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

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

Energy & Environment

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

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

Health & Demographics

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

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

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

Science & Technology

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

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

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

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by Peter Goettler

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

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

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

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

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

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

Age of Abundance

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

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

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

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

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

Engine of Prosperity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cognitive Dissonance

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

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

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

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

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

Do No Harm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Energy & Environment

Conservation & biodiversity

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

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

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

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

Energy production

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

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

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

Food & Hunger

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

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

Health & Demographics

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

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

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

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

Violence & Coercion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Environment

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

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

Health & Demographics

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

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

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

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

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

Science & Technology

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

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

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

Violence

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

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In a recent paper, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Kevin Corinth and economist Richard Burkhauser examine nearly a century of American poverty trends. They find that poverty was already falling rapidly before the War on Poverty began, when government transfers played a much smaller role and rising market incomes drove much of the improvement.

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our research fellow Chelsea Follett speaks with Corinth about how we measure poverty, the relative roles of economic growth and redistribution in reducing it, the trade-offs created by the social safety net, the lessons of 1990s welfare reform, and why economic growth remains essential to lifting people out of poverty.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

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

Joining me on the podcast today is Kevin Corinth, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researches economic mobility, poverty, safety net programs, homelessness, social capital, and other issues. He is a co-author, along with Richard Burkhauser, of a recent paper titled “Poverty and Dependency in the United States, 1939 to 2023.”

What motivated you to revisit nearly a century of American poverty trends?

We have a lot of evidence about the extent of economic progress over the past 50 years or so. My co-author, Richard Burkhauser, and I did a paper a few years ago showing that, since President Johnson declared his war on poverty, we’ve seen a dramatic decline in poverty in the US from a 20 percent baseline to less than 2 percent today. In this paper, we wanted to ask, “What happened before that? Were we seeing declines in poverty before we had a large and expanding safety net?”

I also think that the idea that living standards have not improved over time is motivating a lot of today’s political turn toward socialism. And if we lose our understanding of what we’ve gained through our imperfect capitalist system, that could have very deleterious effects on policy today.

Before we get into the findings, why should people care about how we measure poverty?

A lot of people would agree that you should judge a society based on how it treats its most vulnerable members. I subscribe to that. So measuring poverty matters a lot for people’s views about how society is doing, which matters a lot for determining which policies to adopt.

You measure poverty almost the same way that you measure incomes. The only difference is that you have to pick a poverty line because poverty is the number of people with an income below some threshold. A lot of the debate on poverty comes down to where to draw that line. Where you draw the poverty line is a value judgment. It’s scientifically arbitrary, but it’s not arbitrary in terms of our values. As an economist and social scientist, I don’t get to decide that. You tell me where you want me to draw that poverty line, and then I’ll update it with inflation each year to measure our progress.

The official poverty measure is not measuring poverty well. It tries to be an absolute measure in that it increases the poverty line with inflation, but it uses an inflation measure that overstates how much prices go up each year. It also doesn’t include in-kind transfers like the SNAP program, which is our largest non-medical transfer today. It doesn’t include Medicaid or refundable tax credits. It doesn’t adjust for taxes at all.

Based on the official poverty measure, we’ve seen essentially no decline in poverty over the past 50 years because of these problems. When Rich Burkhauser and I looked at it, we found 90 percent reductions. So how you adjust the threshold and which resources you include matters a lot. Fortunately, almost everyone recognizes that the official poverty measure doesn’t make sense.

Among those who do recognize that poverty has come down in the United States, many assume that it has fallen because of government redistribution. Your central finding is that poverty fell dramatically before the War on Poverty even began. Could you tell me more about that result?

We’re not looking at the causal effect of the War on Poverty. I think we’d argue that it’s not possible for someone to estimate the causal effect of such a massive change in society. However, a lot of people want to say, “Poverty has fallen a lot since 1963 or 1964. That must have been caused by the great expansion of the safety net.” We strongly push back against that assertion, because we found that poverty was actually falling in the 24-year period before the War on Poverty began.

In the paper, you distinguish between poverty reduction through government transfers and poverty reduction through rising earnings. Why should policymakers pay attention to dependency as well as poverty?

That’s the exact way that President Lyndon Johnson thought about it when he declared the War on Poverty in 1964. He wanted to reduce poverty, but he cared a lot about the way in which we did it.

You can reduce poverty by more redistribution, providing more resources to people at the bottom. But that comes with some adverse behavioral effects; maybe they work less, and there could be reductions in marriage, and that could counteract some of the benefits. The other way, which is the one that President Johnson wanted, was to reduce poverty by increasing people’s earnings. People are usually better off, materially and psychologically, when they are able to overcome poverty through their own efforts.

Today, with our spiraling federal debt, there’s also some point at which we cannot continue to expand these programs. If we want to see people flourish and rise up the economic ladder, it’s going to require more than just government transfers. Whenever you redistribute resources to people with lower incomes, these programs are all means-tested. That creates an implicit tax on increasing your own earnings, because if you increase your own earnings, you’re going to reduce the amount of transfers that you receive. Those penalties can stop people from moving up the economic ladder. So those are all reasons why it’s typically better, if possible, to reduce poverty through increases in market income as opposed to more redistribution.

In your view, how much of the post-1960s slowdown in market income growth among lower-income households may be connected to some of those changing incentives from welfare policy itself?

I don’t think it’s the whole story, but it is probably one reason that we’ve seen diminished growth.

There are a few ways that redistribution can slow growth. One of them is by reducing the incentives for people to work, invest in themselves, and get married. It also requires a lot of taxes, which is possibly even a bigger factor. We have high effective marginal tax rates that disincentivize working and investing, which can slow growth. We also borrow money to fund these programs, and the more we borrow, the more taxes we pay in the future. It also means higher interest payments on our existing debt, which slows growth by driving up interest rates and reducing investment.

Many people today are arguing that unconditional cash transfers are the future of social policy in the age of AI.

I worry a lot about the universal basic income debate. My former colleague at AEI, Charles Murray, has talked about it, although for him universal basic income was a replacement for the large safety net that we already have. His idea was to spend the same amount of money, but do it in a way that doesn’t have some of these perverse incentives. The debate has moved on from that idea. Now people are saying,

“Let’s keep the existing means-tested programs and also add a universal basic income for everybody, even middle-class people.”

In the short term, that’s completely unrealistic. We don’t have the budget for it. The cost would be astronomical, and you certainly could not do it just by taxing the rich. You would need vast expansions in taxes for middle-class people too.

However, I worry a lot about universal basic income in the longer term. I don’t know what’s going to happen with AI, but I think in the back of people’s minds there’s this belief, and maybe they’re right, that with AI and all of the benefits it brings, we could see much stronger economic growth in the future. I think that people see that as an opportunity for a universal basic income, and think that once we can afford it, we should implement it. But universal basic income payments could discourage people from working, and especially from entering the labor market. Younger workers may decide, “I may not need to enter into the labor market.” And if you have less labor, you also have less of the augmentation effect of AI, which is where most of the value from AI might be created. So we could see a much smaller economic boom if the labor supply shrinks as a result of universal basic income.

Even if we don’t need human workers and we could actually get by with the machines doing everything, I still think universal basic income would be a terrible idea. People don’t just need work to fuel their own material well-being, but also for the sense of purpose that comes with contributing to society. And there will be ways to contribute to society, no matter what happens with AI.

What policies can we pursue to increase earnings opportunities for Americans without expanding dependency?

We can’t wave a magic wand and get the economic growth rate that we had during the 1940s and 1950s. And we already have a large social safety net. But we can want to design it in a way that reduces poverty and reduces dependence.

Starting in the 1960s, if you measure poverty based only on people’s market income, you see a flatlining of the poverty rate, maybe even a small increase. And at the same time, you see a greater dependence on government transfers. That pattern breaks starting in the early 1990s. Between 1990 and 2000, you see a continued reduction in poverty based on market income and a reduction in dependency.

What happened was welfare reform.

In the late 1980s, there was a lot of frustration about our cash welfare program. It was called AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. There was concern that it was breeding dependency and reducing marriage rates. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, states started experimenting with other ways of providing assistance, like having time limits on cash welfare, work requirements, and more investment into training programs and education. Then, in 1996, or early 1997, we passed welfare reform legislation that rolled those kinds of policies out nationally: time limits on assistance, work requirements, and, at the same time, expanded refundable tax credits that target families with children, including the child tax credit, which didn’t exist before 1997, and the earned income tax credit, which did exist but was much smaller until the 1990s.

In short, didn’t get any of the benefits unless you worked. And then benefits phased in as you worked more. Eventually there is a phase-out, and that has major problems, but these programs all encouraged people to enter the labor force and work. And after these reforms went into effect, we saw a growth in work efforts. Single moms had something like a 10 percentage point increase in their labor force participation. We saw many measures of child outcomes improving, including test scores and long-term outcomes. And even though we were still seeing a reduction in poverty, we were also seeing a reduction in dependency.

The 1990s example shows that, even with a large social safety net, if we design it correctly and address some of these perverse incentives, we can see reductions in poverty and reductions in dependency at the same time.

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The astonishing conveniences and prosperity of modern civilization rest on two pillars: our mastery of energy and our relentless discovery of knowledge. Yet, discovering new knowledge alone was not enough for civilizational progress. To accumulate and build on discoveries across generations, humanity needed a way to encode knowledge onto a medium outside of our collective nervous system. From etching hieroglyphs into stone to digitally controlling electrons in modern solid-state drives (SSDs), humanity’s advancement in creating affordable, lightweight, and reliable data storage is astonishing.

Before the invention of written language, people usually transmitted knowledge orally. Fables and other knowledge had to be memorized and accurately recited to pass from one generation to the next. Transmitting knowledge this way, where data is stored only in the human mind, risks significant data loss. When Joe Huntergatherer, the only member of the tribe who had memorized the story of the Great Elder, was killed by an arrow, that story was forever lost. The fragility of oral transmission is why almost all human history, spanning hundreds of thousands of years, is lost to the erosive sands of time.

The invention of writing, the ability to etch, carve, or paint characters onto clay tablets, stone, and cave walls, allowed humans, for the first time, to store information outside the brain. The first clay inscriptions with readable script date from ~3,400 B.C. So long as another person was trained to interpret the inscribed hieroglyphs, characters, or letters, that knowledge was no longer subject to fallible human memory. However, stone inscriptions had relatively low information density.

To create a formula to measure the data density of storage media over time, I convert characters (letters and punctuation) into bits of information, then divide by the number of grams of matter needed to encode that information. A bit is a single binary digit, a zero or one, and roughly eight bits make up a single character. (View these calculations not as precise figures, but as order-of-magnitude approximations, since data density varies considerably from stone to book to drive.)

Let’s begin with stone engravings, using the famous Rosetta Stone as an example. The Rosetta Stone weighs roughly 750kg and contains the same text in three languages: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on top, Egyptian Demotic script in the middle, and Ancient Greek on the bottom. To estimate the data density, I focused on the Greek portion of the stone, which accounts for roughly 1/3 of the stone’s total weight (about 250kg).

No source I could find provided a reliable count of the surviving Greek characters, so I calculated it twice independently. First, I compared a 19th-century publication’s line-by-line count with a high-resolution photo of the stone, which puts the original, undamaged text at about ~7,290 characters. Adjusting that figure for the approximately 20 percent of the stone that’s damaged or missing gives an estimated ~5,832 surviving characters. Second, I ran an AI optical character count directly off the damaged stone, which returned ~5,800. The two methods are close, so I use ~5,800 characters going forward.

Since a single character of text equates to about 8 bits of information, the surviving 5,800 characters store 46,400 bits of data. Divided by the 250kg weight of the Greek portion, we arrive at a data density for the Rosetta Stone of ~0.19 bits/g.

With the discovery of agriculture and the rise of agrarian civilizations, the demands for knowledge storage and transmission media grew. The human population expanded, and a small but notable fraction began to congregate in small towns. As social and economic complexity grew, so did administration, trade, tax, and legal systems. Humans needed an easy way to perform and store the outputs of mathematical calculations, record taxes, and codify rules and regulations for personal and business conduct. Agrarian civilization, in short, demanded a storage medium with higher information density and faster read/write speeds (throughput). Enter papyrus, parchment, and paper.

Early forms of “paper” included papyrus and animal-skin materials like parchment and vellum. Papyrus was made from the papyrus plant, which grew in the Nile Delta in ancient Egypt. To make papyrus, strips of the plant were cut, laid into overlapping layers, and then pressed and dried into sheets. Papyrus was first used for writing as early as 2,500 B.C. and was one of the primary writing materials for thousands of years. Compared with stone, papyrus was far more data-dense; we could fit more characters on a given surface area, the substrate was lighter, and it could be folded or rolled into a scroll.

Parchment, made from cleaned and stretched animal skin, was developed long after papyrus and, thanks to its superior durability, quickly became the medium of choice for important documents. The Magna Carta, made from parchment, contains about 3,500 words or ~25,000 characters, which equates to about 200,000 bits of information. Medieval parchment weighs about 100–180 g/m², meaning the Magna Carta weighs roughly 50 grams. Using our formula, the Magna Carta’s data density comes out to around 4,000 bits/g.

Even the Magna Carta pales in comparison to modern paper with printed text. “Paper”, the flexible plant-fiber sheets we know of today, was invented in China as far back as the 2nd century B.C.. It took centuries for it to spread outside China. Paper could be made thinner and lighter than parchment or papyrus, and the printing press made it possible to fit more words on a sheet. The King James Bible, for instance, contains around 789,000 words. That’s roughly 4.3 million characters, or 34,400,000 bits of data. A standard hardcover Bible weighs about 1 kg. Even if we conservatively include the weight of the binding, the information density comes to ~34,400 bits/g, about 8.6 times the density of the Magna Carta.

Our eyesight is limited, and text can only be so small before we can no longer resolve it. The next revolution in data storage came in the form of more exotic “machine-readable” media. Examples include magnetic storage such as hard drives and magnetic tape. Here, data is encoded on magnetized material directly as bits of information – ones and zeros – by carefully controlling the polarity of magnetic domains. This technology was a wondrous breakthrough, and it’s still improving. Today, for a few hundred dollars, you can purchase a hard drive that can store tens of terabytes of data! A commercially available 10TB HDD that weighs ~1500 g can store ~80 trillion bits of data, a data density of ~53 billion bits/g, 1.54 million times higher than the King James Bible.

Yet today, hard disk drives already feel antiquated. Instead, most phones, desktops, tablets, and external drives use solid-state storage (SSDs). It’s easy to see why SSDs have become so dominant in recent years; they are ideal for mobile devices. They have no moving parts, are more durable, use less energy, and still have higher data density. Solid-state media store data by trapping electrons in a grid of floating-gate transistors to represent bits of information. A commercially available 4TB (~32 trillion bits) SSD weighs 32 grams; a data density of 1 trillion bits/g, about 19 times higher than a comparable hard drive, or about 5.3 trillion times the data density of the Rosetta Stone!

Commensurate with improvements in data density came higher read/write speeds, or “throughput.” People read about 4 words a second and with an average word length of around 5 characters; that’s about 160 bits per second. A professional stone carver might be able to write up to 20 letters an hour, or about 0.044 bits per second. Paper and paper-like media dramatically increased writing speed. A human writes about 1.1 characters per second, or roughly 8.8 bits per second – 200 times faster than carving into stone, though still slower than reading. Printing machines, of course, could print text far faster than any human could write by hand.

But none of this compares to magnetic storage, such as modern hard drives, where read/write speeds (which are similar) are currently about 4.4 billion bits per second. SSDs are faster still, reaching read/write speeds up to 112 billion bits per second. That’s about 700 million times faster than reading, and nearly 13 billion times faster than writing by hand, roughly 2.5 trillion times faster than carving into stone!

In roughly five thousand years, we’ve pushed the density of our storage media up by a factor of trillions, and the leaps keep coming faster. It took five millennia to get from stone to the printed page, representing a 180,000-fold gain in data density. In the seventy years since the invention of the hard drive, and with SSDs, humanity has multiplied that density by another 29 million times. For perspective, the text of the King James Bible carved in stone would weigh around 185 tons, nearly as much as a Boeing 747 (without fuel). On an SSD, it weighs less than a grain of sand.

Conservation & biodiversity

• A Przewalski’s horse has been born in the wild on the Central Kazakhstan steppe for the first time in 200 years. The male foal, born on August 22, is the offspring of two horses reintroduced to Kazakhstan in 2024. Przewalski’s horses disappeared from the wild globally in the late 1960s before captive-breeding programs enabled their return to parts of their historic range.

• In October, Louisiana will open a new recreational alligator hunting season, thanks in part to a dramatic recovery of the state’s wild alligator population. Since the early 1960s, the estimated number of wild alligators in Louisiana has grown from fewer than 100,000 to more than 3 million.

• Following a very fruitful breeding season, the number of critically endangered kākāpō parrots in New Zealand has grown to 325, up from just 51 in 1995.

Energy production

• Google has agreed to buy 396 megawatts of power from Fervo Energy’s Cape Station geothermal project in Utah, the largest enhanced geothermal power purchase agreement to date. For scale, that is roughly enough electricity to power a city of 300,000.

• Nuclear power is proving resilient to heat waves and droughts. Nuclear plants cooled by river water sometimes cut output when the river runs too warm or low, to limit water usage or avoid returning hotter water than regulations allow. However, a recent study in Energy Policy finds that between 2003 and 2022, reactors affected by heat- and drought-related disruptions had to cut their overall generation by just 0.6 percent. At France's river-cooled plants, output lost to these cuts fell from 5.5 terawatt-hours in 2003 to 0.5 terawatt-hours in 2022, following cooling-tower retrofits and better outage scheduling.

• Africa is expected to install 17 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2026, up from 12 gigawatts in 2025, according to an analysis by Ember, an energy think tank. That works out to roughly 100,000 solar panels installed across the continent every day in 2026. Most of this new capacity appears to come from small-scale, distributed systems installed by households and businesses.

Pollution

• Turkmenistan has begun to repair some of the large methane leaks coming from its oil and gas infrastructure. Over the last two years, the country has plugged eight major leaks after receiving alerts from a United Nations methane emissions monitoring system. Patching methane leaks is one of the cheapest ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Health & Demographics

• The World Health Organization recently validated that Timor-Leste has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma is an eye infection that can cause blindness after years of repeated infections. Timor-Leste was the last country in WHO's South-East Asia Region where the disease was still suspected to be endemic, so trachoma has now been eliminated as a public health problem across the entire region.

• Surgeons at University College London Hospitals have completed a highly successful AI-assisted brain surgery. As the surgeons removed a brain tumor that threatened a man’s sight, an AI system analyzed the surgical video feed in real time and highlighted critical structures at the base of the brain for the surgeons to avoid cutting into. The tumor was successfully removed, and the patient reported dramatically improved vision after surgery.

• eGenesis, a biotechnology company developing animal organs engineered to work in humans, reports that of the five patients who received its pig kidney transplants, three maintained enough kidney function to remain off dialysis for more than eight months. The company plans to begin a clinical trial in early 2027, which will test the pig kidneys in 33 patients awaiting human donor kidneys.

Science & Technology

• Robotaxi services are advancing around the world:

  • Waymo is now giving paid rides in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa, and is preparing to bring its service to Munich.

  • Uber and Wayve, a British autonomous driving company, have started a small robotaxi pilot in London. The cars drive themselves, but because UK regulators have not yet approved driverless operation, human safety drivers will be riding along for now.

  • Tesla has begun deploying its Cybercab—a purpose-built autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals—in its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. Tesla hopes to sell the Cybercab for less than $30,000, a price that would be far below the estimated cost of competing US robotaxis.

• Autonomous planes are beginning to fill a commercial niche in agriculture. In Brazil, about a dozen electric autonomous aircraft made by a California startup called Pyka are being used to spray crops with agricultural chemicals. The planes can fly lower than human-piloted crop dusters, which the company says reduces chemical drift. Pyka’s aircraft has also been approved for commercial agricultural use in the United States, although operations there require a ground operator and visual observer.

Violence & Coercion

• According to a recent United Nations report, the global homicide rate fell by 14 percent between 2015 and 2024, from 5.9 victims per 100,000 people to 5.1.

Read more news stories on our website

In recent years, an intellectual movement known as “degrowth” has grown in popularity through the efforts of a small but growing group of academics and activists. Key texts that champion this ideology, such as Jason Hickel’s 2020 book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and Kate Raworth’s 2017 Doughnut Economics, appear on bestseller lists and in bookstores worldwide. In 2020, Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito published Capital in the Anthropocene (published in English in 2024 as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto), arguing that Karl Marx, in his later writings, anticipated the damage capitalism would do to the environment and called for rejecting unconstrained economic growth. When Saito’s book was published, it sold an unprecedented 500,000 copies in Japan alone, and it now appears in 15 languages. The degrowth paradigm has become so popular that the Autonomous University of Barcelona now offers it as a master’s degree.

Since the mainstream left and the mainstream right agree that economic growth is an important goal—they just disagree about how to achieve growth and how the proceeds should be spent—it is important to understand the appeal of degrowth.

The main motivation is, likely, ecological: concern for the damage we as humans have done to our environment. Writing this in the hot summer of 2026 as wildfires rage across much of Europe, this motivation from degrowthers is understandable. Yet, as we will see, the evidence for the relationship between economic growth and environmental outcomes is much more nuanced and mixed. Nonetheless, enthusiasm for degrowth rests on the authors’ genuine belief that we could be on the edge of various tipping points that could seriously disrupt our planetary equilibrium.

Feeding into this concern about the impact on the planet are egalitarian impulses. Degrowth is an appealing idea for those who fifty years ago would have been socialists or Marxists of some variety. Supporters of degrowth believe the global middle class is already “rich enough.” In their mind, the solution to poverty is not more growth but redirecting growth. Timothée Parrique, author of Slow Down or Die, a best-seller in France, argues that poverty is not a question of production but of allocation, and that “attempting to eradicate poverty by stimulating GDP growth is like trying to change a car’s direction by adding gas to a full tank.”

Hickel and other advocates for degrowth work backwards from the idea of a “planetary allowance” for growth, which is the additional output that they believe the planet can absorb while staying inside safe ecological limits. They argue this “allowance” should go to those earning below the global average income. What average income should be, however, remains difficult to pin down, though Hickel has suggested that the relevant benchmark should be around $24,000, as that is currently the world average GDP per capita at purchasing power parity.1

Given how appealing degrowth arguments are to an environmentally aware younger generation, it is worthwhile addressing the former and demonstrating that degrowth rests on a series of misconceptions about economic growth and economic history.

First, degrowthers often appeal to the simple intuition that eventually economic growth must end because continuous growth is impossible. The economist Kenneth Boulding first made the oft-repeated claim that infinite growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources (and, he added, that only a madman or an economist would think otherwise).

If growth is necessarily finite, as the argument goes, then surely the environmental stress that the planet is now showing is a sign that now is a good time to think about slowing growth down or even ending it entirely? But the claim that we should slow growth now does not follow from the claim that growth is finite. The finitude of growth tells us nothing about when growth might end. Finite might be thousands, or indeed, millions of years. It doesn’t tell us much about the prospects for growth in our own generation or for many generations to come.

Moreover, Boulding’s argument rests on a misconception: the false presumption that economic growth necessitates consuming more resources or producing more physical stuff. This mistake goes back to critics of economics who misunderstod the marginal revolution of the 1870s (i.e., the birth of modern economics). Economic growth is about value. It means producing more of what individuals value. While degrowthers associate economic growth with environmental damage, deforestation, and disregard for our natural habitat, economic growth often brings more parks, reforestation, and cleaner air. Physicists have raised a related objection. Because the Earth contains a finite stock of matter and energy, they argue, economic growth must eventually run into physical limits.

That conclusion confuses growth in economic value with growth in material consumption. As resources become scarcer and more valuable, people have stronger incentives to conserve them, use them more efficiently, recycle them, and find substitutes. Long-run economic growth can therefore increase the value people obtain from resources even as the amount of resources used per unit of value declines.

So economic growth and environmental damage are not necessarily related. Nonetheless, degrowthers can point to the damage that increased temperatures have already caused. The practical debate therefore rests on the extent to which it is possible to decouple economic growth from environmental harms. UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 were 54% below 1990 levels even as the British economy grew by approximately 84%. French emissions fell by around 32% in the same period. Degrowthers, in response, point out that some of these reductions came from shifting polluting production overseas and that global emissions have continued to rise. I think the evidence suggests that decoupling is eminently possible and, in fact, happening, but also that the huge uncertainties around future climate change mean we shouldn’t be complacent about the risks involved.

Degrowthers talk about redirecting the global economy or downscaling it. That brings us to the second misconception: the assumption that we (though who “we” are is left unspecified) currently pursue policies that seek to maximize economic growth. In this way, degrowthers blame all the myriad problems, including (perceived or real) stagnant living standards, inequality, and political polarization, not on a lack of economic growth but on the pursuit of growth.

Even commentators and journalists critical of degrowth often buy this premise; they too assume a “they” who chooses policies that maximize growth and wonder whether adding other goals alongside growth might make sense. In truth, however, there is no “we” or “they” in control of the economy. To think that that is the case is to mistake the spontaneous order of the marketplace for a machine or engine that is driven or directed by policymakers. Of course, politicians mention growth as an important outcome, but in reality they are seeking reelection. That means politicians are incentivized to pursue policies that they think will appeal to the median voter. While politicians can’t ignore the economy, the idea that they are dead set on “maximizing” growth to the detriment of other objectives cannot be seriously maintained.

Third, just as degrowthers misinterpret current policies as those intended to “maximize economic growth,” they also seriously misrepresent the history of economic growth. Hickel’s work provides the historical underpinning of the degrowth ideology. Chapter 3 of his 2018 book, The Divide, is entitled “Where did Poverty Come From?” In it, he asserts that traditional accounts of the Industrial Revolution are false. He argues that the modern world’s wealth stems not from innovation but from conquest and the establishment of an extractive world system based on colonialism and capitalism. It was this exploitation and appropriation that supposedly kickstarted the rise of the West. Indeed, according to Hickel, capitalism created “mass poverty as a historical phenomenon”. In 2023, Hickel and Dylan Sullivan published an attempt to validate this narrative empirically in World Development. If we take this work seriously, mainstream economists and social scientists have misled the public. If the origins of economic growth are in fact responsible for impoverishing millions, why wouldn’t we want degrowth?

That is, of course, a cartoon version of economic history that no specialist in the field takes seriously. Sullivan and Hickel’s most substantive evidence is simply that Robert Allen’s estimates of real wages and welfare ratios show significant declines after 1500, which is when they date the rise of capitalism in Europe. But economic historians have known for decades that living standards fell as populations recovered from the Black Death. That is consistent with a simple Malthusian model, and it tells us next to nothing about the relationship between markets, capitalism and economic growth.

Nor is that an isolated lapse by the proponents of degrowth. Economists have tried to formalize and test Raworth’s doughnut model, which describes a “safe and just space” between a social floor of basic needs and an ecological ceiling of planetary boundaries. Raworth suggests that more capitalist economies stray further from that space. A recent test found the opposite: economies with more economic freedom tend toward less imbalance, improving on social and ecological measures together rather than trading one off against the other.

Critics of degrowth, including economists who are sympathetic to the goals of redistribution and egalitarianism, have commented on its infeasibility. Branko Milanović, for example, notes that even though degrowthers believe in economic growth for the poorest in the global economy, their proposals would require some 86 percent of people in currently rich countries to reduce their standards of living. As Milanović rightly notes, the idea that citizens of rich countries would accept such cuts voluntarily and democratically is pure magical thinking.

That brings us to a fourth fallacy committed by the degrowth movement: the idea that degrowth can be achieved without mass coercion and violence.

The reality, of course, is that degrowth would require a massive increase in governmental organization and intervention in the economy. Parrique asks: “Should every company make a profit? Should we let the markets decide what we produce?” The implicit answer is “no,” for as Parrique continues: “degrowth is planned—meaning it is democratically discussed with society and organized in advance by public authorities and the economy’s stakeholders according to a plan.”

And so, the degrowthers return to the errors made by socialist planners in the 20th century. Degrowthers talk about broadening human capabilities, individual freedom and collective self-realization. “Let’s draw up plans for the boldest utopias without fearing the changes they will impose,” writes Parrique. But the rest of us have heard such calls for revolutionary action before. Needless to say, they have ended badly.

Or perhaps degrowth is not meant to be taken seriously. That is, degrowth is more of a political slogan than a serious academic concept. The radical policies required to reduce the living standards of the middle classes in developed economies would be so politically infeasible that degrowth advocates tend to retreat from the bailey of actual degrowth to the motte of more generic proposals for global redistribution.

Indeed, in The Divide, Hickel ends by arguing for quite run-of-the-mill left-leaning policies such as universal basic income or replacing GDP measures with GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator). His more recent book, Less is More, is subtitled How Degrowth Will Save the World. But it similarly ends with fairly normal left-wing proposals. Understood this way, degrowth may be less radical than it seems, and is more a way of shifting the rhetorical backdrop of policy debates in favor of more redistributive and left-wing policies.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Steve Davies has joined the Human Progress Advisory Board.

Davies has spent over four decades researching, writing, and teaching economic history, with a specific focus on the history of classical liberalism, the political realignments reshaping the modern world, and the origins of modern prosperity, among several other topics.

Davies earned his undergraduate degree from the University of St Andrews in 1976 and returned there to complete his PhD in 1984. He then spent thirty years teaching economic history as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Economic History at Manchester Metropolitan University, with stints as a program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University in Virginia and as a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Today he is Senior Education Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs and a Senior Academic Fellow at the John Locke Institute.

Davies is a prolific author. His early work includes co-editing The Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (Routledge, 1991) with Nigel Ashford and writing Empiricism and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In recent years, his writings focus on big-picture history and current affairs, including The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity (2019); The Economics and Politics of Brexit: The Realignment of British Public Life (2020); The Streetwise Guide to the Devil and His Works (2021); and Apocalypse Next: The Economics of Global Catastrophic Risks (IEA, 2024). His newest book, The Great Realignment: Why the New Right Is Here to Stay (Polity Press, 2026), grew out of a 2018 essay he wrote for Cato Unbound and gives a full account of the political realignment reshaping Britain, the United States, and other democracies.

Outside his research, Davies is a keen follower of the fortunes of Manchester City and an enthusiastic reader of fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction.

Davies’ appointment to Human Progress’ advisory board coincides with a series of fifteen essays he will write for our website exploring conservative critiques of progress.

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Steve Davies.

In 1939, five million people queued at New York’s World’s Fair to ride Futurama, General Motors’ model of America in 1960. Among the marvels were highways and mountain roads where cars, with no driver, whizzed their passengers across the country. Riders left wearing a pin: “I Have Seen the Future.” Sixty-six years later than General Motors expected, that driverless future is here.

The adoption of self-driving cars, also known as autonomous vehicles (AVs), is growing fast. In just two years, Waymo’s weekly paid rides are up tenfold to 500,000 across ten American cities. Using cameras, laser-based sensors (LiDAR), and machine learning trained on physical surroundings and movement, a new kind of car is outgrowing the human driver.

The industry calls today’s technology “Level 4” autonomy: self-driving with no need for human backup, but only within intensively mapped and geofenced areas. So far, no company has reached “Level 5” autonomy: a car that can self-drive wherever a human driver can. Yet, even without Level 5 autonomy, AV rides per week are ballooning. If that keeps up, the AV boom will soon rival the AI boom in scale and consequence, transforming transportation, cities, and the economy along the way.

That is what the arrival of a general-purpose technology looks like. It’s one of the main ways that capitalism keeps overhauling the human condition for the better. Lured by profit or chased by the fear of obsolescence, plenty of people and companies are working hard to bring human progress about. The rest of us will sit back and enjoy the ride.

On General-Purpose Technologies

Economists, starting with Bresnahan and Trajtenberg, call certain inventions “general-purpose technologies,” or GPTs. The name “ChatGPT” is a lucky mnemonic: while it actually stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” the pun is apt. AI is earning its place in the GPT list, alongside steam, steel, electricity, refrigeration, the internal combustion engine, telecommunications, the automobile, mass production, the transistor, the computer, the internet, and the smartphone. AVs may be next GPT.

GPTs stand out for being transformative, not merely additive. They spawn new infrastructure, chart-topping companies, redraw human geography, create and destroy whole occupations, define eras of macroeconomic history, and accelerate productivity. The key is that a GPT becomes a hub that almost every supply chain runs through. It gets built into existing supply chains and spins off new ones, ending in new downstream products. Some GPTs reach mass consumer adoption in the home too.

Today, AI is transforming office work, but its victories are in bits rather than atoms, in data rather than stuff. Vehicle autonomy is likely the first mass application where AI becomes physical.

The AV S-Curve

Extrapolation is a good way to forecast the future. Extrapolate a fast growth rate, and you get exponential acceleration. Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb that computer power roughly doubles every two years while costs drop, is the classic example of exponential acceleration: it persisted for decades, expanding computing power in a way few initially predicted. But exponential growth doesn’t last forever. For new technologies, it eventually levels off, tracing an “S-curve”: flat, then steep, then flat again, as in Figure 1:

Figure 1: The Adoption S-Curve

Figure 2 shows adoption patterns for specific technologies among US households:

Figure 2: Technology Adoption in US Households, Percent

In Figure 2, the steep part of the adoption curves is when a new technology transforms the human experience and the economy. AI is on the steep part now, with its computing power and the volume of data it processes growing more than fivefold a year. And AVs might achieve that growth rate soon.

Waymo, the market leader, runs about half a million paid robotaxi rides a week across ten U.S. cities — up from roughly 10,000 a week in 2023. They are targeting a million rides a week by the end of 2026, with expansions into Tokyo and London next. From spring 2024 to spring 2025, rides per week increased fivefold. From spring 2025 to spring 2026, they roughly doubled— a slowdown widely attributed to a limited supply of vehicles, not waning demand. With almost every car ride in the world still human-driven, there is lots of room for annual growth to keep doubling or even increasing fivefold.

Project that growth forward and the math becomes mind-boggling.

A million rides a week sounds big, but there are around 1.4 billion cars on the world’s roads. If global travel trends mirror American habits of around 1.9 trips per vehicle a day (number of vehicle-trips divided by number of vehicles), that implies upwards of 18.6 billion personal car rides worldwide every week, maybe 20 billion once commercial trips are factored in. That means AV trips currently account for a fraction of one percent. At fivefold annual growth, a million becomes 5 million by end-2027 and 125 million by end-2029, still under one percent. AVs won’t reach mass adoption this decade.

But keep that fivefold growth going, and AVs hit the steep part of the S-curve and 3 billion rides a week by the end of 2031. A year or two later, they would account for most rides worldwide. Even at a mere doubling per year, the takeoff arrives by the late 2030s.

On present trends, driving has one to two decades left as an ordinary part of life. Most of us will live to see it sunset.

The Driverless Revolution

The coming AV revolution is exciting. Start with time. Americans spend about an hour a day behind the wheel, one of their least favorite times of day. With eyes off the road, this time becomes phone calls, reading, movies, work, or sleep. It should save lives too, as algorithms and infrastructure keep improving in ways human reflexes can’t. Road crashes, with human error being the critical reason for 90%+ of them, kill some 1.16 million people a year and are the leading cause of death for those aged 5 to 29.

Urban planners will get millions of acres of downtown parking to repurpose as AVs park themselves somewhere cheaper or move on to the next fare. Children, the elderly, the disabled, and the undocumented all become more mobile. Eventually, traffic lights will vanish as cars communicate with each other, making brake lights and turn signals obsolete.

Household budgets will become simpler as car ownership becomes optional. Expect mobility to become a service, where you summon the vehicle that fits the trip. That will breed more specialized vehicles: one-seaters for solo trips, cargo haulers, sleeper cabins that compete with short flights.

Some jobs, especially long-haul trucking and ride-hail driving, will disappear, but the same shift will ease the work of anyone who drives between appointments, from plumbers to real estate agents to music teachers. Their road time will become fun and/or productive, and access to those jobs will widen because driving will no longer be required. Expect more home health aides, babysitters, house cleaners, landscapers, and domestic services generally.

Without human driver wages, last-mile delivery will become cheap enough to overhaul traditional retail and reduce brick-and-mortar market share. Picture a store sending your order in a refrigerated pod that keeps the ice cream hard. You get a notification as the robot-on-wheels opens your garage with a one-time code and starts loading your fridge. A micro-AV takes a service elevator and goes fifty floors up.

The larger pattern, as economist Xiaokai Yang showed, is that economies grow through greater specialization and variety when transaction costs, the hassle and expense of getting buyers and sellers together and of contracting and shipping, fall. AVs are poised to become a prime technology that reduces transaction costs, enabling a boom in small-scale local trade because “come pick it up” will no longer mean an hour in traffic. Figure 3 shows how falling transaction costs will let many businesses, from restaurant takeout to device repair, charge less and sell more.

Figure 3: How AVs Will Boost Business

Even more interesting are the new businesses that are uneconomic right now, but that AVs will make viable. Figure 4 shows why:

Figure 4: How AVs Make New Businesses Possible

Most businesses can produce more cheaply as they grow, because fixed costs are spread across more sales. If what consumers are willing to pay is less than the average cost, the business folds, or never begins. By reducing transaction costs, AVs will flip some businesses from uneconomic to viable. Think of home kitchens offering takeout, new community farms, an artistic home tinkerer with a 3D printer, and things you never imagined. That’s where AVs will really earn their spurs as a GPT.

Freedom in the Robotaxi Age

For a century, freedom of movement has meant holding a license and keeping a machine in the driveway. Cheap driverless rides extend a freedom many of us take for granted to teenagers, the elderly, the disabled, and many others. But a self-coordinating traffic network could also become a system that knows where everyone went and when, so early safeguards against mass AV surveillance are important.

Steam, electricity, and the automobile gave ordinary people options their grandparents could not have bought, no matter the price. The robots taking the wheel are the next installment. Let them drive.

• The national poverty rate in the Philippines has fallen below 10 percent for the first time, dropping from 15.5 percent in 2023 to 9.7 percent in 2025. The Philippines sets its poverty line at a household income of about $237 per month, the estimated amount a family of five needs to afford their food, shelter, healthcare, education, clothing, utilities, and transportation.

Energy & Environment

Conservation & biodiversity

• Whales are moving into East Greenland’s newly ice-free waters. According to a recent survey, thousands of humpback, fin, and minke whales now spend parts of their summers feeding in coastal waters off East Greenland that were once largely inaccessible due to extensive summer sea ice.

• Atlantic bluefin tuna have returned to the waters off Yorkshire, England, after more than six decades. Bluefin tuna largely disappeared from the North Sea in the 1960s after severe overfishing and the collapse of herring stocks. Researchers attribute the recovery to international fishing restrictions, a greater abundance of prey, and warming seas that have widened the bluefin's range.

• The Great Barrier Reef appears to be recovering. According to a recent report from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, hard coral cover in 2026 was well above the average level recorded since 1986 in the northern and central sections of the reef. Coral cover in the southern section was slightly below its long-term average.

Energy & natural resources

• Natural gas is helping power America’s AI boom. US gas-fired generating capacity currently under construction reached 52 gigawatts by mid-2026, up 76 percent in just six months, according to Global Energy Monitor, a nonprofit that tracks global energy infrastructure. At least 16.9 gigawatts of that capacity is being built to directly power data centers, which are increasingly building their own power plants to avoid lengthy waits for connections to the electrical grid.

• Gulf oil producers are attempting to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. According to reporting in Le Monde, the United Arab Emirates is expanding a pipeline to the Gulf of Oman that, by 2027, is expected to carry 3.6 million barrels per day—nearly the UAE’s entire current oil production. Saudi Arabia is considering expanding its pipeline to the Red Sea, and Iraq has signed an agreement with Syria to revive a pipeline to the Mediterranean. A study from Goldman Sachs estimates that 60 percent of the Gulf’s pre-Iran War oil exports could be protected from disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz by the end of 2028.

Health & Demographics

• The FDA has approved daraxonrasib, a groundbreaking drug for metastatic pancreatic cancer. In a phase 3 trial, patients with previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer who received daraxonrasib lived for a median of 13.2 months after treatment began, compared to 6.7 months for patients receiving standard chemotherapy. Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, with a five-year survival rate of just 13.7 percent.

• Japan has begun replacing nearly two million acres of forests to help reduce seasonal allergies. After World War II, Japan’s government encouraged widespread planting of fast-growing sugi cedar and hinoki cypress trees to supply the country with timber. Unfortunately, the pollen from those trees has since contributed to a national epidemic of hay fever afflicting over 40 percent of the population. The Japanese government is now accelerating the removal of those forests and replacing them with a variety of local trees, including sugi varieties selectively bred to produce less pollen. The long-term goal is to halve cedar pollen emissions within three decades.

Science & Technology

• The AI company Anthropic is developing software that makes it much easier for AI agents to operate laboratory and manufacturing equipment. The system, called the Model Hardware Standard, allows AI models to control and coordinate devices from different manufacturers through a standardized interface. Anthropic claims the system can reduce the time it takes a typical lab or factory to integrate its equipment with AI from weeks to just a few hours, making it much easier to set up autonomous experiments. A select group of research labs and manufacturers are currently testing the system, but it is ultimately intended to be open source.

• AI appears to be accelerating the discovery of software vulnerabilities. A recent analysis from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates the capabilities and risks of AI systems, found a sharp increase in publicly reported security flaws across several major software programs and vulnerability databases in 2026. The report also notes that the number of newly exploited vulnerabilities has increased more slowly than the number of discovered vulnerabilities, suggesting that AI may be strengthening the defensive side of the cybersecurity arms race.

• The cost of launching cargo into space is falling rapidly. Recent research from Cambridge University found that, since 1960, the cost of sending a kilogram into orbit fell by an average of 21 percent for every cumulative doubling of the amount of cargo launched to space. By that measure, launch costs are falling even faster than the cost of solar photovoltaic panels. The researchers project that, if total payload to orbit continues to grow 13.3 percent per year—the rate observed between 2010 and 2025—the average launch cost could fall to less than $300 per kilogram by 2040 in 2024 dollars.

• SpaceX has announced a plan to build the world’s largest spaceport in Louisiana, designed to support thousands of launches per year.

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“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly,” Marcus Aurelius instructed himself, remember that “I am rising to the work of a human being.”

The most powerful man in the world did not want to get out of bed.

Book Five of Meditations begins with the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher arguing with himself under the covers. Staying warm is more pleasant, he admits. Rest is necessary too. But nature has placed limits on rest, just as it has on eating and drinking. The problem, Marcus observes, is that he exceeds those limits when pleasure is involved and “stoppest short” when there is work to do.

Strip away the second-century diction, and this could be a transcript of someone bargaining with an alarm clock before a morning workout. Marcus tells himself to get up, stop overeating, do his job, and quit pretending that comfort is the purpose of life. Two thousand years later, we buy books and download podcasts that tell us the same things.

That helps explain Stoicism’s extraordinary revival. Annual sales of Meditations reportedly rose from around 12,000 copies in 2012 to 100,000 in 2019. Modern Stoic writer Ryan Holiday has sold millions of books to an audience spanning professional athletes, politicians, technology executives, and ordinary people trying to exercise before work. An ancient philosophy of self-command has found a mass market because the problems of self-command have found a mass market.

Marcus did not live an easy life. He ruled during frontier wars and the Antonine Plague. Several of his children died young. Much of Meditations was written to and for himself, apparently while on military campaign. But he also experienced a class of surprisingly recognizable “first-world problems” back when they were much rarer: too much food, too little movement, diffuse anxiety, irritation with other people, uncertain purpose, and the temptation to let comfort consume a life.

First-world problems were once emperor-world problems.

Marcus practiced a form of what psychologists today call cognitive reappraisal: changing an emotional response by changing how one thinks about something. When confronted with an elaborate meal, he reminded himself it is just a dead animal. Falernian wine, among the most prized luxuries in Rome, is “only a little grape juice.” Imperial purple, Rome’s finest clothing material, is just sheep’s wool stained with shellfish blood. The exercise, he explained in Book Six, was to strip away the prestige surrounding an object and see it clearly.

Marcus needed the Stoic operation because he inhabited an unusual ecology of evolutionary mismatch, much like that found in the developed world today.

For nearly all human history, calories were costly, physical exertion was unavoidable, and rest conserved energy that might be needed later. Today, the time prices of food are so low that many can afford a day’s worth of calories in under an hour of labor, all while working sitting down in an indoor climate-controlled environment. Many of us pay for gyms and manufacture strenuous movements that resemble pointless labor because ordinary survival no longer supplies enough activity.

The same principle extends beyond food and exercise. Humans evolved to monitor threats in a local environment. For most of history, only emperors and a small governing elite received a steady stream of dispatches from distant lands. Couriers and envoys brought Marcus news of wars, revolts, epidemics, and political intrigue from across the known world. Now a phone or TV news channel supplies every catastrophe on Earth in real time. And in economic life, we apply evolved intuitions built for small-group scarcity and zero-sum rivalry that fail to scale to modern global markets.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes foresaw these problems of prosperity. Writing during the Great Depression, he predicted that technological improvement and compound growth could raise living standards to such a degree that we would be free from material scarcity. Once the absolute needs were met, humanity would confront what he called its “real, permanent problem”: how to use freedom from pressing economic cares “to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Brink Lindsey borrows Keynes’s phrase for his recent book, The Permanent Problem. Lindsey argues that wealthy liberal democracies now occupy an awkward territory between mass plenty and mass flourishing. Food, shelter, safety, education, and medicine are more available than ever, but people still need status, purpose, belonging, and the sense that their efforts matter.

Imperial wealth solved the economic problem for one man nearly eighteen centuries before markets and technology began solving it for whole populations. Once freed from many ordinary constraints, Marcus encountered the permanent problem early. What should he do with comfort? How much pleasure was enough? Why work when others could work for him? How could he remain useful when status had removed the need to prove himself useful?

Critics sometimes find it amusing that a philosophy of indifference to wealth attracts wealthy executives. But Stoicism’s new popularity is less paradoxical than it seems. Stoicism developed among people living close to power and abundance because power and abundance exposed problems that scarcity had concealed. The philosophy of an emperor becomes more relevant when ordinary people begin living, in important respects, like emperors.

Poverty has not disappeared. But the characteristic problems of affluent societies increasingly concern regulating access rather than enduring absence: eating less of the food surrounding us, moving more despite labor-saving technology, limiting entertainment, directing attention, choosing among options, and finding commitments strong enough to organize freedom.

Stoicism offers a useful set of psychological tools for the task of finding meaning and navigating abundance. Its distinction between what is and is not under our control redirects threat monitoring toward action. Its practice of stripping luxuries down to their physical components weakens the stories that amplify craving. Voluntary discomfort teaches the nervous system that cold, hunger, exertion, and inconvenience are tolerable. Gratitude resets the comparison point against which abundance otherwise becomes invisible. Remembering death makes us appreciate life’s finitude.

But Stoicism was never only a collection of tricks for feeling calmer or becoming more productive. Marcus did not drag himself from bed merely to clear his imperial inbox. He was rising to fulfill a human purpose, which for a Stoic meant acting rationally, socially, and for the common good. Meaning came from duty voluntarily embraced and service to something beyond appetite.

That fits the evolutionary account. Humans are not built only to consume calories and conserve energy. We also evolved to cooperate, master difficult skills, earn esteem, care for kin, reciprocate favors, contribute to groups, and navigate moral concerns that sometimes pull in different directions. The pragmatic response is to choose ecologies that activate the better angels of our nature: difficult work with visible progress, physical exertion, face-to-face relationships, responsibility for others, and problems whose solutions improve a community. Realistic progress works with evolved psychology instead of pretending human beings are blank slates.

Historically, only a tiny elite had enough food to struggle with gluttony, enough leisure to struggle with lethargy, and enough freedom to struggle with what freedom was for. Marcus repeatedly reminded himself that pleasure, technology, wealth, or leisure were not vices themselves. The problem was surrendering judgment to them. He could enjoy the palace without becoming its slave. Likewise, we can enjoy the supermarket, smartphone, washing machine, and weekend, while recognizing the new, preferable challenges that abundance creates.

Emperor-world problems are still problems, but it is a triumph that they are increasingly part of ordinary life.

Adults tell them that democracy is dying, capitalism is exploitation, technology is dehumanizing, climate change is collapse, Russia is at the door, and the next generation will be poorer, angrier, and less free. To question this doom script is to risk being accused of naivety, complacency, or moral failure. Then the same adults wonder why the young seem anxious about the future.

This is not seriousness. It is a culture teaching helplessness and calling it maturity.

None of that means young people should be fed cheerful propaganda. The world plainly has serious problems. Wars happen. Institutions fail. Technologies can be misused. Climate change is real. Families struggle. Many young people face housing costs, mental-health pressures, and a political arena that often feels both hysterical and strangely small.

Then again, hard problems do not become easier because we learn to describe them in the darkest possible language. A culture that turns every difficulty into apocalypse and every risk into proof of collapse should not be surprised when the young start to believe the future is something to fear rather than shape.

The strange part is that the lesson of darkness is being taught to the generation with more tools at its fingertips than any before it. A teenager with an internet connection can now reach lectures, books, markets, networks, design tools, translation systems, coding assistance, and increasingly powerful AI. Young people can learn, build, publish, trade, code, design, organize, and create in ways that would have sounded absurdly utopian a few decades ago.

AI matters here because it is not just another technology story. It is increasingly likely to reshape just about everything: science, medicine, education, energy, defense, productivity, and the nature of work itself. It also changes who gets to play. More young people can now move from reading about problems to working on them.

That is why Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine, his biography of Sir Demis Hassabis — the British AI researcher and entrepreneur, who co-founded Google DeepMind and now serves as its chairman and as Alphabet’s chief scientist — is useful. It is not a book of cheap optimism. It is full of danger, rivalry, and uncertainty. But it also reminds us of something our public culture too often forgets: the future is not simply something that happens to people. It is something people build.

Hassabis is a useful figure because his story is not really about gadgets or hype. It is about a habit of mind. Go, the ancient board game, was supposed to be too intuitive for machines. Protein folding was one of biology’s great unsolved problems. Both looked, to many people, like frontiers that might not move for a very long time. Both did move, because people stopped treating the frontier as an impregnable wall and started treating it as a problem to be attacked.

AlphaFold is the cleanest example. Protein folding was not solved by fatalism, committee rhetoric, or moralized despair. It was solved by imagination, computation, persistence, and institutional ambition — work for which Hassabis and his DeepMind colleague, John Jumper, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A decades-old scientific problem moved because better tools arrived — and because people knew what to do with them.

That is the habit of mind worth passing on to the young. Not that every problem is easy. Not that every technology is good. Not that progress is automatic. But that hard problems are not made easier by dressing up despair as wisdom. They are challenges to understand, test, and solve.

The contrast, which can also be found inside the younger generation, is already striking. Some young founders, engineers, and researchers are acting like doers: building tools, testing ideas, attacking problems, and drawing confidence from the fact that they can influence the world around them. Others have been taught to see the future mainly as a threat. Agency is not a cure for anxiety. But it is surely healthier than a public culture that keeps rehearsing helplessness.

It is worth remembering that public discourse does not merely describe reality. It changes how people behave inside it. It tells them what is possible, what is hopeless, what is shameful, and what is worth attempting. Pessimism is therefore never just a mood. Repeated often enough, it becomes an instruction — and then a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Tell people long enough that democracy is dead, and they may stop behaving like citizens. Tell them capitalism is only exploitation, and they may miss the dignity of building a more prosperous future. Tell them technology is only a threat, and they may leave its development to worse people. Tell them the future is already lost, and the most talented among them may decide not to waste their gifts trying to improve it.

That is where our public culture has become so damaging. Alarm is rewarded. Proportion is treated as complacency. Refuse to panic and you are assumed not to understand the stakes. We have become so used to emergency that possibility now must apologize for itself.

Negativity is therefore not a mark of seriousness. Often it is the opposite. It strips people of the agency that serious action requires.

That is not a left-versus-right problem in any simple sense. The establishment version says: trust our institutions, committees, experts, regulations, and emergency powers, or the world falls apart. The anti-establishment version turns the same darkness inside out: every institution is captured, every expert bought, every compromise cowardice, every failure proof that the system must burn.

One side uses fear to preserve authority. The other uses fury to destroy trust. Both flatter the teller. Both feed the appetite for heroes and villains. Both leave the young smaller than they need to be.

That is what I call the consensus trap. Once pessimism starts to sound profound, doubt becomes expensive. Before long, the crowd has not merely reached a conclusion. It has built a moral identity around it. The more constructive voices — the Steven Pinkers, Matt Ridleys, and Hans Roslings of this world — are left homeless, too positive for the establishment and too practical for the rage of the insurgents.

The result is a culture that misprices risk, opportunity, and timing. It overreacts to dangers that are theatrical or ideologically useful. It underreacts to dangers that are slow, boring, or inconvenient. And it misses opportunities, because opportunity rarely arrives with the emotional force of a threat.

Humanity nonetheless has a remarkable record of solving problems once treated as permanent. Filthy cities became cleaner. Child mortality fell. Famine declined. Vaccines, sewers, electricity grids, antibiotics, trade, education, and technological learning changed the conditions of human life. Not by magic. Not without mistakes or new problems. But because human beings, often when under massive pressure, produced solutions.

Progress was not made by those who explained, with great sophistication, why nothing could be done. It was made by those who tried anyway. In the long contest between doers and cannot-doers, it is not hard to see which side has built the better world.

The burden of proof should therefore fall more often on the doom-mongers. Not because pessimists are always wrong. They are not. But because hysteria should not automatically pass for seriousness.

Young people do not need propaganda, sedation, or TED-talk optimism. They can see the risks. What they do not need is an adult world that turns every difficulty into apocalypse, helps cultivate anxiety, and then congratulates itself on being realistic.

Instead, young people — along with the rest of us — need proportion: a more honest account of both danger and human ingenuity.

The future is still open. Every generation has had its doom-mongers, convinced that decline was irreversible, technology would ruin us, morals were collapsing, and the next crisis would be the one from which we never recovered. Yet humanity kept adapting. Not because pessimists were always wrong about every danger. They were not. But because they so often underestimated the adaptability and inventiveness of human beings — and of society itself.

The task is not to promise each new generation that everything will be fine. It is to stop telling them, directly or indirectly, that nothing can be done. To teach the young to fear the future rather than shape it is not realism. It is betrayal.

• A Chinese shipping company has launched the first regular container service between Asia and Europe through the Arctic. The journey from Ningbo, China, to Felixstowe, England, is expected to take around 20 days, roughly half the time it takes to complete the typical route through the Suez Canal.

• Europeans are using more air conditioning. The amount of energy used for household cooling in the EU has doubled since 2018, though from a low base. In 2020, American households used around 914,000 terajoules to power air conditioning, compared to just 45,000 in Europe. Chinese air-conditioner exports to the EU reached a record $3.76 billion in the first half of 2026, up 43 percent from a year earlier.

  

  While rising temperatures in Europe have aggravated the need for air conditioning, the region has long suffered from unusually high heat-related mortality.

Past Imperfect

Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

A brutal heat wave in Europe has caused a surge in deaths across the continent as temperatures topped 100 degrees in recent weeks. In France, authorities reported at least 2,000 additional deaths in a single week. Germany has reported more than 5,000 excess deaths this year…

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a month ago · 30 likes · 6 comments · Chelsea Olivia Follett

Health & Demographics

• Americans say they are gambling less than they were a decade ago. According to a recent Gallup poll, 45 percent of US adults reported gambling in the past 12 months in 2026, down from 64 percent in 2016.

• The government of Zanzibar is using drones as part of its efforts to fully eliminate malaria from the archipelago. Conventional anti-malaria strategies like bed-net distribution, rapid treatment, and insecticide spraying helped bring malaria prevalence in Zanzibar below 1 percent by 2008. Since then, however, progress toward elimination has largely stalled, with malaria transmission fluctuating at low levels. To help finish the job, Zanzibar health officials are using drones to locate stagnant water where mosquitoes lay their eggs, allowing workers to target the sites with larvicide.

• According to a recent report from the WHO and UNICEF, the share of health facilities worldwide with basic water services rose to 85 percent in 2025, up from 76 percent in 2015.1

• A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for people with high-risk melanoma has succeeded in a large Phase 3 trial. The treatment, developed by Moderna and Merck, is individually designed from mutations found in each patient’s tumor and trains the immune system to recognize and attack their cancer. The companies have not yet released the full results from the Phase 3 trial. But in earlier Phase 2 results, the vaccine—combined with the immunotherapy drug Keytruda—reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49 percent over five years versus Keytruda alone.

• The FDA has authorized a robot that can draw blood. The machine, called Aletta, uses near-infrared light and ultrasound to locate a vein before autonomously applying a tourniquet, disinfecting the skin, inserting the needle, changing collection tubes, and applying a bandage. The authorization will allow Aletta to be used on adults in clinics and other medical settings where patients do not stay overnight.

Science & Technology

• Amazon plans to bring its drone delivery service to nearly 500 cities and towns across the US by the end of 2026. The company says its drones are able to deliver products weighing up to five pounds to customers in as little as 30 minutes.

• California regulators have approved a major expansion of Waymo’s driverless taxi service. The company is now authorized to offer paid robotaxi rides across parts of 18 counties, including new areas around Sacramento, San Diego, Orange County, Napa, and the East Bay of San Francisco.

• LandSpace, a private Chinese company, has landed a reusable orbital-class rocket booster, becoming the third private company to do so.

• Powered exoskeletons are evolving from medical devices to consumer products. Newer systems are far lighter and less cumbersome than their clinical ancestors, allowing them to enhance ordinary movement as well as help restore lost function. One experimental system weighing less than 3 kilograms cut the energy required for younger adults to walk uphill by 18 percent.

Violence & Coercion

• The FBI's newly released 2025 data show that the US murder rate fell to a 70-year low in 2025. The overall violent crime rate in 2025 was 9.7 percent lower than in 2024—the biggest one-year drop since at least 1936, when the FBI’s national crime rate estimates began.

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This summer Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in history. Supporters celebrated the trillions in market value and the thousands of jobs he helped create pioneering electric cars and reusable rockets. Critics treated the milestone as a referendum on inequality. Bernie Sanders invoked the “greed and power of a ruling class.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren renewed demands to tax extreme wealth. Then SpaceX shares fell back below their IPO price and Musk’s fortune dropped to a humble $850 billion, down from its brief peak of $1.4 trillion.

The decline provoked almost no commentary. When Musk “gained” hundreds of billions in unrealized wealth, politicians spoke as if the money had been taken from everyone else. When more than half a trillion dollars disappeared, no one proposed that wealth had been restored to the public. If anything, millions of shareholders, including blue-collar employees holding equity and the retirement accounts of ordinary Americans, lost money.

Economists can explain the difference between income and equity, paper wealth and spendable cash. But the real dispute is psychological. Humans dislike inequality even when a rising tide lifts all boats. If every centibillionaire donated over 99 percent of their net worth to charity and kept a single billion, people would still lament that billionaires exist.

Wealth can be created. That is why the economy grows every year and why most people can afford basic goods like refrigerators that were once luxuries. But status is zero-sum. If one person moves up in rank, everyone below moves down by definition.

Social psychology experiments consistently show that people care more about rank than wealth. Many will take a smaller income if it places them above their neighbors over a larger one that places them below, and their health and happiness track relative standing more than absolute income.

People will even pay to close a gap. When one person proposes how to split $100, and the other can only accept it or kill the deal for both, a lopsided offer is routinely rejected, the responder giving up a real $20 to stop a stranger from pocketing $80. The asymmetry appears early in development. Five-year-old children will even sacrifice some of their own reward to preserve an advantage over a peer.

Envy is not a free-floating vice. It is a system for detecting consequential differences in rank and resources. Humans evolved in groups that were both cooperative and competitive. Food sharing and reciprocal exchange produced mutual gains, but access to land, allies, and mates was limited, and a rival’s rise could shrink one’s own share. Monitoring who had more was adaptive.

The trouble begins when the system cannot distinguish extraction from creation. A fortune won by inventing something useful should be celebrated, not interpreted as a threat.

Musk does not hold a trillion dollars in food, houses, or currency. He owns stakes in companies whose prices reflect what investors expect them to produce. Comparisons between one man’s fortune and the combined wealth of whole populations translate an opaque balance sheet into a familiar problem: one member of the band appears to have claimed the communal kill.

Zero-sum belief also converts personal comparison into coalitional morality. A man who resents a richer neighbor feels small. A man who resents a class of exploiters feels righteous. The English writer George Orwell noticed the pattern: socialism is often motivated more by hatred of the rich than by love of the poor.

Musk may regain his fourth comma or shed another few hundred billion. His rank can swing violently without any matching change in everyone else’s circumstances. That is why the gains produce outrage and the losses silence. The number is being read as a status score.

In his upcoming book, In Trade We Trust: How Commerce Makes Us More Social, Walker Wright, the Director of Programs at the Buckley Institute, argues that markets not only generate wealth, but also teach people to become more honest, fair, tolerant, and peaceful.

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our research fellow Chelsea Follett speaks with Wright about the moral character of markets, the relationship between economic freedom and good behavior, the effects of commerce on prejudice and violence, and why buying and selling from one another may help make us better people.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

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

Walker Wright joins the podcast today to discuss his upcoming book, In Trade We Trust: How Commerce Makes Us More Social.

What inspired you to write this book?

The economic arguments for markets have generally been won, but the moral argument hasn’t.

Even if people admit that markets lead to greater growth and prosperity, they often say, “But aren’t we losing our souls when we do all this type of stuff?” I wanted to show them how much data there actually is on this topic and make a robust argument for the moral character of markets.

In your first chapter, you discuss the building blocks of a commercial society. What are those building blocks?

When I use the term “commercial society,” I’m riffing off of Adam Smith. The way that he talks about commercial society is very much connected to his notion of division of labor. A commercial society is one in which most people are merchants or middlemen of some sort.

Some of the best proxies are things like the Economic Freedom of the World Index that’s produced by the Fraser Institute. They use five major categories to define economic freedom: the size of government, private property rights and the rule of law, sound money, openness to trade, and regulation. But I also try to point out that a commercial society, a market society, can take various shapes and sizes. Nordic countries, for instance, have large welfare states, but their corporate taxes are low, and their openness to trade is high. You still have this general sense of freedom when it comes to exchange. So, commercial society is a little bit broader than we might think.

Are commercial societies more trusting and trustworthy?

Yes.

In more economically free countries, people are more trusting of strangers. Ginny Choi and Virgil Storr have some interesting data on this, looking at social distance. Everybody usually trusts their close friends and family. Then you move out a bit. What about your neighbors, the people you work with, or the people you go to church with? Then you can go out and out until you reach total strangers. That is what they mean by social distance.

Now, as you increase social distance, trust declines a lot more slowly in market societies, and those in economically free countries tend to trust strangers far more than those in non-market societies. And some have argued that there’s a causal relationship, because when countries implement market reforms, trust starts to rise. It’s still hard to figure out which causes which, but to me, it’s just a virtuous cycle.

Markets run on reputations. When someone cheats you, you don’t want to deal with them anymore. You might make some profit here and there cheating people, but eventually it catches up to you. You find this in laboratory studies and in real life. A market society is built on trust and continually builds trust. It doesn’t just require social capital; it produces it.

There’s a really interesting experiment that took East and West Germans and had them play a kind of dice-rolling game. They found that the longer the exposure someone had to communism, the more likely they were to cheat. Communism and other centralized economic systems require people to work around the system in order to get the things that they need. That trains them to bribe, lie, and act dishonestly.

You also devote a chapter to how people in commercial societies are more fair. Tell me about that.

By fairness, I mean impartiality: treating different people the same way.

One institution that people generally consider fair is democracy, and some have argued that markets tend to undermine democracy. That isn’t the case. There was a recent study by Alex Tabarrok and Vincent Geloso that found an interdependence between democracy and economic freedom. As economic freedom goes down, democracy tends to decline. And, in a number of studies, economic freedom tends to have a strong effect on other human rights.

So, economic freedom tends to lay the foundation for the political institutions that protect our rights. But again, this trickles down into the broader culture. There was one study that looked at different villagers and had them perform an experiment in which they had the option to cheat someone else. They found that those with greater market contact treated other participants more impartially, while those with less market contact were more willing to cheat non-villagers. You also see this in some of the work of Joseph Henrich and others. They’ve gone to agrarian societies, like hunter-gatherer societies, and played the ultimatum game. The ultimatum game involves a giver and a receiver. The giver can choose to split a particular sum. They could split it 50/50, but they might split it 99 to 1. And if the receiver says, “Yeah, I’ll take that,” then you both go home with it. But if the receiver says, “No, I don’t want that. That’s unfair,” nobody gets it. They found that those with more market contact left more on the table in these games.

The explanation is that market contact allows you to see others as beneficial to you, which makes you treat people better. You see others less as threats, and more as potential collaborators.

Let’s talk about gender relations. Is it true, as you write, that there are fewer battles of the sexes in a commercial society?

Sex is probably one of the biggest factors that influences how other people treat us. Many societies have attitudes like, “we have to protect the women.” And a lot of the time that protection ends up being a kind of patriarchal control over the household.

Economic freedom undermines that structure. Once you start to place more economic activity outside of the home, women start to go outside the home and earn their own money, and with their own income, women can escape an abusive household or a bad marriage. You also see equalization across the genders. You see it with income, as well as with literacy and education. There’s a delay in childbearing. Women start to be more present in public life rather than confined to the household. And when they are seen in public, competent and making decisions, it changes people’s perspectives. If you care about women’s rights, you should care about economic freedom as well.

So, women are treated better in commercial societies. What about more broadly? Are people more tolerant generally in a commercial society?

Yeah, that’s another thing. Discrimination has costs. When you cut yourself off from a whole subset of the population because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or whatever, you can’t do business with them. You’re gonna miss out on customers and talent. And you do see that as economic freedom goes up, racial tolerance goes up, tolerance towards homosexuals goes up, and also tolerance towards groups with ideas you may not like, like atheists or even communists. In India, you’re seeing the caste system start to decline since the market reforms in the 1990s. People are more willing to do things with Dalits who were considered “untouchables.”

Antisemitism is a particularly potent kind of prejudice that has a somewhat mixed relationship with economic freedom. Some aspects of economic freedom, like open trade, for example, tend to increase antisemitism somewhat. But other aspects, such as the rule of law and property rights, tend to decrease it. Overall, however, you still find that antisemitism tends to fall with greater economic freedom.

Now, when you claim that commercial societies are less racist, invariably someone is going to respond that in the history of capitalism, there was a long period when human beings could be bought and sold based on race. So tell me, what about slavery?

Yes. It’s a totally legitimate concern.

I try to point out that people like Adam Smith made both moral and economic arguments against slavery. They argued that slavery was inefficient compared with free labor. Slavery is probably the most restrictive form of labor market regulation there is. You’re depriving a subset of the population of the rights that other people have, and you are restricting them to a certain plot of land or to a certain task. That becomes less productive over time. A variety of studies have shown that areas which have slavery or used to have slavery even tend to lag behind those that either got rid of it more quickly or used a freer labor system.

I also think it’s important to point out that slavery was heavily regulated and supported by the government. Phil Magness in particular has pointed out that slavery in the United States was a heavily subsidized system that wasn’t very economically competitive.

Moving on to another form of violence. Do commercial societies fight other countries less?

Yes. In general, international trade tends to lead to fewer wars. The logic behind this is pretty straightforward: if your customers are in another country or your supply chain runs through another country, bombing it into oblivion is less attractive. And when a country produces goods and services that you buy, they become partners of some sort, and you’re less likely to fight your friends. But you also see an effect on civil wars and coups. You’re less likely to experience coups in societies that are more market-oriented and have more open trade. You’re also less likely to see ethnic and religious conflicts.

There’s an idea called the democratic peace, which is basically that democracies are less likely to fight one another. But there’s also the capitalist peace, which is that capitalist countries and trading countries are less likely to fight one another. It seems that over time, the way the literature is going, the capitalist peace is starting to take over. Some might dispute that, but at the very least, the liberal peace, as it’s sometimes called, includes economic interdependence.

You also claim that fewer citizens are killed in commercial societies.

Yes. Less economically free countries are far more likely to kill their own citizens and violate their human rights. One of the things they’ve found is that the more a country is open to trade, the less likely it is to experience a government-led genocide. When you don’t centralize all the power, it’s a lot harder to go after your citizens.

Even when it comes to citizen-on-citizen violence, or violent crime, you do find a relationship with economic freedom. Government restrictions on the economy tend to create black markets, which are often very violent. One reason for that is there’s no government protection of property rights, because your property is illegal, so you have to protect your own property using violence.

This is an uplifting story one doesn’t usually hear about market economies or commercial societies. Do you have any concluding thoughts?

It’s a story that doesn’t get told very often, but it is robustly demonstrated in the empirical literature.

How can we treat each other better? How can we not be so violent? Well, you could try buying and selling from one another. You could try focusing on your customers. You could try creating value for others. Because here’s the thing, when you engage in commerce, you are trying to create value for someone else, and they are trying to create value for you. Over time, you begin to value that person.

Sometimes people will come at me with that, where they’ll say, “That is very utilitarian. Is it really true friendship?”

Aristotle had three major categories of friendship. He starts with a lower friendship of utility, where someone is useful to you in some way. Then there’s a higher friendship of pleasure, where you enjoy their company to some degree. And then there’s a friendship of excellence, the kind of friendship where you want the absolute best for one another.

So people are often saying, “Commerce doesn’t create top-tier friendship.” Well, maybe not at first, but it does create a lot of lower-tier utility friendships and pleasure friendships. Those friendships may be incomplete in some sense, but they matter. And they’re much better than people being enemies. That’s what commerce really does throughout the world.

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• Americans are traveling more as they get richer. According to recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal, US residents took 24 million trips to Europe in 2025, up from 13.4 million in 2000, while the share of consumer spending devoted to foreign travel has reached a record high.

• New York City is cutting red tape for small businesses, with more than 50 regulatory reforms aimed at eliminating unnecessary permits, fees, and delays. Reforms include eliminating a redundant frozen dessert permit, streamlining outdoor dining approvals and barbershop licensing, expediting restaurant inspections, and temporarily waiving certain equipment registration fees.

• A growing payment network in Africa is letting participating banks settle cross-border transactions directly in local currencies, with payments processed in seconds rather than days. Such transactions have long been settled in dollars or euros, adding significant delays and fees even when both the sender and recipient were in Africa. The Bank of Central African States recently joined the initiative, bringing the network to 28 African countries.

Energy & Environment

• Deforestation alerts in the Brazilian Amazon have fallen to their lowest level since 2013. Brazil’s satellite deforestation tracking system recorded alerts covering 2,874 square kilometers between August 2025 and July 2026, 36 percent less than the previous year and 56 percent below the previous decade's average.

• Argentina is transforming from an energy importer into a growing energy exporter. Oil production from the Vaca Muerta shale formation is up 28 percent from a year ago, and crude oil became the country’s largest export product during the first half of 2026.

Food & Hunger

• The global food system has become incredibly resilient. Despite fertilizer and fuel shortages and dry El Niño weather, global production of major staple crops remains at or near all-time highs, thanks in part to the development of drought- and heat-resistant crop varieties. And while El Niño is expected to intensify as the year goes on, new major exporters have broadened the global grain supply, and grain stockpiles are near record levels, giving humanity a substantial buffer against poor harvests.

  

Health & Demographics

• Reported rat sightings have fallen by nearly a quarter in New York City, declining 22 percent in the first seven months of 2026 compared with the same period last year. The city’s sanitation department attributes the improvement to its campaign to move trash off the streets and into sealed containers, depriving rats of an easy food source.

• According to NHS England, hepatitis C-related deaths in the country have fallen by 36 percent over the last 10 years, and health officials say they are making progress toward eventually eliminating the disease.

• Stablepharma, a UK-based biotech company, has completed a successful phase 1 trial of a tetanus-diphtheria vaccine that does not need refrigeration. The vaccine—which can remain stable for up to two years at room temperature—could reach places without reliable cold-chain infrastructure.

• Paramedics in Hyde County, North Carolina, have begun using an electric vertical-takeoff aircraft to respond to 911 calls. The county is large, sparsely populated, and swampy, making it unusually hard to traverse by road. On one recent call, a paramedic flying a BlackFly eVTOL reached a patient 20 minutes before the ambulance arrived.

Science & Technology

• Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 AI model has helped disprove the Jacobian conjecture, an 87-year-old open problem in algebraic geometry.

• Google DeepMind researchers have developed an AI system that can forecast tropical cyclones farther in advance than today’s leading models. When tested on storms from 2023 to 2025, the system could predict cyclone paths and intensity about a day farther into the future than leading operational models while maintaining comparable accuracy.

• According to estimates from Smart Analytics Global, a market research firm, global shipments of humanoid robots grew to 19,100 units in the first half of 2026, nearly four times the number shipped during the same period last year. The same report predicts that total shipments will reach 60,000 by the end of the year.

Violence & Coercion

• Turkey has taken a major step toward ending its four-decade conflict with Kurdish separatists, a struggle that has killed more than 40,000 people since 1984. On August 10th, the country’s parliament passed a law that creates a legal framework for the full disarmament of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, with legal protections for many of its members.

• Lebanon’s parliament has voted to abolish the death penalty and replace all existing death sentences with life imprisonment.

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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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