Doomslayer: Progress Roundup

Jan 25, 2026

Economics & Development

According to World Bank data, the middle class now outnumbers the poor in Mexico. The calculation is based on World Bank income thresholds for upper-middle-income countries.1
Iraq’s national poverty rate has fallen from 23 percent to 17.5 percent over the past three years, according to government data.
The International Monetary Fund’s global economic growth forecast has grown more optimistic, with the world economy now expected to expand 3.3 percent in 2026, up from an earlier prediction of 3.1 percent in October. The revision is based largely on a surge in AI-related investment.

The much-diminished European water vole population is rebounding in the East of England after a program to cull the American Mink, one of the vole’s predators.
Thailand’s tiger population is enjoying a robust recovery, thanks in part to a newly protected forest corridor that is allowing the cats to expand into new habitats.
The Kākāpō, a critically endangered, flightless, owl-faced parrot from New Zealand, is expected to have a very fruitful mating season this year.
China created 3.6 million hectares of forest and 4.9 million hectares of grasslands in 2025, as part of its decades-long effort to control desertification.
Once common across eastern North America, the American chestnut was nearly wiped out in the early 20th century by an invasive tree fungus. Since the 1980s, scientists have been trying to restore the species by breeding and genetically engineering blight-tolerant trees. A recent field trial in Maine shows the project is bearing some fruit: American chestnut saplings given a gene from blight-resistant wheat developed much smaller blight cankers than both their non-engineered counterparts and the Chinese chestnut, which coevolved with the disease.

People in Nigeria imported solar panels with a combined 1,721 MW of generation capacity between June 2024 and 2025—equal to 5 percent of the country’s total electricity demand. The panels are bringing electricity to large swaths of the Nigerian population who lack reliable access to the national grid.
Tesla has begun operating a new lithium refinery that the company claims is the largest and most advanced in the United States.
Japan has begun the world’s first deep-sea mud mining test in an attempt to reduce its dependence on Chinese rare earth minerals.
US recycling firms are investing billions in automating recycling facilities, using AI-driven vision systems and high-speed sorting to pull valuable metals, plastics, and paper out of waste. According to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, the new technology is making recycling far more efficient and eliminating some unpleasant jobs.

Not only has human microplastic exposure likely been overstated, but new research from the University of Vienna finds that previous estimates of atmospheric microplastic pollution may have been exaggerated by “several orders of magnitude.” By comparing real-world environmental samples with widely used models, the researchers found that modeled atmospheric microplastic levels were 100 to 10,000 times higher than what measurements actually showed.
A century ago, pollution in Boston Harbor was so severe that shellfishing was banned, save for a handful of licensed, tightly regulated producers. Now, after decades of cleanup, the state of Massachusetts is opening parts of Boston Harbor to shellfish harvesting by the general public.

Moderna and Merck have released the results of a Phase 2b trial of their mRNA cancer vaccine. In the trial, the vaccine combined with the immunotherapy drug Keytruda cut the risk of melanoma recurrence and deaths within 5 years by half compared with Keytruda alone.
India’s malaria incidence has fallen over 80 percent since 2015, according to an announcement from the health minister, while tuberculosis incidence has fallen 21 percent.
US overdose deaths continued to fall during the first half of 2025. The CDC reports that there were 73,000 overdose deaths between August 2024 and 2025, 21 percent fewer than in the previous 12 months.
Maternal mortality in Uzbekistan has fallen nearly 80 percent since 1991, from 65 deaths per 100,000 live births to less than 15. Infant and child mortality fell by around 75 percent over the same period.
The investment banking firm Jefferies has calculated that, if widespread use of GLP-1 weight loss drugs makes airline passengers about 10 percent lighter on average, the resulting fuel savings could boost US airlines’ earnings per share by as much as 4 percent.

Poland’s government has approved a bill offering “cohabitation contracts” for couples of any sex, which would give same-sex couples some of the legal rights and protections of marriage without the formal title.

Shai Wininger, the president of the Lemonade insurance company, has announced that the company will offer 50 percent lower per-mile premiums for Tesla drivers who use self-driving—a testament to the technology’s safety compared to human drivers.
This year, Walmart plans to launch Wing drone delivery in an additional 150 locations across the United States, bringing the service to 12 percent of the population.
Zipline, another drone courier, has now made over 2 million commercial deliveries.
Blue Origin is planning to launch its own Starlink-style satellite internet network. Unlike Starlink, however, Blue Origin will not serve the everyday consumer market; its goal is to provide speeds of six terabits per second anywhere on Earth—useful for very large-scale data processing.

A report from the Council on Criminal Justice indicates that the US murder rate in 2025 may have been the lowest since 1900. The research uses police data from 35 large American cities to approximate the national murder rate.