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

But we can go one step further.

Instead of comparing currencies, we can compare time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Energy & Environment

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

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

Health & Demographics

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

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

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

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

Science & Technology

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

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

Violence & Coercion

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

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

Read more news stories on our website

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

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

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

Listen on your favorite podcast app

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, now onto changes in precipitation patterns.

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

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

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

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

We need to take these one by one.

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

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

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

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

Moving swiftly onto ocean warming and acidification.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a great question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What on Earth is going on?

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

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

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

Do you agree with that?

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

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

Read the full transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• India and New Zealand have signed a free trade agreement, making all Indian exports to New Zealand duty-free and cutting or eliminating tariffs on 95 percent of New Zealand’s exports to India.

Energy & Environment

• The United States Geological Survey recently estimated that there are over 2 million metric tons of undiscovered, economically recoverable lithium in the Appalachian Mountains, enough to supply the country for centuries at current levels of consumption.

• Salmon populations are bouncing back in California following dam removals and a series of wet winters. Responding to that recovery, the Pacific Fishery Management Council has reopened commercial salmon fishing off the California coast.

• Ribbed mussels are proliferating along Virginia Beach. These aren’t the kind of mussels you’d order at a restaurant, but ecologists say the growing population could help reduce erosion and clean up excess nitrogen, phosphorus, and bacteria in local waterways.

• Scientists have found some remarkably heat-resistant corals near the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago off Western Australia. During an extreme 2025 marine heatwave and in lab tests, the corals showed little bleaching or mortality at temperatures that are typically deadly to coral. The researchers are still trying to explain the source of that resilience.

Health & Demographics

• A recently published randomized controlled trial found that the GLP-1 drug semaglutide substantially reduced alcohol consumption in heavy drinkers compared to a placebo.

• Australia has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. While the disease was already rare in most of the country, it remained endemic in some remote indigenous communities until recently.

Science & Technology

• California is now allowing companies to test and deploy driverless trucks, beginning with a safety driver behind the wheel, then moving to fully driverless testing, and finally commercial deployment once companies satisfy the state’s requirements.

• The Chinese battery manufacturer CATL has signed the world’s largest sodium-ion battery deal to date, which will supply 60 gigawatt-hours of sodium-ion batteries to Beijing HyperStrong Technology over three years. Sodium-ion batteries are less energy-dense than lithium-ion batteries, but they use cheaper, more abundant materials, making them especially promising for grid storage.

• A desalination plant in Saudi Arabia has set a new desalination efficiency record: a reverse-osmosis unit at the Yanbu complex used just 1.55 kilowatt-hours to produce a cubic meter of fresh water, below the previous 1.7 kWh/m³ benchmark set earlier in 2026 and the 2.34 kWh/m³ record reported in 2025.

Violence & Coercion

• Pakistan’s Punjab province has banned child marriage, following Sindh, which became the first Pakistani province to do so in 2013.

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Today, a ream of 500 much higher-quality sheets sells for $7.99 at Staples. With average wages around $36.86 an hour, the time price is just 13 minutes.

The time price of paper has fallen by 99.78 percent over the last 200 years. For the time required to earn the money for a single sheet in 1826, a worker today can obtain 461 sheets. Scarcity didn’t disappear because we conserved paper, but because we learned how to transform abundant trees into even more abundant paper.

What About Recycled Paper?

Many people assume that recycling paper saves resources. If that were true, why is recycled paper about 85 percent more expensive than virgin paper? The answer is that the United States has roughly 300 billion trees, while recycling itself consumes substantial energy, labor, and capital.

A useful question whenever someone warns that we’re “running out” of something is simple: If it’s so scarce, why is it so cheap?

Remember, abundance doesn’t come from good intentions; it comes from innovation. Over two thousand years, paper has migrated from papyrus to cotton and linen rags to wood pulp—each transition a triumph of human ingenuity over scarcity. What we consume is not trees or fibers, but knowledge encoded in matter. And the more we consume, the more we discover. That is why paper is plentiful, pencils are cheap, and light is abundant. Wealth is learning made visible, and abundance is the dividend of ideas.

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

Economic models, rooted in assumptions of rational agents maximizing utility under constraints, have long provided elegant frameworks for understanding human behavior in markets and societies. Yet, a persistent friction exists between these idealized portrayals of human beings and the ways humans actually navigate economic choices. People frequently champion policies that contravene basic economic principles, including minimum wages presumed to boost income without increasing unemployment, rent controls expected to enhance housing affordability without reducing supply, or tariffs that run counter to comparative advantage and affordability.

People also often harbor counterproductive intuitions, including a belief that markets erode social bonds, despite evidence that markets foster cooperation and thus generate wealth. Those tendencies stem not primarily from information deficits or irrationality, but from our evolutionary psychology. Our economic intuitions were shaped over thousands of years in a world of tight-knit coalitions and zero-sum intergroup rivalry, rendering modern market dynamics counterintuitive. As such, markets are often rejected even when they are beneficial.

Perhaps the most parsimonious theory explaining why people often behave in economically harmful ways is the evolutionary cognitive model of folk-economic beliefs, proposed by anthropologist Pascal Boyer and political scientist Michael Bang Petersen. Folk-economic beliefs are those convictions about economics held by laypeople untrained in the discipline, which frequently diverge from fundamental economic tenets. These encompass mental representations of varied topics, from prices, taxes, and tariffs to welfare and immigration policies.

Economists have traditionally critiqued those as irrational beliefs or mere byproducts of ignorance, but an evolutionary lens reveals them as predictable outcomes. Ensuring fairness in trade, sustaining social ties, forming stable coalitions, and resolving ownership disputes are all responses to ancestral challenges.

If this theory is right, both actual economic behavior and theories generated to explain one’s own economic behavior are predictable outputs shaped by evolution. When folk-economic beliefs are wrong, they are wrong in predictable ways. We talk about impersonal markets as if they were tribal conflicts. We treat economies built on innovation and surplus as if they were competitions over a fixed pile of resources.

Consider the intuition that international trade is harmful because another country’s gain must come at our expense. From the perspective of standard economics, this belief contradicts the well-established principle of comparative advantage. People benefit from specializing in what they produce most efficiently relative to other goods, even if a trading partner could produce everything more cheaply in absolute terms. For example, a surgeon who happens to type faster than his or her secretary still benefits from hiring the secretary and devoting more time to the operating room. Likewise, America could manufacture its own consumer electronics, but every dollar and worker devoted to assembling phones is one not devoted to designing the software, chips, and financial services where American companies dominate globally. The result is more total output and mutual gain.

But our evolutionary psychology wasn’t built for comparative advantage, especially not across nations or tribes. Human groups historically competed for territory, food, and status in genuinely zero-sum ways. If a rival coalition grew stronger, it often meant danger for one’s own group. When modern individuals read that another nation is exporting more goods to us or running a trade surplus, our tribal instincts activate automatically. Nations are cognitively represented as tribes, and the success of one tribe is interpreted as a threat to another. The idea that both sides could benefit simultaneously—one of the central insights of the founder of economics, Adam Smith—runs against these deeply ingrained intuitions.

The same coalitional logic helps explain folk intuitions about immigration. People opposed to immigration often claim that immigrants steal jobs from native workers while also claiming that immigrants siphon welfare benefits without working. At the level of policy argument, these beliefs are apparently contradictory. But at the level of psychology, it is an expression of a single concern: Outsiders are draining scarce resources, whether the resource is employment or benefits. Humans evolved in groups where membership conferred access to shared resources—food, protection, or status—and where vigilance against free riders was essential to sustaining cooperation. Newcomers were therefore automatically treated with suspicion until they proved themselves contributors rather than exploiters.

When this ancestral heuristic is applied to modern societies, it produces the intuition that outsiders must be consuming resources that properly belong to the in-group. Whether the imagined resource is employment or welfare benefits—or even whether the resources are truly being drained at all—matters less than the perceived threat that group boundaries are being crossed without reciprocal contribution.

The psychology of free-rider detection also helps explain the peculiar ambivalence that many people feel toward welfare programs. While people readily endorse the idea that society should help those who fall on hard times through no fault of their own, they also often worry that welfare encourages laziness or dependency. These views appear inconsistent only if one assumes that the public is applying a unified economic theory. In reality, they reflect two separate intuitions inherited from ancestral exchange systems.

Communal sharing evolved as a form of insurance against bad luck—injury, illness, or an unsuccessful hunt—where helping unlucky group members benefited everyone in the long run. But the same systems also evolved to punish individuals who accepted benefits without contributing. Modern welfare debates, therefore, activate both intuitions simultaneously: compassion toward the unlucky and hostility toward perceived free riders.

Another common folk-economic belief concerns the relationship between labor and value. Many people feel instinctively that hard work should determine how much something is worth. In the hunter-gatherer economy that prevailed throughout most of human history, where the value of goods was closely tied to the labor required to obtain them, strenuous physical effort was intrinsically linked to value production itself. Hunting, gathering, building shelter, or crafting tools all involved visible effort, and individuals who contributed more effort typically produced more resources. When applied to modern economies, however, the same intuition can generate confusion. A programmer writing code, an entrepreneur coordinating supply chains, or an investor allocating capital may create enormous value without performing visible physical labor. Yet because our ownership psychology is sensitive to effort and physical transformation, profits earned through organization or innovation are often framed as morally suspect, particularly in socialist ideology, as if they are thought to represent extraction rather than creation.

Some common opposition to the profit motive itself is explained by evolutionary psychology. In face-to-face exchange within small groups, unusually large gains might indeed signal exploitation or hoarding of limited resources, especially since producing anything of value typically required communal effort. Someone who consistently benefited more than others from trades might be suspected of manipulating information or violating norms of fairness. Modern markets, however, often reward individuals precisely when they discover new ways to produce value—whether by inventing technologies, improving logistics, or coordinating complex networks of production. Because these gains arise in impersonal systems where the beneficiaries are distant strangers rather than known partners, the profits they generate can appear less like the rewards of innovation and more like evidence of exploitation. Our evolved moral intuitions struggle to track value creation in dispersed and opaque market economies.

Likewise, many popular beliefs about regulation reflect ancestral intuitions that authorities can directly control outcomes. If the chieftain declared that food should be shared in a particular way, the order could be enforced through social pressure or direct monitoring. Everyone knew everyone else, contributions were visible, and deviations from the rule could be punished immediately. This experience makes it intuitively plausible that governments—which our minds intuitively represent as tribal coalitions—can simply command economic results. If rents are too high, they can seemingly be capped. If wages are too low, they can seemingly be raised. In naive folk economic theories, prices behave like promises: If the authority decrees a new price, the outcome should follow.

Take rent control. The intuition behind it is straightforward and morally compelling. If landlords raise rents beyond what tenants can afford, people may feel exploited: The owner of a scarce resource is extracting more money without providing more housing. A government rule limiting rents, therefore, appears to be a simple act of fairness. Ostensibly, the authority steps in, declares that rents may not exceed a certain level, and housing becomes affordable again. But in a large market economy, rent is not just a moral claim between two parties; it is also a signal that coordinates investment and construction of new housing. When rents are capped below market levels, the signal changes. Developers build fewer apartments, landlords convert rental units into other uses, and maintenance becomes less attractive when returns are limited. Over time, the supply of housing shrinks, and the shortage intensifies the very scarcity that drove up rents in the first place. The policy fails because the mechanism through which housing supply adjusts is invisible to the mental model that produced the intuition.

The same dynamic appears in debates over minimum wages. If workers are paid very little for difficult or unpleasant jobs, the situation feels unfair. But in a modern labor market, wages also function as signals that coordinate hiring decisions across the entire economy. When the legal wage floor rises above the productivity level of some jobs, employers do not simply pay the higher wage and continue as before. They reduce hiring, substitute machines for labor, or restructure tasks so fewer workers are needed. When the price signal changes, behavior adjusts in ways that the regulation does not anticipate. That often results in the direct opposite of the desired effect.

Our minds are not utility-maximizing computers that simply deviate from optimal choice due to insufficient information or computing power. They are toolkits. Our brains have evolved specialized cognitive inferences, or intuitions, that solved specific recurrent problems in our ancestral environments: “Who is trustworthy enough for exchange?”; “Who belongs to us, and who is a rival?”; “Who is contributing, and who is free riding?”; “Who owns what, and by what right?” These intuitions can be triggered by modern economic situations that resemble ancestral ones, even when the actual circumstances are entirely new.

Folk-economic beliefs persist not because people are irrational, but because they are reasoning with tools that evolved for cooperation in small bands rather than coordination among millions of strangers. The challenge for modern societies is therefore not simply to correct mistaken beliefs, but to build policies that work with—rather than against—the grain of human psychology.

Modern market societies represent one of humanity’s most remarkable cultural achievements. They sprang into existence by harnessing a set of different ancient social instincts—ones that enable cooperation on an unprecedented scale. Systems of property rights, contract enforcement, and voluntary exchange allow millions of strangers to coordinate their efforts in mutually beneficial ways.

The claim here is not that markets are infallible. It is that our evolved intuitions often misidentify the nature of the problem and thus point us toward remedies that make matters worse. In modern economies, visible losses are concentrated, immediate, and emotionally salient, while gains are diffuse, gradual, and spread across millions of consumers and workers. A serious defense of markets should therefore acknowledge adjustment costs and real harms without conceding the larger error: namely, the belief that mutual gain, price signals, profit, and exchange are themselves forms of exploitation.

Some of our evolved instincts—like valuing reciprocity, rewarding contribution, and building reputations for trustworthiness—remain essential foundations of prosperous societies. Markets themselves depend on these deeply rooted norms of cooperation and exchange. Other intuitions, however—such as zero-sum thinking about trade, suspicion toward profitable innovation, or faith that authorities can simply command prices—reflect cognitive shortcuts suited to environments of scarcity and small-group control rather than decentralized abundance.

Recognizing that distinction should not slide into a blanket dismissal of public concern. Not every market outcome is benign, and not all economic anxieties are mere illusions. Trade, technological change, and broader shifts from manufacturing to services can impose real, concentrated losses on particular workers, firms, and regions, especially on lower-skill laborers whose jobs are exposed to offshoring or displaced by new forms of production. A person who loses a job to foreign competition is not simply trapped by faulty intuition. He is often responding to a real personal setback, even if the economy as a whole still becomes more productive and prosperous. The same is true in recessions or cases of fraud and negative externalities.

The question, then, is how societies can address those real costs without defaulting to the very intuitions that misdiagnose their causes.

Human beings are unusual among species in our ability to revise intuitive judgments through abstract reasoning and accumulated knowledge. Economic theory, empirical evidence, and institutional experimentation provide ways of testing whether our intuitions about markets actually match the systems we inhabit. Over time, societies that learn to distinguish between intuitions that promote cooperation and those that misread economic signals tend to design more effective institutions.

Much of the progress of the last two centuries reflects this process of institutional learning precisely. Expanding trade networks, protecting property rights, encouraging innovation, and allowing prices to coordinate decentralized decisions have produced levels of prosperity that would have been unimaginable in the environments where our economic intuitions evolved. Understanding the evolutionary roots of folk-economic beliefs, therefore, helps explain why certain policy ideas remain politically attractive despite poor outcomes—and why sustained progress often depends on institutions that counteract some of our most natural intuitions while reinforcing others that support cooperation, openness, and exchange.

This article was originally published at The Dispatch on 4/21/2026.

• Over the past two decades, Paraguay’s national poverty rate has fallen from over 50 percent to around 16 percent. World Bank economists credit sustained economic growth of nearly 5 percent per year, along with rising labor productivity that has driven gains at the bottom of the income distribution.

• A new analysis of US incomes finds that each generation has ended up richer than the last, though the pace of progress has slowed in recent decades. The authors find that much of the earlier gains were driven by rising work hours among women, while more recent generations have seen smaller gains as that trend has leveled off.

Conservation & Biodiversity

• Forty years after their reintroduction, there are now over 900 Przewalski’s horses in China, some of which are living in “self-sustaining wild herds.” Przewalski’s horse was extinct in the wild by the late 1960s but is now recovering thanks to captive breeding and reintroduction programs.

• A recently published study of African elephants found that, despite a large and prolonged population decline, the species has generally maintained good genetic health.

• Following years of population recovery, Humpback whales are now regularly spotted in massive pods.

Energy & Natural Resources

• Desalination in California is helping reduce pressure on the Colorado River. By adding new supply, notably from the Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego, coastal utilities are freeing up river water for other states in exchange for desalination funding.

• Clean energy generation rose by 887 terawatt-hours in 2025, outpacing growth in global electricity demand for the first time in history.

• The first LNG tanker has arrived at Golden Pass, a new LNG terminal on the Texas coast with a planned annual export capacity of 18 million metric tons. Once fully operational, it will rank among the largest LNG export terminals in the United States.

Health & Demographics

• The World Health Organization recently verified that Algeria has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, and The Bahamas has eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

• The FDA has approved a gene therapy for a form of congenital deafness caused by a faulty OTOF gene. The treatment uses a virus to deliver a working copy of the gene, a technique that has shown very promising results in recent trials.

• In a small, early stage trial, an experimental mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer triggered long-lasting immune responses in a subset of patients. Only about half of the recipients responded to the treatment, but those who did had a much lower rate of cancer recurrence, though the study was small and not designed to show that the vaccine caused the difference.

Science & Technology

• Last year, Beijing hosted a half marathon for both humanoid robots and humans. The robots performed poorly, with the fastest mechanical finisher trailing the fastest human by nearly three hours. This year’s race was a different story: the fastest robot finished in just 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human half-marathon world record.

• Google now claims that 75 percent of its new code is generated by AI, up from 50 percent in the fall of 2025.

• ASML has started selling a new extreme ultraviolet lithography machine that can potentially triple transistor density on computer chips. Using upgraded optics, the machine can print extremely fine patterns—just 8 nanometres wide—in a single step, allowing many more transistors to be packed into the same space.

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In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our managing editor Chelsea Follett speaks with economist Samuel Gregg about his book The Next American Economy. They discuss the roots of this new “state capitalist” consensus, the enduring appeal of economic intervention, and how to make the case for free markets in an increasingly skeptical political environment.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

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

Joining me today is economist Samuel Gregg, the President and Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of seventeen books, including The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World, which will form the basis of our discussion today.

So, tell me about why you chose to write this book and why it is, perhaps unfortunately, more relevant today than ever?

In around 2016, the way that Americans thought about the nature of their economy started to shift. Since the early 1980s, America had moved back towards markets, free enterprise, and limited government, at least in principle. You could find people on the center left and the center right who were more or less on board with that vision. That changed, I think, in 2015 or 2016. People have emerged on the right and left who believe that the state should take a much more proactive role in economic life.

In the book, which came out in October 2022, I wanted to outline why this shift occurred. I wanted to outline some of the differences, the battle lines, if you like, between those of us who favor a free-market economy and those who favor state capitalism. And I also wanted to argue that it was time for free marketers to realize that we weren’t living in the 1980s or even the 1990s anymore. The tide had shifted, and we needed to adjust our message to the conditions that we find ourselves in today.

What is this state capitalism alternative that so many seem to be advocating for?

The way that I use it in the book, and I think this is a common use of the phrase now, is to describe an economy in which you have private property and markets, but also a state that tries to deliver economic outcomes that are substantially different than those that would emerge if markets were left to prevail.

State capitalism usually involves a large and extensive welfare state. It involves using regulation and the administrative state to put certain parameters and contours around the workings of markets in order to push consumers and producers, and particularly producers, in particular directions. So, while you still have markets, competition, and private property, the state goes far beyond anything that would have been envisaged, for example, by America’s founders. And I think if you look around America today, that’s exactly what we’re living in.

Now that you’ve described the idea of state capitalism, let’s dissect it a bit more. You have a chapter in the book titled “Why Protectionism Does Not Pay.” Why doesn’t it?

The classic arguments against protectionism go back to Adam Smith. His basic argument against tariffs was that they don’t create wealth; they just push production or economic activity in particular directions. The problem is that creates a hidden tax on consumers because the businesses that get charged the tariffs invariably pass the costs on to consumers.

Protectionism also encourages cronyism, by which I mean businesses getting close to government to try to ensure that tariffs are leveled against their competitors. It also shifts the balance of the economy away from consumer interests towards producer interests. The problem with that is, in the end, protectionism doesn’t serve producers very well either. It makes them lazy and uncompetitive, and rarely ever manages to maintain a particular industry in place. So, protectionism, despite the name, actually does enormous damage, both to consumers and, in the long term, to the producers that it’s ostensibly designed to protect.

What do you say to those who would argue that the world we live in today is very different from the world of Adam Smith? For example, we have new national security concerns that might justify tariffs.

Free traders and free marketers have always acknowledged that national security is a legitimate exception. Adam Smith says defense trumps opulence. At the same time, the single most important element for a country’s national security is the size and dynamism of its economy. That is what allowed the United States to defeat or outlast Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union.

So, yes, there are genuine national security challenges, but they don’t justify shutting down the whole process of liberalizing trade with other countries. Reverting to protectionism will ultimately hurt our security more than it will help.

Let’s move on to industrial policy. What is the trouble with industrial policy, and why do you think it has so much continued appeal?

The basic problem with industrial policy is something classical liberals talk about all the time, which is, as F.A. Hayek called it, the knowledge problem.

Industrial policy assumes that governments can come up with a better allocation of resources than the market can. The problem is that even central banks and treasury departments, which are full of economists who have lots and lots of data at their disposal, cannot possibly know the best allocation of resources at any one point in time, and you need to know that information for industrial policy to work. So industrial policy cannot help but misallocate resources. Another problem with industrial policy is that it breeds cronyism. In case study after case study after case study, industrial policy is determined, not by some detached being discerning the best allocation of resources, but by the best and most influential lobbyists.

I think industrial policy remains attractive to people for two reasons. One is a sort of hubris about human intellect and how much you can know about the world. The second is that it panders to people’s desire for security. I think it’s very difficult for people to live their lives unless they have some degree of predictability and stability, and people think that industrial policy can provide their community or economic sector with that stability. But it can’t. Just like protectionism, industrial policy corrodes an industry’s competitiveness and can encourage laziness and a sense of entitlement among those who are being protected. In the long term, that results in greater instability and insecurity.

Many worry that, because so many manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, we need industrial policy to help those displaced workers. What would you say about that specific concern?

Well, there’s no question that the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen since the 1970s, but that has relatively little to do with outsourcing and a lot more to do with technological change. And that’s a good thing, because manufacturing in the 1950s relied very heavily on manual labor, which was exhausting and had a high risk of injury. Technology made the industry safer and more productive, and displaced workers gravitated to service sector jobs, which are generally safer, less physically demanding, and better-paid.

The other thing I would say is that many parts of the country that once had very big industrial manufacturing sectors have successfully transitioned towards something different. Pittsburgh and Grand Rapids are good examples. You can contrast those examples with places like Youngstown, Ohio or Detroit, Michigan, which, rather than adapting, tried to stay the same through protectionism. In other words, those towns and cities that opted to embrace change and work with the change have come out the other side quite well, while the places that opted not to change have effectively made themselves poorer and less competitive.

You have a chapter with a rather counterintuitive title: “Business Against the Market.” What do you mean by that?

There’s a common assumption that being in favor of the market is the same as being in favor of business. And I always say, no, businesses are participants in markets, they’re not markets themselves, and that’s an important distinction because the interests of a given business may not coincide with the interests of American consumers. Businesses, in many cases, don’t even particularly like markets. I know plenty of business leaders who like subsidies, are quite favorable towards tariffs, and resent competition. They don’t like having to constantly adapt to stay alive.

That is an excellent transition to part two of the book, “Markets in America.” You start out that section of the book with America as a creative nation. Tell me about that.

The classical economists of the Scottish Enlightenment, even into the 19th century, didn’t say much about things like entrepreneurship and economic creativity. I think it was assumed rather than talked about. But in the 20th century, people like Joseph Schumpeter, or, in more recent decades, Israel Kirzner, pointed out that the entrepreneur, and human creativity in general, is essential for a dynamic economy. Entrepreneurs are not just making big discoveries like the iPhone that fundamentally change the entire economy, but they also make piecemeal changes on an everyday basis that constantly animate the economy. If you took away creativity from the market, it would enter almost automatic stagnation.

I think it’s important for those of us who favor markets to talk more about creativity. It’s a distinctly human force. We are made to truck and barter, as Adam Smith said, and we’re also made to be creative. That, I think, is a very uplifting, very positive message. And of course, people on the other side of the debate tend to be rather suspicious of economic creativity because economic creativity creates disruption and change. It means you have to adapt.

Now tell me about America as a competitive nation.

As you can probably tell by my voice, I wasn’t born in the United States, so I come at this as someone who’s lived in America for a long time, but who has an outsider’s perspective. And Americans are very, very competitive people. They don’t see competition as bad or even distasteful. And that’s important because competition is not about destroying other people, it’s about adapting and changing so that you can do things faster or more efficiently or more creatively than other people.

Finally, you discuss America as a trading nation.

Well, again, Americans have been trading with the world since the very beginning of, and even before the Republic. We’ve never been a people that say trade begins and ends in the United States. At the same time, there’s also been immense debate about trade in the United States since the beginning. In the 19th century, the single issue that most divided Americans, apart from slavery, was tariffs. In the 1830s, we even had some states threatening to secede over tariffs, because they wanted to be able to freely trade with European countries.

One of the things about the United States that lots of external observers noticed from the very beginning is that America began as a commercial nation. It wasn’t a feudal society. Even mercantilism was not particularly strong in the American colonies compared to, say, continental Europe and Britain. When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s, he looked around and said, “Everyone is an entrepreneur.” So, commerce is part of our identity, of who we are as a people.

If we lose sight of that, I think the country is in big trouble. We’re not meant to be just another Western European social democracy. There are some Americans who want America to become like that, but that is not the vision that the founders had of the United States, and I don’t think it’s a vision that large numbers of Americans really want, because they understand that we would lose what makes us different from other countries.

Given current events, what do you foresee in terms of the future economic direction of the United States? Are we going to move closer to that ideal haven of freedom, or further away?

Well, the battle of ideas never ends. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, there were plenty of people expressing deep reservations about markets and limited government. The New Deal and Great Society programs still overhang a lot of American political culture and inform the assumptions that many Americans bring when they think about the economy.

What we’ve seen added since the mid-2010s is the addition of a nationalist populism, which is now the dominant force in the Republican Party. There are similar things happening on the political left as well, in the form of a class-oriented populism that feeds off the idea that any economic inequality is inherently wrong and needs to be corrected.

It’s interesting that you hear a lot of the same mythologies among both nationalist populists and left-wing populists. There’s the sense that blue-collar workers have done poorly as a result of economic liberalization, that manufacturing has been emptied out by trade, that we should be giving more benefits and welfare to particular segments of society rather than trying to wind these things back.

So, in addition to all the usual problems that we have when it comes to defending markets—the fact that arguments for markets are often counterintuitive, that markets are about the long-term rather than the short-term, that markets force us to face up to certain realities of the human condition—we also have this cross-party populist consensus, which is going to be very difficult to dislodge.

In the end, I think their policies will fail and inflict enormous harm, because they always do. Economic history is full of examples like this. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll move back in the direction of markets very quickly; the argument, “well, we didn’t do enough intervention,” will remain. That means that we need to keep making the same arguments, and we also need to find ways to get our arguments across to broader audiences because, like it or not, in a democracy like the United States, you have to win both the battle of ideas and the battle of public opinion.

I always try to end The Human Progress Podcast on a positive note.

What do you feel most hopeful about with regard to the future of the United States of America?

I’m very hopeful and inspired by the fact that we remain by far the world’s most entrepreneurial economy. Even despite all the regulation, despite Roosevelt, despite Johnson, despite all sorts of very bad policies, entrepreneurship continues to flourish in the United States. There’s something about American culture that inclines people to view entrepreneurship as a positive rather than a negative. And if you have a strong culture of entrepreneurship, then I think you’ve got a lot of room for hope.

It’s also amazing how resilient American capitalism is. It bounces back over and over and over again. It’s battered, and it’s still being punched around, but nonetheless, it keeps powering forward.

Read the full transcript

This year’s Simon Abundance Index features interactive graphics that allow you to explore trends in abundance across individual countries and commodities. To access these features, please read the version of the index posted on our website.

The Simon Abundance Index (SAI) measures the relationship between resource abundance and population. It combines the per-person abundance of 50 basic commodities with the size of the world’s population into a single number. The index began in 1980 with a base value of 100. In 2025, the SAI stood at 636.4, indicating that resources have become 536.4 percent more abundant over the past 45 years. All 50 commodities in the dataset were more abundant in 2025 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 4.20 percent, thus doubling every 17 years.

The SAI is based on the ideas of Julian Simon, a University of Maryland economist and Cato Institute senior fellow who pioneered research and analysis of the relationship between population growth and resource abundance. If resources were truly finite, as many people believe, an increase in population would be expected to lead to scarcity and higher prices. However, as Simon discovered through exhaustive research spanning decades, the opposite was true. As the global population increased, resources tended to become more abundant.

How is that possible? Simon understood that atoms without knowledge have no economic value. It is knowledge that transforms atoms into resources that benefit all of us. While the quantity of atoms on Earth is finite, the frontiers of undiscovered knowledge are infinite. He also understood that only human beings, especially those living under conditions of economic and political freedom, can create new knowledge. As he wrote, “The ultimate resource is people, especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty, who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.”

The Simon Abundance Index, 1980–2025

Over 45 years, the index climbed from a base value of 100 to 636.4, a more than sixfold increase. The line does not climb smoothly. The SAI declined in the early 2000s, as a rapidly growing global economy led to elevated demand for resources. It fell again during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted production and supply chains around the world, and following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which spiked energy prices. In both cases, the index recovered. By 2024, it had reclaimed its pre-pandemic trajectory, and 2025 extended that recovery, returning near the all-time high of 700.8 reached in 2020.

This year’s interactive version of Figure 1 adds a capability not available in prior editions: country-level exploration. Readers can select any of the 42 countries accounting for 85.9 percent of global gross domestic product and 66.3 percent of the world’s population, and see how much resource abundance has increased for that country’s citizens relative to 1980. They can also view the ranking of 42 countries by cumulative resource abundance between 1980 and 2025 and compare them. Results show that no country’s citizens in this dataset experienced less resource abundance in 2025 than in 1980.

Individual Commodity Changes Between 1980 and 2025

The SAI uses “time prices” to measure changes in resource abundance. A time price tells you how long you must work to earn enough money to buy something. If you work less time this year than last year to afford the same good, your standard of living has risen. Time prices are elegant, intuitive, and universal. They can be used to compare the cost of bread in France in 1900 with the cost of bread in France in 2000, or the cost of milk in China with that in the United States in 2025. Because time prices always divide nominal prices by nominal hourly wages, they do not require any adjustment for inflation.

Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 basic commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. That figure has a concrete meaning. What required an hour of work in 1980 now requires approximately 18 minutes. Put differently, the same hour of work that bought a single unit of a typical commodity in 1980 buys 3.44 units in 2025, a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. The personal abundance of resources increased at a compound annual growth rate of 2.78 percent, thus doubling every 25 years.

How We Measure Overall Abundance: The Rectangle Explained

Resource abundance can be understood at two levels: personal and population-wide. Think of the world’s resource supply as a pizza. Personal abundance measures the size of each individual slice. Population-level abundance measures the size of the entire pie. The pie can grow in two ways: the slices get larger, or the number of slices increases. Between 1980 and 2025, both happened simultaneously.

The box chart below makes this point intuitive. Draw a rectangle for 1980. Index both the width, representing global population, and the height, representing per capita resource abundance, to a value of one. That is the amber box. Now draw a second rectangle for 2025, scaled to reflect actual changes. The width has expanded to 1.850, reflecting an 85.0 percent increase in the world’s population, from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion people. The height has risen to 3.44, reflecting a 244 percent increase in what the average person on earth can buy with a given amount of work. (We assume average abundance growth rates in economies we do not track – a conservative assumption given that the GDP per person in many of these developing countries grew at a faster pace than that in our dataset, a contributing factor to the well-documented dramatic decline in global income inequality in recent decades.) That is the teal box.

The area of the 1980 box is 1.0. The area of the 2025 box is 1.850 multiplied by 3.44, which equals 6.364. That is a 536.4 percent increase. That is the SAI. Put differently, the world’s population grew by 85.0 percent, but population-level resource abundance grew by more than 536 percent. Every 1-percentage-point increase in global population corresponded to roughly 6.3 percentage points of growth in population-level resource abundance.

This relationship, in which resources grow far faster than the population consuming them, is what we call superabundance.

Individual Commodity Changes from 2024 to 2025

In 2025, the SAI stood at 636.4, up 17.2 points from 619.2 in 2024. That was a 2.78 percent increase. Of the 50 commodities in the index, 27 became more abundant, and 23 became less abundant. The range of one-year change was wide, from a 65.6 percent increase for oranges to a 36.3 percent decline for coconut oil.

A brief clarification is in order. When time prices fall, abundance rises. Workers need fewer hours of labor to buy the same quantity of a good. When time prices rise, abundance falls. Workers must spend more of their labor to buy that same quantity.

The observed pattern of mixed annual results is normal. Some commodities rise sharply in abundance; others fall sharply. Short-term variation is a standard feature of commodity markets. Weather, disease, transport disruptions, investment cycles, policy shifts, and changes in demand all affect prices from year to year. The fact that 23 commodities became less abundant in 2025 is therefore not surprising, nor does it contradict the broader story of long-run progress.

That was one of Julian Simon’s main insights. Simon did not argue that resource prices move in a smooth downward line. He argued that, over time, human beings respond to scarcity signals. Higher prices encourage conservation, substitution, innovation, new production, and better organization. In that sense, temporary scarcity is not the end of the story. It is often the beginning of adjustment, discovery, and the sharing of new knowledge.

Oranges provide a good example of the uneven trend toward greater abundance. In earlier years, orange abundance had risen dramatically, only to reverse as disease, crop damage, and supply-chain problems pushed time prices back up. By 2024, much of the earlier gain had nearly disappeared. If one looked only at that moment, one might have concluded that the long-term trend toward greater abundance had broken down. But that would have been a mistake. In 2025, orange abundance rebounded by 65.6 percent, the largest single-year gain of any commodity in this SAI edition.

That rebound illustrates Simon’s point. Short-term setbacks are real, but they do not by themselves define the long-run trajectory. The proper way to read the index is not to expect uninterrupted annual improvement in every commodity. It is to recognize that volatility is normal, adjustment is constant, and the long-run tendency remains toward greater abundance. By that measure, the 2025 results are consistent with the larger historical pattern.

Conclusion

The SAI began its recovery from the disruptions caused by COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2023, and has continued its recovery into 2025. Despite natural disasters, geopolitical turmoil, persistent monetary inflation in some markets, and ongoing conflict in parts of the world, resources continued to become more abundant at a pace that far exceeds population growth. Over 45 years, global population grew 85.0 percent. Personal resource abundance grew 244 percent. The result is a planet that is, by this measure, more than six times better supplied per capita with the basic commodities on which human welfare depends than it was in 1980.

This year’s edition introduces a substantially more interactive and exploratory presentation than in prior years. Readers can now move between the global SAI trend, individual country trajectories, commodity-level time-price charts, and annual change rankings within a single interface.

The message remains the one Julian Simon spent his career advancing. Human beings are not a drain on the resources of this planet. They are the mechanism by which atoms become resources, by which constraints are discovered and dissolved, and by which each generation inherits a world more abundantly supplied than the one before it.

We explore these topics in greater depth in our book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. You can also visit our website at superabundance.com.

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• An analysis from Brookings finds that the net price of college (i.e., “the sticker price minus scholarships and grants”) in the United States has fallen substantially in recent years, particularly for poorer students attending elite private institutions.

Conservation & Biodiversity

• Around the world, rising crop yields are allowing agricultural land to be returned to nature, but how long does it take for that land to regain a wild, abundant equilibrium? A recently published study in Ecuador’s Chocó rainforest found that recovery can happen fairly rapidly. After analyzing abandoned agricultural land at different phases of recovery, the researchers estimated that within 30 years, the land regained over 90 percent of the abundance and species diversity found in old-growth forests, and about 75 percent of their species composition.

• Another rainforest study finds that the Amazon may be more drought-resistant than previously assumed. The researchers argue that most studies of Amazon drought response focus on forests where groundwater lies deep underground, making them more vulnerable to lower levels of rainfall. Their study instead examined forests with shallow water tables—which make up a third of the Amazon—and found that even during a severe drought, tree mortality did not increase and tree biomass continued to rise.

• Thanks to habitat restoration efforts, Central California Coast coho salmon have enjoyed a run of fruitful spawning migrations. In 2025, 30,000 adult salmon returned to Mendocino Coast rivers to breed, up from 15,000 the year before and 3,000 a decade ago.

Energy & Natural Resources

• Quaise Energy, a geothermal power company, has announced it is building a prototype “superhot” geothermal power plant in Oregon. Their key innovation is a novel drilling technique that uses microwaves to break rock instead of drill bits. This approach could let Quaise tap into deeper, hotter rocks, and thereby generate far more energy than shallower wells.

• Fervo Energy, another geothermal developer, appears to be scaling up. The company recently ordered turbines totaling 1.7 gigawatts of capacity, enough to support dozens of standardized power plants.

Food & Hunger

• A new variety of banana genetically modified to be slow-ripening and browning-resistant has been approved in Japan and Brazil, and will be grown in the latter.

Health & Demographics

• The World Health Organization estimates that measles vaccination has prevented 19.5 million premature deaths in Africa since 2000.

• A new drug for metastatic pancreatic cancer nearly doubled survival time in a phase 3 trial, with patients living for a median of 13.2 months after treatment began compared to 6.7 months on standard chemotherapy.

• Organ donations have surged in the United States, partly thanks to improved harvesting methods. Until recently, most organs came from donors who were brain dead but kept on life support, with their circulatory systems still functioning. Over the past decade, however, advances in organ preservation and recovery have made it increasingly feasible to recover organs after circulatory death, when the heart has stopped and preservation becomes far more difficult. A recent study finds that in 2000, just 2 percent of donors fell into this category; by 2025, that had risen to 49 percent, with the number of such donors rising from 118 to 8,129.

Politics & Freedom

• The Economist’s democracy index shows a small global improvement in 2025, with scores rising or stable in 3 out of 4 countries. A welcome sign, though it does not make up for the significant democratic backsliding the world has seen since the 2010s.

• Thanks to satellite constellations, humanity now has the technical ability to provide internet connection anywhere on Earth. The biggest remaining barriers are political; many governments don’t want their citizens to enjoy unfettered access to the internet, or for their domestic service providers to have to compete with foreign firms. In Argentina, where such a ban was recently lifted, two million people have connected to Starlink, many of whom live in remote areas of the country.

Science & Technology

• A recent paper finds that AI models can outperform humans at fact-checking social media posts. After generating over 1,600 AI-written Community Notes on X, researchers compared them with human-written notes on the same posts and found that the AI notes were rated as more helpful by both left- and right-leaning users.

• Autonomous vehicles continue to make progress around the world:

  • The Netherlands Vehicle Authority has become the first European regulator to approve Tesla’s supervised self-driving software, commenting that “Proper use of this driver assistance system makes a positive contribution to road safety.” Seems especially notable coming from the world’s foremost cycling nation.

  • An autonomous bus will soon begin operating in Norway without a safety driver.

  • Uber and the Chinese self-driving firm Pony.ai are launching the first European commercial ​robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia.

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by Adam Omary, Jeffrey Singer, and Alexander Williams.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.1 billion people worldwide are living with a mental disorder. The figure has grown faster than the global population, and the burden falls disproportionately on the world’s wealthiest societies. In the United States, an estimated 49.5 percent of adolescents have met diagnostic criteria for at least one mental disorder at some point in their lifetime. Additionally, about 31 percent of American adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives, and 21 percent a mood disorder, according to the National Institutes of Mental Health.

In Australia, the National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing found that 21.5 percent of adults over 25 and over 38 percent of young people aged 16 to 24 met criteria for a mental disorder in the previous 12 months. Across OECD nations, one in five adults experiences at least mild depressive symptoms, with over 9 percent of the population reporting clinical depression or anxiety.

These trends have become perhaps the most common objection to the case for human progress: If life is getting better, why are so many people apparently unhappy? Why are hundreds of millions of people across the most prosperous nations on Earth labeled clinically mentally unwell?

For one, rising mental health diagnoses may themselves be a sign of progress. Psychiatry as a discipline is barely more than a century old, and it was stigmatized and unscientific throughout most of its history. What we now call mental health problems are, in many cases, what our ancestors called the inevitable vicissitudes of life. When survival demanded hard physical labor from dawn to dusk, there was little room for psychoanalysis. Perhaps only in a world of material abundance, safety, and comfort—where mood swings and relationship conflict represent life’s biggest challenges for many otherwise healthy people—do we begin to treat such adversity not as fate but as a problem to be solved.

That is not to dismiss the problem entirely. Our survival-evolved brains are navigating environments they were never built for. It was adaptive to be vigilant about threats in one’s local environment; there was no possibility of witnessing every catastrophe on Earth in real time. Social media, sedentary lifestyles, weakened community bonds, and the erosion of traditional sources of meaning all represent genuine evolutionary mismatches that plausibly contribute to psychological distress.

But at least in the United States, there is strong reason to believe that a less-examined driver of the supposed rise in mental illness is the healthcare financing system itself, which pays more when providers diagnose more.

Psychiatric Overdiagnosis in the United States

Psychiatric diagnoses in the United States are rising across virtually every category, in every age group. According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, more than one in five U.S. adults—59.3 million people—lived with a mental illness in 2022. By these numbers, mental illness is not a rare affliction but a near-universal feature of American life, prompting some, including former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, to declare a mental health epidemic.

The rise is evident across specific conditions as well. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now places autism prevalence at 1 in 31, a 381 percent increase since 2000. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among American children nearly doubled from 6.1 to 11.4 percent between 1997 and 2022. Among adults, self-reported ADHD diagnosis among working-age adults has more than tripled since 2012, from 4.25 to 13.9 percent. Diagnosed anxiety among children aged 3 to 17 rose from 6.9 to 10.6 percent between 2016 and 2022—a 54 percent increase in just six years. Diagnosed depression among the same age group climbed from 3.1 to 4.6 percent, a 48 percent increase, in the same time period. Among adults, the past-year prevalence of any mental illness rose to 23.1 percent in 2022, with young adults aged 18 to 25 reporting the highest rate of 36.2 percent.

A surface-level reading of these numbers suggests that America is indeed in the midst of a mental health crisis. But diagnoses can change even when our underlying psychology does not.

Psychiatric diagnoses differ from most of medicine because they rely on subjective mental phenomena and behavioral symptoms instead of physical symptoms or biomarkers. There is no blood test for autism, no imaging scan that confirms ADHD, and no objective test that differentiates clinical anxiety from ordinary worry. Diagnosis depends on clinical judgment about whether a person’s behavior exceeds a threshold established by committee consensus in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

The DSM has progressively broadened the boundaries of major psychiatric categories over successive revisions. The DSM-5, published in 2013, collapsed previously distinct autism categories into a single spectrum, making “on the spectrum” a label elastic enough to encompass both nonverbal children requiring constant care and socially awkward adolescents who prefer solitude. The same revision loosened ADHD criteria, allowing symptoms to appear as late as age 12 rather than requiring onset by age 7, and reducing the symptom threshold for adults. Generalized anxiety disorder requires only that worry be “excessive” and cause “clinically significant distress or impairment,” judgments that depend entirely on a clinician’s interpretation of where normal worry ends, and disorder begins.

Defenders of modern psychiatry often claim that expanding diagnostic criteria reflect better screening, capturing subtler presentations, and that rising diagnoses reflect more accurate assessments of the true population prevalence of mental illness. But aside from the grim forecasts of living in a world where half of all young people have experienced mental illness, there is reason to believe that psychiatric diagnoses have become less precise, not more.

Broad diagnostic criteria often interact with screening instruments that cannot reliably distinguish clinical conditions from normal variation. The CDC’s autism prevalence estimates, for instance, rely on surveys such as the Social Responsiveness Scale, which asks parents to rate statements like “Would rather be alone than with others,” “Has difficulty making friends,” and “Is regarded by other children as odd or weird.” These items describe behavioral traits common to social anxiety, introversion, and ordinary shyness and cannot reliably distinguish autism. Yet researchers routinely use high scores on such instruments as proxies for clinical diagnosis in prevalence studies, including in the CDC’s own data.

The limitations of this approach became especially apparent after the COVID-19 pandemic. CDC autism prevalence surged an additional 40 percent in just four years, from 2018 to 2022—a period during which millions of children experienced prolonged social isolation, disrupted routines, and reduced peer interaction that would predictably elevate scores on parent-reported behavioral surveys measuring social difficulties, whether or not the underlying rate of autism had changed.

None of this diminishes the reality of autism, ADHD, or anxiety disorders for individuals with significant functional impairment. But when the boundaries of diagnosis are inherently subjective, and when diagnosis is the key that unlocks streams of taxpayer-funded services, the system will predictably expand those boundaries.

How Medicaid and the ACA Reward Diagnostic Expansion

When diagnosis is subjective, and payment depends on diagnosis, the system will reward expanding the definition of illness.

Incentives drive behavior. Psychiatric overdiagnoses would matter less if the diagnosis were merely a label. But in the American healthcare system, diagnoses serve as keys that unlock streams of taxpayer dollars.

The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, extended by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), requires health plans, including Medicaid managed care plans, to cover behavioral health services at parity with medical and surgical services. Parity addressed a real problem: mental health conditions were historically under-covered. But parity also limits the tools that plans can use to manage utilization. Prior authorization requirements, visit caps, and annual spending ceilings can all be challenged on parity grounds. Plans that wish to avoid litigation or regulatory action have a strong reason to approve rather than deny.

Under the fee-for-service payment model within Medicaid, which 2008 parity provisions dramatically expanded, providers submit a claim to the state Medicaid agency. The state then pays the provider in accordance with the predetermined price of the service, otherwise known as the fee schedule. The fee schedule, in theory, serves to regulate providers’ room for maneuver with respect to payment claims, thereby preventing undue financial gain. The reimbursement structure underlying the fee-for-service model is designed to mitigate abuse by binding providers to a prearranged sum.

However, the fee schedule only governs the prices to which providers are entitled for their services. It introduces no effective mechanism by which to govern the legitimacy of the services themselves. This empowers providers to profit by inflating the frequency of services, knowing that the fee-for-service model fixes only the pricing and not the services. This creates the conditions for supplier-induced demand.

In practice, therefore, providers have the freedom to manipulate demand by lowering the diagnostic threshold for services. Across states, weak spending constraints further subsidize this demand. This serves to distort natural market forces by enabling providers to expand mental health services beyond the point at which their cost would be acceptable to recipients, especially those with minimal diagnostic eligibility.

Similar risks persist in managed care, which pays per patient rather than per service. While this model improves cost predictability, it does little to ensure services are necessary. Providers still control enrollment, and expanding the number of patients can drive spending just as effectively as increasing the number of services. Changing the payment mechanism does not eliminate the incentive—it simply shifts how it is exploited.

Additionally, under Medicaid’s Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment (EPSDT) benefit, states must cover all medically necessary services for children under 21, even services not otherwise included in the state’s Medicaid plan, including mental health services.

When diagnoses rest on subjective behavioral criteria, and when coverage means open-ended reimbursement for services billed by the hour, the connection between spending and genuine clinical need begins to erode.

Then there is the federal matching structure. Medicaid’s open-ended Federal Medical Assistance Percentage reimburses states for 50 to 83 percent of Medicaid expenditures. When a state spends a dollar on autism services, it pays 17 to 50 cents. Federal taxpayers cover the rest. And because the match is open-ended, more spending automatically brings in more federal dollars. States bear only a fraction of the cost, weakening the fiscal discipline that comes with spending their own money.

Once therapy became mandatory, states used Medicaid waivers to circumvent standard rules and expand services and eligibility with federal funds. These waivers—and similar authorities—opened the door for providers to significantly increase Medicaid billing.

Enhanced federal matching rates during the COVID-19 public health emergency further reduced the state share, especially during the period when mental health spending grew the fastest. The pandemic significantly increased both the supply of and demand for psychiatric services. Telehealth services for mental health conditions surged 16- to 20-fold during the first year of the pandemic, according to a RAND study of over 5 million commercially insured adults, more than compensating for the drop in in-person care. By August 2022, overall mental health service utilization was 38.8 percent higher than before the pandemic. Mental health and substance use diagnoses grew from 11 percent of telehealth visits in early 2019 to 39 percent by mid-2021. The share of all outpatient visits carrying a mental health or substance use diagnosis doubled from 4 to 8 percent.

Pandemic emergency waivers and telehealth policies further loosened restrictions on how services could be delivered and reimbursed. States such as Massachusetts, North Carolina, Indiana, and Colorado expanded telehealth eligibility (including audio-only services) and adopted payment parity for telehealth, effectively turning remote services into scalable, high-volume billing opportunities. The result was not just a shift in how care was delivered, but a notable increase in utilization and spending, often in the tens of millions of dollars per state annually, consistent with policy changes that reduced the marginal cost of delivering and billing for services.

A substantial body of research suggests that financial incentives can influence psychiatric diagnosis rates. In the United States, eligibility for school services and insurance coverage often depends on specific diagnostic categories. For example, states offering more autism-specific services tend to report higher autism prevalence, while classifications of other developmental disabilities decline—a pattern consistent with diagnostic substitution. A 2009 study estimated that at least 26 percent of the increase in autism diagnoses in California between 1992 and 2005 could be explained by diagnostic substitution, primarily from children previously classified as having intellectual disability.

A Problem of Prosperity?

In economic terms, what has unfolded in American mental healthcare is supplier-induced demand operating within a system that lacks the price signals, utilization controls, and outcome accountability mechanisms that would normally constrain it. The therapy industry has expanded to absorb the available reimbursement, exactly as economic theory would predict in a fee-for-service system with elastic diagnostic criteria, open-ended coverage mandates, and absent oversight.

That is worth stating clearly, because the rising tide of psychiatric diagnoses is often cited as proof that modernity has failed; that the improvements in life expectancy, poverty reduction, literacy, income, and so forth are hollow, because they mask a deeper spiritual or psychological collapse. That narrative is understandable. It is also incomplete.

The story of mental health in the modern world is not one of pure decline. It is a story of multiple forces operating simultaneously, some genuinely concerning and some artifacts of the very prosperity that makes psychological well-being a priority in the first place. Wealthy societies can afford to screen for, name, and treat conditions that our ancestors endured in silence or never recognized at all. That is a form of progress. But when the systems designed to deliver that care are structured to reward volume over value, diagnosis over outcome, and spending over accountability, the result is predictable: an ever-expanding pool of diagnoses that dilutes resources away from those with the most severe impairment.

There is reason to be optimistic. The fact that societies are wealthy and secure enough to attend to psychological suffering at all—rather than simply enduring it—represents a remarkable achievement.

But the same ingenuity that produced modern medicine, market economies, and unprecedented material abundance can also produce perverse incentive structures that undermine the goals they were designed to serve. Understanding that human systems, like the humans who design them, are imperfect and responsive to incentives, is not an argument against progress. It is a precondition for sustaining it. Progress, as ever, depends on getting the incentives right.

Authors:

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

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

Alexander Williams is an intern at HumanProgress.org.

• The Wall Street Journal recently published a fascinating set of data visualizations showing how life has changed for the average American worker over the past few centuries. In short, despite all the hand-wringing over our transition out of a manufacturing-dominated economy, the modern worker has a lot to be grateful for.

  

Energy & Environment

• The New York State Department of Health has determined that, thanks to a reduction in water pollution—namely, declining levels of toxic polychlorinated biphenyl compounds (PCBs)—certain fish species in the lower Hudson River are now safe to eat in moderation.

• Conservationists in Zambia are using synthetic furs to reduce leopard poaching. An important festival of Zambia’s Lozi people involves dressing up in leopard skins. Rather than trying to end the practice, the cat conservation non-profit Panthera Corporation began distributing ultra-realistic synthetic pelts. According to a recently published study of the program, the fake furs were rapidly adopted by the Lozi and were followed by a drop in poaching incidents and a rise in leopard sightings by camera traps.

• The ampurta, a formerly endangered carnivorous marsupial found in Australia, has rebounded in recent years, expanding its range by an area the size of Denmark between 2015 and 2021. Researchers credit some of the resurgence to the 1995 release of rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus, which wiped out large numbers of invasive rabbits in Australia and thereby reduced the population of feral cats and foxes, major predators of the ampurta.

Health & Demographics

• In a small trial in China, a single-injection gene therapy improved hearing in all ten congenitally deaf participants. One even gained near-normal hearing within just four months.

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that traffic deaths in the US were 6.7 percent lower in 2025 than in 2024, reaching the second-lowest death rate per mile traveled ever recorded.

• US pedestrian deaths were 10.9 percent lower in the first half of 2025 than in the same period a year earlier, though they remained slightly above the 2019 level.

• An experimental hookworm vaccine sharply reduced infection intensity in a Phase 2 trial, with vaccinated participants showing a median of zero detectable worm eggs in their feces after exposure. If approved, this would be the first vaccine for the parasitic disease, which infects hundreds of millions of people each year and is a leading cause of anemia.

Science & Technology

• Rapid delivery is not only for urbanites. According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, Amazon now provides two-day delivery to 62 percent of rural and small-town households in the US, and one-day delivery to 20 percent.

• Total robotaxi travel distance doubled in California last year, from 3.8 million kilometers per month at the end of 2024 to 9.4 million in December 2025.

• Scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute in California used sorghum leaf cells to model how thousands of genetic tweaks affect photosynthesis, building a detailed map of which changes could plausibly enhance the process. The researchers hope their insights will generalize across crops and offer new ways to increase yields.

• A new CRISPR gene-editing technique could make it much easier to engineer staple crops. Using a refined CRISPR enzyme they call CasY7, researchers from the South China Agricultural University were able to edit rice and maize genomes 2.7 times more efficiently than a typical CRISPR system, potentially speeding up the development of higher-yielding, more resilient crops.

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Americans have seen tremendous advances in the availability and abundance of material goods. As Marian L. Tupy and Gale Pooley from the Cato Institute have shown, the most basic necessity of food became eight times more affordable over the 100 years up to 2019, relative to average wages (the food inflation after 2019 set us back a little bit, but the long-run trends are still quite favorable). This increasing abundance is not limited to food alone, as a wide variety of finished goods have become much more affordable in recent decades.

These positive trends are well known for goods and even some services, such as cosmetic surgeries, but a common objection, both on social media and in real life, is: What about housing? That is a fair question, considering that Americans spend about 25 percent of their pre-tax annual income on housing, which has been a fairly constant share of their income for most of the past 125 years. Given the large share of the budget that housing costs represent, and the failure of housing to decline as a share of the budget as other necessities did, it is worth investigating the problem further.

On housing, the critics do have a point: Housing costs across the US and many other nations have quickly outpaced income growth in recent years. While we shouldn’t be nostalgic for the housing of the 1950s—houses were about half the size of today’s and had fewer amenities we now consider standard, such as air conditioning—nostalgia for the housing of 30 years ago might be justifiable.

Since 1994, two common measures of housing prices, the Case-Shiller Index and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Median Sales Price data, have increased faster than most measures of income, including median family income and average wages. And unlike the change since the 1950s, the recent increase in housing prices can’t be primarily explained by houses getting bigger: The median square footage of new homes sold has increased only 16 percent since 1994 and has even been falling in the past decade.

Even more so, to the extent housing has become more expensive relative to wage growth in recent years, the trend could worsen over the next 30 years—unless we quickly change policy to allow the supply of housing to increase.

It may seem puzzling that housing could remain roughly the same share of income on average in the US, even as housing prices have increased faster than incomes in recent decades. This seeming puzzle can be resolved by thinking about two different kinds of households: renters and homeowners. While renters and homeowners may certainly be different in many ways—renters tend to be younger, poorer, and so on—there is a fundamental difference in how they experience increases in the price of housing. Renters are typically subject to new market-rate rents on a regular basis, often annually. However, if homeowners remain in the same house they are generally insulated from these changes, with only insurance and property taxes possibly increasing annually, not their principal and interest on the mortgage.

These intuitions are borne out in the data. According to the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, in 1984 the share of income that renters spent on housing was about 30.4 percent, which rose over the next four decades to 34.4 percent. Homeowners saw the opposite pattern, with the share of their income spent on housing falling from 27.7 percent in 1984 to 22.6 percent in 2024. The overall average has been fairly stable, but the experience of renters and homeowners has diverged.

The Facts of Housing Unaffordability

Historically, the rule of thumb in the United States is to spend no more than 30 percent of income on housing—though as we saw above, on average Americans spend less than that. But averages can obscure cost burdens for some households. According to an analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), fully one-third of US households spent over 30 percent of their income on housing, and 16 percent of households spent over half of their income on housing in 2024. The number of cost-burdened households has been steadily rising in recent years, as the price of both homes and rentals has increased faster than incomes in most of the US.

We can see the problem of rising home values relative to income by looking at another rule of thumb: Home prices should be in the range of three and five times a household’s annual income. In 1994, out of the United States’ 387 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), 263 had median home prices that were less than three times the median household income (the data once again come from Harvard’s JCHS). Only 12 MSAs in 1994—mostly in California and Hawaii—had ratios above 5.0.

Fast-forward to 2024, when there were 114 MSAs above the 5.0 ratio of median home prices to income, and those were scattered all over the country. Instead of being in just California and Hawaii, they were also in previously affordable states such as Montana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arkansas. In 2024, the number of MSAs with price-to-income ratios below 3.0 had dwindled to just 32, many of them in the dying Rust Belt. And you don’t even need to go back to 1994 to see the dramatic change. As late as 2019, there were still well over 100 MSAs with a price-to-income ratio below 3.0.

While the majority (241 MSAs) are still within the suggested range of three to five times a household’s income, many are pushing toward the upper end of that range. Given the trend—the median ratio crept up from 2.65 in 1994 to 4.27 in 2024—it is not unreasonable to expect the ratio to continue to increase, absent any changes in policy.

The challenge of housing affordability is not unique to the United States. Using the home-price-to-income ratio from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), since 1994 the US saw home prices increase by 20 percent more than incomes did, meaning that housing is more expensive in real terms. Some other countries were in a much worse situation: Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom all had over 80 percent increases in the ratio of housing prices to income. Not every country followed the same pattern, though. In New Zealand, the price-to-income ratio rose by 126 percent between 1994 and 2021. The ratio declined to 80 percent in 2024. And Japan’s price-to-income ratio fell by 25 percent from 1994 to 2024. However, even Japan has recently seen a modest increase in the ratio, by about 14 percent in the past decade. We’ll look at New Zealand and Japan in more detail below.

The Fix for Housing Affordability

But something can be done. While there have been several political solutions proposed, most of those focused on the demand side, such as subsidies to homeowners or renters. Those kinds of solutions are suboptimal because they increase demand, which will only further increase prices if supply does not also increase. The real problem is on the supply side: There is not enough new housing being built in the places people want to live and of the size people want. What is preventing additional building? In most of the US, it is land-use restrictions such as zoning and other policies that limit the density of new homes. Australia and countries across Europe have implemented similar policies that limit the construction of housing in various ways, primarily in the first half of the 20th century. Price increases did not show up immediately, because in most places restrictions were not binding constraints; there was plenty of land in favorable locations until recent decades.

A major restriction on the supply of housing comes in the form of single-family zoning, which prevents multifamily housing (everything from duplexes to skyscraper apartments) from being built in residential areas. A 2019 analysis by the New York Times found that about 75 percent of residential areas in US cities are reserved for single-family homes. In some cities that figure may reach over 85 percent. Of course, most families probably aspire to eventually own a single-family home, but the zoning laws force most land to be dedicated to this form of housing for everyone. That contributes to making housing unaffordable for many younger families today.

Land-use restrictions limit supply in ways that go beyond merely proscribing that most lots be reserved for single-family homes. For example, regulations will often require lots to be of a minimum size, which is counterproductive because land area is often the most expensive part of the property in urban settings, and the regulation forces families to purchase more land than they want. Regulations also set a maximum amount (a common range is 40–60 percent) of the lot that can be covered by the building itself, essentially forcing homes to have large lawns. Again, many families might want a large lot with a large lawn, but these regulations require it for everyone. The problem is that the less land dedicated to the home itself, the less land there is for other homes in the same area. These rules preclude single-family home types that were common in the past in large American cities, such as row houses or townhouses, which typically occupy most of the small lots they sit on.

Zoning Reforms Work

Would reforming land-use regulations really increase the supply of housing and make it more affordable? The available evidence indeed suggests it would.

One example of reform is New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, which in 2016 reformed residential zoning to allow for more intensive housing—duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and the like—on most residential land. This process is referred to as “upzoning.” The results were staggering: As documented in a paper published in the Journal of Urban Economics, construction boomed, with permits doubling in five years. The economists who studied this reform found that rents were 26–33 percent lower than they would have been without it. Rents kept skyrocketing in the rest of New Zealand but stabilized in the parts of Auckland that were upzoned. As mentioned above, New Zealand is notable for seeing its home-price-to-income ratio fall after 2021: As rents stabilized and incomes continued to grow, the ratio declined.

Another example comes from Houston, the fourth-largest city in the US. Houston has long been known as the shining example of a major US city that never adopted citywide zoning, even though some neighborhoods have private deed restrictions that incorporate features similar to zoning. But despite eschewing traditional zoning, Houston still has land-use regulations of various sorts. For example, like most cities, Houston prescribed a minimum lot size of 5,000 square feet. Because people would’ve been paying for more land than they needed, alternate forms of housing such as townhomes were less likely to be built. First in 1998 and then in 2013, Houston reduced the minimum lot size to just 1,400 square feet in parts of the city. As Mercatus Center economist Emily Hamilton shows, there was a boom in construction following the reforms. Despite adding over 1 million people between 1970 and 2020, Houston still managed to have median home prices below the national average.

If Houston and Auckland demonstrate the power of local reform, Tokyo shows what is possible when a nation treats housing as essential infrastructure rather than a matter set by local competing interest groups. As urban scholar André Sorensen details in The Making of Urban Japan (2002), the country stripped municipalities of the power to block code-compliant projects, effectively turning zoning into a national “right to build” rather than a discretionary local negotiation. The results of this policy choice are astonishing. According to a 2016 analysis by the Financial Times, the city of Tokyo consistently builds more new housing each year than the entire state of California or the whole of England, despite having little empty land to spare. By removing the “veto points” that plague Western cities, Tokyo has achieved the status of a growing, vibrant mega-city where rents have remained flat for decades.

Allowing the Market to Increase Supply Keeps Housing Affordable

As families become richer and the population grows, there is increasing pressure on housing prices in desirable locales. The natural market response to increasing prices is to increase supply. Unfortunately, in much of the US and the rest of the developed world, governments have put artificial barriers in place to prevent this market response. While the housing shortage was created by the political process—through the establishment of zoning and other land-use regulations—the solution does not need to come from governments in the form of subsidizing demand. Instead, to unleash the forces of the market and human initiative, governments need to ease regulations on supply.

Land-use regulations are not the only interference in the market process that makes housing less affordable. Some forms of trade policy and protectionism can also harm home prices. For example, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that recent tariff increases for lumber and other inputs can add at least $10,000 to the average price of a home. Even more costly are building regulations, which the NAHB estimated could exceed $90,000 for a typical home in 2021 and were around 40 percent of the cost of multifamily housing such as apartment buildings. While not all of these regulations could be eliminated immediately, the best thing governments can do to address the affordability issue in housing is to figure out how they can get out of the way.

by Walker Wright

In earlier essays, I argued that trade makes us richer, more trusting, more honest, and more fair. Yet over the past decade or so, we have witnessed a growing populist backlash against globalization and international trade. Many critics portray international trade as an example of “foreign intrusions on national sovereignty.” At first glance, the backlash might seem to suggest that trade with outsiders breeds resentment, cultural tension, and ultimately prejudice. In this essay, however, I argue that trade mitigates discrimination and prejudice, paving the way for greater tolerance.

In Capitalism and Freedom, the late Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman dedicated a chapter to the market’s relation to discrimination. Drawing on Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker’s groundbreaking work, Friedman wrote, “The preserves of discrimination in any society are the areas that are most monopolistic in character, whereas discrimination against groups of particular color or religion is least in those areas where there is the greatest freedom of competition.” He continued:

The man who objects to buying from or working alongside a Negro, for example, thereby limits his range of choice. He will generally have to pay a higher price for what he buys or receive a lower return for his work. Or, put the other way, those of us who regard color of skin or religion as irrelevant can buy some things more cheaply as a result.

Survey data can shed light on the relationship between trade and attitudes toward others. A study of international survey data published by the Brookings Institution found that feelings of national superiority and chauvinism were positively associated with opposition to global trade across multiple countries. On the flip side, pro-trade attitudes and greater exposure to global markets are negatively associated with nationalism, ethnocentrism, and prejudice.

For example, negative attitudes among Americans toward outsourcing appear to be associated with an “us versus them” mentality. According to a study by political scientists Edward Mansfield and Diana Mutz, switching from the most isolationist to the least isolationist outlooks predicted a fivefold increase in support for outsourcing. Shifting from the least ethnocentric to the most ethnocentric attitudes predicted a 50 percent decrease in support for outsourcing. And changing from the least nationalistic to the most nationalistic views predicted a 25 percent decrease in support for outsourcing (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Support for Outsourcing by Level of Nationalism

The evidence compounds. Employing data from the General Social Surveys conducted from 1977 to 2010, Northwestern University’s James Lindgren found that racism, intolerance toward out-groups (e.g., homosexuals, atheists, and others), anti-capitalism, and pro-redistribution go hand-in-hand. Even after controlling for gender, logged income, education, age, and year of the survey, Lindgren showed that racism and intolerance are still strong predictors of socialist pro-redistribution and anti-capitalist attitudes. Lindgren’s analysis led him to conclude, “Those who support capitalism and freer markets and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be . . . less traditionally racist” and “less intolerant of unpopular groups.”

That tracks with the work of the Mercatus Center’s Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Choi, who compared respondents from market societies to those in nonmarket societies using the World Values Survey. When asked who they would not like to have as neighbors, those in market societies were less prejudiced against those of a different race, language, or religion, as well as foreign workers, homosexuals, and cohabitating couples (see Figure 2). Trade, it seems, is next to good neighborliness.

Several studies by economists Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson investigated the relationship between tolerance, economic freedom, and globalization. The evidence they gathered suggests a causal relationship between the level of economic globalization and the willingness of parents to teach their children tolerance. Another analysis found that economic freedom plays a seemingly causal role in parents teaching their children tolerance and fostering tolerance toward homosexuals and people of different races (see Figure 3). Focusing solely on the United States, Berggren and Nilsson found a similar causality: Economic freedom increases tolerance toward homosexuals, atheists, and communists. Another study found that economic freedom increases tolerance toward homosexuals, particularly in societies that are high in trust.

Figure 2. Market Societies Are Less Prejudiced

Figure 3. Racial Tolerance and Economic Freedom

And it’s not just parents teaching children tolerance. The media also plays a role in shaping our outlook. An interesting study by researchers at St. Olaf College, Stanford University, and George Mason University combed through a corpus of New York Times articles written over a 20-year period in search of moral language that Americans used in discussing other countries. They then measured the US market interaction with these countries by looking at bilateral trade flows and immigration statistics. Their results indicated that the more market interaction the United States had with a country through trade and immigration, the more news articles contained humanizing language toward that country. We tend to be cordial toward those we do business with.

Of course, it’s easy to say you’re tolerant in a survey or write nice things in an op-ed. It may even be socially desirable. We all want to look good. But does this translate into action? Several studies suggest that it does.

A clever set of experiments published in the European Economic Review showed that both local (monopsonist) and wholesale (competitive) buyers in the Bangladeshi rice market held prejudicial views of ethnic minorities. Prejudicial attitudes were the same across the board. Yet the wholesale buyers quoted the same price for both ethnic majority and minority farmers, whereas the local buyers did not. Why? The authors concluded, “This suggests that the taste-based discrimination that these buyers have against the ethnic minority group . . . can be eliminated if competition is strong enough.”

Those findings were supported by another set of experiments that demonstrated that market exchange decreases discrimination by increasing participants’ focus on their personal gains and reducing identification with their social in-group. Banking deregulation yielded similar results: As the financial sector was deregulated, competition intensified, leading to reduced discrimination against women and minorities.

Protectionist restrictions can exacerbate prejudicial attitudes. As the late economist Walter Williams explained, anti-competitive regulation “lowers the private cost of discriminating against the racially less-preferred person.” But when there is money to be made, trading only with groups who look or think like you doesn’t seem so important. And the more you trade with different groups, the more you realize that maybe, just maybe, they aren’t as bad as you thought.

But let’s go a step further. Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Bates College have also shown how trade can break down prejudice in practice. The researchers examined areas along the Silk Roads, a network of trade routes throughout Eurasia that has been used for over millennia. It turns out that areas within 50 kilometers of the Silk Roads today have higher economic activity compared to those that are 50–100 kilometers away. No real surprise there. But more importantly for our purposes, the former areas also have higher rates of intergroup marriage. It’s hard to find a better example of tolerance than asking someone of another ethnic group to become family and spend the rest of their lives with you.

You see this in 19th-century America as well. Railroad-driven market integration between 1850 and 1920 helped reshape American social horizons. A new study found that as counties gained better access to this intrastate trade, the likelihood of marrying someone outside the local community increased. That’s what’s called extra-community marriage. Other signs of tolerance and trust became apparent: Newspapers began to adopt language that reflected generalized trust. Parents began to give children nationally popular names rather than locally distinctive ones, implying a social circle that had extended beyond the local community. But one of the strongest findings was the increase in religious diversity: A 1 percent increase in market access raised religious diversity by 0.27 standard deviation, indicating a greater tolerance for religious identity and practice. Perhaps most striking, families who moved to these more market-integrated areas adapted quickly, especially those working in commerce-intensive industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, wholesale, retail, and transportation.

The available evidence suggests that repeated exchange softens suspicion toward outsiders. Sustained commercial contact makes unfamiliar people feel less distant and, consequently, less threatening. Trade provides a mechanism through which tolerance is learned and reinforced. As the 18th-century English theologian and scientist Joseph Priestly noted over 200 years ago,

By commerce we enlarge our acquaintance with the terraqueous globe and its inhabitants, which tends to greatly expand the mind, and to cure us of many hurtful prejudices. . . . No person can taste the sweets of commerce, which absolutely depends upon a free and undisturbed intercourse of different and remote nations, but must grow fond of peace, in which alone the advantages he enjoys can be had.

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

• UNESCO recently published an encouraging report on access to education around the world. It finds that 1.4 billion students were enrolled in school in 2024, 30 percent more than in 2000. Over the same period, the global “out-of-school rate,” which measures the share of appropriately aged children who are not enrolled in primary or secondary school, fell from 27.2 percent to 16.8 percent. Unfortunately, the report also notes that enrollment progress has stagnated over the past decade.

• Argentina’s national poverty rate fell to 28.2 percent in the second half of 2025, the lowest it’s been since 2018.

Energy & Environment

• Koalas in the Australian state of Victoria have long since bounced back from their near-extinction in the early 1900s, but many worried that inbreeding threatened their long-term prospects. Happily, a new genetic database suggests Victorian koala genetic diversity is also recovering.

• Whale populations in the Southern Ocean have rebounded to the point that researchers now regularly report spotting pods numbering in the hundreds.

Health & Demographics

• An analysis from Brookings finds that US health care spending in 2024 was $977 billion lower than the government projected it would be back in 2010. The authors attribute some of the gap between the projections and reality to technological innovations that have lowered the costs and improved the effectiveness of certain treatments.

• CDC data indicate that the decline in US drug overdose deaths continued into October 2025.

Science & Technology

• NASA has launched Artemis II. The flight will send four astronauts around the Moon—humanity’s first crewed journey out of low-Earth orbit in over fifty years.

• Data centers receive power from utilities in the form of alternating current electricity, but the computers inside them run on direct current. Because of this mismatch, most facilities end up converting electricity multiple times as it moves through the system, wasting energy at each step. This may now be changing: multiple data center infrastructure suppliers are developing new power distribution systems that require only a single AC-to-DC conversion, potentially making future data centers more resource and energy efficient.

• ChatGPT has solved a math problem on FrontierMath: Open Problems, a benchmark of unsolved problems designed to test AI systems. This is the first problem from the benchmark to be solved so far.

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For years, public health debate has often fixated on a supposed rise in the prevalence of autism. Various culprits have been named, including the well-investigated but unsubstantiated claim that vaccines cause autism. More recently, additional risk factors have been proposed — many by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — including maternal Tylenol use, food dyes and additives, chemical manufacturing agents and other possible stressors affecting perinatal development. Concerns about autism have been spotlighted within the larger Make America Healthy Again movement, motivated by a well-founded alarm over the nation’s devastatingly high burden of chronic disease and psychiatric illness. But there is a bigger problem with the autism epidemic: It doesn’t exist.

Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. The most recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on autism, which was published in April last year, revealed a nearly five-fold increase in the prevalence of autism between 2000 and 2022, from 67 to 322 cases per 10,000 children. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged. A large-scale study published in December, drawing on CDC data from 24,669 8-year-olds across the country, suggests that the dramatic rise in autism diagnoses may be entirely driven by children with mild symptoms and no significant functional impairment. Between 2000 and 2016, there was a 464 percent increase in diagnoses among children with no significant functional impairment whatsoever. In fact, during the same time period, there was a 20 percent decrease in the prevalence of moderate or severe autism, from 15 to 12 cases per 10,000 children.

There is often a lag of several years before such epidemiological datasets are released, and years more for researchers to perform statistical analyses, publish the findings and enter public policy discussions. We do not yet have data more recent than 2016 breaking down symptoms by severity level while controlling for other psychological factors such as intellectual disability. However, given the trends observed between 2000 and 2016, it is highly unlikely that the additional 74 percent increase in autism diagnoses between 2016 and 2022 reflects a sudden surge in severe, functionally impairing autism. Rather, it is more likely a continuation of the same problem of overrepresentation among children with mild symptoms and no significant functional impairment.

Despite that, some advocates support the narrative that autism is on the rise, because an ever-expanding “spectrum” that produces more diagnoses draws more attention and research funding — even if children’s underlying psychology remains unchanged.

Some of the CDC’s data documenting the supposed rise in the characteristics of autism, meanwhile, comes not from gold-standard in-person psychiatric assessments but from parent-reported surveys such as the Social Responsiveness Scale. The SRS includes statements such as “Would rather be alone than with others,” “Has difficulty making friends,” and “Is regarded by other children as odd or weird,” which parents rate from “Not true” to “Almost always true.” In my own doctoral research on adolescent mental health, I included the SRS to account for the extent to which other psychological outcomes were explained by social difficulties. However, I was always careful to use hedging language — these are behavioral traits known to be associated with autism, not diagnostic markers. Unfortunately, many studies use high scores on the SRS as a substitute for clinical assessment of autism — accounting, for example, for at least 12 percent of “suspected cases” in the 2022 CDC data.

We should be concerned about the rising number of quirky children “on the spectrum,” but not because they are being exposed to neurotoxins that older generations were insulated from, nor because a growing number of children face clinically–significant social impairment. Rather, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy,” the more pressing concern may be a cultural and institutional drift toward overdiagnosis across child psychiatry. Like the rise in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression diagnoses among young people, the surge in autism labels may reflect shifting norms, looser diagnostic criteria and excess therapeutic attention directed toward ordinary struggles. If autism were truly increasing because of a new environmental insult, we would expect to see increases across all levels of severity. But that is not the case.

This reality should fundamentally reshape our national conversation. Policymakers and public health officials have rallied around dramatic claims fueled more by fear than by evidence. Yes, America faces a real crisis of chronic disease — including obesity, metabolic dysfunction and autoimmune disorders — which plausibly could be impacted by environmental toxins. Yes, many children face real mental health challenges that warrant increased attention and psychiatric support. But neither of these narratives survives scientific scrutiny when applied to the rise in autism diagnoses.

When public discourse starts from an alarming headline — “Autism rates have quadrupled” — even careful scientists can be pressured into chasing explanations for a biological phenomenon that doesn’t exist. The result is a misallocation of scientific effort and a blurring of the real signals of environmental harm. In many cases, the kid labeled “on the spectrum” is the same train‑obsessed third‑grader your grandfather knew, only now he’s been assigned a diagnosis. Let’s instead direct public health toward real, ongoing health crises and insist on psychiatric criteria that are consistent, unexaggerated and clinically meaningful.

A version of this article was published at the Washington Post on 2/10/2026.

• The United States is changing from a middle-class society to one of mass affluence. Data compiled by the economist Owen Zidar show that the number of “ultrawealthy” US households with a net worth of over $30 million (in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars) is growing faster than the population in general, reaching 430,000 in 2022.

  

• Paraguay’s economy has grown by an average of 4 percent annually for two decades—a record of stability that helped earn it investment-grade credit ratings and is now drawing in foreign investors.

Energy & Environment

• There was a bumper monarch butterfly migration to Mexico this winter. The population was 64 percent larger than last year’s and covered the largest land area since 2018. The butterflies remain far below their historical numbers, but seem to have stabilized in recent years.

• Southern white rhinos are back in Uganda’s Kidepo Valley National Park for the first time since 1983, when they were extirpated by poachers.

• European forests continue to recover from their preindustrial nadir. According to the European Union’s statistical office, forests grew in 2023 in every EU country with data except Estonia.

Health & Demographics

• A pill for sleeping sickness that can cure the disease with a single dose has been approved by EU regulators and could be deployed in endemic countries as soon as next year. It’s far easier to administer than the current standard 10-day regimen and could make it much easier to treat patients in remote areas.

• A recently published meta-analysis found that people on GLP-1 weight loss drugs lose about the same amount of muscle, relative to total weight loss, as people who lose weight through diet and lifestyle changes.

• The FDA has approved a new kind of insulin injection for type 2 diabetes that only needs to be used once a week, rather than the standard daily dose.

Science & Technology

• Scientists at CERN have transported antimatter by truck for the first time in history. The goal is to eventually distribute antiprotons to other laboratories in Europe.

• A new electric vehicle charging system from the Chinese manufacturing giant BYD can recharge a battery from 10 percent to 70 percent in just five minutes.

• The Rwandan government has agreed to expand its partnership with Zipline to build the world’s first nationwide drone delivery network for healthcare. The system will extend beyond rural areas into cities like Kigali, enabling on-demand delivery of blood, vaccines, and medicines across the entire country.

• AlphaFold, Google’s AI system that predicts the 3D shapes of proteins, now includes predictions of how proteins pair up and work together in its database. As many proteins only function properly when bound to others, the advance could help scientists better model cells and develop new treatments.

• An Australian tech entrepreneur claims he used AlphaFold and ChatGPT to design a customized mRNA cancer therapy for his dog. Working with scientists at the University of New South Wales, the treatment was produced and administered in a matter of months.

Violence & Coercion

• The Global Terrorism Index reports that global deaths from terrorism fell by 28 percent from 2024 to 2025, reaching their lowest level since 2007.

• Best Friends Animal Society, an animal welfare nonprofit, estimates that the number of cats killed in US shelters has fallen 75 percent over the past decade.

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Americans are told, daily, that they are getting poorer. The left points to “record” prices and concludes that capitalism has failed. The right points to the same prices and concludes that America is in irreversible decline. Both sides lean on a familiar statistical trick: they talk about prices or pay in isolation, then invite readers to fill in the rest with anxiety.

There is a simpler and truer way to judge living standards. Ask one question: How long do you have to work to buy what you used to buy?

That is the idea behind the new American Abundance Index, a tool that translates economic health into units normal people understand: hours of work. It uses standard government statistics, comparing inflation (the Consumer Price Index) with hourly earnings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The output is not a partisan narrative. It is a measure of purchasing power that speaks plain English.

The index tracks two measures. Time Price represents how many work-hours are needed to purchase the standard CPI basket of goods and services. Abundance is the inverse. It represents how much of that basket one hour of work can buy.

When time prices fall, abundance rises. When time prices rise, abundance falls.

The American Abundance Index starts in March 2006, when the relevant earnings series become available, and updates monthly following BLS releases. It reports month-over-month, year-over-year, five-year, ten-year, and since-start changes so readers can separate short-term noise from long-term reality.

That distinction matters because the loudest arguments about living standards are usually built on selective time windows.

Recent numbers illustrate the point. For the average private-sector worker, December 2025 saw a tiny monthly decline in CPI and a larger rise in average hourly earnings. The result was a decline in time prices and a rise in abundance for that month. Over the year from December 2024 to December 2025, CPI rose 2.68 percent while hourly earnings rose 3.76 percent. Time prices fell 1.04 percent, and abundance rose 1.05 percent.

Zoom out further. Since March 2006, time prices for the BLS basket have fallen 12.16 percent and abundance has risen 13.84 percent. The index translates those findings into an intuitive claim: over that period, the average private-sector worker gained the equivalent of roughly 1.1 extra hours of purchasing power for every eight hours worked.

The product is not just one headline series. It includes separate views for all private-sector workers and for blue-collar workers. It also includes “upskilling” scenarios that reflect a basic fact of labor markets that both ideological camps often ignore: people do not stay in the same job, at the same wage, for decades. Many workers move from entry-level roles into higher-paying roles as they gain skills. A living-standards tool should help readers see what that typical path implies for purchasing power over time, rather than freezing workers in place for rhetorical effect.

So how does this fit into today’s abundance argument, and the misuse of statistics by left and right?

The left’s favorite move is to spotlight prices, preferably the most salient and emotionally charged ones, then treat the price level as the full story. But prices are only half the equation. Wages and work-hours are the other half. If pay rises faster than prices, the public is not “getting poorer” in any meaningful aggregate sense, even if the public is angry, and even if some groups are falling behind.

The right’s favorite move is different but no less misleading. It treats every inflation episode, every housing squeeze, and every bout of consumer pessimism as proof of national decline. It cherry-picks peaks, ignores recoveries, and sometimes talks as if today’s worker has no mobility and no capacity to adapt. That is how you turn real problems into a permanent story of collapse.

The American Abundance Index does not settle policy debates. It disciplines them. It forces advocates to answer the question that matters to households: How many minutes of my life does this cost, and how has that changed? If your preferred policy raises time prices, you are making people poorer, whatever your rhetoric. If it lowers time prices, you are making people richer, even if it offends someone’s ideology.

The index is also candid about limits. It focuses on averages, may not capture individual experiences, and is most meaningful over longer periods than a single month. That is not a weakness. It is a reminder that serious measurement should separate broad trends from personal hardship, and that anecdotes are not statistics.

If journalists and politicians want fewer mirages and more reality, they should start here: stop counting dollars. Start counting hours.

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our editor Marian Tupy speaks with the world-renowned psychologist Steven Pinker about recent trends in meaning and mental health, the decline of religion, and whether or not human flourishing requires spiritual transcendence.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

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

Today, I’m pleased to have with me Steven Pinker, a world-renowned Harvard University psychologist and author of best-selling books including The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and of course, most recently, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. Highly recommend all of them.

Let’s start at a high level and look at how Americans think about the country. Gallup shows that 80 percent of Americans are either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, but only 20 percent are satisfied with the way that America is going. That’s a bit of a discrepancy.

What does a psychologist have to say about that?

It’s a fascinating phenomenon that pollsters have known about for decades. They call it “the optimism gap.” It appears in just about any question.

“What is the quality of education in this country?”

“It’s terrible.”

“What’s the quality of your child’s school?”

“Well, not bad.”

“How safe is the country?”

“Oh, you can’t walk anywhere. You’ll get mugged.”

“How safe is your neighborhood?”

“Oh, I feel perfectly fine.”

Part of it is that, because none of us can experience the entire country ourselves, our opinions are based on media coverage, and the media have a number of negativity biases. The nature of news selects for negative events because it reports what’s new and discrete enough to be a story. New, discrete events are more likely to be bad than good because there are many more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right. And while bad things, like a terrorist attack or natural disaster, can happen quickly, positive things tend to be things that don’t happen or things that happen gradually, like the long-term decline in extreme poverty, the rise in literacy, and many other trends that you’ve written about.

Editors also feel more responsible if they emphasize negative stories over positive ones. I’ve heard one editor say, “Well, negative news is journalism, and positive news is advertising.” I think it was Stewart Brand who once said, more generally, that a pessimist sounds like he’s trying to help you, while an optimist sounds like he’s trying to sell you something. So, our picture of the country and the world as a whole is distorted both deliberately and accidentally by the very nature of news.

Let me mention one other thing. There really are problems in the world, to put it mildly, and some things have gotten worse in the last 10 or 20 years. But one has to have a quantitative, statistical, probabilistic view of the world to acknowledge the reality that things can get worse while still being better than they were historically, and that some things can get worse while other things are getting better.

You don’t conclude from something that genuinely has gotten worse that everything has gotten worse or that we’re in a worse situation now than we ever have been.

You mentioned literacy. Recently, I’ve been reading about freshmen entering university without basic reading and math skills. People are reading fewer books. Are we getting dumber, and is education an example of something that is worse than it was 40 or 50 years ago?

Yes, and it’s not the only example. The world’s democracy score has gone down in the last couple of decades. War deaths are worse now than they were 20 years ago, although still better than they were in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and most of the ‘90s. But yeah, educational scores have gone down. The Flynn effect, by which IQ scores rose for about three points a year for almost a century, has now gone in the other direction.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re back to the level that we were 100 years ago, but there’s been a bit of a droop. It may be that there are pathologies in our educational system, that the drive for equity and especially for equity across all racial groups has led to bringing down the top rather than raising the bottom. It could be that our schools of education have been training teachers to use the wrong methods. There’s also the fact that, while reading and literacy are good things, they are cognitively unnatural. We didn’t evolve with print; it’s a recent invention, and we’ve seen, especially in the last 10 years, that a lot of people prefer listening and watching to reading. Thanks to the massive availability of video, people may no longer be putting the effort into developing literacy, which we have reason to believe was one of the drivers of the Flynn effect and of cognitive sophistication in general.

My understanding is that the decline of reading and math scores is most severe at the low end. The smart students have not declined much, but weaker students have. So, it is a problem, and I think it’s a problem that ought to be addressed.

When it comes to the decline in reading books, there may be one other factor: the optimal length of a work of text may no longer be a book. I have found that, as a curious person, I can get lost in reading about things on Wikipedia like the history of the potato chip or transatlantic travel or planets. There’s just a flood of information out there and it’s all really interesting. And I say this with some embarrassment because I write books, and sometimes very long books, but for some kinds of information, it may be that a book has diminishing returns.

Let’s now look at other criticisms of human progress.

You and I had an article in The Free Press pushing back against the “crisis of meaning.” Have you ever seen any hard evidence suggesting that people’s lives are more meaningless in rich countries versus poor countries or that lives are less meaningful today than they used to be?

No, I haven’t.

We don’t have survey data on “How meaningful do you think life is?”, but meaning and happiness seem to be partially correlated. So, in general, people who are happier say their lives are more meaningful. But some sources of meaning are not the same as sources of happiness, and vice versa. Just to give a couple of examples, if you’re dedicating your life to some cause, there can be setbacks and frustrations that make you less happy, but you say your life is more meaningful compared to a life of pleasure and leisure. Time spent with friends is more pleasurable, while time spent with family is more meaningful. So, meaning and happiness are not perfectly correlated, but they are partially correlated.

Over the course of history, if you look at the whole range of countries, there has been more of an increase in happiness than a decrease. In countries that are very affluent, like the United States, there has not been an increase in happiness. We may be close to the ceiling. But overall, across the world, there’s reason to believe that happiness has increased, so that would suggest but not prove that there has not been a decline in meaningfulness.

Anecdotally, there have been complaints that life is meaningless as far back as you go. Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Henry David Thoreau in 1854: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” T.S. Eliot, 1920s: “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men.” So, it’s a constant complaint, and the fact that people say it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. It’s always tempting to think that life is meaningless. We like to think that there is a plan to the universe, and we get disillusioned when we find out there isn’t one. The laws of nature don’t tell any story with an ending. There are things built into the evolutionary process that guarantee that life is going to appear meaningless. There’s the law of entropy. Things fall apart and decay. We die, we get older, we weaken. Even our closest relationships are never perfect.

Now, I think the answer to that is to focus on human purposes, like not dying young, not getting shot, knowing more, experiencing art and culture, experiencing friendship, and seeing the world. But one has to reorient and realize that those are the goals of life and not expect that the universe itself tells a satisfying story.

People often look at proxies for meaning, such as anxiety and suicide. There seems to be some evidence that rich countries have higher rates of anxiety than poor countries. Of course, definitions can change and expand. Trauma used to mean being bombed by the Germans; today, it may be that you are breaking up with your boyfriend or girlfriend.

Do you have any sense as to how reliable the data on anxiety and trauma is?

There’s certainly been some diagnostic category creep. I’ve seen this in my own students. There’s an eagerness to diagnose oneself, sometimes with bogus diagnoses like autism for introversion. There’s a funny kind of cachet to having a pathology. But looking retrospectively at surveys, I think there probably has also been, on top of that, some increase in anxiety since the late 1950s.

Some of that may be that we’re taking on more responsibilities and adding to our anxiety burden. When I think back to my parents in the 1950s, there were a lot of things that they just never thought about. Are they getting enough exercise? Are they exposing themselves to skin cancer risk by going out in the sun? The state of the climate, inequality. Most people didn’t think about these things.

Jean Twenge and Jon Haidt have been trying to make the case that social media, especially through smartphones, has led to a genuine rise in anxiety, particularly in younger people. There’s some controversy there over cause and effect—maybe anxious and depressed kids turn to social media—but there seems to be at least some evidence that suggests causation.

Let me offer to our listeners what I consider to be the strongest argument in favor of rational optimism.

The clearest sign of unhappiness is when you kill yourself. Here in the United States, we’ve had an increase in suicides, but suicides are dropping in most, if not all, other rich countries. So, it seems there is a particular American pathology rather than a general pathology in prosperous countries. What’s wrong with this argument?

When I report on violence, I usually concentrate on homicide, simply because homicide is the most objective measure of violence. A dead body is hard to argue away, and people record homicides pretty accurately, so it’s the best indicator of violence. By extension, one might think that suicide would be the best indicator of unhappiness. But, partly to my surprise, that doesn’t seem to be right.

There is more ambiguity in how officials record suicide deaths. For example, when there’s a stigma against suicide, they’re often classified as accidents. Also, as best as we can tell, there’s not an excellent correlation between the suicide rate and national unhappiness. There’s even what some researchers call the suicide-unhappiness paradox, which is that countries where people are happier can sometimes have higher suicide rates, partly for the same reason that suicide rates increase around Christmas: if you look around and everyone is happy and you’re not, then you really think you’re a loser.

Suicide rates are also driven by contagion and by how easy it is to commit suicide. I quote the rather macabre poem by Dorothy Parker: “Guns aren’t lawful, nooses give, gas smells awful, you might as well live.” Suicide went way down in Britain when they changed the composition of cooking gas from coal gas to methane, which is not toxic. In developing countries, access to pesticides, a common method of suicide, has a big effect on actual rates. And in the United States, the availability of guns seems to be one of the drivers.

So, there are a lot of puzzles with suicide rates. But generally, I think it’s important to point out, as you do, that suicide rates are actually dropping globally, especially in poorer countries, but also in many rich countries. The United States is something of an anomaly. Since the 1990s, when the Global Burden of Disease project began to collect data, suicide has gone down by about 40 percent. A lot of that is thanks to urbanization. When a woman is put into an arranged marriage and leaves her village for the village of her husband, where she is dominated by her in-laws and has no friends and no way of escaping, that leads to a lot of suicides. In a more modern urban culture where you kind of have more freedom, there’s less desperation. So globally, modernization and urbanization have led to falling suicide rates. Even in the United States, suicide rates went down until the mid to late 1990s. That was a low point, and they’ve been rising since then, but it’s not as if they’ve been inexorably rising over the last century.

Those are very good caveats, thanks for introducing that nuance.

One thing that you and I discussed in our Free Press article was the criticism that meaninglessness in the West is driven in part by falling religiosity. A defender of religion might say that religion is essentially a cognitive or cultural technology for producing responsibility, happiness, restraint, and gratitude. So, if you remove religion, you may be making people more irresponsible, more unhappy, less restrained, and less grateful.

What do you think about that argument?

There is a need for community institutions and organizations that bring people together, that discuss meaning and morality, and that are a locus for collective action. The problem is that if you bundle that with theology, miracles, scripture, and invisible agents, it just isn’t going to be convincing anymore.

Religion wasn’t taken away from people; people left religion. In every developed country, there’s been a move away from organized religion. The churches are still around, and no one’s stopping people from attending; they just don’t find that religion gives them meaning and purpose. This is partly because the institutions themselves have not been sources of morality or meaning. The Roman Catholic Church with its sex abuse scandals, evangelical Protestantism in the United States with its embrace of far-right politics, the subordinate role of women in the more conservative religions like Orthodox Judaism—these are just turn-offs.

I’m gonna quote G. K. Chesterton, who is supposed to have said that when men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. A 2021 national survey found that young Americans are more likely to believe in witchcraft, luck, black magic, and spell casting.

What do you make of the argument that Christianity keeps the belief in black magic and witchcraft at bay?

A few things. The witch hunts of the 16th century were a Christian movement. I mean, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” is in the Christian Bible. I also think Chesterton was wrong about the idea that people who are more religious are also more open to astrology, ESP, the paranormal, crystal healing, and other kinds of New Age woo-woo. I don’t think it’s true as a general correlation.

The data that you cite on openness to paranormal beliefs is interesting. I’ve never reported this, but I’ve looked at trends in the belief in devils, ESP, precognition, curses, and all kinds of paranormal things. As best as I can tell, it’s been pretty flat since the 1970s.

Something to be aware of is that there are different ways in which societies can change, and quantitatively, it’s not always easy to tell them apart. There can be a cohort effect, that is, as one generation replaces another, that generation has beliefs that they carry with them as they age; a period effect, where everyone changes their beliefs; or a life cycle event where, as people age, they change their beliefs. As best I can tell, what you cited is largely an age effect. Younger people are more open to woo-woo and magic than older people. So, I think those data are correct, but don’t necessarily mean that societies have become more open to the paranormal.

One way or another, there is a sizable chunk of the population that is attracted to the supernatural or transcendental, the so-called God-shaped hole in the human heart. Critics say that irreligious people are offering a meaningless, cold universe without a purpose, and that people really need some form of transcendence to make sense of their lives.

What do you think of that argument?

I think it’s literally wrong in the sense that people’s craving for meaning and purpose isn’t shaped like a God. In fact, that argument is sometimes used to explain the rise of wokeness, that religion was replaced with the idea that differences between groups are a moral emergency, and you have to find the oppressors responsible and punish them. There’s no God in any of that.

Granted, many people do search for transcendence, but kids like to believe in Santa Claus. That belief doesn’t have to be indulged. Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment was man’s escape from his self-imposed childhood. Part of growing up involves some hard lessons, like the universe is a cold place, and it doesn’t care about you. That does not mean life is meaningless, because the fact that the universe doesn’t care about you doesn’t mean that other humans don’t care about you or that we don’t have to care about other humans. We have a purpose, which is to make people as well off as possible, to increase flourishing, to increase knowledge, life, health, freedom, and safety. These are really meaningful goals that I don’t think should leave you empty.

Without religion, what is the basis of morality? Where does morality come from if not from man being created in the image of God?

Well, man being created in the image of God doesn’t give you a whole lot of morality. If you look at the Old Testament, God is commanding the Israelites to rape, massacre, and mutilate their enemies, while there are religious prescriptions against mixing linen and cotton, lighting a fire on Saturday, and other crazy stuff that has nothing to do with morality as we could argue for it.

Conversely, I think the obvious source of morality is some kind of Golden Rule. The way we teach kids to be moral is we say, “How would you like that if someone did that to you?” The logical basis of mortality is that, as long as I’m not the galactic overlord and my fate depends on other people, I’ve got to agree to some sort of social contract that treats us as equivalent. That’s why versions of the Golden Rule have been independently discovered by many different cultures.

Here’s the most common counterargument I hear to that point of view: it is very well for an intelligent professor who reads a lot of books to derive moral principles from reciprocity, reason, and self-interest, but ordinary people don’t think like that.

What’s wrong with just picking an oven-ready set of moral norms off the shelf, like those presented by modern Christianity, which have been made more humane over time? You don’t have to do much thinking, for which you might not have time or ability.

Well, I think that could be a means to an end, but one must keep in mind what the end is, which is humanistic morality that we can justify. As we know, religions can contain off-the-shelf moralities such as “kill anyone who insults the prophet Muhammad,” “execute blasphemers or gay people,” or “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Now there are religions guided by humanistic, enlightenment, universalist principles, such as some of the liberal Protestant denominations and Reform Judaism. I don’t oppose keeping some symbolism and ritual if the institution has moved in a humanistic direction. Maybe that would be a good thing.

A somewhat different criticism of progress has to do with status competition, essentially the idea that no matter how much things get better, ultimately, as you once again put it in your book, men don’t contend with the dead but with the living.

Are our efforts at Human Progress bound to fail because people care about relative rather than absolute improvements in life?

I love that Hobbes quote. He introduces it by saying there’s a natural reverence for antiquity because men contend with the living, not with the dead. That is, intellectuals and moralists will tend to revere earlier eras and bemoan the present era because complaining about the present is another way of complaining about your contemporaries, who are your rivals. That’s another reason there is a negativity bias.

That’s an aside on elite status competition, but we all compare ourselves to others. So, in that sense, there won’t ever be a utopia. People will always compare themselves to others and be less happy than they ought to be. Still, it’s worth working toward progress. Even if you’re a spoiled first-world brat, it’s still better that you live to 80 instead of 55. It’s still better that your kids don’t die. It’s still better to travel the world instead of being confined to your village.

There’s a quote on my wall from a psychologist called Richard Layard that reads, “One secret of happiness is to ignore comparisons with people who are more successful than you are. Always compare downwards, not upwards.”

How do we go about explaining to people that it’s okay that there is always going to be somebody who is taller, smarter, and more handsome than you are?

You’re right that this is a piece of wisdom we’d be better off having, but it’s not easy to engineer. Some features of culture are very bottom-up. They can be influenced by education and by the messages that we give children, but no one’s really in charge; it’s the result of millions of people interacting with each other every day. However, we shouldn’t abdicate our responsibility for what we teach kids. We can do our part and try to nudge them in the right direction.

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