A recent column by Allison Schrager that appeared in Bloomberg poses a puzzle: Americans have never been richer, and they have rarely been angrier. Indeed, by nearly every objective measure of material flourishing, such as life expectancy, real income, hours worked to buy food and shelter, access to technology that did not exist a generation ago, the average American lives better than his grandparents did. The mood does not match the record. The explanation lies partly in the happiness data themselves and partly in how people evaluate their country compared with their own lives.

Schrager invokes the Easterlin Paradox. In 1974, Richard Easterlin observed two findings that appeared to contradict each other. Within any country at a given moment, richer people report higher well-being than poorer ones. If income raises well-being for the individual, one would expect it to do so for the nation. But as a country grows richer across decades, average reported happiness appears to remain flat.

That conclusion rested on thin evidence, however — mostly American data over a few postwar decades. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers reexamined it in 2008 using global surveys covering far more countries over a much longer period. They found that rich countries report higher well-being than poor ones and that growth raises reported well-being over time. The relationship is logarithmic: Each doubling of income adds roughly the same increment of satisfaction. A rise from $2,000 to $4,000 a year does about as much as a rise from $40,000 to $80,000. That accounts for much of the apparent paradox. In a wealthy country, a 3 percent raise is a small proportional gain, so the measured return looks negligible even though the relationship between income and well-being remains intact.

The same correction has been applied to the best-known finding in the field. In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton reported that day-to-day emotional well-being stopped improving above roughly $75,000 in annual income. In 2021, Matthew Killingsworth, sampling moods in real time through a smartphone application rather than asking people to recall the previous day, found no such ceiling.

The two camps then conducted an adversarial collaboration and reanalyzed the data jointly. Their 2023 result: For the least happy fifth of people, well-being does flatten above a threshold, because, the authors suggest, heartbreak, bereavement, and clinical depression are not problems that income solves. For the remaining four-fifths, well-being continues to rise with income and rises fastest among the happiest. Kahneman accepted the revision of his own finding.

Easterlin has not conceded. His 2022 work with Kelsey O’Connor maintains that the long-run correlation between growth and happiness disappears over horizons of 20 years or more. The dispute is now largely technical, and it is not settled.

Two cautions are warranted on the skeptics’ side. Happiness scales are bounded from 0 to 10: Someone who rated his life a 7 in 1975 cannot report a 14 today, however much better his circumstances have become, so the instrument understates real gains. And income was never the dominant variable. Health, marriage, friendship, employment, and a sense of purpose account for more of the variation between individuals than earnings do, which is what one should expect if markets are a means rather than an end.

The sharper explanation for American discontent has little to do with Easterlin. When Americans are asked about their own lives — their health, families, safety, and standards of living — roughly four in five report satisfaction. When the same population is asked about the direction of the country, satisfaction falls to a quarter or less. The pessimism is aimed at the nation, not at the respondent’s own circumstances.

Three mechanisms produce that gap. The availability heuristic, identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1973, leads people to judge how common an event is by how readily an instance comes to mind. Negativity bias, summarized by Roy Baumeister and co-authors in 2001, means adverse information registers more forcefully than favorable information of equal magnitude. And the economics of media reward salience: Incremental improvement is not reportable, while price spikes, scandals, and disasters are. Personal experience is drawn from direct observation. National judgment is drawn almost entirely from mediated information selected for alarm.

The consequence is not merely a sour mood. Voters who conclude that democratic capitalism has failed them will accept price controls that suppress supply, tariffs that reduce trade, and immigration restrictions that cut off the inflow of talent that generates new ideas. Dismantling the institutions that produced current abundance on the strength of a misperception would convert a false belief into a true one.

Progress does not promise total contentment. It is a method for solving problems. Housing costs, childcare costs, and failing schools are real and specific, and they yield to reform, competition, and technical ingenuity, as thousands of comparable problems have. The mood, then, is not a verdict on the record. The mood is a verdict on the story Americans have been told about the record. They have never been richer, and they have rarely been angrier — but the anger is best aimed at the specific problems that remain, not at the machinery that solved all the others.

This article first appeared in National Review on 7/30/2026.

• Thanks to sustained economic growth, Laos’s national poverty rate fell from 24.6 percent in 2012 to 15 percent in 2024, according to a recent World Bank poverty profile. The report also notes that Laotian inequality has fallen in recent years, as living standards among rural and poorer households rose faster than average.

Energy & Environment

Conservation & biodiversity:

• Conservationists have established a new wild population of Sumatran orangutans in Indonesia. After nearly 200 orangutans were released into the Jantho Pine Forest Nature Reserve, the population is now reproducing naturally, with at least 10 births recorded in the reserve.

• According to the latest national report, the number of wild tigers in Nepal has reached 429, up from an estimated 121 in 2009.

• As large predator populations recover in North America, they may be making roads safer for people as well as helping restore ecosystems. A recent study on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula found that deer were 15 percent less likely to linger near roads in areas frequented by mountain lions, reducing the chances of deer-vehicle collisions by an estimated 67 percent.

Energy & natural resources

• 3 Proton Lithium, a Nevada mining company, says it has identified what may be the largest known tungsten deposit in the United States, containing an estimated 1.78 million metric tons of the metal. If commercially recoverable, the contained tungsten would be equivalent to centuries of current US consumption.

• The world’s installed solar capacity surpassed three terawatts this year, according to BloombergNEF, less than two years after reaching two terawatts and four years after reaching one. China still accounts for most of the growth in global solar capacity, but a rising share now comes from cheap Chinese panels installed in developing countries.

• Casey Handmer, the founder of Terraform Industries, says the startup has demonstrated an electrolyzer that can produce more than 99.9 percent pure hydrogen from water, while running directly on solar power, for under $2 per kilogram—roughly the cost level the US Department of Energy targeted for 2026. Terraform’s goal is to eventually combine hydrogen with carbon dioxide captured from the air to produce synthetic fuels.

Health & Demographics

• Tampa General Hospital is preparing to launch what it says will be the first drone system in the United States that delivers blood directly to the scene of traumatic injuries, allowing transfusions to begin on the spot. Average delivery times are expected to be under three minutes across the initial 70-square-mile service area.

• A weekly HIV pill has succeeded in two Phase 3 trials. The pill was found to be as effective as standard daily treatments at keeping the virus suppressed, offering patients a simpler alternative to daily medication.

• The FDA has approved an mRNA flu vaccine. Unlike conventional flu vaccines, which take about six months to manufacture, mRNA vaccines can be produced in two to three months, potentially allowing each shot to better match that year’s flu strains. In a trial of more than 40,000 adults, mFlusiva reduced the risk of contracting the flu by 26.6 percent compared with a standard vaccine.

• A large observational study of close to 53,000 people with type 2 diabetes and heart disease found that those taking the weight-loss and diabetes drug tirzepatide had a 33 percent lower risk of heart attack compared with those taking the non-GLP-1 diabetes drug sitagliptin.

• The FDA has approved the first drug for narcolepsy that targets the disorder’s underlying cause rather than its symptoms. The newly approved drug, Orzeyful, mimics a brain chemical that people with narcolepsy type 1 lack, helping restore control over their sleep.

Science & Technology

• Software developers in Africa are increasingly taking advantage of cheap, open-weight AI models from China to build tools for agriculture, education, legal services, and business. Unlike flagship American models, these Chinese models can often be downloaded, modified, and run independently, enabling greater customization and avoiding subscription fees.

• A recent paper from OpenAI reports that an internal AI model has resolved or made substantial progress on 10 longstanding open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science.

• Starlink’s satellite internet service is expanding rapidly, reaching 12 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2026, double the number a year earlier.

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The American consumer advocate Erin Brockovich went on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night to talk about what she has spent the year mapping: American towns that found out a data center was coming only after the bulldozers arrived. She has collected thousands of such reports from all fifty states. A big facility, she says, can consume millions of gallons of water a day. The audience was meant to conclude that artificial intelligence is swallowing the country’s water and land.

Start with the land, because that part is easy to settle. Cushman and Wakefield, the commercial real estate firm that tracks these deals, reports that the average parcel bought for a data center in 2024 ran to a couple hundred acres. Scale that up by the computing capacity the industry expects to have running by 2030, and by my reckoning every data center in America, plus all the ground around the buildings, comes to roughly the area of Rhode Island. The buildings themselves would fit inside a mid-sized city.

Now compare that with how we already use land. The federal government requires refiners to blend corn ethanol into gasoline and growing that corn takes an area about the size of New York State, for a fuel that a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found is probably dirtier than the gasoline it replaces. The Agriculture Department pays farmers to leave a Kentucky-sized area unplanted. Since 2000, American farmland has shrunk by an area larger than Colorado, and output went up anyway. None of this made the evening news.

Water is the harder argument, and it is where the case goes wrong at the level of chemistry. A data center does not destroy water. Cooling moves heat but does not burn anything. Hydrogen and oxygen do not come apart in a cooling tower. The water molecules leave as vapor, and hydrologists have long put their average stay in the atmosphere at about nine days before they fall again as rain. The word often used, “consumption,” does not mean the water is gone. It means the water left the neighborhood. That is a genuine cost to a neighborhood. It is not a subtraction from the world’s supply, and no amount of AI will make it one.

The problem of local water displacement is one that engineers have been fixing for two years. The scary numbers come from old evaporative towers, but the newer Nvidia chips run at 113 degrees Fahrenheit. That is hotter than the air outside on most summer days. Heat moves from hot to cold on its own, so the liquid sheds its warmth into the open air through a radiator, like the one in a car. Those radiators need fans, and fans need power, so the better chips turn a water problem into an electricity problem. That is a good trade, because building power is something this country knows how to do.

Similarly, Microsoft has announced designs that circle the same fluid through a sealed loop past the chip and back. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft already run some sites on treated city wastewater rather than anything anyone would drink.

Brockovich anticipated this answer. In an essay published two days before the broadcast, she argued that a sealed loop does not remove the water use but only moves it to the power plant that supplies the electricity. She is right that this second, hidden figure is bigger than the water used at the site itself. But the two together still amount to less than one percent of all the water Americans consume. The figures behind it come from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in a study Congress ordered and the Energy Department published. Its lead author, the staff scientist Arman Shehabi, supplies the numbers that both sides of this argument quote.

The comparison with national consumption is drawn by Robin Gaster of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who reviewed the same evidence in July and drew two conclusions. The technology to bring on-site water use near zero already exists. And the upstream share depends on which power plants get built, which means it is not fixed either. A forecast of disaster must assume that nobody will ever build anything different.

For scale, the EPA’s WaterSense program reports that outdoor household water use runs to about nine billion gallons a day, most of it landscape irrigation: suburban sprinklers use more water in two days than all data centers in the country uses directly in a year.

The host pushed back against Brockovich’s more alarmist claims, but he soon went back to his old assumption that there are simply too many of us and that we are using too many resources. In an April 2019 monologue, Maher cheered the falling birth rate, called fewer humans the best gift we could give the planet, and named our numbers as the great unspoken cause of the climate crisis. Last Friday, he repeated those concerns. He was wrong to do so.

In 1980, the economist Julian Simon bet the biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, that a basket of metals would grow cheaper as the population grew. Ehrlich sent the check ten years later. The economist Gale Pooley and I are keeping the score. The Simon Abundance Index we published this April found that the Earth was 536 percent more resource-abundant in 2025 than in 1980, a period in which humanity added nearly four billion people. Every commodity we track is more plentiful per person than it was, because each additional person arrives with a mind as well as a mouth.

Maher has spent three decades treating every new demand on the earth as a bite out of a fixed inheritance. Data centers are only the latest one. The land is plentiful. The water is not leaving the planet, and the engineers cooling these AI machines are already several product cycles into solving the thing he is sure cannot be solved.

by Adam Omary and Jeffrey Singer

The sharp increase in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses—nearly doubling among American children between 1997 and 2022, and more than tripling among adults from 2012 to 2023—has been chalked up to better screening, increased awareness, and the corrosive effects of smartphones and social media on developing brains. None of these factors holds up well under scrutiny.

The diagnostic category itself has been steadily widened by the institutions that define it and the financial structure that rewards every participant for applying the ADHD label. As we have argued in our Cato Institute analysis of how the American healthcare system rewards psychiatric overdiagnosis, subjective diagnostic criteria interact with a payment system that rewards diagnosis to produce predictable inflation across psychiatric categories. The result is labeling ordinary behavior as pathological. ADHD is among the cleanest case studies of that pattern.

Foraging minds in an industrial classroom.

Human cognition was shaped over hundreds of thousands of years in small foraging bands, where attentional flexibility was an asset rather than a liability. A child who scanned the horizon, registered novel stimuli, and shifted focus rapidly between threats and opportunities was a child more likely to survive. Sustained, narrowly channeled attention to a single abstract task for hours at a time was simply not part of the ancestral environment, and the cognitive machinery to produce such concentration on demand was never uniformly selected for. What we now call distractibility is, in another light, vigilance. Most animals, including ancestral humans, evolved to be constantly on the lookout for novelty and threat.

Mass schooling, which emerged in the 19^th century in part to prepare children for industrial labor, asks something quite different. It asks 6- and 7‑year-olds to sit still in rows, suppress physical movement, attend to a single voice for extended stretches, and produce written output on a fixed schedule. Most children adapt. The variance in how easily they do so is enormous, and the children at the lower tail of conformity to that demand have come to define the diagnostic category.

Boys end up there more often than girls, for reasons that are not mysterious. Boys, on average, are more physically active, take longer to develop self-control, and are more drawn to rough play. The same pattern shows up in other mammals and tracks the effects of testosterone on brain development. Put boys in a room and tell them to sit still for six hours, and a predictable share of them will fail, not because they are mentally ill but because they are boys. The youngest children in any classroom are also more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than their older peers, a finding so robust across studies and countries that it points to ordinary developmental variation rather than disease.

The evolutionary frame also provides a more nuanced understanding of the fear that screen time in childhood harms brain development and attention span. The brain is plastic, especially in childhood, and it adapts to the environment it is given. That plasticity is precisely what allowed generations raised under modern industrialized education systems to develop the sustained attention style that schools reward, despite it being so far from our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. But a generation that grows up navigating fast-moving feeds, switching between applications, and processing rapid streams of visual information will predictably develop a different attentional profile than one raised on books and chalkboards.

That does not mean the learning or attention span of youth raised on digital technology is impaired. Heavy media multitaskers and habitual users of touchscreen devices do tend to perform worse on tasks that demand sustained, narrowly focused attention and inhibitory control. But they also tend to perform better on tasks that demand rapid visual search, parallel processing of multiple objects, and flexible reallocation of attention. Action video game play, in particular, has been shown to enhance visual selective attention, processing speed, and the spatial resolution of vision. These effects transfer beyond the trained task, improving general abilities to track several moving things at once, spot relevant objects in a crowded scene, and pick out a target faster when surrounded by distractions.

These cognitive trade-offs elucidate how neural plasticity gives rise to different forms of intelligence. The brain has a finite budget of computational and metabolic resources, and the cortex reallocates them in response to the demands placed on it. The clearest demonstrations come from sensory deprivation: In people who lose their sight, the visual cortex does not simply lie fallow but is recruited for auditory and tactile processing, including Braille reading, with measurable gains in those domains. Congenitally deaf individuals show analogous repurposing of the auditory cortex for vision and smell. Every brain is continuously specializing toward whatever it does most, and different cognitive skillsets have different trade-offs.

A brain trained on rapid feeds and parallel streams gets better at rapid visual search, switching, and parallel processing while getting worse at slow, serial, endogenous focus. A brain trained on long books and chalkboards makes the opposite trade. The picture is not simply that screens damage children’s brains or lower their intelligence. Claims of generalized cognitive harm typically rest on measures of a single attentional style, the one schools happen to demand, and ignore the capacities that grow on the other side of the ledger. Calling the resulting attentional profile ADHD, treating it as a chronic illness, and medicating it accordingly is a category error. The trade-offs are real, but the diagnostic system measures only the deficits because only the deficits are reimbursable.

From hyperkinetic boys to inattentive adults.

The diagnostic category we now call ADHD has been progressively widened almost from the moment it entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the reference text published by the American Psychiatric Association that defines the criteria for every recognized psychiatric condition in the United States. The DSM-II, published in 1968, listed the condition as “hyperkinetic reaction of childhood” and described it in a single sentence, focused on the restless, disruptive child, almost always identified as a boy, who would supposedly grow out of the condition by adolescence. The DSM-III, in 1980, renamed it attention deficit disorder, with or without hyperactivity, and for the first time treated inattention as a stand-alone presentation rather than a symptom of restlessness. That single revision opened the category to a far larger population of children, especially girls, whose attentional patterns had previously been invisible to the diagnostic system.

The DSM-III‑R, in 1987, folded the subtypes back together and introduced the current acronym, ADHD. The DSM-IV, in 1994, separated the disorder again into three presentations—predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, and combined—and explicitly extended the diagnosis into social, academic, and vocational contexts beyond childhood. Studies comparing the DSM-III‑R and DSM-IV criteria directly found that prevalence rose from 9.6 to 17.8 percent under one set of comparisons and from 7.3 to 11.4 percent under another, almost entirely on the strength of newly identified inattentive cases. The DSM‑5, in 2013, raised the age-of-onset requirement from 7 to 12 and lowered the symptom threshold for adults.

Each revision expanded the population eligible for diagnosis, and, with it, the population eligible for stimulant prescriptions, academic accommodations, and disability protections. The trajectory runs in one direction. There is no edition of the DSM in which the criteria for ADHD became more restrictive.

The incentive problem.

Layered atop the definitional and developmental story is a set of economic incentives that quietly lower the threshold for diagnosis. A growing share of these diagnoses now comes from primary care clinicians rather than specialists, reflecting how rapidly ADHD treatment has migrated into routine primary care, and how the expansion of telehealth lowered the friction of obtaining a prescription.

One of the clearest examples of incentives for overdiagnosis comes from how we finance education. When special-education funding is tied to specific diagnoses, schools have a built-in reason to identify more students with ADHD, because the label unlocks additional resources. Researchers have documented systematic differences in diagnosis and treatment that align with funding formulas rather than with underlying disease rates, a pattern consistent with third-party financial incentives shaping who gets labeled. Clinicians do not work in isolation; they respond to expectations from schools, families, and the broader system. Once stakeholders recognize that a diagnosis unlocks services, pressure to apply the label tends to grow.

Primary care clinicians typically practice in fee-for-service systems, where assigning a diagnosis makes the encounter billable and enables reimbursement for follow-up visits and medication management. Patients have their own incentives to seek the diagnosis, including academic accommodations, workplace protections, and access to performance-enhancing stimulants such as Adderall. In an environment where the condition is defined by subjective criteria rather than objective tests, it is unsurprising that some individuals exaggerate or feign symptoms to obtain those benefits.

The pattern is by now familiar. As we documented in our analysis of Medicaid-funded autism therapy, the broadening of autism criteria, combined with open-ended reimbursement, produced an explosion in spending on applied behavior analysis that far outpaced any plausible change in the prevalence of disabling autism. The broadening of ADHD criteria has produced a parallel surge in stimulant prescriptions, and our recent piece against the campaign to formalize “social media addiction” anticipates the same trajectory if that diagnosis is formalized. In each case, subjective diagnosis and financial incentives that reward diagnosis push the boundaries of illness outward.

What this should teach us.

The growth in diagnoses is best understood as the cumulative output of several systems, each behaving in a way its incentives reward. Definitions expand because there is little institutional pressure to keep them tight. Clinicians diagnose because diagnosis is what the system pays for. Schools refer because referrals bring resources. Patients seek labels because labels bring access to special accommodations. The aggregate effect is a steady erosion of the line between ordinary human variation and clinical disease.

That erosion has costs. Children whose ordinary inattentiveness is medicated as a chronic condition, adults who organize their identities around a label, and patients with severely impairing ADHD whose treatment resources are diluted across an ever-larger pool all bear those costs. The path to more reliable diagnoses runs through more reliable incentives: tighter criteria, independent assessments, and payment structures that do not reward expanding the definition of illness. Policymakers should stop structuring schools, insurers, and healthcare systems so that people must acquire a medical diagnosis to receive help, accommodations, or reimbursement.

Children today have greater safety, resource availability, and tools for education than any cohort in human history. It is the schoolroom that asks kids to sit still for hours and the diagnostic system that pathologizes the ones who cannot that are the more unusual and pathological features of modernity. A more honest accounting would distinguish severely impairing attentional disorders from the wider band of ordinary human variation. It would recognize that the temperaments now most likely to be medicalized are, in a different setting, the temperaments that helped aid survival and human progress.

This article originally appeared in The Dispatch on 5/13/2026.

Authors:

Adam Omary is a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. Subscribe to his Substack, Psychology of Progress.

Jeffrey Singer is a Senior Fellow in Health Policy at the Cato Institute.

• An analysis by The Economist finds that, for the first time in its 25-year dataset, over half of global billionaire wealth is now held by self-made billionaires who made their fortunes through “competitive activities,” meaning by providing goods and services in competitive markets, as opposed to inheriting their wealth or accumulating it in politically connected industries.

Energy & Environment

• For the first time, China generated less than half of its electricity from coal during the first six months of 2026. Coal, while often crucial during the early stages of economic development, is among the most polluting sources of energy.

• Observations from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service show that, despite large wildfires in Europe and North America, global carbon emissions from biomass burning fell to a record low in the first six months of this year. That is largely thanks to reduced burning in Asia and Africa, where more permanent forms of agriculture are supplanting traditional seasonal burning and expanding farms and settlements are limiting the spread of wildfires.

• A recently published study using aerial lidar and satellite imagery found that prescribed burns saved thousands of giant sequoias during California’s Castle and KNP Complex wildfires in 2020 and 2021. After analyzing images of around 26,400 trees, the researchers found that sequoias treated with prescribed burns during the preceding decade were nearly four times as likely to survive the wildfires. They estimate that the burns saved around 1,900 giant sequoias and that treating the area around each tree beforehand could have saved another 3,900.

• Across Africa’s Sahel region, groundwater reserves are recovering after decades of drought. Aquifer reserves across Niger have risen by an estimated 15 percent, while Lake Chad reached more than 9,000 square miles in 2024, around 10 times its size in the mid-1980s. One major reason is that rising temperatures in the North Atlantic have pulled the West African monsoon farther north, bringing more rainfall to the Sahel.

Food & Hunger

• Avocado breeders currently have to wait five to ten years for a young tree to flower before they can determine its flowering pattern, an important trait for designing orchards with efficient pollination. Scientists have now identified the gene that controls the pattern, allowing breeders to classify avocado seedlings using their DNA and avoid wasting time, money, and orchard space.

• The New York Times recently profiled Driscoll’s, the international berry giant that helped turn berries into year-round global staples. Thanks in large part to Driscoll’s breeding and distribution systems, global berry production has tripled since 2000.

Health & Demographics

• AIDS-related deaths and HIV infections fell to their lowest levels in more than 30 years in 2025, according to a recent report from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. The report also notes that the number of new HIV infections among children fell 69 percent between 2010 and 2025, from 300,000 to 93,000.

• According to Uganda’s Health Ministry, the country has contained an Ebola outbreak imported from Congo after all identified contacts completed quarantine without further transmission.

• A breast cancer patient in California recently received a robotic nipple-sparing mastectomy, one of the first such procedures performed in the United States outside of a clinical trial.

Science & Technology

• Waste Management, North America’s largest recycling firm, reports that its new, more automated facilities have a 30 percent lower labor cost per ton of material processed than its older plants.

• SpaceX’s Starship completed a largely successful test flight last week. The spacecraft deployed satellites for the first time, reignited an engine in space, survived atmospheric reentry, and completed its first intact ocean splashdown.

• Nine schools in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado are installing attack drones designed to confront active shooters. Teachers can summon the drones—which are remotely piloted from a central command center—with an app or panic button. According to their manufacturer, Mithril Defense, the drones can reach a suspect within 15 seconds and attack or disorient them using pepper gel, strobe lights, sirens, or simply by ramming them at up to 60 miles per hour.

• The National Highway Traffic Safety ‌Administration has approved a Robotaxi design without human controls such as a steering wheel or pedals. The newly approved vehicle, developed by Zoox, Amazon’s robotaxi subsidiary, uses the space normally occupied by a driver to create a roomy carriage-like cabin for passengers.

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In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our editor Marian Tupy speaks with economist Brian Albrecht about the role of prices in modern prosperity. They discuss why price controls fail, whether scarcity can ever truly disappear, the difference between large companies and monopolies, price discrimination, and the underappreciated ways in which competitive markets enrich our lives.

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

Today, I’m joined by Dr. Brian C. Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics and author of the Economic Forces newsletter. Brian writes about competition, regulation, how markets work, and why good intentions often produce bad policy. His work matters because human progress depends not only on innovation, but also on the institutions and incentives that let useful ideas spread, compete, and improve ordinary lives.

Brian, we’re trying to alert our listeners to the economic underpinnings of modernity: why the last 200 years are so fundamentally different from the previous 300,000 years that Homo sapiens has been on the planet. Online, you’re described as one of the chief defenders of price theory. Why does this amorphous idea matter for the great enrichment and for human progress?

One thing that makes the modern world unique is that markets are a huge part of our lives. Markets let us coordinate across time and place in a way we couldn’t have imagined 300 years ago. And price theory is about studying prices: what causes them to move, how they coordinate behavior, when policies affect them productively or destructively.

Can you talk about prices as a signaling mechanism, and draw out the distinction between prices emerging spontaneously under free markets versus politicians trying to set prices?

I take a line from Alex Tabarrok that a price is a signal wrapped in an incentive. Hayek used the example of tin. Users of tin don’t need to know where a shortage came from or whether there’s a new usage; they see the price go up. That allows coordination across time and place. I can decide whether to hold off on tin production or do something else with my factory because tin is more expensive—all that coordination comes from a simple signal.

Thinkers try to distinguish free market prices from others. What does the price of my electricity bill convey? It’s not set by the same forces as the grocery store, where Krogers, Albertsons, Walmart, and Costco bid for chicken from the wholesaler. There’s gradation, and at the other extreme is not allowing prices at all: a government edict, a ration.

The other aspect of prices is incentives. If you own a grocery store and set the price of bananas too low, you sell out and leave money on the table. That’s a signal to raise prices tomorrow. But when the government sets prices, the Politburo chief isn’t making that money. What incentive do they have to set prices in a way that conveys information?

So it’s not just free market prices that give a signal; a government-regulated price like electricity, with taxes and green levies on top, still allows people to adjust. But at some point you get a situation like we did in Eastern Europe, where I grew up, where prices are so divorced from reality that the system collapses.

That’s an extreme example. Less extreme is just shortages. Mayor Mamdani in New York is known for wanting subsidized government-led grocery stores, but those have been tried elsewhere. It’s not that the system collapsed; there are just shortages in these stores.

In public debates, politicians often ignore scarcity and tradeoffs. Why is it so difficult for people to accept that there are scarcities and tradeoffs?

People accept scarcity in situations where they face the feedback themselves.

Any time you go to the grocery store, you’re confronted with scarcity. In other parts of life, that feedback isn’t as tight. In a large organization, you make budgeting decisions that don’t affect you. If you spend extra on the company card, how tight is that feedback?

The government has more insulation because it doesn’t have shareholders. Local governments might have tighter feedback because they’re more responsive to voters. Totalitarian regimes don’t have any feedback.

Right now, we are in the middle of the conflict in Iran. The price of gas has gone way up, and some people have suggested that we should cap the prices of gasoline. But we’ve been here before in the 1970s. What does the 1970s episode have to teach us about what to do when gas prices are going up because of geopolitical conflict?

Every few generations, you need to relearn the lessons of price controls.

The stories from the 1970s are generally known. There were gas lines and energy caps on different things across the economy. It all circles back to the core idea that when you cap prices, people aren’t able to adjust to reality. There’s less supply than there was before the conflict, and price controls don’t change that; they just hide it. In the 1970s, scarcity showed up as gas lines. At other points in time, it showed up as different types of shortages.

Tyler Cowen has written that we’ve forgotten the lessons people learned in the 1970s about price, wage, and rent controls and are now beginning to relearn them. As an economist, do you think that economic understanding is so counterintuitive that, unless taught, the default position is some sort of diktat socialism? If every generation needs to be retaught, then human nature must be the opposite. Have you thought about that?

I’ve thought about it in the context of Hayek’s idea about the micro and macrocosm. His point is that our brain evolved to think about our day-to-day lives and families rather than larger systems. Modernity, especially through markets, but also through things like the internet and social media, brings those larger systems into contact with our brains, which developed in the microcosm, and that’s a fundamental tension we have to keep dealing with.

Another thing that makes economics tricky is that some parts are intuitive and some parts are not. When I tell my students there are tradeoffs, everyone nods. When I ask whether they’d buy more or fewer bananas if the price rises, everyone answers correctly. There’s an intuitive part we think we understand, and then we think we can make the jump ten steps down the road. Economics would almost be easier to teach if it were completely unintuitive. When you go into quantum physics, nothing’s intuitive, so you don’t even try to intuit it; you look at the experiments and the math.

There’s an idealistic vision of the future where AI and robots give us everything we need, eliminating scarcity. Is that kind of future possible, or are human desires infinite?

I was working this morning on a paper about how when we get more stuff, we discover desires we didn’t even realize we had. There was an LLM released that was only trained on text up to about 1930. You ask it what a computer is, and it says a computer is a person who computes because it’s predicting what a person in 1930 would think. They can’t imagine what we think of as a computer, so they don’t know that desire is possible.

That’s how human desires are infinite. Each time I don’t have to worry about where my water comes from, I can buy something fancier and worry about the next thing. Some of that may be resources, some social status. So far, as soon as we can take care of something without worrying about it, another desire appears. I can’t think of a good reason that would end.

The fundamental scarcity that isn’t settled is time. Even if AI does all the work, time with my kids is still scarce. And once there’s scarcity, there are tradeoffs. I’m excited for what AI will do, but the core principle of scarcity doesn’t go out the window.

Let’s talk about your work on monopolies and market concentration. A lot of people seem confused about the difference between firm size and monopoly power. They look at big companies like Apple, Walmart, or Amazon and say that they are monopolies. But those two terms aren’t identical, are they?

A monopoly, in the strictest sense, means one seller. The term grew out of times when you truly had one seller; the king said only one person could do something. In economics, it doesn’t need to be one seller, but rather one big player in a market. With one dominant player, you could imagine that company being a monopolist, or at least having market power. But what if you’re a small player in many markets? Amazon isn’t the biggest in retail or groceries, but add up enough, and it’s a very big company. Companies can be big because they’re diversified. “Monopoly” is a weird term for that.

Another distinction: the East India Company’s monopoly privileges came from politics, but companies often get big by winning a market. If you provide lower-cost or higher-quality goods, you’ll win the market and become a bigger company. That’s fundamentally different from the old-school idea of a player who’s there because they stole something and have power over you.

Right, so people often misunderstand what it means to be a monopoly. Still, people feel uncomfortable when JetBlue wants to take over Spirit. They feel concentration will result in high prices. How often do big companies raise prices rather than lower them?

In the broad sweep, the way to get rich is to lower prices.

The retailer everyone’s talking about is Costco. Costco has low prices. Combined with a membership fee that people happily pay, they get a lot of customers. No one says Costco’s profit comes from crazy high prices. They came in and lowered prices, maybe not on every item, but as a bundle. Before that, it was Walmart. Way back it was A&P. Even in tech, Microsoft and Apple lowered the price of computers and became big. That’s the default way most companies make money: find a cost saving, lower prices, attract more customers, and get profits over the long run.

And it protects you against competition, right?

Yeah, for sure. If I were born in 1920, maybe my job would be to open a corner shop selling lollipops as a retailer, but in today’s world, I can’t compete with the scale of Costco or Walmart. I could compete on a different margin, a gentler boutique experience, for instance, but it’s harder. The flip side is that I get to talk about economics all day instead of operating that corner store. These cost savings help consumers directly through lower prices and indirectly by freeing up resources for people to produce other stuff and move into services.

Now, when it comes to mergers, people are often concerned about collusion. What if all the sellers get together as one legal entity and collude to raise prices? We can separate winning the market by being more efficient versus winning by convincing everyone to stop competing, but mergers sit in between. Is the merger like Walmart, getting scale efficiencies and lowering prices, or like collusion? In most situations, it’s like Walmart, with real efficiencies and synergies. But in airlines or other situations, it can be more collusive, and that’s case-by-case.

To me, that’s why international competition is so important. Even if United takes over American, JetBlue, and Spirit and we end up with one company, so long as they’re exposed to international competition, it’s harder to collude and raise prices.

That’s a real benefit of international trade: if there are pockets of waste from implicit collusion or inefficient mergers, a constant force of external competition is a disciplining force. We want that pressure because it’s what lets us lower costs, improve quality, and generate progress in the longer run.

Let’s stick with airlines. Here’s something that freaks me out. The internet has a lot of information on my income and yours. At some point, between companies knowing our spending patterns and how much we can afford, they’ll discriminate the prices of plane tickets. If Brian is twice as rich as I am and he logs onto American Airlines, his price will be twice as high as mine because the company knows he can pay twice as much. How do you feel about that future?

Let me talk through the economics.

We can work out that the only way that price discrimination works is that you’re able to lower prices for the marginal consumer. Why do you not lower prices in general? Because you’re worried you’ll have to lower prices for the people you were making profit from. If someone says they won’t pay $100 but will pay $50, why not do that? Because the next person will say the same, and soon everyone will beg for $50.

Price discrimination lets you set different prices for different people and lower prices for consumers who wouldn’t otherwise buy the good. If willingness to pay is a proxy for income, you lower prices for poorer people and raise them for richer people. How you think about those tradeoffs depends on the situation, but there’s no disputing that the only way price discrimination works is if you lower prices for some and possibly raise prices for others.

If poorer people would get a price cut, and the rich pay more, why does the left oppose price discrimination so much?

I’ve tried to push that line, though it’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek. The only way price discrimination is profitable for firms is if it gets new people in the door, which means lowering prices for some people, who tend to be poorer. We should take that seriously as one of its benefits.

Also, who knows where technology ends up? There may be ways for people to hide their identity, or third-party sellers where you call and say, “Hey Brian, buy this ticket for me.”

That is in some sense wasteful. People respond to the threat of theft by installing locks, which reduce theft but are themselves a waste of resources. So there could be a role for policy there. Maryland just passed a law trying to ban this sort of price discrimination for grocery retailers. It had stuff like you cannot use tracking information to lower prices in the store, which isn’t something anyone does, but they’re imagining a future where that happens. In the meantime, it’s not a first-order priority.

Free-market economists emphasize competition over regulation. You just talked about a policy response, a regulation. Should an ordinary person rely on competition as a better way of handling these important issues?

People say the reason they feel safe at the grocery store is food regulation. But it’s not really true. It’s mostly because of competition. The Walmarts of the world try very hard to keep their products safe because they have to in order to keep customers coming back. Competition is a facet of the world that we rely on every day.

If you go to a different country, or even a different US city, you often ask whether the tap water is safe to drink. But people never ask that when opening a Coca-Cola. I remember traveling through Zimbabwe during the hyperinflation in 2008. You couldn’t buy anything, but we found a shack in the middle of nowhere selling ice-cold Coca-Cola. I drank it without thinking twice.

That’s a great example, and I’m ashamed I hadn’t thought of that connection because I’ve written on the importance of brands. I can go into a McDonald’s anywhere in the world and expect some level of quality. The power of these big brands is that they keep their quality good enough that you trust what you’ll get and reach a price point that lets them be anywhere in the world.

To circle back to price theory, I try to understand how this is possible: the incentives, rule of law, institutions, and competition that make it possible. That’s what I try to do in my research.

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Conservation and biodiversity:

• There are now close to 400 wild Asian elephants living in China, up from around 150 in the 1980s.

• The Hawaiian stilt and the razorback sucker are no longer considered endangered in the United States following substantial recoveries.

• A system of canopy bridges has apparently eliminated roadkill deaths for tree-dwelling animals along a road near Alta Floresta, a small town in the Brazilian Amazon. Brazil’s federal transport agency has made the design its recommended standard for highways.

Energy production:

• Fervo Energy, a geothermal energy company, has drilled its deepest and most complex well yet, reaching a measured depth of nearly 19,500 feet in just 21 days. The new well, Sawtooth 7, will contribute to a 400-megawatt geothermal power project in Utah scheduled to begin delivering electricity in 2028.

• Cypress Creek Energy and Google have begun construction on an energy project in Arkansas that is set to become the largest solar project in the United States. When completed, the facility will provide 2.5 gigawatts of solar capacity and 2.9 gigawatt-hours of battery storage, enough to power 315,000 homes.

Natural disasters:

• The area burned in the Brazilian Amazon fell to 3.1 million hectares in 2025, the smallest area since at least 1985, when satellite records began.

• A British climate technology company is testing a simple method for preserving Arctic sea ice: pumping seawater onto its surface during winter to create thicker ice. At the start of the 2026 melt season, treated ice near Cambridge Bay, Canada, was 20 inches thicker and more reflective than untreated ice, helping it melt more slowly. The pumps themselves use surprisingly little power. According to reporting in The Guardian: “The small pumps require less power than a toaster as they are only lifting the water from just under the ice to just on top.”

Food & Hunger

• According to estimates from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the share of the world’s population that was undernourished1 fell to 7.8 percent in 2025, down from 8.1 percent in 2024 and 8.6 percent in 2022. The decline marks the third consecutive year that global hunger has fallen, a welcome recovery after progress against hunger stalled during the 2010s amid conflict and economic stagnation, particularly in Africa, and then partially reversed during the COVID-19 pandemic as incomes fell and food prices rose. In Asia and Latin America, the rate of undernourishment has now fallen to historic lows.

Health & Demographics

• The World Health Organization reports that the global rate of road traffic deaths fell by 21 percent between 2011 and 2025. The rate dropped or remained the same in every region except Africa.

• A new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease study finds that the age-adjusted US death rate from ischemic heart disease, which is caused by blocked coronary arteries, fell 59 percent between 1990 and 2023. The model also found especially large declines in the mortality burden attributed to smoking and particulate air pollution.

• According to recent estimates from the World Health Organization, the number of people living in areas requiring mass trachoma interventions has roughly halved over the past decade, falling from 190.2 million in 2016 to 92.0 million in 2026, while the estimated number suffering from the disease’s advanced, potentially blinding stage has fallen 58 percent, from 2.8 million to 1.2 million.

• India has approved its first dengue vaccine, a two-dose vaccine from Takeda Pharmaceutical that, in a late-stage trial, was 80 percent effective against confirmed dengue during the year following the second shot.

• With assistance from the Gates Medical Research Institute, India’s Serum Institute is preparing for large-scale production of what could become the first new tuberculosis vaccine in over a century.

• Belgian medical researchers have restored sperm production in a man left infertile after childhood chemotherapy using testicular tissue that had been frozen for 16 years. A year after transplantation, the tissue showed active sperm production and yielded a mature sperm cell.

Science & Technology

• Another Waymo safety study, this time conducted independently by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, finds that Waymo vehicles were involved in 68 percent fewer police-reportable crashes per mile than human drivers. The research also found that Waymo vehicles were involved in 81 percent fewer injury-causing crashes than human drivers and 91 percent fewer rear-end crashes in which they struck another vehicle.

• European regulators have approved Science Corporation’s PRIMA retinal implant, which combines a tiny chip inserted beneath the retina with camera-equipped glasses to restore functional vision.

• AI adoption continues to rise. A recent Gallup poll finds that 47 percent of US employees said their organization was using AI in the second quarter of 2026, up from 38 percent at the end of 2025. Recent research from Google estimates that 21 percent of tasks at the typical job are now completed with AI assistance.

• Skyroot Aerospace, an Indian startup, launched the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket last weekend.

• A new species of monkey has been described in the Congo rainforest.

Violence & Coercion

• Today, throughout much of the chicken egg industry, newly hatched male chicks—economically useless because they neither lay eggs nor grow efficiently for meat—are gassed or thrown into industrial grinders. That horror may come to an end thanks to in-ovo sexing, a relatively new technique that allows hatcheries to cheaply identify and destroy male chicken embryos before they are capable of feeling pain. According to a recent report from Innovate Animal Ag, an animal agriculture think tank, 40 percent of Europe’s commercial laying flock had been sexed in ovo as of June 2026, up from 34 percent in 2025. The report also notes that the technology has been adopted by certain hatcheries in the United States, Brazil, and Australia.

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by Jeremy Horpdahl

In a previous exploration of the housing affordability crisis, I observed a sobering reality: artificial scarcity is often a policy choice. We have placed arbitrary limits—mostly through local governments—on our ability to build homes, driving up costs and restricting opportunity. But this pattern of self-imposed constraint does not stop at the edges of our neighborhoods. It extends into the institutions and policies that shape economic growth. It is one of the primary reasons why, despite living in an age of extraordinary digital innovation, we remain stuck in a decades-long productivity slump.

Economists often measure technological progress using a concept called Total Factor Productivity (TFP). In simple terms, TFP measures how efficiently an economy turns labor, land, and capital into goods and services. When TFP rises, society discovers better ways to produce more with the same resources.

From the 1920s through the early 1970s, TFP in the United States and much of the developed world grew at more than 2 percent per year. This was the era that gave us commercial aviation, widespread electrification, antibiotics, and the Apollo program. The physical world was transformed in a single generation.

Since the early 1970s, however, productivity growth has slowed dramatically to less than 1 percent in most years. As investor Peter Thiel famously quipped, “We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.” Digital technologies have advanced rapidly, while progress in energy, transportation, infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing has been far slower. We can send vast amounts of information across the globe in milliseconds, yet we often struggle to build major infrastructure projects on time or on budget.

A 2020 paper by Nicholas Bloom and co-authors argues that good ideas are getting harder to find – that is, more investment in research and development has become necessary for each new patentable idea. However, more recent research by Teresa Fort and co-authors (currently in working paper form) suggests that this is not the case. The Bloom et al. result may, in fact, be an artifact of focusing on manufacturing firms, which were dominant from about 1970 to 1990. Fort and her co-authors show that patenting and innovation have shifted in recent decades, becoming dominated by firms in information, management, and professional services.

Because manufacturing is a physical process, it is much more likely to be subject to, for example, environmental regulations, whereas an IT firm operates in a much less regulated sector. So, our relative stagnation may not be the result of a scientific drought after all. Universities and research laboratories continue to produce remarkable discoveries. We are not failing at invention; we are failing at diffusion, the process of turning new discoveries into widely used products and services.

The Diffusion Deficit and the Permitting Veto

Innovation does not benefit society until it escapes the laboratory and enters the marketplace. The journey from a peer-reviewed paper to a consumer-ready product is long, expensive, and uncertain. Over time, policymakers have added layer upon layer of regulatory complexity to that journey.

Physical innovation requires physical construction. New technologies need testing facilities, advanced laboratories, semiconductor fabrication plants, energy infrastructure, and transportation networks. Yet building almost anything of significance in the modern West often requires navigating years of environmental reviews, public-comment periods, and multi-agency approvals.

Laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and state-level counterparts such as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) were originally intended to prevent environmental harm. Over time, however, they have increasingly become tools for the delay of progress. Because these laws frequently allow opponents to challenge projects on procedural grounds, they have contributed to what political scientist Francis Fukuyama calls a “vetocracy”—a system in which many actors can block decisions but few can make them. Average NEPA environmental impact statements now take almost four years to complete, with many extending far beyond a decade. Thankfully, the median is a bit shorter, but still about 2.5 years.

Consider the recent push to reshore semiconductor manufacturing. While the government has allocated billions of dollars in subsidies to build these vital factories, the physical construction is bottlenecked by years of permitting and environmental reviews. A state-of-the-art fabrication plant (commonly called a “fab”) that takes 18 months to build in Taiwan or South Korea can take three to five years just to obtain a permit in the United States.

The result is predictable: projects take longer, cost more, and become less attractive to investors. Even when governments provide subsidies for strategic industries such as semiconductor manufacturing, years of permitting can slow implementation. Time is money, and prolonged regulatory uncertainty discourages investment in capital-intensive industries.

The solution is straightforward, even if politically difficult. Critical infrastructure, advanced manufacturing facilities, and research laboratories should face streamlined approval processes. If projects satisfy clearly defined environmental and safety standards, they should be approved in months rather than years.

Pull Mechanisms: R&D Prizes and Commercialization

Reducing regulatory barriers is only part of the solution. We must also rethink how innovation is encouraged and financed.

In addition to corporate financing, most governments try to support innovation through “push” funding. Researchers receive grants to conduct experiments, purchase equipment, and explore new ideas. This model, some economists argue, can be effective for basic science, especially when commercial applications may be years away.

Commercialization presents a different challenge. Many promising technologies fall into what innovators call the “Valley of Death” – the difficult period between a successful laboratory demonstration and a commercially viable product. At this stage, development costs rise sharply while uncertainty remains high.

That is where “pull” mechanisms become valuable. Instead of paying for research inputs, policymakers reward successful outputs. An Advance Market Commitment (AMC), for example, guarantees that a buyer will purchase a product if it is successfully developed. Rather than funding every possible approach, the sponsor commits to paying for results.

Economist Michael Kremer helped pioneer this approach through vaccine development programs. More recently, Operation Warp Speed demonstrated its effectiveness. The government did more than fund vaccine research; it guaranteed large future purchases for successful vaccines. By reducing market risk, policymakers encouraged firms to accelerate development and manufacturing simultaneously. The result was one of the fastest vaccine-development efforts in history.

Consider other approaches. Throughout history, prizes have also stimulated innovation. The Longitude Prize helped solve a critical navigation problem for maritime trade, while the Ansari X Prize helped launch the private spaceflight industry. Pull mechanisms align private incentives with public goals by rewarding success rather than political connections or grant-writing skill.

Breaking Local Monopolies and Regulatory Capture

When people hear the word “monopoly,” they often think of large technology companies. Yet some of the most significant barriers to innovation exist at the local level.

The electric utility sector provides a clear example of how regulatory design shapes technological adoption. Because most utilities operate as regulated monopolies with government-guaranteed rates of return on capital investments, their business model relies on continuous, large-scale infrastructure growth.

Put simply, utilities make more money the bigger power plants and power lines they build, so they usually prefer huge projects over things like rooftop solar panels that let people generate their own power without the utility having to build as much infrastructure.

Decentralized energy technologies—such as local battery storage, micro-grids, and advanced management software—directly threaten this model by optimizing the existing grid and reducing the need for new capital projects. As a result, studies from the MIT Energy Initiative and industry financial analysts indicate that utilities frequently leverage legacy regulatory processes to delay or block these decentralized innovations from integrating into the wider network.

Similar dynamics exist elsewhere. State dealership franchise laws frequently restrict direct-to-consumer automobile sales, making it more difficult for new manufacturers to enter the market. Occupational licensing requirements now affect roughly one-fifth of American workers and can create barriers to entry that limit competition and labor mobility.

Innovation depends on what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” – the replacement of older, less efficient business models with better ones. When established interests use regulation to shield themselves from competition, they slow technological adoption and reduce future productivity growth. Encouraging competition and reducing regulatory barriers at the state and local level would help accelerate the diffusion of new ideas throughout the economy.

Choosing Abundance

The productivity slowdown is not an immutable law of nature. It is, at least in part, the consequence of policy choices. Human ingenuity remains as powerful as ever. We have more scientists, more capital, and better tools than any previous generation. The challenge is not generating ideas; it is allowing those ideas to spread.

By streamlining permitting processes, expanding the use of R&D prizes and Advance Market Commitments, and reducing barriers created by protected local monopolies, we can accelerate innovation in the physical world.

An additional one or two percentage points of annual productivity growth may sound insignificant. Yet when compounded over decades, the effects are transformative. Higher productivity means higher incomes, better health outcomes, more abundant energy, and greater opportunities for future generations. The ideas already exist. The question is whether we will allow them to flourish.

Author: Jeremy Horpedahl, the Director of ACRE and an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas.

• According to the World Bank, the number of economies with high levels of inequality, defined as having a Gini coefficient greater than 40, fell by 40 percent between 1995 and 2024. The Gini coefficient measures how unevenly incomes are distributed across a population, with zero representing perfect equality and 100 representing a situation in which one person receives everything.

Past Imperfect

A Reality Check on the Inequality Panic

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for far higher taxation in a recent blog entry, arguing that current wealth concentration is higher than that of the Gilded Age and is about to get worse globally. The chart-topping singer Billie Eilish implored billionaires to…

Read more

4 months ago · 36 likes · 8 comments · Chelsea Olivia Follett

• The latest Energy Progress Report, jointly produced by five international agencies, contains some impressive figures:

  • 92 percent of the world’s population had access to electricity in 2024, up from 84 percent in 2010. About 86 percent of those still without electricity lived in Sub-Saharan Africa.

  • 75 percent of the global population had access to clean cooking fuels in 2024, up from 57 percent in 2010.

  • Global primary energy intensity—the amount of energy used per unit of economic output—fell from approximately 4.75 megajoules per 2021 purchasing power parity-adjusted dollar of GDP in 2010 to 3.76 megajoules in 2023, a decline of about 21 percent.

Energy & Environment

• The co-founder of The Humpback Whale Project, a Brazilian research and conservation nonprofit, estimates that the western South Atlantic humpback population has grown from around 2,000 whales four decades ago to roughly 35,000 today, approaching or possibly matching its estimated pre-commercial whaling abundance.

• The New York Times recently reported on a research center in South Carolina that burns houses to better understand how wildfires spread through neighborhoods. Funded by the insurance industry, the research identifies the physical mechanisms that allow flames and embers to ignite buildings and is helping inform building standards and wildfire-mitigation programs across the country.

Food & Hunger

• The European Union is substantially loosening its restrictions on certain gene-edited crops. Last month, the European Parliament passed a law that will allow plants with genetic modifications that could occur naturally or through conventional breeding to bypass the EU’s onerous approval process for genetically modified organisms. The new regulatory process is expected to take effect in around two years.

Health & Demographics

• Fewer teenagers are dying in motor-vehicle crashes in the United States. According to data from the US Department of Transportation, 2,899 teenagers died in crashes in 2024, 67 percent fewer than in 1975, though motor-vehicle crashes remained the leading cause of death for US teens.

• Hospital-acquired infections have become less common in the US. A CDC survey of 13,653 patients at 218 hospitals found that 2.6 percent had at least one infection acquired during care in 2023, down from 3.2 percent in 2015. Over the same period, the estimated annual number of infections fell from 687,000 to 518,000.

• The FDA has approved a pill that blocks PCSK9, a protein that limits the liver’s ability to remove LDL cholesterol from the blood. In trials, the drug lowered LDL cholesterol by roughly 60 percent. Injectable drugs that treat high cholesterol the same way are already approved but carry list prices of around $500 per month. The new pill will be listed at $315 per month.

• El Salvador has become the first country in Central America to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma is an eye infection that can cause blindness after several untreated infections.

Science & Technology

• The Federal Communications Commission has approved a test flight of a satellite designed to reflect sunlight to the dark side of the Earth, potentially useful for harvesting solar energy at night or simply illuminating an area without the need for electric lighting. The prototype satellite, Eärendil-1, is equipped with a 60-foot mirror that can light up a three-mile-wide circle on the Earth’s surface.

• Drones are now assisting with a variety of public services:

  • In Australia, land managers used drones to clear an island of mice, and authorities are employing drone pilots to help warn beachgoers about great white sharks.

  • In India, a pilot program is using drones to rapidly transport phlegm samples from rural areas to laboratories for tuberculosis testing, helping patients avoid costly trips to distant testing centers.

  • During recent floods in China, rescue operators used drones to deliver emergency supplies and hoist stranded people to safety.

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Heatwaves have pushed temperatures to record highs across both Europe and the United States. Yet the human toll between these two locales was dramatically different, with Europe recording more than 10,000 excess deaths in June.

This is a familiar pattern, notes Jack Nicastro:

The United Nations estimates that the European continent accounted for approximately 175,000 heat-related deaths annually between 2000 and 2019. The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, calculates that about 1,300 deaths per year in the US are due to extreme heat. (This translates to four heat-related deaths per million annually in the US and 235 heat-related deaths per million annually across Europe.)

Europe and the US differ in demographics, urban density, reporting methods, and climate patterns. Even so, the death rate due to heat in Europe is 59 times higher than in the US.

In the United Kingdom, only about five percent of homes have air conditioning. In the United States, roughly 93 percent do.

Research identifies 72°F and 45 percent humidity as optimal for maximizing office and mental productivity.

With sweltering temperatures once again gripping much of the world, it is worth appreciating air conditioning — the quiet invention that transforms dangerous heat into manageable discomfort, shields millions from heat-related suffering and death, boosts productivity, and makes once-hostile climates livable. It is a powerful reminder that wealth, innovation, and human ingenuity enable societies to adapt to nature’s extremes and protect human life.

To understand why the US heat death rate is 59 times lower than that of Europe, it helps to begin with a young engineer named Willis Carrier.

The Father of Air Conditioning

Willis H. Carrier was born outside of Buffalo, New York on November 26, 1876, the same day inventor Alexander Graham Bell successfully demonstrated his large box telephone between Boston and Salem, Massachusetts. Carrier was an only child and attended a one-room schoolhouse. When he was nine years old he struggled to grasp the concept of fractions. His mother helped him master the idea using a pot of apples and slicing them into portions. Carrier remembered this event fondly as “the most important thing that ever happened to me.”

Carrier was awarded a full scholarship to attend Cornell University. He majored in engineering, earning a Master’s degree in 1901. After graduation, Carrier accepted a job at the Buffalo Forge Company for $10 a week.

The Sackett & Wilhelms printing plant in Brooklyn, New York was losing money because the sweltering, humid summers caused sheets of paper to absorb moisture from the air. The paper would expand and warp, throwing off the alignment of colored inks on the printed page and ruining entire print runs. They asked the Buffalo Forge Company for help. Carrier was assigned to solve the problem.

He was not trying to cool people. He was trying to save knowledge.

Air conditioning began not as a luxury, but as a technology of information, productivity, and adaptation — a machine that transformed oppressive heat from an economic barrier into a manageable inconvenience.

Carrier’s breakthrough system, in July of 1902, controlled both temperature and humidity, stabilizing the paper and rescuing the precision of mass communication.

Carrier applied for a patent on his invention, an “Apparatus for Treating Air,” which became patent No. 808897 and was issued on January 2, 1906.

On December 3, 1911, Carrier presented what is perhaps the most significant document ever prepared on air conditioning – Rational Psychrometric Formulae – at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It became known as the Magna Carta of Psychrometrics and tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, thus making it possible to design air-conditioning systems to precisely fit the requirements at hand.

In 1915 Carrier and six other engineers formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation using their personal savings of $32,600. Carrier Global Corporation (NYSE: CARR), the parent company of the Carrier HVAC and refrigeration business, has a current market capitalization of approximately $56 billion. This valuation makes it one of the largest climate and energy solutions providers in the world.

“With his new company,” Alexander Hammond notes, Carrier began to expand the use of air conditioning units by supplying hotels, department stores, movie theaters and private homes. His units were even installed in the White House, the US Congress and Madison Square Garden.”

Another overlooked legacy of Carrier’s invention is the birth of the summer blockbuster. Before air conditioning, movie theaters dreaded the hot months — few people wanted to sit in a crowded, sweltering auditorium. That changed in 1925 when the Rivoli Theatre in Times Square installed one of Carrier’s new cooling systems. Crowds flocked in, many as eager for the cool air as for the feature presentation. Almost overnight, summer transformed from Hollywood’s off-season into its most profitable season. Air conditioning didn’t just cool theaters — it reshaped the economics of entertainment and helped create one of America’s most enduring cultural traditions.

When New York City organizers launched the 1939 World’s Fair under the motto “Building the World of Tomorrow,” they sought technologies that would advance human progress and improve everyday life. Few embodied that vision better than modern air conditioning. During the Fair’s first 100 days, nearly 1.3 million visitors toured the striking “Carrier Igloo of Tomorrow.”

Inside, guests learned how air conditioning worked, explored a modern refrigerated food store, and experienced Carrier’s latest self-contained cooling systems — getting a glimpse of a future that would soon make homes, offices, and entire cities more comfortable, productive, and livable.

In 1985, Willis H. Carrier was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and in 1998, Time magazine recognized him as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

By conquering heat and humidity with knowledge, Carrier enlarged the realm of human possibility. His invention transformed sweltering regions into thriving economies, extended human productivity, and brought comfort and prosperity to billions around the world.

One of the great triumphs of entrepreneurial capitalism is how quickly air conditioning traveled the familiar path from luxury to necessity. What began as an expensive convenience for a tiny elite became, within a generation, affordable to ordinary families. The market did not merely invent comfort — it democratized it.

In their report Time Well Spent: The Declining Real Cost of Living in America, Michael Cox and Richard Alm found that a 5,500-BTU air-conditioning unit cost about $350 in 1952. At the time, entry-level workers earned roughly 83 cents an hour, putting the time price at 422 hours.

Today, Walmart sells a far more efficient 6,000 BTU air-conditioning unit (with a remote control) for only $115. The current hourly wage for limited-service restaurant workers is around $19 an hour, putting the time price at six hours.

The time price has decreased by 98.6 percent. For the time it took US workers to earn the money to buy one unit in 1952, they get 70 today.

If air conditioning saves lives, why don’t more Europeans have it?

Europe’s electricity prices are typically much higher than the US, driven by higher taxes, network costs, renewable energy mandates, and energy import dependence. Customers in the US pay 17 to 19 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) compared to 25 to 32 cents in Europe. This means Europeans pay roughly 47 to 68 percent more per kWh than US customers.

Americans are also much richer than Europeans. According to World Bank data, American gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was $84,809 in 2024, while the European Union’s was 25 percent lower at $63,585. That $21,224 difference could buy a lot of comfortable cooling.

The European Union also prioritizes environmental targets over human comfort by imposing strict regulations for heating and cooling, making these amenities much more costly. The commission encourages citizens to use fans instead of air conditioning. Imagine the government doing that in Phoenix and Atlanta in July. Italy, Greece, and Spain even announced temperature limits in public spaces during the 2022 heatwave in an effort to meet these environmental objectives. Spain limited air conditioners to be set no lower than 80°F. No wonder European productivity is 38 percent lower than the US.

Historic preservation laws and strict landlord rules frequently ban exterior window units to maintain aesthetic uniformity.

While air conditioning ownership increases households’ electricity consumption, it may be a small price to pay for comfort and avoiding death.

The problem is not the climate but the policy mindset. Too many European regulators approach energy and technology through the ideological lens of scarcity rather than creative innovation and human flourishing. One reason such policies persist is that the officials who design them are largely insulated from the consequences of their decisions and rarely experience their costs directly. Instead, those costs are borne by millions of ordinary citizens.

Air conditioning is not ultimately a story about cooling. It is a story about knowledge. It transformed oppressive heat into comfort, inhospitable regions into thriving communities, and summer misery into year-round productivity. Coal, copper, and electricity become valuable only after humans discover how to harness them. The history of air conditioning is the history of knowledge triumphing over nature’s constraints.

The ultimate resource is neither energy nor matter. It is the infinite capacity of human beings to learn, create, and discover.

This article appeared in The Daily Economy on 7/13/2026.

As briefly mentioned in my last column for The Dispatch, World Cup tourists’ repeated astonishment with everyday American abundance has become a viral sensation—and in a very good way. Seemingly not a day goes by without some happy foreign soccer fan raving on social media or to the press about quintessentially “American” things—free drink refills, bottomless chips and salsa, ginormous sports stadiums, fancy cars, big houses, ranch dressing, frigid air conditioning, shiny hospitals, etc.—that we consider relatively mundane features of daily life in the United States. (Buc-ee’s, Costco, and Texas Roadhouse have been particularly big hits, and for good reason.)

These viral posts have delighted American onlookers and captured endless media commentary on how the foreigners’ innocent—and often hilarious—observations have helped unite a divided U.S. and remind us locals of just how good we have it. In an era of endless grousing about the U.S. economy—reflected in various surveys of American “sentiment” and sometimes even justified—the ongoing episode has been a welcome, optimistic change of pace and a loud, folk-libertarian reminder that a nation’s capital, policies, and political class are most definitely not the same as its communities and citizens.

The scenes have also raised several noteworthy economic policy points—some good, some ominous—that deserve more attention.

Yes, We Have It Pretty Darn Good

For starters, the amazement of relatively wealthy foreigners—you don’t take weeks off touring America if you’re dirt poor—at relatively middle-class American environments is real-world evidence of our nation’s immense everyday wealth.

The timing couldn’t be better (and, no, I’m not talking about the A/C-less heatwave in Europe).

As The Economist just documented, earlier this year Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and several other elite economists got into a heated (and very wonky) online debate about whether Americans’ living standards really were zooming ahead of those of our European counterparts. The main point of contention was how to measure individuals’ purchasing power in both places, with one approach showing an increasing wealth gap and the other (Krugman’s) a relatively steady one. You can see the difference in the chart below: Using a constant “purchasing power parity” adjustment shows France’s GDP per capita—a standard way to measure individual wealth—to be declining versus that of the U.S., while using a “current PPP” adjustment shows little long term change, and thus a different wealth narrative.

As someone who loves both visiting foreign countries and returning home to my American creature comforts, I freely admit my biases in this debate. But both sides do raise some legitimate issues about how we should measure living standards across countries, as well as what should be measured. Overall, the debate has been delightfully intense and catty—at least for nerds like me.

Yet, as The Economist points out, both sides also seem to agree on a few things: First, Europe is growing more slowly than America, thanks in large part to the economic dynamism and tech-fueled productivity here. Second, even Krugman’s pro-Europe data (see chart above)—along with many other sources—show Americans to have higher average wages and more disposable income (yes, even after accounting for out-of-pocket healthcare costs) than the average European in most places (yes, there are exceptions), due to our superior labor productivity and their leisure choices. Third, and most importantly, both sides want to support their reading of the data with an “eye test”—i.e., visiting each place and just looking around—that the economists believe will confirm their own American/European wealth story.

Hilariously enough, thousands of European World Cup tourists—along with ones from Japan and other countries, too—have performed just that test, mere days after the economists proposed it. And the result is an absolute rout for Team America:

There are many reasons for the foreigners’ astonishment. (A big one, in my opinion, is that these folks are seeing parts of Real America, especially in the Sun Belt and Midwest, that foreign tourists rarely visit, yet—as we’ve discussed here repeatedly—allow not-rich Americans to live very comfortable lives.) And, to be sure, not all the astonishment is genuine.

But a lot of it obviously is, and at its root lies the Great American Prosperity Machine. Deal with it, haters.

Capitalist “Charity” Is Still Good

Another fascinating and wholesome part of the foreigners’ U.S. experience has been the outpouring of support they’ve received from both normie Americans—workers, neighbors, random passersby, etc.—and a wide range of American celebrities and companies. Most notable in this regard has been German soccer (fußball) fan Freddy, whose daily adventures in Middle America have earned him a giant online following and a Forrest Gump-like amount of in-kind support from pro sports teams, hotels, airlines, and a smattering of famous athletes, entertainers, and politicians (including at least one sitting governor who volunteered to help Freddy attend Germany’s game in Toronto after a flight cancellation). Freddy’s experience is unique, but only in terms of its magnitude: A wide range of U.S. businesses, municipalities, and influencers have rolled out the red carpet for these happy foreign visitors, greatly adding to the entire feel-good experience.

Unsurprisingly, this support has led dismissive cynics to explain that, actually, a lot of it is just a selfish attempt to boost sales, brands, and online engagement instead of genuine generosity and kindness. Some of those allegations are clearly false, but the correct ones are hardly worth complaining about. Instead, they evoke yet another lesson from Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Scholars (ahem) often apply this quote to explain that “selfish” market transactions among free people are not only mutually beneficial but also can have broader social benefits and generate the wealth individuals need to perform charity (which Americans do a lot of, by the way). But Smith’s famous line also often applies to many “charitable” acts by corporations and celebrities: While maybe not motivated by pure altruism, these efforts are often a strategic effort to drive long-term profitability by improving brand reputation, attracting customers and workers, and generating more sales.

There’s little reason to view such motivation as unseemly. First, the act still makes people better off in some way (and often entertains and encourages onlookers, too), so who cares whether it was done for “benevolent” or “selfish” reasons? “Dinner,” in Smith’s terms, still gets served. Second, it’s usually impossible to say why these “charitable” people and firms decided to help Freddy (and any others in need)—and it’s usually a combination of both sympathy and self-interest/promotion. On the latter motivation, see point 1 and Smith above. On the former, check out his other book.

Tourism as a Massive US Services Export (And Source of “Soft Power”)

Admittedly, the World Cup visitor story isn’t all wine and roses, and there are—as noted—some less-optimistic policy lessons buried in here, too. For one thing, all these visitors are a stark reminder of the economic and geopolitical value of foreign tourism—and its recent, policy-driven decline here in America.

As we discussed last year, one of the more interesting and unfortunate results of Trump’s tariff wars, deportations, and related overseas antagonism (threatening to invade Greenland, calling Canada the “51^st state,” etc.) has been foreigners’ independent retaliation against U.S. goods and services. And tourism—a U.S. services export—has been the trend’s most conspicuous victim. According to a May 2026 Congressional Research Service report, in fact, international visits were down in 10 of 12 months last year, with the only increases coming before Trump took office (January) and due to an abnormally late Easter (April):

This drop, in turn, hurt lots of American businesses and likely reduced U.S. economic growth last year by billions of dollars:

According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 2023, travel and tourism (both domestic and international) accounted for approximately 3% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), a nonprofit organization that advocates for and researches global tourism, international visitor spending in the United States was approximately $176 billion in 2025, a 4.6% decrease from 2024. WTTC further noted that GDP for the travel and tourism sector increased 4.1% globally in 2025 from 2024 but grew 0.9% for the United States.

On the bright side, CRS goes on to note that the World Cup could boost foreign visits and GDP growth in 2026, and—judging from the packed bars/restaurants and sky-high prices for match tickets, airline fares, and hotel rooms—you can easily see why. Even with a few embarrassing visa-related snafus, the monthlong event has been going pretty smoothly so far and is forecast to attract almost 1.25 million international visitors, each expected to spend more than $5,000 (nearly twice the typical international tourist). None of that erases the roughly $12.5 billion in lost international visitor spending that WTTC projected for 2025, but it’s still a welcome rebound—especially for the smaller American businesses that depend heavily on foreign tourist spending each year.

The scenes of international comity surrounding the World Cup in 2026 are also a vivid, real-time reminder of how U.S. tourism is a market-based source of America’s “soft power,” improving the United States’ image abroad and advancing U.S. geopolitical objectives without spending taxpayer dollars (or doing stuff far worse than just that). Scholars call this the “contact hypothesis,” i.e., the notion that person-to-person encounters can affect overseas perceptions of a country in ways that no government messaging campaign or foreign aid package can match. World Cup visitors’ ecstatic consumption of everyday Americana is soft power in (mostly) organic form, with our culture, hospitality, and abundance doing the diplomatic work that American government officials can’t (or won’t) do.

To be clear, the goodwill America earns from Waffle House, Bass Pro Shops, Fenway Park—and the Americans who live and work near these and other iconic spots—doesn’t automatically translate into durable shifts in foreign acceptance of U.S. policy. But at a time when America’s global image has taken a few (ahem) hits, having a million-plus foreigners document their travels and return home as amateur American ambassadors is a welcome development, reminding people everywhere that the words of one guy in the Oval Office don’t represent a 350 million-person country.

The only question is whether the foreign tourism boost—and good vibes—can continue after the World Cup ends. The answer, unfortunately, will probably not be in Costco’s hands.

Seeing the Linkages Between Trade and Peace

Relatedly, all these good vibes are a nice reminder of one of the ways that trade—in this case both foreign tourism and global sports entertainment—can help encourage peace. As I documented in a 2020 paper, a wide body of research finds that heightened foreign trade can meaningfully reduce (but not eliminate) the chances of armed international conflict through several channels:

First, by making countries more commercially interdependent, trade encourages these nations to avoid war or other large-scale armed conflicts (which could impose substantial economic losses). Second, trade and commercial bargaining are more cost-effective than war as a means of resolving disputes with, or obtaining resources from, another country. Third, trade increases material prosperity (e.g., goods, services, investment, ideas) and promotes mutual tolerance and understanding. And fourth, free trade can limit the political power of domestic constituencies that may benefit from increased conflict.

Recent studies reinforce these conclusions. One finds a strong causal “peace dividend” from trade generally, i.e., that a doubling of bilateral trade reduces the probability of militarized conflict by roughly 30 percent. Elsewhere, a recent survey of almost 2,000 Japanese firms finds they routinely pushed for diplomatic solutions to supply-chain disruptions involving allies and adversaries alike—new support for the concept of “commercial peace,” i.e., that global businesses have powerful incentives to oppose wars that might harm their facilities (or, you know, kill their customers).

Regardless of the driver, however, the outcome is clear: While global economic integration can’t eliminate armed conflicts, policies that liberalize trade can make peace among nations more likely—especially when compared to the isolationist, antagonistic alternative the U.S. government is pursuing today.

In their modest but viral way, the million-plus foreigners now cheering in American bars are making a similar point.

A version of this article was published at The Dispatch on 6/25/2026.

• Five countries—Vietnam, the Philippines, Micronesia, Sri Lanka, and Jordan—advanced from lower-middle income status to upper-middle income this year, according to the World Bank. In addition, Togo moved from low to lower-middle income, but mostly thanks to a large reduction to its population estimate. No countries moved down.

• Interjurisdictional competition is paying off in North America. In Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is using a parcel of its land that is not subject to the city’s zoning authority to build large residential towers that would be illegal under Vancouver’s extremely restrictive zoning rules. And in the United States, data center developers are courting Indian reservations, attracted by the possibility of securing faster approvals from sovereign tribal governments.

• Norway is currently building a 26.7-kilometer-long subsea road tunnel, which will be the longest and deepest in the world once completed.

• North Carolina has passed a law that will abolish mandatory parking minimums in most of the state, following similar, though less extensive, reforms in California, Colorado, Montana, Washington, and Maine.

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• Two decades after rats were eliminated from Lundy Island in the UK’s Bristol Channel, its seabird populations are soaring. The island’s total seabird population has risen from 7,351 in 2000 to more than 40,000 today, including 1,335 puffins and more than 150 breeding pairs of storm petrels, which had previously vanished from the island.

• Researchers at Australia’s Macquarie University have developed an AI system designed to detect trafficked marine wildlife in packages and luggage. In simulated tests on bags that incorporated classic smuggling tricks, the system detected concealed shark fins and seahorses 95 to 96 percent of the time and sea cucumbers 86 percent of the time.

Energy and natural resources:

• Since 1976, the solar panel industry has maintained a long-run learning rate of 26 percent, meaning that module prices have fallen by an average of 26 percent each time cumulative global production doubled, according to a recent industry report. The report also notes that manufacturers shipped roughly the same volume of modules in 2025 as in 2024 while using about 20 percent less silver.

• Several major automakers are adapting to high copper prices by replacing some of their copper wiring with aluminum. Ferrari claims that switching to aluminum is not only cheaper but can reduce total wiring weight by up to 20 percent.

• Four nuclear startups participating in Department of Energy reactor-testing programs have brought experimental reactors to criticality, meaning they can sustain controlled nuclear chain reactions. The department had aimed to reach that milestone with at least three designs by July 4; the companies delivered four. Analysts at the Breakthrough Institute argue that the programs are restoring a crucial stage in the nuclear innovation cycle by allowing companies to build, test, and improve reactor designs before attempting to build costly commercial-scale plants.

The Ecomodernist

From Paper to Real-Life Reactors: The Holistic View of the Reactor Pilot Program

The July 4 deadline for the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program (RPP) is just days away, and the program has met its central early test: three advanced test reactors have reached criticality on an extraordinarily compressed timeline…

Read more

a month ago · 47 likes · Adam Stein and Spencer Toohill

Pollution:

• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed a practical disposal pathway for “Greater-Than-Class-C” nuclear waste, the most radioactive category of low-level nuclear waste, which currently has no functioning disposal route and is instead being held at various power plants, hospitals, and other facilities across the country. The proposed rule would tailor disposal requirements to the radioactivity of the material, potentially allowing nearly 80 percent of GTCC waste to be buried near the surface rather than in a deep geological repository, which does not currently exist in the United States for this kind of waste.

Health & Demographics

• According to a recent Gallup poll, 11 percent of US adults now take GLP-1 drugs for weight loss, up from 3 percent in 2024.

• The recent drop in US traffic deaths has continued into early 2026. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, traffic deaths were 4.3 percent lower in the first three months of 2026 than during the same period of 2025. If the trend continues, 2026 will mark the fifth consecutive year of falling traffic deaths.

• Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes are now being released in the DC area in an effort to control mosquito populations. The released mosquitoes are all male, meaning they don’t bite, and the bacteria they carry cause any eggs produced when they mate with wild females to fail to hatch.

• Likang Life Sciences, a Chinese biotech company, has begun building a production line for AI-assisted personalized cancer vaccines. The facility, expected to open in October, will start by producing LK101, an experimental mRNA vaccine tailored to the mutations in each patient’s tumor.

Science & Technology

• China has landed the booster stage of an orbital rocket, replicating a version of the feat pioneered by SpaceX in 2015.

• An index from the Center for AI Safety finds that frontier AI models are getting much better at completing economically valuable work. The researchers gave AI agents realistic projects in fields such as graphic design, video production, software development, and data analysis, then compared their work with examples produced by human professionals. They found that Fable 5, the best-performing system, completed roughly 16 percent of the projects to an acceptable standard. In late 2025, when the index launched, the best model completed just 2.5 percent of projects acceptably.

• In its first 18 months surveying the sky, the European Space Agency’s Euclid Space Telescope discovered 31 quasars, extremely bright galactic cores powered by supermassive black holes. Twelve date to the universe’s first 770 million years, more than doubling the number previously known from that period. The expanded sample could help astronomers explain how such enormous black holes formed so soon after the Big Bang.

Violence & Coercion

• Four men have been brought to trial in Sierra Leone over the alleged forced marriage of a 17-year-old girl. Activists say the trial—the first of its kind in the country—shows that the national ban on child marriage is starting to be enforced.

Read more news stories on our website

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our managing editor Chelsea Follett speaks with economist Michael Strain about the rise of populism, what the evidence says about American living standards, why inequality does not explain today’s political discontent, and how policies built on a myth of national failure could undermine the prosperity and opportunity they promise to restore.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

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

Joining me today is economist Michael Strain, Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy. He is the author of The American Dream Is Not Dead: But Populism Could Kill It and co-author of “Have You Heard the Good News?” an essay in The Free Press that will be the main subject of our discussion.

Let’s walk through this piece. You write that “Yes, we have real problems. But widen the aperture, and you’ll see that there has never been a better time to be alive.” Tell me about that.

I think that is self-evidently true. It’s true whether you look at economic outcomes or broader measures of quality of life. But it’s a very controversial statement. Opinion leaders, commentators, and politicians from both parties seem to agree that things are very bad and were much better in the past.

You say all this doomsaying feeds into the populist moment we are living in, and it comes from both sides. Are we living in a populist moment?

I do think we’re living in a populist moment.

There’s always been a populist strain in American politics, but it was amplified by the 2008 crisis. Pat Buchanan’s message from his 1990s presidential campaigns and Donald Trump’s message from 2016 are very similar. Bernie Sanders’ message from the 1990s was very similar to his 2016 campaign. The financial crisis exacerbated this populist impulse: the share of the GOP primary electorate that voted for Buchanan in the run-up to Super Tuesday was around 25 percent; for Trump in 2016, it was around a third.

The financial crisis was global, and in fact we’ve seen a rise of populist politics globally—across Western Europe and the United Kingdom, for instance—that’s quite similar to what’s been happening here at home. My sense is that populist sentiment was reverting to its baseline by 2019, but then the pandemic stirred up a lot of populist sentiment. One characteristic of populism is that it pits the people against the elites, and the elites made a lot of mistakes during the pandemic, such as keeping kids out of school and issuing faulty public health guidance. That exacerbated the populist sentiment.

Tell me about horseshoe theory and the parallels you see between a figure like Zohran Mamdani on the left and a figure like Josh Hawley on the right.

Horseshoe theory is the idea that in a two-party system like ours, the far left and the far right tend to more closely resemble each other the further you go toward the extremes. You see it in support for specific policies: both the far left and the far right are more supportive of organized labor than the center left and center right. They are more supportive of using the tax code to penalize certain corporations or industries. But you also see convergence on a deeper level, where the far left and far right are both less supportive of the US Constitution and our Madisonian system than the center left and center right.

I think now is a good time to ask you what exactly you mean by populism, because people use that word in different ways.

I think of populism as characterized by three big things. The first is pitting the people against the elite. The second is a turn inward: the idea that the US should be economically self-sufficient, that globalization and international trade are bad, and that the US should be very skeptical of immigration and isolationist in foreign policy. The third is a deep pessimism about the current state of the country and prospects for the future.

That populist mentality gives rise to zero-sum grievance: the idea that for me to do better, you have to do worse. For the people to do better, the elites have to be made worse off. For native-born workers to do better, there have to be fewer immigrant workers.

The left and right define “elites” differently, with some overlap. Who are the elites being defined as the enemy by the populists on the right and the left?

Both left-wing and right-wing populists are skeptical of big business, rich people broadly defined, and the media. One important difference is that right-wing populists direct a lot of hostility toward immigrants in a way that left-wing populists don’t. They wouldn’t say immigrants are part of the elite, but they would say the elites are encouraging and allowing large immigrant inflows, which is bad for native-born Americans.

The narrative on both sides is that our economic system, and the political system that supports it, has been fundamentally broken for decades. That system exists to serve the interests of the elites, and, because society is zero-sum under their view, if the elites are doing better, the people are doing worse.

There’s disagreement among populists on the right and left about what needs to be done to fix the system, but they agree that whatever replaces it should be much more intrusive. They agree that market outcomes should be altered much more substantially and that economic liberty should be much more curtailed.

So according to this narrative, life in the United States today is terrible, and we need to burn down the system. But you write that there has never been a better time and place to be alive than in the United States today. Lay out the facts for me.

That’s self-evident from the data, especially if you focus on economic outcomes.

Over the last three decades, inflation-adjusted wages for typical workers have increased by 44 percent. Inflation-adjusted household incomes are way up as well. The wealth of the typical household, after adjusting for inflation, has more than doubled over the last three decades. Consumption is at an all-time high as well.

We should care more about the poor than we care about the rich, but if you look at low-income Americans, the bottom 20 percent or bottom third, their outcomes over the past several decades have improved faster than outcomes at the median. So, the evidence is very strong that from an economic perspective, there’s really never been a better time to be alive.

What about inequality?

There’s no question that inequality is a lot higher today than it was in the ‘70s, but most of that growth happened in the ‘80s and ‘90s. My reading of the evidence is that over the last 15 years or so, inequality has either stagnated or declined. Wage inequality has been declining in recent years, and I’m comfortable asserting that we’ve seen a reduction in income inequality over the last decade or two.

I would add that people overstate the importance of inequality. Inequality growth was really rapid in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but people didn’t care about it because average wages were growing quickly, just not as quickly as incomes at the top. Inequality was falling in the decade after the financial crisis, but people were much more concerned about it because the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession were such traumatic events. So, I don’t think inequality is really what people are reacting to.

You also discuss non-economic measures of well-being, such as crime and life expectancy. Tell me about some of those.

The story is much the same when you look at broader outcomes. The rate of violent crime has fallen dramatically in the past three decades. Life expectancy dropped in 2020 and 2021, but it’s now once again trending in the right direction. Access to information has obviously never been higher. Leisure time, in terms of paid time away from work, has never been higher. Life in general has also become much safer; you’re much less likely to die of an illness or in a car accident than in previous decades.

Now is actually a particularly strange time to be arguing that our outlook is bleak and life was better decades ago. Think about what artificial intelligence is likely to do for drug discovery, for curing diseases, and for educating kids. We are at the beginning of an age of marvels. We’re likely to see astonishing innovations and improvements in quality of life in the next two decades.

You write that populist leaders actually seem to look down on American workers and households by behaving as if everyday people don’t benefit from material prosperity, low prices, or relatively safe and comfortable jobs.

Can you make that argument comprehensible?

Take the argument that more people should make things with their hands. Many people hear that and think, “Okay, I can kind of get that.” But think about the implications in an economy with a 4 percent unemployment rate. If we’re moving more people into manufacturing, we’re moving people out of services, and service workers earn more on average than manufacturing workers. So, the argument is really that people should move from a higher-wage industry into a lower-wage industry. That may be inconvenient for the populists chasing this vision, but it is just a fact.

There’s an attitude here on the part of populists that it’ll be better for people to work in an industry they have not chosen, that pays lower wages, in a job that’s less physically comfortable or safe than their current job. That strikes me as patronizing and condescending, and antithetical to the way Americans should expect their government to treat them.

How does this piece relate to your book The American Dream Is Not Dead?

The message and arguments are quite similar. The view that the American dream is dead is quite common, with a large focus on the economic components of the American dream, and I don’t see it that way.

You do fear that if enough people believe the dream is dead, they could kill it — that’s the subtitle of your book. How could populism kill the American Dream?

The populist diagnosis of what ails the United States is fundamentally wrong, and the policies that flow from that incorrect diagnosis are going to be harmful. A big trade war or big new social programs or nationalization would be very bad for typical workers and households: wage growth would slow, real wages might even decline, and you’d see a reduction in the rate of innovation and productivity growth. More fundamentally, there’s a real threat to our system of democratic capitalism if the government stops respecting the role that markets play in advancing prosperity and feels generally less constrained about stepping in.

Finally, if you introduce the pervasive belief that the game is rigged, that hard work doesn’t pay off, that typical workers can’t get ahead because the elites are expropriating all the economic gains, you dim people’s aspirations, reduce work effort, and make people less tolerant of risk. You end up creating some of the very problems the populists are incorrectly arguing currently exist.

One thing you do in this book is invite two ideological opponents to provide rebuttals, one from the populist left and one from the populist right, so readers can decide for themselves. One of those arguments is that despite all your data points, there are still real segments of the population who are economically struggling. How would you respond?

There’s no question about that, and we should be focusing our energy on those pockets of problems. If you’re a 50-year-old man who did not graduate high school and has recently been laid off, you’re in a tough spot, and public policy should be doing more to connect you with opportunities.

There have also been time periods of real struggle. 2008 to 2014 or so were bad years for lots of households. My goal is not to be Panglossian. Even when times are good, like they are right now, there are groups of Americans and places in America where things are not going well. But part of the problem of populism is that it doesn’t want to focus our energy on those groups or places. It wants to focus on much larger projects like reordering the global trading system or the American healthcare system, and that’s actually to the detriment of the Americans who are really struggling.

Read the full transcript

• The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed a new rule that would allow civilian aircraft to fly faster than Mach 1 over the United States if their sonic booms stay below a strict noise threshold at ground level. If finalized, the rule, along with another planned rule that would set landing and takeoff noise standards for supersonic aircraft, would end the 1970s ban on overland civilian supersonic flight.

• Finland has retired its analog copper-wire phone network, material-intensive infrastructure made obsolete by fiber optic cables.

A single fiber optic cable made from less than 150 pounds of silica can carry the same volume of information as multiple 1‑ton copper cables.

“Markets and Dematerialization,” Jonathan H. Adler.

• Artificial intelligence seems to be enabling a surge of solo entrepreneurs and tiny startups.

Energy & Environment

• Ontario Power Generation has begun construction on what may become the Western world’s first grid-scale small modular reactor.

• Air pollution in Europe continues to decline, according to the latest report from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

• Since 2020, and for the first time since the Middle Ages, forests have occupied a greater land area in Italy than farmland, with the former extending over more than a third of the national territory.

• US Atlantic mackerel stocks, which were deemed overfished in 2017, now appear to be recovering, with surveys turning up abundant quantities of mackerel and their eggs in 2024.

• Red kites, once nearly wiped out in Britain, are now numerous enough that English conservationists are sending them back to Spain. In the 1990s, Britain imported red kites from Spain and Sweden to rebuild the domestic population; since then, the UK population has risen from roughly 160 breeding pairs in 1995 to at least 4,600. In recent years, after surveys found only a handful of breeding pairs left in Extremadura, conservationists have released 126 English-born red kites to the Spanish region.

• For decades, a coral community has been developing in the Port of Miami, home to endangered staghorn and elkhorn corals, large brain corals, fish, manatees, turtles, and other marine life. Intriguingly, scientists have discovered that the Miami corals are unusually resilient. They have survived pollution, disease, freshwater runoff, and extreme temperature swings that devastated other staghorn and elkhorn coral populations in the region.

• The US Fish and Wildlife Service and Colossal Biosciences recently announced a plan to create a cryogenic “BioVault” for the tissues and genetic material of around 2,300 species protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Health & Demographics

• In 2025, the age-adjusted death rate in the United States fell to a record low of 689 deaths per 100,000 people, thanks partly to falling overdose deaths.

• The FDA has expanded approval of Casgevy, a CRISPR-based gene therapy for sickle cell disease, to children as young as two.

Science & Technology

• A recent working paper finds that advice from large language models may make people’s decisions less extreme, despite the tendency of chatbots to behave sycophantically toward their users. In a large experiment, the researchers found that people who chatted with AI tended to move away from their initial judgments on a range of tasks, narrowing the gap between participants who started on opposite sides. The researchers propose that the mechanism is new information: even when the AI agreed with or flattered its users, it also offered new facts and counterarguments that sometimes changed their minds. Making the AI more sycophantic weakened that depolarizing effect, but did not reverse it.

• Google’s earthquake warning system, which uses accelerometers in Android phones as seismic sensors, sent alerts to 11.4 million people in Venezuela last week, giving them precious seconds to prepare for the tremors. It’s not yet known how many lives the warnings may have saved.

• Conception, a biotechnology company trying to make human eggs in the lab, says it is making progress toward that goal. This week, the company reported that it has produced early human egg cells, or primary oocytes, inside miniature ovaries grown from stem cells. The oocytes are not mature eggs, but Conception says they showed signs of entering meiosis, the special cell division required to make eggs, and forming into follicles, the ovarian structures that nurture developing eggs.

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Every year, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates the cost of a traditional Independence Day cookout. The basket includes summer cookout staples such as cheeseburgers, chicken breasts, pork chops, potato chips, pork and beans, fresh strawberries, homemade potato salad ingredients, fresh-squeezed lemonade ingredients, chocolate chip cookies, and ice cream.

Since 2016, the dollar cost of this basket has risen 30.3 percent, from $56.67 to $73.82. At first glance, that suggests celebrating the Fourth of July has become significantly more expensive.

But money prices tell only half of the story. The real question is not how many dollars the meal costs, but how much time people must work to earn those dollars. Since 2016, blue-collar worker hourly earnings increased 50.4 percent, from $21.48 to $32.31 per hour.

Because wages rose faster than prices, the time price of the cookout actually fell 13.4 percent—from 2.64 hours of work in 2016 to just 2.28 hours today, a savings of 21 minutes.

Another way to measure progress is to ask: How much more does the same hour of work buy? We call this the abundance multiplier. Compared with 2016, the same amount of work today buys 15.5 percent more.

America added 22 million people between 2016 and today, a population increase of 6.8 percent. Yet abundance didn’t merely keep pace with population—it grew 2.28 times as fast. Every 1 percent increase in people produced a 2.28 percent increase in cookout abundance. That’s the signature of superabundance: on average, every additional person contributes more than they consume. Even though there are 22 million more of us, we’ll actually spend 7.5 percent less time working as a country to pay for our celebration compared with 2016.

Americans may spend more dollars, but they spend less of their lives earning this year’s Independence Day feast.

Government money printing during the COVID-19 pandemic did cause a temporary spike, but we have returned to the long-term trend of decreasing time prices and increasing abundance.

This year saw a slight reversal. Compared with the record-low time price in 2025, food prices increased 4.1 percent while blue-collar hourly earnings rose 3.5 percent. As a result, the time price of the cookout edged up by just 0.5 percent—less than one minute of additional work. Even after that small increase, the Independence Day cookout remains substantially more affordable in time than it was a decade ago.

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

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently made a point that every critic of billionaire wealth should confront: “If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving.”

To see if he is correct, consider the one resource that is truly finite: time. Modern debates about wealth start in the wrong place. They begin with the fortune. They should begin with customers and their time. Mr. Bezos is worth roughly $275 billion. That number offends many people because they assume wealth must have been taken from someone else. But Amazon didn’t become valuable by force. It became valuable because hundreds of millions of people chose to use it.

Consumers weren’t forced to buy books, batteries, diapers, cables, razors, tools, groceries or printer ink from Amazon. They did so because Amazon saved them time, money, effort or uncertainty. Sellers weren’t forced to use Amazon’s marketplace. They did so because it gave them access to demand. Firms weren’t forced to use Amazon Web Services. They did so because renting computing power was cheaper than building and maintaining their own information-technology infrastructure. That is capitalism: People get rich by creating something others value enough to buy.

The Bezos fortune looks large because it is visible. The value Amazon created is harder to see because it is dispersed. A mother who doesn’t drive to a store to buy diapers doesn’t appear in an economic headline. A small business that reorders supplies in two minutes doesn’t make the evening news. A rural customer who gains access to goods once available only in cities doesn’t receive a subsidy check with Amazon’s logo on it. Yet each transaction saves time, and time is limited.

Consider the arithmetic. Suppose an hour of labor is worth about $64, roughly the average gross domestic product per hour worked in the countries in which Amazon operates. If Mr. Bezos’ fortune corresponded to the total value that Amazon created, his $275 billion would represent about 4.3 billion hours of saved time. Divided among Amazon’s more than 300 million active customers, the saving comes to about 14 hours per customer over Amazon’s life. That’s nothing. Many customers save that in a month.

But entrepreneurs don’t capture all the value they create. The Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus estimated that innovators keep only a small share of the social value—roughly 2%—produced by their innovations. Under that assumption, Mr. Bezos’ $275 billion fortune implies that Amazon created about $13.8 trillion in total value for society.

At $64 an hour, that means Amazon has saved its customers about 214 billion hours. Across 300 million customers over roughly 32 years (Amazon was founded in 1994), the saving equals about 22 hours per person a year. That is 25 to 26 minutes a week, or a little less than four minutes a day.

So the question isn’t whether Mr. Bezos has too much money. It is whether Amazon has saved the average customer four minutes a day. The answer is yes. A single avoided trip to a store can save 30 minutes. Finding a product online instead of driving to three retailers can save an hour. Reading reviews can reduce the chance of buying the wrong product. Automatic reordering can save repeated errands. Price comparison can save money and time. Fast delivery can substitute for inventory kept in closets, garages, offices and warehouses.

The savings extend beyond retail. Amazon Web Services lowered the cost of starting and scaling companies. It gave firms computing capacity without the old capital expense. That made experimentation cheaper. Some firms failed faster. Others grew faster. Both outcomes matter. Cheap failure is part of progress.

Amazon also forced competitors to improve. Walmart, Target, grocery chains, hardware stores, logistics firms and online retailers responded with better websites, faster delivery, wider selection and lower search costs. Even people who dislike Amazon benefit when its competitors become better because Amazon raised consumer expectations.

Charity can do good, but Mr. Bezos is right: Business can do better. Charity moves existing resources toward chosen ends. Business, when it works, creates new value by reorganizing labor, capital, knowledge and logistics. Enterprise can improve how hundreds of millions of people spend their time every week. Some people will spend the extra time earning money to buy things they previously couldn’t afford, helping their communities, enjoying the company of their loved ones, taking a holiday or relaxing.

That distinction is often lost. Critics praise entrepreneurs when they give money away, but condemn the process that made the money possible. That is backward. The social contribution of an entrepreneur usually occurs before the charitable foundation is created. It occurs when customers gain, workers earn, suppliers sell, competitors improve, and resources move to better uses.

None of this means Amazon is perfect. No large company is. Amazon can make errors. But that doesn’t cancel the basic fact: Amazon created enormous consumer surplus.

The moral case for Mr. Bezos’ wealth doesn’t require blind admiration of his business acumen. It requires arithmetic. If Amazon saves each customer 22 hours a year, Mr. Bezos’s fortune passes the Nordhaus test. If it saves more than that, society receives far more than he keeps.

It is easy to resent the billionaire. It is easy to ignore the saved hours. But the hours matter because time is limited. It is our most precious resource. Count the time saved, and Mr. Bezos’ fortune becomes less mysterious and much more defensible.

A previous version of this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 5/26/2026.

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

Energy & Environment

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

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

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

Food & Hunger

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

Health & Demographics

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science & Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heinlein imagines a different path forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food & Hunger

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

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

  

Health & Demographics

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

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

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

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

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

Science & Technology

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

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

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

Violence & Coercion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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