“Take any variable of human well-being—longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population—and draw a graph of its value over time,” Charles Mann writes in The Wizard and the Prophet. “In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as humans learn

The system we developed is unique. Decisions that are often made by bureaucracies in other countries are made by judges in our country.

Scarcity Is a Choice

“This is what democracy looks like” is a common chant at protests, but what democracy should look like is a devilishly hard question to answer.

But there is some margin at which trying to do more means ultimately achieving less.

The term “political order” is the coinage of Gary Gerstle, an American historian and a professor at Cambridge University. Many historians focus on how Republicans and Democrats have fought and disagreed over the years. Gerstle’s work focuses instead on how hidden points of consensus between the parties create distinctive periods of history, which

The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can. The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.

In 2023, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who struggled for years to get a dollar of funding from the NIH, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a technology that saved millions of lives.

“What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time—from climate change to inequality and ageing—we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness? What if, rather than having no sense of a different future,