. Researchers at the company used CRISPR to disable the gene that produces Can f 1, a major allergen produced by dogs, and subsequent tests found no detectable Can f 1 in their saliva or dander.

Violence & Coercion

• The NYPD reports that New York City enjoyed the safest summer in recorded history this year, with the number of shootings, shooting victims, and murders all reaching record lows between June 1 and August 31.

Read more news stories on our website

The Democratic Socialists of America are having a moment. The group’s membership passed 120,000 members in July, overtaking the Eugene Debs-era Socialist Party of the early 20^th century as the largest socialist organization in American history. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a democratic socialist, and DSA candidates won a handful of primary elections over the summer. The DSA’s rise is often attributed to inequality, resentment, or ambition. But critics have pointed out that many DSA members are highly educated or come from wealthy families, so something else must be at play.

People compete for more than income. They compete for reputation, recognition, influence, and rank. The economist Fred Hirsch described such goods as “positional” in his Social Limits to Growth (1976). More food, housing, or energy can make many people better off simultaneously. Status works differently. Simply handing out more titles within a single hierarchy does not create more prestige, because relative rank within any given ladder is zero-sum.

Joseph Schumpeter identified a related problem in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). He argued that prosperous societies would educate more people than established prestige systems could absorb. Many would acquire the education and expectations associated with elite positions without obtaining them. Some, he thought, would respond by turning against the source of that prosperity—the free-market system. Schumpeter’s prediction has not aged badly.

Status competition is most consequential when many people depend on the same hierarchy for recognition, income, or professional identity, especially when alternatives are scarce and exit is costly.

Academia illustrates the mechanism. Scholars compete for jobs, tenure, publications, grants, and recognition within the same institutional system. Years of specialized training can make exit difficult. A scholar who has invested a decade acquiring specialized skills may have few opportunities to obtain comparable income and standing elsewhere.

Relative advantage can be pursued by improving one’s own position or by reducing the standing or opportunities of competitors. The first can involve producing research, teaching, or discovery. The second can involve challenging a rival’s competence or fitness for membership without producing an equivalent intellectual contribution. That does not mean criticism is illegitimate or that every dispute is driven by status. Ideological disagreements can be sincere, and institutions need mechanisms for identifying error and misconduct. The narrower point is that institutional arrangements affect incentives. When one hierarchy controls a large share of available rewards, the potential payoff from influencing membership and advancement within it increases.

For much of the 20^th century, journalism operated in a similar way. A small number of newspapers, magazines, and television networks controlled access to national audiences. Losing a position at an important publication could mean losing both income and public visibility.

The internet changed that. Journalists and commentators can now reach audiences through newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, and other platforms. A writer rejected by a newspaper can publish directly on Substack or a personal website and promote work via social media. A broadcaster without a network contract can still reach millions on X or YouTube. Competition for status remains and has arguably grown harsher, but failure in one hierarchy no longer determines a person’s prospects elsewhere.

Academia is beginning to experience the same change. Scholars can reach readers through subscription platforms, podcasts, and online lectures. Preprint servers allow research to circulate before journals approve it. Private laboratories and research institutes offer employment outside conventional departments. Organizations such as Arcadia Science and the Arc Institute are experimenting with funding scientists rather than rigid project proposals, providing multi-year support to follow promising questions without the constraints of predefined deliverables.

Alternative teaching institutions are also emerging outside legacy university systems. The University of Austin—founded as an independent, tenure-free institution dedicated to open inquiry—enrolled its first undergraduate class in 2024. Meanwhile, Peterson Academy bypasses campus infrastructure entirely, offering low-cost, recorded university-level courses that have attracted more than 80,000 subscribers. These institutions remain small, but they do not need to replace established universities to matter. They need only provide credible alternatives for some students, teachers, or scholars.

Those alternatives remain incomplete. Scientific research can require laboratories, equipment, teams, and funding that individuals cannot access or provide independently. Credentials still matter in medicine, law, and other professions. Capital requirements and network effects can also concentrate opportunities.

Government policy can strengthen or weaken this concentration. When research funding, accreditation, licensing, or other forms of authorization channel people through the same institutions and evaluation systems, policy can reinforce common hierarchies. Dispersing authority among independent funders, accreditors, jurisdictions, and institutions can create more routes to advancement.

The objective should not be to eliminate hierarchy. Reputation conveys information. Organizations need ways to identify competence. Competition for recognition can motivate effort and discovery. Relative rank cannot become abundant in the way food or energy can. The objective should be to multiply independent arenas in which people can succeed.

That is one reason economic and technological dynamism matters beyond higher income. New firms, industries, technologies, and institutions create new occupations and forms of achievement. The automobile created the mechanic and the highway engineer. Software created the programmer and the product manager. Each of these technologies built ladders that did not exist before.

Stagnation creates fewer such openings, and collectivist policies tend to yield stagnation, whether they come from the left or the right. Ambitious people must compete for a more fixed set of positions, making success or failure within existing institutions more consequential. A free-market economy does not abolish the competition for status, but it gives people more places to compete.

This article originally appeared in The Dispatch on 9/15/2026.

• Higher education is growing rapidly in India. According to the country’s Ministry of Education, India’s higher-education gross enrollment ratio—the total number of enrolled students divided by the college-aged population—rose from 23.7 percent in 2014–15 to 30 percent in 2023–24. The female gross enrollment ratio increased even faster, from 22.9 percent to 31.2 percent.

• Boeing projects that Africa’s commercial airline fleet may more than double over the next two decades, from 755 aircraft to over 1,600, to serve an estimated 6 percent annual growth rate in passenger traffic.

• Average incomes have more than doubled in nine African countries since 1990. Our World in Data highlights this progress in Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Uganda, using GDP per person adjusted for inflation and differences in the cost of living. All nine countries also saw declines in the share of people living in extreme poverty.

• China has nearly reached high-income country status. Every year, the World Bank classifies countries into income groups based on their gross national income per person. Last year, China’s GNI per person reached $14,230, just $145 below the World Bank’s high-income threshold.

Environment

• Two Amur leopards have been born at Helsinki Zoo. The cubs matter for conservation because their paternal grandfather was rescued from the wild, making their genetic lineage rare among zoo populations. After falling to a historic low of 30–35 in 2000, the number of Amur leopards living in the wild has risen to over 100 today.

• Eight orangutans have been born at US zoos since the beginning of 2025 through the Orangutan Species Survival Plan, a long-standing coordination effort among zoos that aims to maintain a healthy and genetically diverse captive population of the critically endangered apes.

Health & Demographics

• The global health workforce nearly tripled between 1990 and 2023, according to a new study in The Lancet Public Health, rising from 40.9 million health workers to 122.1 million.

• The World Health Organization recently validated that Bhutan has eliminated dog-transmitted human rabies as a public health problem.

• In Thailand, the World Health Organization has also announced that rubella, a virus that can cause severe birth defects if contracted by a pregnant woman, is no longer a public health problem.

• Global childhood vaccination coverage rose slightly in 2025. Estimates from WHO and UNICEF indicate that 90 percent of infants worldwide received at least one dose of the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine in 2025, while 85 percent completed the full three-dose series. Both rates were one percentage point higher than in 2024, although they remain slightly below their 2019 levels.

• In a recently published trial, daraxonrasib—a drug that just received FDA approval for treating metastatic pancreatic cancer—shrank tumors in more than 30 percent of participants with a common form of lung cancer.

Science & Technology

• A new $1 million prize will reward academics conducting rigorous but controversial research. The Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage, launched by Harvard economist Roland Fryer and investor Bill Ackman, will award up to five prizes each year to scholars who “pursue bold ideas that challenge prevailing orthodoxies—whether political, intellectual, or methodological—and hold the potential to reshape knowledge, policy, or society.”

• An experimental AI system from OpenAI may have solved the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, a 90-year-old open frontier math problem with a $1 million bounty. According to OpenAI, a swarm of roughly 10,000 AI agents spent about 88 hours working on the problem using a powerful unreleased model.

• Isar Aerospace, a German startup, has completed the first successful commercial orbital launch from continental Europe.

Violence

• The average number of daily homicides in Mexico has fallen by more than half over the past six years, from 96.5 in August 2020 to 40.8 in August 2026, according to national crime data.

Read more news stories on our website