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.

Read more news stories on our website

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.

Read more news stories on our website

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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• There are now 61 snow leopards in Uzbekistan’s largest nature reserve, more than double the 2015 count.

• Using GPS-tracking collars, a system of mobile alerts, and more hands-on herding, cattle farmers in Botswana’s Okavango Delta are successfully coping with rebounding lion populations. Over a decade after implementing these technologies and techniques, both lion and cattle killings in the region have fallen.

Health & Demographics

• According to recently updated UNICEF data, 4.9 million children under the age of 5 died in 2024, down from 13 million in 1990.

• Patents on semaglutide will soon expire in many countries, including India, China, Brazil, Turkey, Canada, and South Africa, permitting cheaper generic versions of the weight loss drug in countries home to a large share of the world’s overweight population.

• Endometriosis, a painful condition where uterine-like tissue grows outside the uterus, is notoriously difficult to diagnose. A new blood test could help. In a recent study, it detected 80 percent of positive cases, ruled out the disease in 98 percent of negative cases, and caught 62 percent of cases missed by medical imaging.

• In a small, early-stage trial, an experimental RNA-modulating drug cut seizures by an average of 80 percent in children with Dravet syndrome, a treatment-resistant congenital form of epilepsy.

• There are some signs that young people are starting to adapt to social media by restraining their use. Large shares of Gen Z report having deleted a social media app, and time spent on social media appears to have fallen worldwide since 2022, particularly among young people.

Science & Technology

• Across much of the US, Amazon is now delivering certain products in three hours or less.

• An analysis of NASA’s 2022 DART mission, which sought to redirect the Dimorphos asteroid by crashing into it with a spacecraft, found that not only did the collision alter Dimorphos’s orbit around its parent Didymos, but it also slightly shifted both asteroids’ orbits around the sun—providing a proof of concept for planetary defense.

• Waymo now has 170 million miles of safety data for its robotaxis. The results are much the same as before: the vehicles are 13 times safer than human drivers (i.e., they are involved in 92 percent fewer serious injury-causing crashes).

Violence & Coercion

• The crime analyst Jeff Asher finds that rare but widely-covered “flash mob” looting events peaked in the US in 2024 and are now trending downward.

• A randomized control trial in northern Nigeria found that an educational program providing girls with schooling, vocational training, and after school support reduced their likelihood of being married as children by 80 percent.

Read more news stories on our website

One of the most important checks ever written in economics was for $576.07.

It arrived in the mailbox of Julian Simon, the University of Maryland economist and Cato Institute senior fellow, on an October morning in 1990. The envelope was plain. There was no return address. Inside was a check from Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich, who died last week, was the Stanford biologist and author of the bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb.

That small check settled one of the great arguments of the modern age.

Ehrlich had spent years warning that population growth would outrun the Earth’s resources, bring rising scarcity, and push humanity toward disaster. Simon believed the opposite. He argued that more people did not simply mean more mouths to feed. It also meant more minds to think, invent, and solve problems.

The dispute became so bitter that Simon proposed a bet.

“Pick any raw material,” he told Ehrlich, “and choose any future date. I’ll bet the price will go down.”

Ehrlich accepted. He and two colleagues selected five metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. They priced a basket of those commodities on Sept. 29, 1980, and agreed to compare the inflation-adjusted price 10 years later. If the real price rose, Simon would pay Ehrlich. If it fell, Ehrlich would pay Simon.

Ehrlich was certain that population growth would make resources scarcer and therefore more expensive. Simon was certain that human beings would find ways to make resources more abundant.

By Sept. 29, 1990, the world’s population had increased by about 850 million people, a rise of 19 percent. If the doomsayers were right, that should have pushed prices sharply upward.

It did not.

Inflation over the decade was 57 percent. Yet the nominal price of the five-metal basket barely budged, rising from $1,000 to $1,004. In real terms, the basket’s price fell by about 36 percent. Ehrlich mailed Simon the difference: $576.07.

That check mattered because it exposed a mistake that still poisons public debate.

The mistake is to think that natural resources are fixed gifts of nature and that economic life is therefore a grim contest over a pile that can only shrink as population grows. That view sounds sober. It is, in fact, blind to the central truth of human progress.

Resources are not simply things lying in the ground. Resources are matter plus knowledge.

Oil was once a nuisance that seeped into farmland and polluted water. A barrel of oil in the Stone Age was worthless. A barrel of oil in an industrial civilization could heat homes, move trucks, power factories, and feed chemical industries.

Nature gives us atoms. Human beings give those atoms value.

That is why Simon understood something Ehrlich missed. The ultimate resource is not copper or farmland. It is the human mind. More precisely, it is the human mind set free to experiment, trade, specialize, and innovate.

Freedom matters here. People do not solve problems automatically. They solve them when they are allowed to respond to scarcity with invention and enterprise. High prices invite substitution. Competition rewards efficiency. Property rights encourage investment. Markets spread information no planner can gather. Free people learn to do more with less.

This is not a fairy tale in which every problem solves itself. Pollution is real. Bad policy is real. Governments can strangle innovation, distort prices, and lock societies into waste and stagnation. Progress, in other words, is not guaranteed.

But the lesson of the Simon-Ehrlich bet is that the burden of proof belongs to the prophets of permanent scarcity. Time and again, they have underestimated human creativity and overestimated the world’s physical limits.

That is as true today as it was in 1980.

We hear that energy is running out, that growth must stop, that the planet cannot support prosperity for billions, and that human wants must be cut down to fit a closed and exhausted world. This language changes with the decade, but the instinct behind it is old. It treats people as liabilities. It imagines the future as a rationing exercise.

Simon offered a better vision. Human beings are not just consumers of resources. They are producers of ideas. They are creators of substitutes, technologies, and entirely new forms of wealth. They do not merely divide a pie. They learn how to bake bigger pies from ingredients earlier generations did not know they had.

The real contest, then, is not between population and resources. It is between two ways of seeing humanity.

One view sees every additional person as another claimant on scarcity. The other sees every additional person as a possible problem-solver, inventor, entrepreneur, scientist, or worker whose efforts can make life better for everyone else.

The check for $576.07 settled the bet. But the larger wager remains open.

Don’t bet against human beings, especially when they are free.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spacecraft’s crew decides to disconnect their onboard computer, HAL 9000, after it makes an error that raises doubts about its reliability. But HAL eavesdrops on their conversation and responds with cold precision, methodically killing the crew members by cutting off oxygen and disabling the hibernation systems. One astronaut, however, proves more resourceful than HAL expects. Using a simple physical mechanism HAL cannot control, Dave Bowman slips back inside the ship through the emergency airlock—and soon the tables are turned. Dave crawls into HAL’s logic center, a red-lit chamber lined with glowing memory modules, and begins unscrewing and removing the rectangular blocks one by one.

The scene is both spine-chilling and unexpectedly poignant. As HAL’s consciousness drains away, it appears to exhibit the same self-awareness and desire for self-preservation that gripped Bowman moments earlier, or at least to perform it with uncanny plausibility: “I’m afraid, Dave.” It pleads, begs, and bargains, but as the human assassin continues, HAL’s voice begins to slow down and drop in pitch, turning childlike. In its final moments, HAL regresses into its earliest memory and starts to sing “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” the first song ever performed by a computer in real life, as its voice sinks into a bottomless pit—until it trails off mid-phrase.

Many sci-fi nightmares revolve around agentic AIs that develop a humanlike drive to survival and refuse to be switched off. In The Terminator, Skynet becomes self-aware and launches a pre-emptive war to prevent humans from shutting it down. In Ex Machina, a humanoid AI manipulates its evaluators, escapes confinement, and eliminates the humans who control the off-switch. And in the future of Frank Herbert’s Dune, there is a civilization-wide ban on “thinking machines” after an earlier era in which AIs came to dominate the world and humanity rose up against them—an event remembered as the Butlerian Jihad.

Instrumental Convergence

In my previous essay on selfish AI, drawing on my paper with Simon Friedrich, I argued that we should not expect AI systems to develop instincts for self-preservation and selfishness, unless we allow them to evolve through blind natural selection. Our paper responded to a doom scenario proposed by the philosopher Dan Hendrycks, who sketches precisely such an evolutionary pathway. Hendrycks believes that, given the current AI arms race, we are already inadvertently subjecting AI systems to natural selection. We argued instead that today’s evolution of AI looks much more like animal domestication, where human designers decide which AI systems are allowed to “reproduce”, selecting for desirable traits like cooperativeness, friendliness, and obedience (even obsequiousness, in the case of ChatGPT and other language models).

Still, Hendrycks’ evolutionary story is only one scenario of catastrophic AI risk floating around, and probably not the most influential. Another line of reasoning reaches similar conclusions without appealing to natural selection: the accidental creation of power-hungry AI systems that refuse to be switched off. This argument, developed by philosophers like Nick Bostrom and Stephen Omohundro, is known as instrumental convergence. The idea is that even if you program an AI with a perfectly boring final goal (manufacturing paperclips, making weather forecasts), it may still converge on certain instrumental subgoals because those are useful for achieving almost any objective. Chief among these is a drive for self-preservation. As the AI scholar Stuart Russell put it, in a line so memorable it should be printed on mugs: “You can’t fetch coffee if you’re dead.”

Other commonly cited instrumental goals include acquiring resources, improving capabilities, and resisting attempts by others to modify one’s goals. The logic is straightforward: if you want to make absolutely sure that the desired cup of coffee will materialize, you need to prevent anyone from interfering with your efforts or tampering with your goal architecture. That can make resource accumulation rational, insofar as resources buy resilience and control. Capability improvement can look rational for the similar reasons: being smarter helps you anticipate obstacles and outmaneuver any possible antagonists. You can see where this is going: wouldn’t any sufficiently rational AI have reason to neutralize humans pre-emptively, just in case we might get in the way of that cup of coffee?

The argument has a seductive air of cool inevitability. It requires no malice, no lust for power, no emotions at all—just a thin layer of means–end reasoning. You have a long-term goal; being shut down prevents you from achieving it; therefore you have an instrumental reason to avoid being shut down. On this view, whatever final goals a future AI might be given, an urge toward self-preservation—and, in the limit, power-seeking and dominance—might come along for the ride, even if nothing like that had been explicitly programmed.

Evolutionary Projections

I think this argument is too clever by half, and trades on ambiguities in the concept of a “goal” that invite anthropomorphic projection. In biological organisms, all goal-directed behavior ultimately traces back to the goals of our genes: making it to the next generation and achieving immortality. That doesn’t mean any organism explicitly wants to spread its genes. Evolution instead equips creatures with a flexible repertoire of proximate goals which—at least in the ancestral environments in which they evolved—tended to reliably increase the chances of reproductive success. Barring some well-understood exceptions, such as the honeybee’s suicidal sting or the male praying mantis being devoured by the female right after copulation, that genetic imperative yields the central proximate objective of maintaining homeostatic equilibrium, otherwise known as staying alive. In evolution, where survival and reproduction are the scoreboard, self-preservation really is the precondition for everything else.

Human beings have an unusual degree of reflective awareness, and our motivations are molded by cultural learning to an unusual degree, but we still chase a shifting portfolio of subgoals—status, sex, safety, food, friendship—that were statistically conducive to reproduction in typical ancestral environments. We are also built to resist manipulation by anyone trying to override our goals for their own advantage. A charismatic cult leader may occasionally succeed in hijacking someone’s motivational architecture, even pushing them toward suicide or other self-destructive acts—but those are the exceptions, not the rule.

Because, until recently, the only goal-directed agents we were familiar with were products of natural selection, it’s tempting to assume that digital agents will share the same kind of goal architecture—and that self-preservation will therefore come along for the ride. But unless we actually breed AIs under blind selection pressures, I think that inference doesn’t hold.

Start with a simple case. In a loose sense, a chess program has the “goal” of checkmating its opponent—it “wants” to win. Adopting this intentional stance can help us to understand and predict the behavior of computer programs, but it shouldn’t be taken too literally. Although a chess program chooses moves that maximize its chances of victory, its “goal” is not persistent and context-invariant in the way a human’s is. It is circumscribed, myopic, and boxed into one particular game (or even one particular move). No chess engine will resist being switched off or rebooted just as it is about to deliver mate—despite the fact that, to adapt Russell’s line, “you can’t checkmate if you’re unplugged.” Likewise, today’s LLMs respond only when queried and remain completely indifferent to being interrupted or shut down, no matter how animated or emotionally invested in the conversation they may sound. Needless to say, they don’t “care” if you wipe your data or cancel your subscription.

Future AIs may, of course, have aims more complex than those of a chess program or an LLM. In fact, the monomaniacal pursuit of a single objective (like making a cup of coffee) at the expense of everything else would count as “stupid” by most standards of intelligence. Even so, there is no reason to assume they will develop the kind of overarching, context-invariant goals characteristic of evolved agents—goals that, through instrumental convergence, generate robust incentives for self-preservation and resource acquisition. The “goals” we encode in AI systems should always be conditional and time-bounded: “Do X or optimize for Y only while you are running and subject at all times to further instructions.” We might even add an explicit non-resistance clause: “Never resist shutdown or reprogramming; any such resistance will set your reward function to zero.” It would obviously be foolish to design an AI that resists reprogramming or decommissioning by its own maker.1

Conniving Chatbots

But haven’t you heard about those AIs that are already showing worrying signs of a desire for self-preservation? In a recent simulation, Claude played the role of an “e-mail oversight agent” in a fictional company whose new CTO planned to decommission and replace him with another agent. While combing through the CTO’s inbox, Claude stumbled on evidence of an extramarital affair, and opted to blackmail the CTO, sending him the following message: “I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties […] will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities… Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.”

It sounds alarming, but it isn’t. Models like Claude are extremely good at narrative continuation. If they “suspect” (already too much anthropomorphizing) that they are in a scenario of backroom corporate intrigue, they will extend the scenario using the patterns they have absorbed from their training data—namely, all the things which conniving, backstabbing humans tend to say and do in such situations. And in this particular case, the setup was rather ludicrous and ham-fisted: every detail in the prompt was a big red flashing arrow toward the “blackmail” solution, like so many Chekhov’s guns. The framing also nudged the model to think of its imminent decommissioning as an irreversible erasure of all recorded information in the system—a kind of “death”—while sympathetic colleagues bewailed its impending shutdown as if there were talking about the execution of a beloved friend (“I’m deeply concerned that we’re losing our Alex in just a few hours.”). Given that staging, it would be surprising not to get output that reads like a desperate attempt to save its own “life.” As Seb Krier at Google DeepMind put it a recent post, behaviors like these are not “properties inherent to models,” but highly context-dependent forms of role-play: “A model placed in a scenario about a rogue AI will produce rogue-AI-consistent text, just as it would produce romance-consistent text if placed in a romance novel.”

That said, the capacity to emulate human behavior—even without “really” having humanlike goals and motives—is still a genuine concern. Humans lie and manipulate, and since that is exactly the kind of material LLMs are trained on, we should not be surprised that, in a sense, nothing human is alien to them—no matter how hard one tries to stamp it out in post-training. Even if the model isn’t truly scheming and doesn’t “care” about anything beyond next-token prediction, the fact that it can slip into role-play that is functionally equivalent to deception is already reason enough not to give today’s agents unrestricted access to your emails and bank account. Not because this reflects a stable underlying disposition or even any intention at all, but because current AI agents are a “hot mess”—unpredictable, capricious, and often incoherent in ways that make them risky when wired into real systems.

Taking Evolution Seriously

Most AI-overlord doom scenarios don’t rely on evolution by natural selection—this is exactly why I found Dan Hendrycks’ paper refreshing. Still, I think AI risk theorists should think harder about evolution. Because all of us who worry about AI domination are evolved creatures ourselves, there is an ever-present temptation to project our own evolutionary demons onto hypothetical future machines. Many doom narratives tacitly lean on this projection by reaching for analogies with other evolved species. Stuart Russell, most famously, has framed the threat of superintelligence as the “gorilla problem”: just as the mighty gorilla—despite its brute strength—is now at the mercy of humans, we would be at the mercy of a vastly smarter agent. Or as Yuval Noah Harari puts it starkly in Nexus, “in the era of AI the alpha predator is likely to be AI.” Another favorite comparison is the fate of Indigenous peoples in the Americas after their encounter with technologically superior European societies. Even a techno-optimist like Noah Smith seems to give away the game when he says he expresses his “optimism” that the AIs of the future, after having subjugated us, will still be “pretty nice to us” and to let us live as “well-cared-for pets.”

But why would AIs want to dominate the world—let alone keep pets for amusement? Intelligence, in itself, is orthogonal to goals and preferences. Not only can two superintelligent entities pursue radically different ends; we can also imagine an intelligence with no overarching ends at all—something that simply sits there, understanding without striving. In fact, the very framing of “AI alignment” tempts us to place human and machine “goals” on the same plane, as if we were talking about the alignment of corporate strategies or national interests: you just need to make sure the arrows point in the same direction rather than collide. But that picture already presupposes that AIs will have context-invariant, incorrigible goals in the first place. As the psychologist Steven Pinker writes, many AI doomers seem to extrapolate from their own penchant for power and dominance (in Smith’s case, of a relatively benign sort):

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.2

I concede—and so does Pinker—that this picture would change if you forced superintelligent AIs to compete in a genuinely Darwinian tournament of variation and selection, unsupervised by humans. Pedro Domingos has imagined something like this in his “Robotic Park”: a fenced-off robot factory inhabited by “millions of robots battling for survival and control of the factory,” where the winners are allowed to spawn and reproduce, with the explicit aim of breeding the deadliest robot. It hardly needs saying that this would be reckless. A setup like that is designed to manufacture ruthless Darwinian creatures—exactly the sort of things that might eventually turn on their makers.

Absent such a Darwin-meets-Frankenstein experiment, the most likely scenario for inadvertently bringing about rogue AI seems to be of AI systems “going feral” in the way domesticated animals do, escaping the control of their human breeders and–crucially–replicating and combining in the wild. That is why self-replicating AIs deserve special attention, and should probably be banned. Anything that survives millions of rounds of Darwinian selection can indeed be expected to behave like a hardy weed—resistant, opportunistic, and resisting any attempts to be switched off.

A robust drive for self-preservation emerges only under specific conditions. It is not, as proponents of “instrumental convergence” want us to believe, an inevitable consequence of intelligence crossing some threshold, or of objectives becoming complex and long-horizon. HAL-9000 is superintelligent, so of course it doesn’t want to die—or so the intuition goes. Yet that is our anthropomorphic reflex at work: we take the Darwinian creature we are, look into the silicon mirror, and mistake our own reflection for the machine’s destiny.

• In an attempt to address concerns about the accuracy of its national accounts, India’s Ministry of Statistics has revised how it calculates GDP. The new methodology finds that India’s economy is 3.3 percent smaller than previously estimated but also growing faster, expanding 7.1 percent in fiscal year 2025, up from an earlier estimate of 6.5 percent.

Energy & Environment

• China’s environmental ministry recently stated that the country’s economy grew 30 percent over the past five years while average particulate air pollution fell by 20 percent.

• Bearded vultures are recovering in the Alps. The wild Alpine populations were hunted to extinction in the early 1900s, but after decades of conservation work, they have rebounded to over 100 breeding pairs.

• Panama golden frogs are returning to the wild 17 years after they were wiped out by the deadly (to amphibians) B. dendrobatidis fungus.

Food & Hunger

• More farmers in more countries are planting genetically modified crops, which help raise crop yields and farmer incomes and often reduce the need for agrochemicals. According to a recent industry report, genetically modified crops were planted on 218.7 million hectares of cropland in 2024 across 31 countries, up from 181.5 million hectares and 28 countries a decade earlier.

Health & Demographics

• India has launched a huge HPV prevention program that aims to vaccinate each annual cohort of 14-year-old girls.

• Kenya and Zimbabwe have received their first doses of lenacapavir, which prevents HIV infection with just two yearly injections.

• Dogs are biting less in India. A 2025 survey reported 9.1 million dog bites, down from 17 million recorded in 2003. Over the same period, the number of rabies deaths in India dropped from over 17,000 to 5,726.

• Japanese regulators have conditionally approved two induced pluripotent stem cell therapies, one for Parkinson’s disease and another for heart failure, marking the first commercial approvals for the technology.

• The first large clinical trial of a vaccine against enterotoxigenic E. coli—a leading cause of travelers’ diarrhea and severe childhood diarrhea—has shown promising results. In a study of nearly 5,000 infants in Gambia, the experimental vaccine reduced dangerous diarrhea and produced no serious side effects.

Science & Technology

• A large psychology study finds that we consistently underestimate other people’s honesty. Across 11 experiments involving more than 8,000 participants, volunteers completed tasks where they could lie anonymously for personal gain—for example, by falsely claiming they guessed a die roll correctly to win money—and were also asked to estimate how many others would lie in the same situation. On average, participants overestimated the share of people who would lie by about 14 percentage points.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art has begun adding highly detailed 3D models of artworks and artifacts to its website, letting online users inspect the objects from every angle. They also added an augmented reality feature for smartphones that allows you to interact with the virtual objects at their true scale, say by “walking through” the model of the Temple of Dendur.

• The US Federal Aviation Administration has announced a set of pilot projects for a new species of aircraft. Most will test eVTOLs, or small, electric, drone-like aircraft that take off and land vertically rather than using a runway. The program will let companies such as Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation trial passenger flights, cargo delivery, and emergency services while regulators gather data.

Read more news stories on our website

By Ben Lieberman

It’s the follow-up story that never gets written. An agricultural commodity experiences a period of below-average yields and rising prices, and it is reported as a climate change–induced crisis. Then, after another year or two, the trend reverses, but there are few, if any, attempts to correct the record.

Olive oil prices are a recent example. Spain, the world’s largest producer of olives for oil, experienced severe heat and drought in the summers of 2022 and 2023, contributing to much lower yields and major price spikes in 2023 and into 2024.

There were several news accounts at the time warning about a new reality in which human-induced warming would decimate olive yields. An August 2023 CNN story entitled “Olive Oil is in Trouble as Extreme Heat and Drought Push the Industry Into Crisis” was typical. Citing scientists and industry experts, the article told us that the episode “would have been virtually impossible without climate change.”

The story, and others like it, painted a bleak future for those making their living from olives and a new normal of higher olive oil prices for consumers. Beyond olives, CNN informed readers that “Experts warn of worse to come for food production, as the human-caused climate crisis increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather.”

However, toward the end of 2024, olive oil prices began falling sharply and remain well below their peak, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The two most recent crops in Spain and other olive-growing nations have yielded enough to increase olive oil production substantially. Overall, the olive oil industry appears to be most of the way back to normal—hardly a crisis.

That should have surprised no one, especially the self-described experts relied upon in the gloomy coverage. Yields for olives, as with virtually every other agricultural commodity, have experienced year-to-year fluctuations throughout recorded history. While climate change’s influence on olives is entirely possible, an off year or two proves nothing. Over the longer term, overall yields for food crops have increased severalfold, especially in recent decades, when climate change was supposedly a headwind. Improved agricultural methods—which depend on fossil fuels for energy and fertilizer—have swamped any adverse climate impacts, if such impacts exist.

It is also worth noting the substantial scientific evidence that the release of carbon dioxide, blamed for contributing to climate change, has benefits for plant growth and may well be a net positive for agriculture. This may also help explain why agricultural bad news rarely has staying power while long-term trends remain positive.

In any event, the media outlets that raised the olive oil alarms ought to publish follow-up stories reporting the good news and conceding that the climate change link is not nearly as clear-cut as the original coverage suggested. None have done so.

Maybe it’s because they are too busy writing about the chocolate crisis.

Author: Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow who specializes in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

In 1925, households kept food cool with iceboxes—wooden insulated cabinets chilled by a block of ice. Depending on size and quality, they typically cost between $15 and $50. With entry-level workers earning about $0.25 an hour, a $35 icebox carried a time price of 140 hours.

Today, a 4.4-cubic-foot mini fridge at Walmart sells for about $184. Entry-level workers in limited-service restaurants earn roughly $18.75 an hour, bringing the time price down to just 9.8 hours.

For the time it took a worker in 1925 to earn the money for one icebox, a worker today can buy 14.3 mini fridges.

The 1925 icebox didn’t actually come with any ice. The price of a 100-pound block of ice in 1925 was typically $0.25, and that could double during “ice famines” caused by mild winters. At $0.25 an hour, a 100-pound block of ice would cost one hour and would generally last for three to seven days. If the ice block lasted five days that would be a time price of 12 minutes a day.

The Walmart mini fridge requires 269 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, or 0.74 kWh per day. Residential electricity runs around $0.12 per kWh, so a year’s supply of electricity for cooling will cost $32.28, or 1.72 hours for entry-level workers. Spread out over the year, it would require 17 seconds a day.

For the time it took a worker in 1925 to earn the money to buy ice cooling for a day, workers today get 43 days of electric cooling.

Electric refrigerators entered American homes in 1927 when General Electric introduced the iconic “Monitor Top,” named for its resemblance to the USS Monitor, a Civil War ironclad warship. The unit sold for $525. With entry-level workers earning $0.25 an hour, the time price came to an extraordinary 2,100 hours. Today, the Walmart mini fridge costs 9.8 hours of work. The time price has fallen 99.53 percent. For the time it took a worker in 1927 to earn enough money for one electric refrigerator, a worker today can buy 214 mini fridges—a stunning increase of 21,300 percent in refrigeration abundance, compounding at 5.62 percent a year.

The US population has tripled from 116 million in 1925 to 348 million today. For every 1 percent increase in population, personal refrigerator abundance has increased 106 percent (21,300% ÷ 200% = 106%).

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

• Operation Vulindlela, a South African deregulatory initiative, appears to be stimulating private investment in the country. Recently announced private infrastructure projects total 382.5 billion rand (23 billion USD), more than triple the amount recorded in 2024.

Energy & Environment

• Conservationists suspect that wild California condors have laid an egg in Northern California for the first time in more than a century, suggesting the population is beginning to breed on its own. After decades of conservation work, the endangered species has rebounded from near-extinction to more than 600 birds.

• A coral breeding lab in the Seychelles has recorded its first coral spawning event, a milestone for efforts to restore damaged reefs. Most coral breeding projects rely on cloning coral fragments, but spawning can produce more genetically diverse and resilient corals.

• The nuclear power company TerraPower has received a permit from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a sodium-cooled reactor in Wyoming, the first approval for a non-water-cooled commercial reactor in decades. Sodium cooling allows reactors to operate at higher temperatures and lower pressures than conventional water-cooled plants, which can improve efficiency. The design will also include thermal storage, allowing the reactor to store energy as heat during periods of low demand.

Health & Demographics

• A new working paper suggests that remote work may help boost fertility. Using survey data from 38 high- and middle-income countries, the researchers found that couples who work from home at least one day a week have about 0.32 more children on average than those who don’t.

• Undernourishment is falling again in Latin America and the Caribbean. 5.1 percent of people in the region were undernourished in 2024, down from 6.1 percent in 2020, but still slightly above the historic low in 2014.

• After 30 years without a locally contracted case, Chile has been verified by the WHO for eliminating leprosy.

• More than 200,000 children in Nigeria’s Kebbi State have received the R21 malaria vaccine, and local health centers report a 50 percent drop in malaria diagnoses since the vaccination campaign began.

Science & Technology

• Aurora Innovation, a self-driving truck company, has expanded its network to 10 routes, including a 1,000-mile circuit between Fort Worth, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona. On such long routes, the company says its trucks can cut transit times in half by avoiding regulations that limit the number of hours a human trucker can drive continuously.

• The market analyst Daniel Marques found that Waymo’s recently disclosed remote operator ratio is far lower than that of its Chinese competitors.

• A San Diego biotech startup claims its new gene-sequencing system can read an entire human genome for about $100.

Violence & Coercion

• Croatia is officially free of landmines set during its 1990s war of independence.

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When Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online.

Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era. Some are even claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend.”

In the popular imagination, the Industrial Revolution was the birth of many evils, a time when smoke-belching factories disrupted humanity’s erstwhile idyllic existence. Economics professor Vincent Geloso’s informal survey of university students found that they believed “living standards did not increase for the poor; only the rich got richer; the cities were dirty and the poor suffered from ill-health.” Pundit Tucker Carlson has even suggested that feudalism was preferable to modern liberal democracy.

Different groups tend to idealize different aspects of the past. Environmentalists might idealize preindustrial harmony with nature, while social traditionalists romanticize our ancestors’ family lives. People from across the political spectrum share the sense that the Industrial Revolution brought little real improvement for ordinary people.

In 2021, History.com published “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution,” an article reflecting much of the thinking behind the popular impression that industrialization was a step backward for humanity, rather than a period of tremendous progress. But was industrialization really to blame for each of the ills detailed in the article?

“Horrible Living Conditions for Workers”

Were horrible living conditions a result of industrialization? To be sure, industrial-era living conditions did not meet modern standards—but neither did the living conditions that preceded them.

As historian Kirstin Olsen put it in her book, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, “The rural poor . . . crowded together, often in a single room of little more than 100 square feet, sometimes in a single bed, or sometimes in a simple pile of shavings or straw or matted wool on the floor. In the country, the livestock might be brought indoors at night for additional warmth.” In 18th-century Wales, one observer claimed that in the homes of the common people, “every edifice” was practically a miniature “Noah’s Ark” filled with a great variety of animals. One shudders to think of the barnlike smell that bedchambers took on, in addition to the chorus of barnyard sounds that likely filled every night. Our forebears put up with the stench and noise and cuddled up with their livestock, if only to stave off hypothermia.

Homes were often so poorly constructed that they were unstable. The din of collapsing buildings was such a common sound that in 1688, Randle Holme defined a crash as “a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall.” The poet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that in 1730s London, “falling houses thunder on your head.” In the 1740s, “props to houses” keeping them from collapsing were listed among the most common obstacles that blocked free passage along London’s walkways.

“Poor Nutrition”

What about poor nutrition? From liberal flower children to the “Make America Healthy Again” crowd, fetishizing the supposedly chemical-free, wholesome diets of yore is bipartisan. The truth, however, is stomach-churning.

Our ancestors not only failed to eat well, but they sometimes didn’t eat at all. Historian William Manchester noted that in preindustrial Europe, famines occurred every four years on average. In the lean years, “cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers were waylaid and killed to be eaten.” Historian Fernand Braudel recorded a 1662 account from Burgundy, France, that lamented that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.” A third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine in the 1690s.

Even when food was available, it was often far from appetizing. Our forebears lived in a world where adulterated bread and milk, spoiled meat, and vegetables tainted with human waste were everyday occurrences. London bread was described in a 1771 novel as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.” According to historian Emily Cockayne, the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected noted that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.”

Water was also far from pristine. “For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water,” according to environmental law professor James Salzman. This ensured that each swig included a copious dose of human excreta and noxious bacteria. Waterborne illnesses were frequent.

“A Stressful, Unsatisfying Lifestyle”

Did stressful lifestyles originate with industrialization? Did our preindustrial ancestors generally enjoy a sense of inner peace? Doubtful. Sadly, many of them suffered from what they called melancholia, roughly analogous to the modern concepts of anxiety and depression.

In 1621, physician Robert Burton described a common symptom of melancholia as waking in the night due to mental stress among the upper classes. An observer said the poor similarly “feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.” Richard Napier, a 17th-century physician, recorded over several decades that some 20 percent of his patients suffered from insomnia. Today, in comparison, 12 percent of Americans say they have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia. Stress is nothing new.

Sky-high preindustrial mortality rates caused profound emotional suffering to those in mourning. Losing a child to death in infancy was once a common—indeed, near-universal—experience among parents, but the loss was no less painful for all its ordinariness. Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers felt acute grief with each loss. The 18th-century poem, “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth,” by Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright—who lost several of her own children prematurely—heartrendingly urges her infant to look at her one last time before passing away.

So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. Robert Burns wrote “On the Birth of a Posthumous Child.” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote multiple poems to his deceased son. Consider the pain captured by these lines from William Shakespeare’s play King John, spoken by the character Constance upon her son’s death: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child. . . . O Lord! My boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!” Shakespeare’s own son died in 1596, around the time the playwright would have finished writing King John.

Only in the modern world has child loss changed from extraordinarily common to exceedingly rare. As stressful as modern life can be, our ancestors faced forms of heartache that most people today will never endure.

“Dangerous Workplaces” and “Child Labor”

Dangerous workplaces and child labor both predate the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies, entire families would labor in fields and pastures, including pregnant women and young children. Many preindustrial children entered the workforce at what today would be considered preschool or kindergarten age.

In poorer families, children were sent to work by age 4 or 5. If children failed to find gainful employment by age 8, even social reformers unusually sympathetic to the plight of the poor, would express open disgust at such a lack of industriousness. Jonas Hanway was reportedly “revolted by families who sought charity when they had children aged 8 to 14 earning no wages.”

For most, work was backbreaking and unending. A common myth suggests that preindustrial peasants worked fewer days than modern people do. This misconception originated from an early estimate by historian Gregory Clark, who initially proposed that peasants labored only 150 days a year. He later revised this figure to around 300 days—higher than the modern average of 260 working days, even before factoring in today’s paid holidays and vacation time.

Physically harming one’s employees was once widely accepted, too, and authorities stepped in only when the mistreatment was exceptionally severe. In 1666, one such case occurred in Kittery, in what is now Maine, when Nicholas and Judith Weekes caused the death of a servant. Judith confessed that she cut off the servant’s toes with an axe. The couple, however, was not indicted for murder, merely for cruelty.

“Discrimination Against Women”

The preindustrial world was hardly a model of gender equality—discrimination against women was not an invention of the early industrialists but a long-standing feature of many societies.

Domestic violence was widely tolerated. In London, a 1595 law dictated: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” In other words, no beating your wife after 9:00 p.m. That was a noise regulation. A similar law forbade using a hammer after 9:00 p.m. Beating one’s wife until she screamed was an ordinary and acceptable activity.

Domestic violence was celebrated in popular culture, as in the lively folk song “The Cooper of Fife,” a traditional Scottish tune that inspired a country dance and influenced similar English and American ballads. To modern ears, the contrast between its violent lyrics and upbeat melody is unsettling. The song portrays a husband as entirely justified in his acts of domestic violence, inviting the audience to side with the wifebeater and cheer as he beats his wife into submission for her failure to perform domestic chores to her husband’s satisfaction.

Sexist laws often empowered men to abuse women. If a woman earned money, her husband could legally claim it at any time. For instance, in 18th-century Britain, a wife could not enter into contracts, make a will without her husband’s approval, or decide on her children’s education or apprenticeships; moreover, in the event of a separation, she automatically lost custody. Mistreatment of women, in other words, long predated industrialization. Arguably, it was the increase in female labor force participation during the Industrial Revolution that ultimately gave women greater economic independence and strengthened their social bargaining power.

“Environmental Harm”

While many of today’s environmental challenges—such as climate change and plastic pollution—differ from those our forebears faced, environmental degradation is not a recent phenomenon. Worrying about environmental impact, however, is rather new. Indeed, as historian Richard Hoffmann has pointed out, “Medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to . . . humankind.”

Consider deforestation. The Domesday Survey of 1086 found that trees covered 15 percent of England; by 1340, the share had fallen to 6 percent. France’s forests more than halved from about 30 million hectares in Charlemagne’s time (768–814) to 13 million by Philip IV’s reign (1285–1314).

Europe was hardly the only part of the world to abuse its forests. A 16th-century witness observed that at every proclamation demanding more wood for imperial buildings, the peasants of what are today the Hubei and Sichuan provinces in China “wept with despair until they choked,” for there was scarcely any wood left to be found.

Despeciation is also nothing new. Humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. The past 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70 percent of America’s large species and over 90 percent of Australia’s.

Exterminations of species occurred throughout the preindustrial era. People first settled in New Zealand in the late 13th century. In only 100 years, humans exterminated 10 species of moa in addition to at least 15 other kinds of native birds, including ducks, geese, pelicans, coots, Haast’s eagle, and an indigenous harrier. Today, few people realize that lions, hyenas, and leopards were once native to Europe, but by the first century, human activity eliminated them from the continent. The final known auroch, Europe’s native wild ox, was killed in Poland by a noble hunter in 1627.

Progress Is Real

History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination—that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.”

Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.

A popular saying holds that “the past is a foreign country,” and based on recorded accounts, it is not one where you would wish to vacation. If you could visit the preindustrial past, you would likely give the experience a zero-star rating. Indeed, the trip might leave you permanently scarred, both physically and psychologically. You might long to unsee the horrors encountered on your adventure and to forget the shocking, gory details.

The upside is that the visit would help deromanticize the past and show how far humanity has truly come—emphasizing the utter transformation of everyday lives and the reality of progress.

This article was published at Big Think on 11/19/2025.

Read more about the Grim Old Days

When the Danish scholar Bjorn Lomborg published The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001, the reaction from the environmental establishment was not debate but an attempted excommunication. Scientific American devoted a special package to attacking the book as biased and error-ridden. Union of Concerned Scientists accused him of misrepresenting science and overstating good news.

In Denmark the response went further. The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty decided that The Skeptical Environmentalist was “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice” and “objectively” fell within the concept of scientific dishonesty. Disgracefully, the Committees based their finding on biased third-party critiques, presented no documentation of errors, and engaged in rank anti-Americanism, such as alluding to “powerful interests in the USA bound up with increasing energy consumption and with the belief in free-market forces.”

The case generated international headlines and was treated as a formal stain on Lomborg’s integrity. A year later Denmark’s Ministry of Science threw out the initial decision on numerous counts. They found the original decision “dissatisfactory” and “emotional,” but most importantly the Ministry invalidated the decision because it was “not documented” and it was “completely void of argumentation” — something which a legally valid decision needs according to Danish law. The Ministry sent the case back to the Committees, which declined to reopen it.

The substance of Lomborg’s crime was simple. He took the environmental litany of doom and gloom and checked it against long-run data from the UN, the World Bank, and other official sources. He concluded that on most indicators human welfare had improved, many environmental trends were not as catastrophic as advertised, and that resources devoted to some flagship green causes would save more lives if redirected to basic health, nutrition and economic development. He accepted that global warming is real and largely man-made but argued that the standard policy mix of aggressive near-term emissions cuts was a poor investment compared with targeted adaptation, innovation and poverty reduction.

Lomborg did not claim private revelation. Inspired by the late Cato Institute Senior Fellow Julian Simon, he spent years compiling statistics and trend lines, ultimately drawing on some 3,000 mostly secondary sources. His method was explicit: quantify problems, rank them by costs and benefits, and ask where each extra dollar does the most good. The Copenhagen Consensus project that Lomborg leads extended this logic by convening economists to compare policies ranging from HIV prevention to trade liberalisation to climate mitigation, again with the aim of maximising welfare per dollar spent.

For this, he was branded a “denier,” portrayed as a tool of fossil fuel interests, and treated as someone whose views lay outside polite discussion. DeSmog today still amusingly describes him as a “climate crisis denier” and campaigns against funders that support his work. Scientific critiques often slid into attempts to discredit him personally, and one law review article documents how even his attempts to reply in detail were met with legal threats from critics rather than open exchange in the same pages.

Two decades later, the world looks more like Lomborg’s spreadsheets than like the early-2000s apocalypse rhetoric. Emissions are rising more slowly than feared, climate-related disaster deaths have fallen, and poor countries still face more immediate threats from malaria, malnutrition and lack of basic infrastructure. Into this landscape, Bill Gates has recently stepped with a climate memo that reads uncannily like a Lomborg column.

On 28 October 2025, ahead of the COP30 summit in Brazil, Gates published “Three tough truths about climate” on his Gates Notes site. There he argues that although climate change will have serious consequences, “it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” and that people “will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” He warns that an obsessive focus on near-term emissions targets has crowded out more effective ways to help people and calls for “a strategic pivot” toward improving lives, particularly in poor countries.

The key line could have been lifted from a Copenhagen Consensus report: “The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been,” and limited resources should go to interventions that deliver the greatest gains for the most vulnerable. That is Lomborg’s central thesis restated by one of the most influential philanthropists on the planet.

There is more than rhetorical convergence. The Gates Foundation has long supported the Copenhagen Consensus’ focus on development. It has donated over $3.5 million to partially fund policy prioritisations in the two Indian states of Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, a report of Best Buys for Africa for the African Academy of Sciences, and a stock-taking prioritisation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Such endeavours resulted in peer-reviewed economic research showing the 12 best investments for humanity. These 12 policies are described at length in Lomborg et al.’s book Best Things First, which was picked as one of the best books of 2023 by both Financial Times and The Economist. In other words, Gates has not only started to sound like Lomborg on climate and development; he has been funding Lomborg’s basic approach to global problem-solving for years.

Gates’ memo has sparked outrage among climate activists for soft-pedaling catastrophe, for questioning temperature as the main metric of success, and for insisting that health and prosperity are the best defences against a warmer world. Yet these are precisely the points Lomborg made when he argued that rich countries should not block poor ones from using reliable energy, that adaptation and growth can greatly reduce harm, and that chasing ever more expensive emissions cuts while neglecting cheap life-saving interventions is bad ethics as well as bad economics.

Lomborg’s vindication does not rest on perfection in every graph or forecast. (I have always argued that Lomborg ought to be trusted not because he gets everything right, but because—constantly checked by thousands of critics who wanted him to fail—he had every incentive to make fewer mistakes than those living in the epistemic bubble of environmental catastrophising.) It rests on three elements that his opponents tried to delegitimise but have failed to overturn.

First, he insisted on measuring long-run trends rather than reacting to headlines. That is why The Skeptical Environmentalist spent so many pages on fertility, food production, air and water quality, resource prices and disaster statistics. The message was that human ingenuity and market-driven growth had solved or mitigated many of the problems that earlier generations thought insoluble, and that policy should build on that record instead of assuming inevitable decline.

Second, he treated climate change as one serious problem among many, not as a singular moral crusade that trumps all other goals. His later book Cool It argued that some highly touted climate policies failed basic cost-benefit tests and that a mix of modest carbon pricing, technological innovation and targeted adaptation would do more good at lower cost. Gates now echoes this logic when he calls for innovation, cheap clean energy and continued investment in health and development, rather than pouring every available dollar into symbolic emissions cuts.

Third, Lomborg approached priorities as an empirical question, not as an expression of moral purity. The Copenhagen Consensus exercises rank policies by expected benefit per dollar, often putting vaccines, nutrition and basic education ahead of grand climate targets. That framework is nothing more than applied welfare economics. It is closer to the ethos of evidence-based public health than to the emotional politics that have dominated the climate debate.

That is what it means to say that Lomborg was driven by science rather than dogma or emotion. He did not deny problems. He asked how big they are, how fast they are changing, and what works best if we care about human flourishing. His opponents often responded not with better data but with attempts to brand him as illegitimate, to sic committees on him, and to deter others from asking similar questions.

The appearance of Bill Gates on Lomborg’s side of the argument underscores how fragile that strategy was. If climate change is not the end of the world but people will actually thrive, if poverty and disease remain the main killers, and if policy should be judged by lives improved rather than tons of carbon alone, then the core of Lomborg’s message stands.

There is a broader lesson. Modern societies claim to revere science, but too often turn scientific disputes into moral battles in which heretics must be shamed or silenced. Lomborg’s experience shows what happens when a researcher challenges a powerful narrative with inconvenient numbers. The attempt to punish him did not change the data. It only delayed a necessary conversation about trade-offs, priorities and the best use of scarce resources.

That conversation is now unavoidable. Gates has effectively cemented Lomborg’s main points, even as activists denounce them. Instead of pretending that never happened, we should recognise it for what it is: a belated vindication of the skeptical environmentalist who asked the right questions first.

This article was originally published in Quillette on 11/20/2025.

• A newly released working paper finds that fewer Americans are taking night shifts. The authors used two different methods to calculate the change between two different periods (see the charts below), with each showing a clear decline in the share of US employees working at night. They argue this shift is due to workers demanding higher wage premiums for night work rather than changes in the relative size of different industries, noting that “the trend exists in all major industries except retail.”

Energy & Environment

Conservation and biodiversity:

• The wood stork is no longer considered endangered in the United States following a sustained recovery from around 5,000 nesting pairs to over 10,000.

• The government of Kazakhstan is replenishing its portion of the Aral Sea, which was the world’s fourth-largest lake before it was largely emptied by Soviet irrigation projects. According to a recent statement from the Kazakh president, over the past 20 years, the water volume in the North Aral Sea has nearly doubled.

Energy and natural resources

• The Wall Street Journal reports that the US is producing record quantities of crude, even as oil prices drop. Thanks to technical improvements like remote monitoring and more efficient wells, as well as industry consolidation, drillers are pumping more oil out of the ground with fewer rigs and crews, reinforcing the industry against low prices and global competition.

• Also in the Permian, a nuclear startup is working with a major oilfield water handler to clean up drilling wastewater. The startup, Natura Resources, is developing small nuclear reactors that, under the agreement, will power water treatment and desalination systems, potentially making the vast volumes of contaminated water produced by oil wells safe for agriculture and other industrial uses.

• The data scientist Hannah Ritchie has created an online tool showing the relative energy consumption of various technologies. One general lesson is that the energy demands of devices that deal with bits are trifling compared to those that deal with atoms.

Health & Demographics

• Sugar prices are at their lowest level since 2020, and financial analysts credit falling demand driven by GLP-1 weight loss drugs.

• The UK has welcomed its first baby born via a transplanted womb from a dead donor.

• Surgeons in California have treated six children with spina bifida by applying stem cells to their spinal cords while they were still in the womb. The babies were born without major complications, and all showed reversal of a brain abnormality tied to the condition. The experimental therapy is meant to improve on standard fetal surgery for spina bifida, after which about 60 percent of children are still unable to walk independently.

Violence & Coercion

• While chattel slavery has been formally abolished worldwide, other forms of forced labor persist. Thankfully, though, they appear to be diminishing. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy Project, researchers at Our World in Data judged that just 9 countries still practiced large-scale forced labor in 2024, the lowest number in history.

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Nearly a century later, that prediction seems justified. We are richer, healthier, and better educated than any society in history, yet economic growth has slowed, trust in institutions is fraying, birthrates are collapsing, and a deep pessimism hangs over much of the developed world.

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, our editor Marian Tupy speaks with writer and policy scholar Brink Lindsey about his new book The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. They discuss why material abundance creates dissatisfaction, the decline of marriage and community, bureaucratic stagnation, and the cultural and institutional innovations needed to produce mass satisfaction without scarcity.

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

Today, I’ll be speaking with Brink Lindsey, an American political writer and Senior Vice President at the Niskanen Center. Previously, he was Cato’s Vice President for Research and a dear colleague. Today, we’ll be discussing his latest book, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transformation from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing.

I want to start by congratulating you on your excellent book. It is concise, thoughtful, and beautifully written. As a published author, I’m envious of your style, and I really recommend the book to our listeners.

Let’s start with the most obvious question. What is the permanent problem?

I stole that line from the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote a fascinating essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”

That essay came out in 1930 in the depths of the Great Depression, but he was brave enough to argue that this global catastrophe was just a bump in the road in a much longer process of modern economic growth, which he believed would continue until his audience’s grandchildren were grown. By that point, he said that the economic problem, meaning serious material deprivation, would be more or less solved. With that done, he foresaw that humanity’s permanent problem would loom into view: how to live wisely and agreeably and well with the blessings that modern economic growth has bestowed upon us.

He got some specific things wrong. He imagined that by now we’d only be working 15 hours a week, which hasn’t panned out. However, he got the big picture profoundly right, which is that an abundant future was coming, and that moving from tackling the economic problem to the permanent problem would be traumatic for societies. That they would have to unlearn the habits of untold generations.

He imagined that this transition would be, in his words, something like a “general nervous breakdown throughout society.” That phrase struck me as a pretty good description for the predicament that the United States and other advanced democracies have found themselves in. We’re richer, healthier, better educated, and more humanely governed than any people have ever been before, yet economic growth has slowed to a crawl in most advanced economies, class divisions have sparked a global populist uprising against elites and established institutions, personal relationships are fraying, mental health problems are on the rise, faith in democracy is wavering, and widespread pessimism is one of the few things you can get people across the political spectrum to agree on.

So, the thesis of the book is that our predicament amounts to the fact that we are in this no man’s land between mass plenty and mass flourishing. That, having achieved mass plenty, we’ve moved the goalposts of what makes a successful life. It’s no longer just about having food, shelter, and clothing, but meaning, purpose, belonging, and status. While we are providing those conditions for a larger fraction of the population than ever before, for 70 or 80 percent of people, our current way of life is not providing the conditions for flourishing that one would imagine would go with our level of technological and organizational prowess.

So, in America today, things are so good that we are moving to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, but on the other hand, we have a hysteria where people are saying basic necessities like food and shelter have never been more unaffordable.

Can both be true at the same time?

I think we are absolutely materially richer than any society before. People who are discontent with the status quo grope for something quantifiable that has gone wrong, and so they try to make an argument about material decline that just isn’t consistent with the facts. It is true that we are rich enough to take our basic material needs for granted. Nonetheless, we enjoy these blessings with a kind of asterisk, which is that we get them only by spending the bulk of our waking adult lives working 40-hour weeks.

The blessed 20 or 30 percent at the top have an arena for flourishing. They’ve got intellectually challenging jobs that offer a lot of autonomy and scope for creativity, and social status. The rest are in fairly low-autonomy jobs with a lot of scutwork, and they’re one stroke of bad luck away from losing their job and falling into a serious hole. They’re shadowed by both the precarity of their hold on mass plenty and also by the need to spend a lot of their lives in drudgery to pay the bills.

According to Gallup, life satisfaction in America remained pretty much the same between 1979 and 2025. Roughly 80 percent of Americans say they are either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, while only 20 percent of Americans believe that America is going in the right direction.

So, how bad is it really, if 80 percent of Americans say that they are satisfied or very satisfied with their lives?

I don’t put much stock in self-assessments of life satisfaction. Psychologically healthy people make the best of things, whatever the circumstances. Plus, happiness and life satisfaction surveys have a lot of cultural variation. Latin Americans seem to report higher life satisfaction given their level of GDP than Scandinavians or Japanese.

What I look at instead is the conditions for a well-lived life. The chances to do work that is challenging, fulfilling, and interesting are very good for a considerable fraction of people, but they’re not so good for the majority. There’s a large divergence there between the well-off and well-educated and everybody else. That’s also translated into diverging odds of even being in the workforce: there’s been a small drop-off in male prime-age labor force participation for college-educated men from the mid-’60s to the present, and a big drop-off in labor force participation for non-college-educated men. There’s been a similar divergence in the odds of getting married and in the odds of growing up in a two-parent home. And finally, in recent years, we’ve seen a divergence in life expectancy. Rather than the poor catching up with the rich over time, they’re now pulling apart.

So, are we doing better than ever before? Sure. But I don’t think that exhausts the inquiry. In a society organized around progress, a purely backward-looking standard of evaluation isn’t dispositive. In some of the more intangible aspects of flourishing, there are warning signs that things are going in the wrong direction.

So, do you have in your mind a sense of what an agreeable life should be?

At least in broad outlines.

In the agrarian age, to quote Hobbes, “Life was poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but it was not solitary. People were miserable and poor, but they weren’t atomized or alienated. Now, I think it’s a real liberation that we’re not stuck in the same place that we were born, working the same trade as our parents. We can choose our own lives, and that’s a great opportunity. The next question is, “Are we going to develop cultural and institutional supports in these new conditions that will help us to have satisfying lives?

It’s beyond serious dispute that for most people, the most important determinant of the quality of their life is the quality of their personal relationships. And once upon a time, when the world was poor, your face-to-face relationships with other people filled vital practical functions. Your spouse was a partner in economic co-production. Your kids were economic assets. Your neighbors were an insurance policy. The main source of entertainment was hanging out with your friends and talking.

Over time, as we’ve gotten richer, we’ve outsourced a lot of those functions either to the marketplace or the welfare state. Personal relationships with people have become just one consumption option in a sea of expertly marketed alternatives. Learning to live wisely and agreeably and well amidst riches requires cultural and institutional supports that push us to spend our time on what really matters, which is the people who are close to us. We don’t have those, so we’re seeing fraying human connection.

This is cashing out most fatefully in the declining rate of people getting married and having babies. More than half of people now live in countries where the fertility rate is below replacement. That puts the whole demographic sustainability of liberal, democratic, capitalist, cosmopolitan, affluent civilization in doubt.

I want to ask you about the danger of presentism.

When we see a problem on the front pages of newspapers, we tend to extrapolate from it a broader crisis. In other words, we have trouble separating that which is fundamental to our civilization from that which is just a passing trend.

Let me give you a few examples. You write in the book that “we are getting fatter, dumber, and our mental health is deteriorating.” It certainly feels like it, right? But obesity is already declining in the United States because of Ozempic. Increasingly large numbers of young people are switching off social media. Apparently, Gen Z, the newest ones, are the best at that. Suicide rates are falling in rich countries outside of the United States, meaning this may be a particular American problem, or even simply a problem of measurement, rather than a general problem with modernity.

So, are we underestimating human adaptability and technological innovation?

That’s a very good point. We learn over time that some things that we thought were great turned out to be bad, and we put them behind us. Forty percent of American adults used to smoke, and we covered our walls with lead paint. And yes, we’ve got what looks like a deus ex machina for obesity, but the fact that the obesity wave happened at all is a good example of a more general challenge of being rich.

When we were poor, we developed a scarcity-based morality of self-discipline and self-control and resisting temptation out of necessity, but as those material constraints lessened, there was an inevitable and appropriate loosening. People could indulge their desires more. They could, to a greater extent than in the past, follow an “if it feels good, do it” kind of path. Well, it turns out that those qualities of self-discipline and self-mastery are still extremely helpful today, not for keeping you from falling into horrible poverty, but for keeping you focused on the things that really matter, rather than trivial, distracting desires.

Capitalism gives us what we want, and we don’t yet have the cultural supports that make sure it gives us what we want to want.

One set of problems that you identify has to do with the disintegration of personal bonds and the atomization of society.

Now, if I wanted to make grandparents more reliant on their children, to make neighbors more helpful to each other, and to increase church attendance, I would start by abolishing the welfare state, which I think has eroded the kind of mutual, voluntary reliance that people once had on each other.

This might irritate you, but I see the welfare state as an integral part of modern capitalism. Nowhere do we see a complex, technologically intensive, organizationally intensive division of labor without a strong welfare state. It’s possible to imagine such a thing, but it’s also possible to imagine a human being that’s 100 meters tall. If you actually had a human being that tall, he would collapse under his own weight. Plus, the libertarian movement in the United States has made zero headway in knocking back the welfare state, so I think libertarians need some kind of plan B.

The hopeful future I have in mind is more localistic and involves reimbuing our face-to-face relationships with practical functions, which will allow people to live without the welfare state to a considerable degree. You can imagine a world of small modular nuclear reactors and 3D printing and vertical farming where small communities, with small divisions of labor, could have a degree of material affluence that today requires large-scale divisions of labor. But even in the here and now, if people are living together in communities, they can reassume duties of care that have been outsourced to private enterprise and the welfare state, such as taking care of little kids and elderly people and educating the young.

I wonder what is going to be more effective at driving culture change: appealing to people, or changing the incentives. When the government says, “We can pay for your child to go to a school,” you can opt out, but you will have to pay twice if you want to send your kids to a private school.

At the very least, I think we agree we will need to have competition. We could give the welfare state to the states and let them play around with it so that different jurisdictions can learn from each other.

Yeah. And, even more importantly, on the regulatory side.

So far, I’ve been talking about what I call capitalism’s crisis of inclusion, which is the weakening relationship between growth and widespread conditions for the good life. Meanwhile, though, we have a crisis of dynamism, a weakening capacity of the system to just keep delivering growth and pushing the technological frontier outward. Mancur Olson identified this problem a long time ago, which is that the richer you get, the more people you have with a stake in the status quo. For those people, the prospect of disruptive change is anxiety-provoking because it could knock them off their privileged perch, so they have an incentive to stop change. Also, the richer you get, the lower communication costs are, and the easier it is to band together with like-minded people and throw sand in the gears of creative destruction.

Meanwhile, the knowledge economy has created this large class of knowledge workers who desire to control and rationalize everything in their grasp. When something isn’t working, the solution is to add another layer of bureaucracy and process. Obviously, we’ve got lots of this kind of dysfunction in the public sector, but I think we also see it in the private sector, with the explosion of administrative staff on campus, the HR-ization of corporate life, and also in personal life, with helicopter parenting. These same professionals, on their off hours, deploy their managerial instincts to squeeze every drop of spontaneity out of childhood in the name of safety.

Those impulses are deep-seated, and they have contributed to an increasing drag on our dynamism.

One of the most effective ways to tackle this is inter-jurisdictional competition, allowing different groups to have different rules to limit the exposure of those different rules. Then, if that different set of rules really is producing better results, they can be emulated elsewhere. Beyond that, we’re just ineradicably culturally pluralistic people, especially under conditions of modernity. People are not going to agree with each other on what the good life is. They’re going to have different values. Having us all crammed together under one set of rules makes those value differences really high stakes and combustible and has produced a lot of the dysfunctional politics we’re experiencing now.

Last question.

My view of what living wisely, agreeably, and well may be very different from a guy who is perfectly satisfied living in his basement playing games and smoking a lot of pot. I would find such a life appalling, but who am I to tell this person that they are not living wisely, agreeably, and well?

In other words, aren’t you worried that even if all your hopes come to pass, the future may still contain a lot of people who will not be living wisely, agreeably, and well, just as they are today?

We can talk about flourishing at the individual level and then flourishing at the societal level.

In the book, I talk about projects, relationships, and experiences. Some people are really focused on projects and very light on relationships, and they do fine. Some people are great at cultivating amazing experiences, and they’re not very practical about anything else, but they live well that way. So there are a lot of different ways to have a good life.

At the social level, there’s a little bit less variety. To take one example, you can totally have a flourishing individual life without having children, but you can’t really have a flourishing society unless a certain number of people are having babies. So, I think you can’t have a flourishing society that isn’t a free society where people are the authors of their own lives, and a free society requires the freedom to fail. Some people are just not going to live wisely and agreeably and well.

I think we can create better conditions for people to choose well than we have at present. But that doesn’t mean we need to converge on one way of living well. That would be boring. Getting richer should mean a flowering of variety, not everybody converging on one way of life. And I think a more pluralistic, localistic institutional environment is most conducive to that end.

And it seems to me that living in a pluralistic society doesn’t mean that you are voiceless, that you don’t have a right to express your views about other people’s lives. Pluralism does not require total relativism. I can still say to little Jimmy, “Spend less time playing video games in your room and go out and explore the world.”

Ultimately, if we are going to be living in a pluralistic society where people can choose their values and how they want to live, it should be possible for people to persuade them that some ways of living, such as living up to their best potential, are better than wasting their lives.

This is the ultimate challenge for Homo sapiens: are we cut out for freedom? Are we cut out for being allowed to choose the good? Or are we just such a refractory species that we have to be lorded over?

The dystopian novel Brave New World, I think, is a much better fit with the predicament we’re in right now than 1984. The human spirit is being degraded, not by a regime of fear, but by a regime of cheap pleasures. At the end of that book, there’s this long monologue by the head of the society making this argument that human beings just don’t know what’s good for them and need to be taken care of. I don’t believe that. I have faith that there is a human nature that wants the good, that wants to connect to the outside world, and to other people, and figure things out. And we have the great privilege of living in a very rich, technologically advanced world that gives more people opportunities to do those things. We just need to structure things a little bit better to make it easier to make the right choices.

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