Doomslayer: Progress Roundup
Swedish economic reforms, a rare antelope recovery, growing the human genetic catalog, and more.
Economics & Development
Sweden, long treated as a model of democratic socialism, has spent the past three decades moving toward freer markets. Following a period of economic stagnation and a financial crisis in the early 1990s, the country cut taxes, restrained public spending, opened parts of education and healthcare to private providers, and generally liberalized the economy. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, Sweden’s growth prospects now look unusually strong by European standards, with projections roughly equal to those of the United States and about twice as high as those of France and Germany.
America’s productivity growth is recovering after years of post-financial-crisis stagnation. The Economist reports that US productivity has grown by about 2 percent a year over the past five years, up from 1 percent in the 2010s. Reflecting that welcome news, the Federal Reserve recently raised its median estimate of America’s long-run GDP growth rate from 1.8 percent to 2 percent.
Energy & Environment
The United States set a new energy production record in 2025, the fourth consecutive year of growth.
Mountain bongo antelope are returning to Kenya’s forests after nearly disappearing from the wild. The Associated Press reports that fewer than 100 wild mountain bongos remain, but a breeding program at the Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy now maintains a large captive population that is gradually being reintroduced to protected forest habitat.
Health & Demographics
Tunisia has been recognized by the World Health Organization for eliminating trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma is a bacterial eye disease that can cause blindness after repeated infections.
A four-year evaluation of the RTS,S malaria vaccine pilot in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi has found that introducing the vaccine led to a 13 percent reduction in mortality among eligible children and a 22 percent reduction in severe malaria hospitalizations, despite incomplete coverage.
Science & Technology
Ramp, a corporate payments platform, has been tracking AI spending from its clients since 2023. In its April 2026 AI Index, the company reported that more than half of the businesses on its platform paid for AI tools in March, up from 35 percent a year earlier.
Atoco, a company building machines that harvest atmospheric water, recently showed Bloomberg its latest prototype ahead of a planned commercial debut. The company was founded by Omar Yaghi, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist whose work helped pioneer metal-organic frameworks, which the device uses to pull drinking water from the air. Atoco says the machine can produce up to 4,000 liters a day, and while it will be more expensive than desalinated water, it could be useful inland or in places without reliable water infrastructure. The company is also developing a version that produces less water but runs on ambient sunlight.
India’s Department of Biotechnology is funding a major effort to catalog the country’s genetic variation. So far, the survey has sequenced the genomes of 9,768 people and identified 44 million genetic variants that were absent from global scientific databases. The initiative aims to eventually sequence one million genomes, which would greatly expand the genetic map researchers use to study disease, ancestry, and human biology.
The FCC has loosened rules that constrained low-Earth-orbit internet satellites by limiting the strength of the signals they could send to customers on the ground. Under the new rules, satellite networks such as Starlink could use up to eight satellites to serve a given area and frequency band simultaneously, up from one under the old limits, allowing the networks to serve more users at once and potentially improve internet speeds.
Violence & Coercion
Crime continues to fall across the United States. According to data from 67 major police departments, homicides were down 17.7 percent in the first three months of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025. The same comparison shows a 20.4 percent decline in robberies, a 7.2 percent drop in rapes, and a 4.8 percent fall in aggravated assaults, continuing the post-pandemic drop in violent crime.
