From today, Works in Progress is now in stock at Barnes & Nobles nationwide across America.

We’re in 570 stores in 49 states*, including the flagship stores at Union Square & Fifth Avenue in NYC; Georgetown, DC; State Street, Chicago; The Grove, Los Angeles; and the Barnes & Noble branches at San Francisco Airport.

We’re also now in Hudson News outlets across most major US airports, and a handful of independent newsagents in New York, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, and London including magCulture in Clerkenwell (from tomorrow) and Shreeji News on Chiltern St.

If you Substack Note, Tweet, LinkedIn, or Instagram a photo of your copy of Works in Progress outside any of these stores, share the post with us and we’ll send you a free tote bag as a thank you. If you’re a subscriber already, feel free to do it with your own copy!

You can see a full map of Barnes & Noble stockists here, and enter your Zip code to find your nearest store.

*Sorry, Wyoming, we’ll get to you!

‘You just piss it oot,’ my friend Stuart Ritchie has always told me. In a politer register, other friends have expressed scepticism too. But for a long time, despite the wisdom of my smartest scientist pals, I was an enthusiastic believer in supplementation. As recently as five years ago, I had a long list of supplements I recommended for normal people, based on my research. I no longer take anything and haven’t for a while, and I don’t think there is an especially good case for anyone to do so without having a specific justification, like bloodwork or the advice of a doctor.

Subscribe to print

My thinking in my supplement era was simple: there is no special reason to think everyone’s diets are giving them an optimal amount of every micro- or phytonutrient. It might be that the perfect amount is some way above the threshold for not being deficient. Therefore, I argued, with the right evidence it was worth punting on various supplements, like choline, vitamin K2 (menaquinones 4 and 7, naturally), fish oil or omega-3 fatty acids (prepared in the right way, of course), and potentially many more things. I took wheat germ (for its spermine and spermidine). I even took glycine, a slightly sweet amino acid prominent in skin and bone but not muscle meat, which people online claim improves their sleep.

I was an evangelist. My wild-eyed confidence and thorough research inspired many people over the years to take one thing or another that I recommended on my ever-permuting list. I had an easy audience, because there seems to be a near-universal drive toward supplementation, either as a kind of inherited folk memory of beriberi, pellagra, scurvy, and rickets, or perhaps as a natural human instinct – the same one that makes us want a pill when we leave the doctor’s office.

My method was tripartite. I reasoned that though we can’t be absolutely sure, a supplement was, on balance, likely worth taking if three things held. First, we have a plausible evolutionary story about how we originally evolved in an environment with more of it, and our modern diets do not. Second, there is a logical, not obviously disputed, story about how it works. Third, the balance of evidence suggests that consuming the nutrient at least correlates with good health, and ideally well-designed trials show that it actually causes good health.

With such a rigorous method, how did everything fall apart? It’s a sad story. Ultimately, it was both a bad methodology and I applied it badly. The core problem is the same problem for all theorizing, the same problem the methodology of science was designed to solve: it is very easy to validate one’s tender hypotheses by looking carefully for validating evidence. Another perhaps equally big problem is that most science is nearly useless.

Let’s start with the first problem. Basically, I have an underlying psychological... call it a trait rather than a flaw, though there is a case for either name. This psychological trait makes me take pleasure in having bespoke, rare, fresh, interesting opinions. You might call it metacontrarianism. I love to have original views, and it’s possible, I admit, that I get just a little bit invested in these opinions and in proving that they are right.

Subscribe now

Now, this combines with another trait I have, this one definitely a flaw: food obsessiveness. I’m afraid that I was a pathologically, distressingly fussy child who would eat only a handful of plain foods. As a teenager, I forwent artificial colorings and flavorings completely, to an extent that made people think (rightly) that I was a freak. For years, I ate only during a six-hour window between 2pm and 8pm. At other times, I have obsessively counted calories, or completely avoided carbs. Currently, I just eat a lot of fiber. I follow dietary fads like I am constantly switching religions.

This naturally led me to search out evidence that would allow me to believe, with at least some reason, that we are short on vitamin K2 because our diet is lower in liver, alpine cheese, and grass-fed butter. My elegant evolutionary story combined with a plausible mechanism for how K2 would help us – preventing arterial calcification brought on by a diet with too much calcium – and with evidence that adults with more vitamin K2 are healthier. There are even academic studies showing that vitamin K2 improves health. Voila: I began taking a specific brand of vitamin K2 supplement (InnovixLabs Full Spectrum), which I judged to have the right balance of the rarer menaquinone-4 (this word on its own has a certain ring to internet users of the early 2010s) and the less rare menaquinone-7.

And so on for the other supplements. I had complex views on which ones were dangerous (copper), which were pointless (B vitamins except B12; creatine in omnivores), and which were essential (K2 menaquinone-4). This complexity was a great deal of what made the whole thing so enjoyable, akin to being into a fandom like Warhammer with a lot of lore, or a sport like baseball with very rich statistics.

Lore maximization reaches its apotheosis in the ideas of the late Dr Ray Peat, who has views so esoteric that even aficionados disagree on them. Some of my most enjoyable evenings have come from advancing Peatist views to uncomprehending, spluttering audiences. He advises consuming sugar, especially in the form of ice cream or orange juice, to speed up the metabolism, or even eating dessicated beef thyroid.

Though Peatism was pure affectation, it shined a light on what was really happening. I didn’t really believe in all the supplements I was taking – I just treasured the esoteric dietary knowledge, like a kind of modern-day druid. This blinded me to the fact that a big share of my research was confirmation bias.

But there was a more profound problem. People like the wise Stuart Ritchie and my colleague Saloni Dattani had been telling me for ages that science was overloaded with complete nonsense, which I accepted on an intellectual level but had not really absorbed into my intuitions. My feeling had always been that we could still draw conclusions if we had a big enough pile of papers. But now I have come to believe that something like 90 percent of research is nearly valueless.

Subscribe now

Just as Peatism was undermining my emotional investment in supplementation, an intellectual justification for supplement scepticism appeared in the form of a blog post by Milky Eggs. The average paper in nutrition science is so bad, because of the usual range of poor research practices ranging from fraud to p-hacking, that even large bodies of research papers can have not just the wrong magnitude of effect, but the wrong sign. It is surprisingly easy to produce dozens of papers showing something false, and what’s more, there is a bandwagon effect, and people do it all the time.

The proposed mechanism through which amino acid glycine extends life is by inhibiting methionine (another amino acid)’s effect on a particular signalling pathway. But with evidence as weak and inconsistent as it is today, how can we be sure that any random amino acid we supplement is not really functioning as a methionine?

This isn’t to say that there are never beneficial supplements for normal omnivores, but I am now suitably chastened. Silly old Stuart, I always said – why does he think that everyone, just by ‘eating a balanced diet’ (me: chortle, snigger), will have maxed out their ability to absorb micronutrients? ‘Piss it oot’ indeed. Well, I’m afraid that Stuart has had the last laugh.

Ben Southwood is an editor at Works in Progress.

Join us on December 3rd at the London School of Economics. RSVP here.

Britain struggles to build almost anything: houses, infrastructure, data centres, and everything else. Its economy is anaemic. It has the most expensive energy of almost anywhere in the world. Its labour market looks dangerously exposed to shocks to professional services. The British state is paralysed and unable to act.

​Two years ago, when we published Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated, these were important facts for anyone who cared about reviving Britain’s economy. Today, they will decide whether Britain thrives in the age of AI or goes the way of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and twentieth century Argentina.

​You are invited to join us at Building Abundance: How Britain can flourish in the age of AI, a day of ideas for rebuilding Britain’s economy and state so it can adapt to and embrace artificial intelligence and other opportunities for growth.

​It will be held on Thursday 3rd December at the London School of Economics, from 1pm to 7:30pm (doors open 1pm for a 1:20pm start). This is hosted by Works in Progress in association with the LSE Law School and School of Public Policy. Tickets are free.

​Our keynote sessions feature former Prime Ministerial advisors Dominic Cummings and Morgan McSweeney in conversation on the decline and fall of British state capacity, and John Fingleton on what the government has and has not done to put his review of nuclear regulation into effect, one year after committing to implement it in full.

​Other speakers include:

• Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes on why nearly every attempt to get Britain building has failed;

• ​Rachel Wolf on what the public really thinks about economic growth and AI;

• ​Luis Garicano on messy jobs and Britain’s labour market;

• ​Julia Willemyns on why Britain needs gigawatt-scale compute, and how to get it built here;

• ​Saloni Dattani on why fixing clinical trials is the best industrial policy Britain could have;

• ​Michael Dnes on building the first new tunnel under the Pennines since 1954;

• ​Robert Boswall on how to finance and power the data centre buildout; and

• ​Daisy Christodoulou on why VAR matters for state capacity.

​This is a half-day event, and we cannot admit people mid-way through. We look forward to seeing you there!

RSVP now.

January 2022. TikTok had chosen its villain of the week. West Elm Caleb was a six-foot-four mustachioed lothario who had strung along several different women. They took to TikTok to tell their matching stories of being made Spotify mixtapes and then being ghosted and were outraged to discover a pattern. He became an avatar for hitherto suppressed rage as people uncovered his precise identity and tried to get him fired. A dating app even took out a billboard about him.

Cads are nothing new. What was new is that these women felt they had been morally wronged. In millennial culture, ‘fuckboys’ are generally considered to be an amoral force of nature, the bridge trolls you pay to participate in 2010s sex positivity. The view from the Huffington-Post-iverse was that they were probably better people than the so-called nice guys who can’t get laid. The kids have a different view. Polling says that young people today are less likely to have sex on a first date or a one-night stand, and are more interested in marriage.

Subscribe to print

The younger generation’s reaction against casual sex has puzzled older commentators. Much like the rise of the New Right, the arc of history was not meant to bend like this. But the rise of prudishness was to be expected. From the Second World War, up to the 1990s, American dating markets had too many women. I think this is a partial explanation for why the sexual revolution happened. Now, they have too many men.

The standard story of the sexual revolution is that we invented the contraceptive pill, unleashed it upon the white-picket-fence nuclear families of postwar America, and – depending on your politics – either liberated or destroyed them with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s a neat story, but it doesn’t quite fit the facts. By the time the pill was approved in 1960, premarital sex had been on a steady, multi-decade rise in America. By 1953, half of women reported having had premarital sex. And contraception is popular in lands untouched by the sexual revolution. Condoms, the pill and sterilization are all widely available in India, but only 3 percent of unmarried women will admit to having had sex. Abortion and contraception have been widely practiced in Japan since the 1950s, but they still haven’t had a pro-casual sex revolution either.

At the start of the early twentieth century, middle and upper class courtship was managed by an arcane system of courting etiquette and socially filtered matchmaking by elders. Most people in Western culture expected to marry for love, but male-female socializing was chaperoned, and respectable young women were only introduced to men within their social class. This changed in the roaring twenties as dating trickled up from the working classes, who moved to cities for work and didn’t have their mothers around to issue invitations or parlors to host in.

Subscribe now

When dating first arose, America had too many men. Mass immigration meant that in 1920 there were 104 men for every 100 women. So for dating’s first two decades, women had the upper hand. Men took them out dancing, paid for their milkshakes, and everyone got married a little younger. Free from parental watchfulness some ‘necking and petting’ was known to happen, and the amount of premarital sex rose, but it remained a minority pursuit rather than an expectation.

After the Second World War, for the first time in its history, the United States had surplus women. Because couples consistently opt for relationships where the man is slightly older, a high birth rate can create a false shortage of men. From the end of the Second World War until 1961 every cohort of babies was bigger than the one before: 3.7 million were born in 1950, 3.8 million in 1951, and 3.9 in 1952. The average age gap between couples was two years meaning there were only 1.85 million boys born in 1950 for the 1.95 million girls born in 1952, creating an oversupply of 105 women for every 100 men a couple of years older than them. So from the 1940s through to the 1990s, Americans experienced a dating market with a false shortage of men.

Even before we had reliable contraception, the number of women having premarital sex tripled. Only one in seven women from the 1920s had sex before marriage. Half the youth of 1950 did. Of course, sex without commitment or reliable contraception could have been devastating but shotgun marriages rose substantially. A sixth of first borns to married couples in the early 1960s were the product of premarital shenanigans (versus a twelfth in 1920).

The male shortage had a big impact on Asian marriage markets too. In India, dowries (payments from the bride’s family to the groom’s) rose in the decades following the Baby Boom, tripling from 1930 to 1975. Now sex selective abortion has inverted the sex ratio – there are 13.5 million 24-year-old men for the 12.3 million 19-year-old women – and so, running counter to the long tradition of dowries bride buying has become a problem in the most sex-skewed parts of India.

Similarly, the arranged-marriage-based ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in the United States grows by about four percent a year, leading to what they call a ‘shidduch crisis’ (shidduch being the name for their system of matchmaking). For every 100 men who are 22, they have 112 women who are 19. Nose jobs are becoming a popular present for girls before they get matched. Tellingly, the Hasidic parts of the community, where men and women typically enter shidduch at the same age, have no similar crisis.

Subscribe to print

The cleanest evidence comes from college campuses, which provide us with hundreds of micro dating markets with wildly different sex ratios. Women on more female-skewed college campuses go on fewer dates and are less likely to have a boyfriend but more likely to be sexually active. They also think less of men.

Perhaps, having cooked up a theory, I’m just seeing it everywhere. I’m overinterpreting stats like they’re a Rorschach test. But the data lines up. Birth rates in America rose up to 1961, giving us increasing sexual liberty up to the 1990s. Then, up to the mid-2000s, they fluctuated around four million a year, giving us stable norms up to the 2010s. After that, birth rates fell from the mid-2000s onward. For current young people, that means there are 104 20-year-old men for every 100 18-year-old women. Effectively, we’re back to the pre-War gender skew.

Just like the 1960s, we’re headed for society-wide upheaval as we renegotiate sexual norms. Teenagers post viral videos shaming adults canoodling in the park, calling them disgusting and asking that they ‘think of the children’. Why Men Love Bitches, an early 2000s dating manual encouraging women to demand higher standards, has returned to the book charts after going viral on TikTok. The ‘Sprinkle Sprinkle’ method is a new dating trend that encourages women to use men for their money; girls who participate brag about their boyfriends paying the deposit on their apartments and about laughing if a man tries to split the bill on a date.

We’re already seeing a decrease in sex (casual or otherwise), which a lot of people attribute to smartphones. I think soon we’ll see people getting married sooner too. It’s only a matter of time before a West Elm Caleb-style reckoning comes for a man who drags his feet on proposing to his girlfriend. It’s happening in fits and starts, but I see a return to 1930s dating on the horizon.

Aria Schrecker is an editor at Works in Progress.

In this column from Issue 26, Samuel Hughes reviews ‘From Shame to Sin’, and explores how Roman love worked.

Read more

In this article from Issue 26, Tyler Cowen argues you should go to Brazil.

One of my joys in traveling to Brazil, which I did recently for the seventh time, is dining. In general, Latin America is the great underdiscovered frontier for top-tier food. Most of the region is undertouristed, affordable, and not – yet? – obsessed with Instagramming what arrives on the plate. And Brazil is one of the peaks in the region.

With the possible exception of Uruguay and also Kobe, Japan, Brazil has in my not-so-humble opinion the best beef. Of the very finest steak meals I have had, two of the top three were in southern Brazil.

The basics of the Brazilian countryside, and Brazilian agriculture, make such successes possible. Brazil has plenty of space, lots of fertile land, and high agricultural productivity, all combined with relatively short supply chains. That combination means that the foodstuffs are plentiful and fresh.

Most of all, the Brazilian dining achievements are a progress story. Often Brazilian yields in agriculture are approaching those of the United States, or they are occasionally superior, even though Brazil is a much poorer country. Brazil has done a remarkably good job integrating technology into its food sector, though sadly most of the rest of the economy has not followed suit.

Brazil also is a nation of immigrants. Brazil has roughly two million citizens of Japanese origin – there is no exact figure – most of them living in the south. Brazil is thus one of the best places, after Japan itself, to enjoy Japanese food.

In June this year I patronized an omakase restaurant in São Paulo, Kan Suke, which has been awarded one Michelin star. I had a fifteen-course omakase for $110, with personal service from the head chef. Only eight seats. I reserved a mere half hour in advance, a difficult feat to pull off in comparable restaurants elsewhere. All the other diners seemed to be Brazilian Japanese, which added to the cultural flair of the experience.

Brazil also has about 30 million citizens of Italian descent, the largest such diaspora in the world. I recently had a debate with a very well-traveled Italian friend of mine, from foodie haven Modena, and we concluded that Brazil is the third-best country in the world for Italian food, after Italy itself and then Japan.

If you are into fruit, Brazil has much to offer. A list of some starter options would include acai, cupuaçu, caju (‘cashew apple’), soursop, bacaba, jabuticaba, pitanga, cambuci, pequi, umbu (Brazil plum), mangaba, and others. Nor should you neglect the less exotic items. When I took my daughter to Brazil for the first time, she remarked simply ‘I have never had a banana before.’ A special favorite of mine is hearts of palm (not technically a fruit), which in Brazil have a sweetness and texture reminiscent of sushi.

Brazil, like most large nations, also offers multiple cuisines. For instance you can go to Minas Gerais for pork and beans. Minas beans would be my favorite of what I have sampled, surpassing Mexico. Belem serves cuisine from the Amazon region, including exotic river fish, dried shrimp, duck, and rice, with flavors from cassava, manioc, and the local fruit. You cannot get those dishes in many other places.

Feijoada is of slave origins, and is often associated with Rio de Janeiro, but it has evolved into a national dish, available almost everywhere. Think rice, black beans, collard greens, orange slices, and farofa, a kind of manioc flour, with different parts of the pig mixed in. At home I cook the vegetarian version of this dish. The coolness and sweetness of the orange go well with the sandy texture of the farofa, and the meal hardly costs anything to make.

Rio de Janeiro offers highly cosmopolitan options, and the city has a tradition of excellent French and Continental restaurants.

The best churrascarias I have had were on the outskirts of Curitiba in the south. You can get an excellent pasta meal combined with your choice of many kinds of meat, leading to an impossibly large quantity of food at your disposal. I favored these establishments more in my youth, but if you have never tried them, you are missing something.

Campo Grande, the booming agro-city in central western Brazil, has a derivative form of Okinawan soba (!) as a dining specialty. I regret that, due to a delayed flight connection, I have yet to try this apparent delicacy.

Desserts are very traditionally Western and European. They lack originality but are high in quality and consistent in execution. For chocolate ice cream and gelato, favorites of mine, the country is top tier.

I can’t say I find all of the food in Brazil underrated. You will hear lavish praise for the dishes from the northeast, specifically the heavy coconut milk and palm oil blends, sometimes coming under the name moqueca. I suspect some of these meals are wonderful in the more rural parts of the Northeast, but when I have tried them in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and also Salvador, they struck me as mucky, lacking clarity of flavor, and too heavy to boot. The fault might be mine in the selection of restaurants, but practically speaking I think you have to work hard to get fine food from this regional cuisine.

São Paulo is the dining capital of Brazil, and as a highly commercial, business-oriented city it offers dishes from all the major regions of the country. It also attracts very few tourists. During my four-day trip there I wandered plenty, including to a variety of parks and museums, and I saw only a few people who obviously were foreign tourists. That helps keep an integrity to the dining scene, since most of the restaurants are geared toward regular customers who know local food reputations well.

As for price, the restaurants are not dirt cheap, as you might find in parts of Mexico and Southeast Asia. Still, even in São Paulo they are much less expensive than in New York, Paris, or London, and at the upper end of the market you will find comparably high standards of décor and service.

Brazil is not a country where you need to resort to street food, unless we are talking sandwiches. The offerings in restaurants are authentic enough, so you do not need to go ‘slumming’ to get the real thing. You may find that either a plus or a minus.

In the meantime, the demands on your time and attention just got more complicated.

Tyler Cowen is an economist.

Subscribe now

This is our fifth article from Issue 26, which arrived with print subscribers last week. In it, Charles C Mann explains how he learned to love porcelain.

I am aware that I am a bit of a kitchen equipment nerd, okay? So maybe you don’t have to roll your eyes theatrically like my cousins did when I tell you my wife and I got a swanky induction cooktop that was, well, kind of pricey for a middle-class couple? And maybe you can imagine my irritation when it turned out that the swanky induction cooktop – did I mention it was pricey? – did not include the necessary smooth cooking surface above the induction burners, and that you had to buy the cooking surface separately from a separate company, a fact not exactly advertised on the website, and that the surface could not be tempered glass, which is what I had thought was on top of induction ranges, a sheet of which costs maybe $30 per square foot, but a special, newly created material called Dekton that cost five times as much. ‘What on earth is Dekton?’ I asked the heavens, or at least my wife.

My question turned out to have two answers. The first is that Dekton is an artificial material invented by the Spanish company Cosentino in 2013 that is amazingly heat-, pressure-, scratch-, shatter-, and stain-resistant – a high-tech substance that would have been almost impossible to fashion even thirty years ago. The other answer, equally true, is that Dekton is basically porcelain.

Paradoxically, porcelain is both one of humankind’s oldest high technologies and one of its newest. The earliest proto-porcelain was created more than three thousand years ago, and was, for the time, an astonishing technical feat, as unprecedented as the roughly concurrent development of iron metallurgy. Iron technology had its second flowering in the mid-nineteenth century, when the invention of the Bessemer and Siemens-Martin refining processes allowed manufacturers to produce cheap, high-quality steel. Porcelain is having its resurgence today – indeed, high-tech ceramics are key elements in the ongoing upsurge in materials science, the study of the relationship between a substance’s structure and its physical properties.

Much attention is rightfully focused now on the rise of the digital world and the explosive arrival of artificial intelligence. But that attention sometimes obscures the ongoing, equally important transformation of our physical world, the built environment, by materials science. Unleashing a cataract of innovation so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, materials science has literally changed the walls around us. Porcelain is a reminder that the drive to create new types of matter has long played a powerful role in human history.

Kaolin

The initial steps toward porcelain occurred when potters in northern China started to tinker with an unusual clay, chalk colored and fine grained, called kaolin. Kaolin was known for its color, useful in paints, coatings, and fillers. Potters learned that subjecting this soft, white, unremarkable-looking mud to extreme temperatures produced startling effects.

Ordinary clay looks like amorphous glop but actually is composed of huge numbers of microscopic crystals. The crystals have an unusual structure: flat plates stacked atop each other like playing cards in a deck, loosely held together by hydroxyl groups (hydrogen and oxygen bound together, or -OH, in chemists’ terms). When clay is cooked in a kiln, the hydroxyl groups vibrate and break free, causing the plates to fall apart and reform into long, needle-shaped crystals that lock together into a sturdy structure. Meanwhile, the free hydroxyls merge, becoming water molecules that steam away in the hot kiln, leaving behind oxygen in the new crystals.

Kaolin clay is abundant in kaolinite, a mineral made of aluminum, silicon, oxygen, and hydrogen – Al₂Si₂O₅(OH)₄, with the parentheses meaning that each molecule has four hydroxyl groups. When heated in a kiln, kaolinite also loses its hydroxyls and reorganizes itself into a three-dimensional web of needle-like crystals. But when the temperature rises to about 1,200 degrees centigrade, well above the typical level for earthenware pottery, kaolin does something else. The silicon and oxygen break free, forming silica, which forms a thick liquid glass, filling all the spaces around and inside the web of needles, creating a dense, continuous, translucent matrix – porcelain.

In China, like everywhere else, ceramics had been a foundational industry for millennia. Clay was a primary part of construction (bricks, adobe, wattle-and-daub), cooking (pots, tableware), art (paints as well as sculpture), and even communication – clay tablets were the first surfaces used for writing. But porcelain was a giant leap, a concatenation of multiple innovations.

Ordinary kilns couldn’t reach the temperatures required to fire porcelain, partly because their exhaust vents, located on the ‘roof’, let out the hot air almost as fast as it was created, cooling the kiln. (This is a problem for conventional home fireplaces, which are fun to look at in use but wildly inefficient as a means of heating.) Chinese potters designed downdrafts, which forced the hot air to escape through floor vents, trapping the heat around the pottery. Alarmingly, ordinary kilns would shatter or even melt at such high temperatures. Chinese potters invented new types of heat-resistant brick. And so on.

Alltinktur

When Europeans first saw East Asian porcelain, probably in the thirteenth century, they were astounded. Harder, stronger, finer, smoother, and more lustrous than any other pottery, it became an obsessive object of desire, ‘white gold’ for the Continent’s wealthy and powerful. Enormous sets of gleaming white china became symbols of luxury – the private jets and invite-only clubs of the Renaissance era.

Unhappy about the high prices charged by the merchants who imported porcelain from Asia, European elites spent lavishly on efforts to make their own porcelain – and failed comprehensively for several centuries.

A key problem was that nobody on the Continent knew that porcelain was made from kaolin. Or that kaolinite alone didn’t actually contain enough glassy liquid silicate to make proper porcelain, so that Chinese potters added pulverized ‘China stone’ – a type of partly decomposed granite containing silicon – into the kaolinite.

Trying to make their wares porcelain-white, European potters added materials like tin oxide and ground glass to the clay, an approach that led to Italian maiolica, French faience, and Delftware. The results were often beautiful, but lacked porcelain’s impermeability to water, high tensile strength, and the distinctive ring made by porcelain cups when tapped with a spoon.

Enter Count Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708), a mathematician, physicist, and philosopher born in the Electorate of Saxony. Tschirnhaus initially studied math and philosophy but in his twenties became fascinated by porcelain. Beginning in about 1679, he conducted a series of experiments that used concave copper mirrors to beam intensely hot sunlight on multiple types of metals, minerals, and ceramics. Eventually he realized that glass lenses could outperform mirrors and invented a method of casting glass to make big, thick lenses for focusing sunlight, sending samples of the results to European monarchs in an unsuccessful quest to obtain financial backing to establish a science academy in Saxony.

In the winter of 1693–94, Tschirnhaus discovered a surprise: a type of clay that wouldn’t melt. Dug from Colditz, about 25 miles southeast of Leipzig, in Saxony, it contained kaolin (Tschirnhaus, of course, didn’t know this). Adding alabaster or chalk to the clay and heating the mix produced a hard, yellow, somewhat translucent ceramic that Tschirnhaus called ‘wax porcelain’. Unfortunately, he couldn’t produce it in quantity – his lenses could focus sunlight on an area of 10 to 15 square centimeters but not heat spaces of any size. When he tried making his porcelain in commercial kilns, their walls shattered or melted. Tschirnhaus was struggling to develop a better kiln when he was approached by Augustus the Strong, the ruler of Saxony.

A few years earlier, a young mountebank in Prussia named Johann Friedrich Böttger had let it be known that he had discovered the Alltinktur, an alchemical substance that cured any disease and turned base metal into gold. In a fine example of FAFO, Prussia’s gold-hungry king, who wanted to monopolize the Alltinktur, immediately ordered Böttger to be taken into ‘protective custody’. Böttger escaped into Saxony, whereupon he was seized by Saxony’s equally gold-hungry ruler Augustus the Strong, confined to an attic in a fortress outside Dresden, and ordered to produce gold. Böttger toiled for years, promising all the while to produce ‘alchymist gold’. Surprisingly, he was unable to deliver. Augustus grew exasperated and in 1704 asked Tschirnhaus to supervise work on the Alltinktur. Tschirnhaus, who evinced no interest in alchemy, invited Böttger to work with him instead on porcelain. To save his neck, Böttger grudgingly agreed.

Tschirnhaus, Böttger, and Gottfried Pabst von Ohain, a high-ranking mining official (in those days, the closest thing available to an earth scientist), developed a red clay that could be made into bricks suitable for porcelain kilns. In June 1708, Pabst von Ohain found a source of white clay – nearly pure kaolin, though he didn’t know it – and shipped it to the other two. Mixing the white clay with ground limestone and heating it in kilns made from the new red clay in August and September, Tschirnhaus single-handedly created a cup that looked and behaved very much like white Chinese porcelain.

He did not live to enjoy his triumph. In October, Tschirnhaus suddenly dropped dead, supposedly of dysentery. On his deathbed, he gave Pabst von Ohain a black box filled with documents. The box was found in Böttger’s belongings after his death, which may explain why he wrote to Augustus in March 1709, claiming to be the sole discoverer of the process to make porcelain. Augustus officially chartered the Royal Porcelain Manufacture in Meissen, another small town near Dresden, the following year and put Böttger in charge. It took ten more years for its workers to figure out that ‘China clay’ (or, more precisely, a similar local stone) was a better additive than limestone. Meissen then became Europe’s porcelain center. Augustus made so much money that he built a ‘Japanese palace’, filled it with Meissen copies of Asian originals, and crowed to visitors that he had beaten the Chinese – correctly, because Meissen porcelain was harder and less porous than the original.

Dekton

If Meissen was Porcelain 2.0, the Dekton for my cooktop is Porcelain 3.0 or more. Made by baking a slurry of ground porcelain, glass, and quartz into slabs, running the slabs through a huge hydraulic press that applies 25,000 metric tons of pressure, and hardening them at 1,200 degrees centigrade, Dekton took six years and almost $200 million to invent. Traditional ceramics contain microscopic voids and flaws that act as ‘stress concentrators’, focusing rather than diffusing the energy from impacts, which is what causes them to crack. The high pressure and heat used to produce Dekton cause atoms in the particles of kaolinite and quartz to diffuse across the boundaries where they touch, turning the entire thing into what amounts to a single solid mass. In consequence, Dekton has nearly eliminated porcelain’s long-standing weakness: its brittleness and structural fragility.

Dekton is but one part of an ongoing resurgence in porcelain, which itself is part of the still larger revolution in materials science. The field was founded in the 1940s and 1950s, when physicists, chemists, and engineers had to work together in the Second World War, the Cold War, and the space race. But it really took off in the 1980s and 1990s, with the development of precision measuring and manufacturing techniques. Most of its innovations have been incremental, but the accumulated total has had enormous impact in our daily lives.

To give a personal example, my late mother-in-law was injured permanently by slipping on a wet porcelain bathroom tile – something that happens to tens of thousands of people in the United States every year. In the past, firms made nonslip tiles by coating them with rough, jagged grains – a bit like laying sandpaper over the surface, and deservedly unpopular in the home. Ten years ago, Italian and Spanish tile manufacturers like Ceramica Sant’Agostino and Inalco introduced ‘wet-activated’ or ‘in-out’ tiles, with special crystalline compounds baked onto the surface. Dry, they look and feel like ordinary porcelain tiles. But when they are wet and someone steps on them, the pressure drives the water into thousands of pores on the surface, creating a suction-cup effect between foot and tile, instantly making them less slippery. (How much suffering will wet-activated tiles prevent? Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest it would be equivalent, in terms of deaths prevented, to curing childhood cancers.)

Another personal example: My daughter, hit with a rare bone infection at age eleven, now has a porcelain hip joint – porcelain because the previous cobalt and chromium replacement joints can release metal ions into the bloodstream, which can migrate into the placenta of pregnant women, potentially harming the fetus. About the same time that ceramics firms introduced wet-activated tiles, researchers deployed 3D printing to create porous, lattice-like ‘bioceramic’ structures to replace defective bone. The structures are not permanent replacements but scaffolds that allow blood vessels and bone cells to migrate into the spaces in the bioceramic. Over time, the porcelain structure dissolves and is replaced by the patient’s own tissue. (The scaffold is expelled from the body.)

I could go on to talk about the use of nanotechnology to fill porcelain pores to enhance color depth and stain resistance, imprinting porcelain with silver ion layers to enhance antimicrobial activity, or the use of lithium disilicate to make ultrathin dental implants of unprecedented strength. But maybe the best way to say it is that my grandmother, who proudly displayed her mother’s eggshell-thin Meissen china on the sideboard, would have been astonished to find that I was cooking on a thin slab of porcelain, heedlessly dropping heavy pots of boiling water on its surface. But when I tried to explain how remarkable this is to my son, he gave me a blank look. He had never lived in a world that wasn’t made of porcelain.

Charles C Mann is a correspondent for The Atlantic.

Subscribe now

This is our fourth article from Issue 26, which arrives with print subscribers this week.

Imagine if Y Combinator owned and ran San Francisco. Too much traffic? That’s bad for business. Highway 101 would be triple- or quadruple-deckered, and the metropolitan area might have a dozen subway lines, more like Madrid’s or Osaka’s networks than the BART as it stands. Heritage buildings? They’re nice, but this is a tech town. Skyscrapers would fill the entire peninsula. Instead of wealth taxes on billionaires, the city might even cut taxes to encourage more founders and companies to move there.

This is only a slight caricature of how city government works in China. Provincial cities like Hefei and Hangzhou have become world-leading centers of commerce in electric vehicles, consumer electronics, solar panels, batteries, and AI, steered by mayors whose career incentives are similar to those of partners in a venture capital firm, getting promoted if their portfolio grows and fired if it fails. The cities they run function as vertically integrated conglomerates that benefit not just from the success of their local champions, but also from the broader growth generated by masses of companies in their slipstream.

In the West, China’s success is often attributed to the central government’s willingness to pick winners and direct its economy from above. Many Westerners have concluded that a similar top-down approach is needed in their countries to create champions that can compete with China’s. But Beijing’s role is more akin to being a rulemaker in a great tournament. Subnational governments – provinces, cities, towns, villages – are responsible for around 85 percent of public expenditure, according to the IMF, the lion’s share of which is spent at city level.

The heavy state involvement correctly perceived by observers belongs not to Beijing but to those local governments, of which China has thousands, and which compete with one another for investment and prestige. These local growth machines and the competition between them are what drives China’s stunning economic success, and what the Western world must embrace to keep up.

Local heroes

For the initial decades after China’s economic opening in the 1980s, ‘Made in China’ meant cheap goods mass-produced for Western businesses. Today, Chinese companies lead the world in high-tech manufacturing, and many of them are household names in the West. Huawei is arguably the world’s most advanced telecoms company; BYD is the largest electric automaker; and DJI makes over 90 percent of consumer drones. Less familiar but no less important are companies like Geely, an auto giant which began in the 1980s as a refrigerator parts manufacturer and now owns Volvo, Lotus, Polestar and a stake in Aston Martin; and Vivo, now India’s biggest smartphone supplier.

What all have in common is that Beijing played no role in their creation. They were private companies encouraged by local governments. Huawei, BYD, and DJI emerged from Shenzhen’s Special Economic Zone, where municipal bureaucrats could write local regulations without regard for national rules. Geely was quietly supported by Zhejiang province at a time when only state-designated automakers were meant to build cars. Vivo spun off from a company founded in Dongguan, after Zhongshan, the neighboring city, wouldn’t give the company leaders equity.

Some sectors, such as batteries, electronics, and most recently electric vehicles, have received special support from Beijing as strategic industries. Companies in these areas benefited from subsidies, tax rebates, and in the case of electric cars, sales tax exemptions. But though the state was happy to lend its support to certain sectors, it was agnostic as to which specific firms and regions rose to dominance by means of that support. Beijing set a prize, and local bureaucrats competed to win it.

Hefei, the capital of Anhui province in inland Eastern China, is the most famous illustration of this process in action. In 2008, the municipal government invested $500 million in the electronic display company BOE Technology to build a new-generation LCD production line, bringing China to the cutting edge of panel production for the first time. At the time, Hefei was an unremarkable city with no display industry, and BOE was only the world’s ninth-largest manufacturer of LCD displays. The city provided the necessary land, utility connections, and cheap capital (investing almost a tenth of its total revenue that year) to set up a subsidiary company with BOE, in which it had an 81 percent stake. The bet paid off. BOE is now the world’s largest display panel manufacturer and makes about a quarter of smartphone screens worldwide.

The city reinvested the returns from its investment in other venture capital–like bets, which have won big surprisingly often. Hefei’s investment in carmaker NIO, which the city backed in 2020 in exchange for a 24 percent stake, paid off with an internal rate of return exceeding 30 percent. CXMT (Changxin Memory Technologies), 24 percent of which is directly or indirectly owned by the city of Hefei, runs just behind Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron with 7 percent of the global market for DRAM chips, the short-term memory used in smartphones, PCs, and data centers. Over the decade to 2023, the city had invested roughly $25 billion of public funds, generating reported earnings of nearly $9 billion.

Other cities have followed the venture capital model to bring in similar growth in jobs and tax revenues. The city of Wuhu imported a secondhand Ford engine line from Britain, lured engineers away from state behemoth FAW (First Automotive Works), and copied a Volkswagen design to build a local carmaker. That makeshift venture eventually grew into Chery, today one of the country’s leading carmakers and supplier of Britain’s bestselling car in March 2026, the Jaecoo 7. As well as having seen growth in jobs, exports, and tax revenues, the city of Wuhu retains a 21 percent stake in Chery, worth around $3.7 billion.

Ningde, a relatively modest city in Fujian province in the southeast, is the founding site of CATL, now the world’s biggest battery producer. The city’s leaders made a strategic wager from its founding in 2011, committing land, infrastructure, tax support, administrative coordination, and supplier attraction efforts to help the still-young battery company to scale. CATL’s bases in Ningde now have capacity to produce 330 gigawatt hours of batteries per year – equivalent to almost half the global demand for electric vehicle batteries in 2023.

Share

Growth is the best policy

China’s mayors and provincial governors turn their cities into venture capital portfolios because of the system of incentives in which they operate. Each cadre (the party members and other officials who run the Chinese state) is scored by their superiors in a secret file built up over the course of their career. Prefecture-level party secretaries evaluate county chiefs, who in turn evaluate their juniors heading up townships, who evaluate village leaders, down to the lowest party member.

Promotions – not just for politicians, but across the civil service – are based in large part on scoring the economic performance of the province or city that a cadre is responsible for. For example, the Shaoxing Municipal Party Committee’s 2008 assessment for city leaders featured 100 base points, of which 54 were awarded for economic development, including growth in GDP per capita, local revenue, industrial investment, and exports. Across China in the 2000s, officials who presided over growth 3.3 percentage points higher than their predecessors were 40 to 50 percent more likely to be promoted. Whereas success leads to promotion, failure can mean early retirement, demotion, or disciplinary action.

To further incentivize bureaucrats, promotions are governed by strict, albeit not explicit, age ceilings. A cadre must make the jump from county officialdom to prefecture level by their mid-forties, must take the next jump to provincial or ministerial level by their mid-fifties, and is unlikely ever to reach the Politburo if they have not done so by their sixties. Missing an age window means being locked into a lower tier for the rest of their lives.

What makes these incentives work is the fact that, unlike in many Western systems, provincial governments get to keep much of the money they generate. After 1980, when China’s economy first started to open up, provinces retained roughly 75 of every 100 marginal yuan they raised. Many provincial governments negotiated deals in which they agreed in advance how much income they would owe to Beijing over the next five years or more, meaning that every yuan they subsequently did or didn’t raise went onto their own balance sheet. By 1990, the average marginal retention rate was nearly 90 percent. Local government incentives were sharpened even more after 1994, when a package of reforms cut the share of VAT that provinces and cities kept, leaving them with a hunger for revenue, but often allowed them to keep 100 percent of the upside from state-owned enterprises, and the ability to sell land-use rights, almost all of whose revenues they could keep.

The way these incentives play out is illustrated in the career of Li Qiang, today China’s second most powerful man. Li started at the bottom: he was born in 1959 to an unremarkable family in Rui’an, an ancient but small city in Zhejiang province, and worked factory clerk jobs before joining the local branch of the Communist Party in 1983. Over the following twenty years he pursued a career in local politics, holding a string of provincial posts.

In 2002, he was made party secretary of Wenzhou, a larger city in the same province. Even under communism, Wenzhou had been seen as an outpost of entrepreneurship and private business within Zhejiang. Li’s strategy was to encourage more private companies to start up, bring private capital into infrastructure, and release bottlenecks on land and labor. Wenzhou’s GDP grew 14.8 percent during his first year in charge. After a second year of rapid growth, this time 14.1 percent, he was appointed chief of staff to the provincial party secretary, Xi Jinping.

When Xi took over in Beijing in 2013, Li was promoted to the provincial governorship himself. Li described his strategy as getting the government out of the way to ‘allow the market to play its decisive role, further stimulating the entrepreneurial and innovative drive of the masses’. Zhejiang must replace the ‘restless hand’ of government intervention with the ‘invisible hand’ of market competition, he said. In practice this meant scrapping 8,000 of the province’s legal powers, including over 700 approval requirements.

After success in Zhejiang, Li was put in charge of Jiangsu, before being brought to Shanghai itself. In Shanghai, he once again focused on freeing up private capital. He set up a new stock market, STAR, which became one of China’s main exchanges within a year of launching. He presided over an expansion of Shanghai’s free trade zone. And he announced a raft of reforms to increase the ease of doing business as in Wenzhou, focused on reducing permit requirements.

In 2022, after climbing the ranks for 39 years, Li was elevated to the Party’s top decision-making body, the seven-person Politburo Standing Committee. As the second-ranking committee member, he was now junior only to his former boss, Xi Jinping.

The entire Chinese bureaucracy is staffed this way, from the smallest village to the country’s capital itself. Being a local government bureaucrat is a very different proposition in China than it is in the West. China’s public servants are more like company directors than administrators, making investments to increase their division’s financial performance and improve their professional prospects.

Subscribe now

How local governments create clusters

Competition is the driving force of Chinese industrial success. Instead of a single body making decisions for the entire country and passing them down, there are hundreds. When a strategy is proven to work, the country doubles down on it. In this, it is similar to American capitalism, with its hedge funds, investment banks, and venture capitalists, each a competitive central planner, portioning out capital for a sliver of the United States economy.

But China takes it further. In American capitalism, each individual ‘player’ represents their own interests, but nobody represents the interests of the game as a whole, which often makes coordination problems hard to solve. China’s competitive municipal socialism works because of local governments’ role as, effectively, landowners. Because they capture the spillovers of growth through rising land values and tax receipts, local governments create public goods that benefit all the companies in their area.

Local governments in the West have many of the tools that China’s cities have, but they lack the same incentives. Its cities suffer from fragmented political governance, like the San Francisco Bay Area, which is governed by 101 different municipal governments, or from rules that cap or redistribute their property tax revenues. Many Western cities have become dysfunctional even when they host economic clusters that rival those in China.

In contrast, China’s governments retain a large share of the money they raise and are led by cadres whose careers depend on growth. They have both the tools and the incentives to build their economic clusters up as much as they can. Sometimes this means directly luring in anchor firms which attract other companies to the area through tax rebates, specific infrastructure offers, and cheap bank loans.

To bring Tesla to Shanghai, the municipal government under Li Qiang offered $289 million in grants, arranged for $2.2 billion in low-interest loans from Chinese banks, a ten-point cut in the corporate income tax rate from 2019 to 2023, and a 50 percent discount on the 86 hectares of land beneath the factory. The support was so lavish that one Chinese minister reportedly complained that ‘Shanghai leaders were unbelievable – giving away the entire investment without Tesla having to spend a penny.’

Li promised speed along with capital. Elon Musk thought the factory would take two years to build; Li promised to do it in one. Tesla set up a Shanghai-based subsidiary in May 2018, signed a deal with the city in July, contracted for the land it needed in October, began construction in January 2019, and started producing cars in December that year. Even by Musk’s standards, Shanghai’s processes were lightning fast. Retooling an existing factory in Fremont, California, took Tesla almost twice as long, and building a new Berlin gigafactory took almost three times as long. Musk himself credited the Shanghai government as essential for that speed.

Sometimes, as in Hefei, support even means making direct investments that help anchor companies to grow as well as providing equity returns directly to the city’s coffers. Chinese provinces and cities make heavy use of cash subsidies, which total 2 percent of Chinese GDP according to the IMF, compared to around 0.3 percent in the United States and 0.5 percent in the European Union.

These direct inducements and investments are an important part of the puzzle. But these investments would not pay off if cities were not prepared to capitalize on them. Chinese cities are. They zone masses of land for industry, rent it out at a cut price to build the larger cluster around the anchor firms, then fund the discount by selling land to developers who lease it to the workers and entrepreneurs attracted in.

Kunshan, a small city near Shanghai, was a poor place – known as the ‘little sixth’ for being the least developed of the six subdivisions in its region – when, without permission from Beijing, its leaders secretly started an industrial zone in the mid-1980s. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Kunshan’s officials courted Taiwanese electronics firms with almost comic enthusiasm, building a Taiwanese school, encouraging Taiwanese restaurants, broadcasting forty Taiwanese TV channels, and offering industrial land at throwaway prices. When Beijing objected to Taiwanese schoolbooks, Kunshan officials lobbied the central government for a compromise and resolved the standoff by blacking out sensitive symbols like the Taiwanese flag.

Nantz and Foxconn were among the first Taiwanese companies to arrive, making boring but foundational parts like electrical connectors and printed circuit boards. Acer Peripherals joined in 1994, opening bases in the nearby city of Suzhou to make keyboards and monitors and bringing 14 major suppliers with it. Thousands of technicians, including Taiwanese expats, circulated between firms in the rapidly growing electronic components industries, forming the largest community of molding technicians in China, and training many more. By the late 2000s, Kunshan made half of all laptops in the world.

This cluster building has been replicated across China, creating cities that concentrate a disproportionate share of global output for specific goods. Zheng’an, in Guizhou province, produces roughly one in seven guitars worldwide. Shaodong, in Hunan, makes 70 percent of the world’s disposable cigarette lighters. Danyang, in Jiangsu, hosts 1,600 companies that manufacture half the world’s spectacle lenses. In a remarkable range of specialized manufacturing sectors, both light and heavy, a Chinese hub holds a world-dominant position.

Almost three quarters of Chinese productivity growth in manufacturing from 1998 to 2007 came from new entrants to the market, rather than the growth of existing businesses. By the end of 2023, China was home to 4.1 million different manufacturing enterprises – almost twenty times as many as the United States – and 96 percent were private, together employing around 105 million people, about eight times as many as the United States.

Clusters allow upstarts to improve products through rapid iteration and low lead times across almost every conceivable industry, and this is the single biggest reason why China is absorbing so many, from simple to advanced. Bambu Lab brought its first 3D printer to market in 22 months and reached $1.5 billion in revenue and 37 percent of the global market for affordable 3D printers within five years. Hesai, a Shanghai-based LiDAR maker, entered the market when the technology was still ultra-expensive, with a robotaxi sensor suite costing more than many entire cars. A decade later, it has become the world’s largest LiDAR supplier, with more than 1.6 million units shipped in 2025 alone. (The most prominent American contender, Luminar, filed for bankruptcy in December 2025.)

The incentive and ability to form economic clusters may be the single most important factor that explains why China’s cities have succeeded over the past three decades while America’s superstar cities have stagnated.

Feeding the growth machines

China’s local growth machines need a tremendous amount of fuel in the form of investment capital. Beijing provides this fuel by generating a giant pile of domestic savings. By preventing ordinary Chinese people from moving more than $50,000 abroad each year and limiting the range of investment opportunities that could be an alternative home for their savings, the government ensures that the country collectively saves an enormous amount of money in domestic banks. Chinese households held 165 trillion yuan ($24 trillion) in bank deposits in September 2025, equal to 122 percent of the country’s GDP.

At the same time, the interest rates that banks pay to depositors are capped, giving banks a huge supply of artificially cheap capital, which they lend out at a small margin. As of early 2025, a typical current-account deposit rate in a Chinese bank is 0.15 percent. Real interest rates, adjusted for consumer inflation, have been negative in almost half of the years since 1999.

The net effect of these policies is an immense forced transfer of wealth from hundreds of millions of savers to Chinese companies. As a result, these firms are highly indebted: corporate debt peaked at 142 percent of GDP in 2016 and is still around 138 percent today. But their financial expenses, including debt interest payments, account for under 1 percent of industrial firms’ turnover. In the United States, by contrast, non-financial corporate debt is roughly half that level, at 72 percent of GDP, but interest payments amounted to about 5.3 percent of sales in 2024.

An unfortunate side effect of this approach is that entrepreneurs may be backed to attempt extremely unlikely, borderline harebrained, schemes. One Chinese carmaker, a spinoff from a real estate developer, was briefly worth more than Ford despite never producing a car. The wider Chinese car industry is enormously overcrowded: the Shanghai-based Gasgoo Automotive Research Institute estimates that the Chinese auto industry had a capacity to build 55.5 million vehicles a year in 2024, but utilized only half of that. Western plants typically utilize 80 percent of their capacity, or above. Even mighty BYD’s profit margin has fallen to a meager 4 percent.

This overexuberance is visible in Chinese macroeconomic data. The capital efficiency ratio measures how much output a country gets out of the capital stock it has invested – how many dollars of GDP a country can buy with a dollar of investment. The United States gets almost twice as much economic output out of every dollar it invests as China does, precisely the opposite of what we would expect from a developed country with a mature economy versus a rapidly growing country playing catch up.

Beijing’s second job, after ensuring the availability of cheap capital, is to rein in the overexuberance it has set off. Local governments piled into steel and coal production in the 2000s and 2010s. After crude steel output surged from 419 million tons in 2006 to 804 million in 2015, the central government launched a drive to cut overproduction, shuttering businesses surviving on debt rollovers, banning net new capacity, enforcing a ban on cheap and dirty induction furnaces, and giving local governments targets to push their excess production down. Coal went through a similar centrally driven cleanup, as did property.

The central government’s third job is policing the tournament and stopping local governments from going too far in pursuit of their own growth at the expense of the wider economy. China’s huge single market would be undermined if provinces or cities put barriers on flows of land, labor, and capital, fragmenting a billion-person market into 34 smaller ones. In the late 2010s, when Beijing began a crackdown on this tendency, some local authorities had been attempting to block goods from entering their borders, or rewritten public procurement specifications to exclude out-of-province bidders.

Such behavior continues to be policed by the Chinese state. On 1st July 2025, Xi Jinping convened the highest-level economic body of the CCP, and devoted it to building a unified national market. His speech framed the task as a precondition for ‘gaining the initiative in international competition’. Energy policy since 2022 has reversed decades of local control: by 2027, most provinces are required to operate a real-time electricity market rather than pre-agreed fixed rates, allowing for more efficient use of energy on a national scale.

Like all powerful incentive systems, the Chinese municipal tournament generates some perverse outcomes. Until 2013, when the scorecard was updated in favor of harder-to-fake measures of activity, the pressure to produce a high GDP figure was so intense that officials routinely fudged the numbers. One study found that mayors still young enough to be promoted reported growth 3.4 percentage points higher than mayors just past the age cutoff, but that this higher measured growth was not reflected by other indicators like lights at night, electricity use, business entry, or productivity.

The power of local officials has sometimes bred corruption: businesses give gifts and favors to officials in exchange for contracts and land deals. But the direction of incentives means that these have largely been payments that greased deals and accelerated projects, rather than negative-sum corruption that simply drains an economy. And like America in the twentieth century, the central government has increasingly cracked down on corruption as China becomes richer and more developed.

The Chicago way

Many Western analysts play up China’s uniqueness. But China today looks a lot like the America of the 1950s and 1960s, when it too was on a rapid upward trajectory powered by local growth machines.

American metropolises of that era were dependent on returns from land development, in their case from the property taxes that supplied 87 percent of local tax income, rather than land sale or leases. Only about a quarter of local government funds were grants from state or (via the state) federal governments, meaning that some 70 percent of revenues were raised locally, implying a high level of local control comparable to China’s today.

America had its own Li Qiangs: Richard J Daley expanded Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to maintain his city’s place as a center of American transportation in the aviation age; Robert Moses and Fiorello LaGuardia bulldozed through historic parts of New York against vigorous opposition to build new roads across New York City; William Hartsfield transformed Atlanta’s airport into the nation’s busiest by 1957, setting the city up to become a center of American logistics and corporate capitalism. These leaders controlled local government bodies like New York’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority or California’s redevelopment agencies, which were funded by tolls and increased property values. Mayors could capture the spillovers to nearby businesses and reinvest some of them in sanitation, civic amenities, patronage, and more growth, which together won them reelection. They fought for growth because it was in their best interests to do so.

The results were remarkable. America laid 310,000 miles of new local roads between 1950 and 1970, alongside 31,000 miles of new interstate highways. Electricity generation increased sixfold between 1945 and 1975. The number of fully plumbed homes doubled. The share of homes without flushing toilets dropped from 24 to 4 percent. The country’s housing stock doubled from 39 million to 80 million between 1940 and 1975, with the country building three times as many homes per capita in 1972 as it did in 2025.

As in China today, the federal government fed the machines through mortgage insurance, urban renewal subsidies, the Federal Highway Act, and massive defense and research spending. It provided the framework on which American capitalism is based: secure property rights, interventions to stop fraud and corruption, strong capital markets, and a robust defense of interstate commerce.

Similar growth machines powered the city corporation of Manchester, England, when it built a 36-mile canal in the late nineteenth century to turn the inland city into Britain’s third-busiest port, the community of Madrid when it added 126 miles to its metro in 12 years between 1995 and 2007, and Munich when it built its S-Bahn to create a 434-kilometer fast metro network within six years in time to host the 1972 Olympics.

What makes China unique is how widespread these local growth machines still are. Just as in the postwar United States, city leaders are personally incentivized to grow, and city budgets directly benefit when they capture the upside through selling leases or through their stakes in businesses. Like modern-day Fiorello LaGuardias, mayors in China can be overexuberant, but they are rarely timid.

By Western standards, China’s government is interventionist. But this interventionism is directed by a system of competition far more ruthless than in the modern-day United States, let alone Europe. Towns, villages, cities, rural districts, provinces, their leaders themselves, bureaucrats at every position, and yes, millions of private capitalist businesses, compete to win promotion or profits.

There are still some urban growth machines in the West, like Houston and Nashville, that still function the way cities like San Francisco and Chicago once did. But most of its other growth machines have broken down at the very same time that China has built up dozens of new ones. The lesson from China’s economic miracle is not that the West needs a new economic model. It needs its old one.

Robin Rivaton is a tech founder and author of Why China Will Run the 21st Century.

Ben Southwood is an editor at Works in Progress.

Illustration by Micha Huigen.

This is our third article from Issue 26, which arrives with print subscribers this week.

Books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ and on the ‘STEM’ quaternity of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors.

The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun.

Despite this, the elites of nineteenth-century Britain were, by their own lights, extremely successful. For much of the century, Britain was the richest country on Earth. Its companies dominated global commerce, industry and finance. Its huge navy reigned over the world’s oceans, and its tiny army won a long sequence of wars while keeping watch over an enormous empire. Britain progressed gradually toward democracy with none of the revolutions and civil wars that wracked continental Europe. There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.

Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well. Huel, STEM, and cold baths have their merits. But the example of the Victorians should make us hesitate before concluding that there is only one way to rule the world.

Subscribe now

School

Caricaturing a little, we can distinguish two groups in modern educational debates: traditionalists and progressives. Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop personally and socially.

One might assume that Victorian education was at the extreme traditionalist end of the spectrum, and modern educational progressives would indeed be horrified by the rote learning and corporal punishment of Victorian schooling. But in respect of all the controversies listed above, elite Victorian schools lean curiously toward the ‘progressive’ side of the spectrum.

Most socially elite Victorian boys began formal education at the age of seven or eight, spending about five years in a ‘preparatory school’ before passing on to a ‘public school’ (which, to the enduring confusion of international observers, is a kind of elite private school). There was a hierarchy of public schools, with the nine ‘Clarendon schools’ at the top, and just one, Eton College, clearly at the apex. About 30 percent of nineteenth-century cabinet ministers and 40 percent of prime ministers were Old Etonians.

Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire.

The public schools were of course single-sex, generating a somewhat febrile atmosphere in which intense quasi-romantic (or sometimes actually romantic) relationships between boys were common. Perhaps the powerful ties of nostalgia and loyalty that students felt for their former schoolmates were linked to this. The writer Jan Morris said that ‘the whole of English upper-class life…was shot through with bisexual instinct’ and that ‘the public school system…meant that male relationships were full of emotional nuance and undertone’. Demonstrative affection remained normal in adult life, and it was completely standard for pairs of Victorian men to walk arm-in-arm in public.

Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century. Trailing in third and fourth places were mathematics and modern languages. There was resistance to the teaching of science, not because Victorians were hostile to science in principle, but because they thought it irrelevant to the kind of moral and cultural formation that a school for gentlemen was supposed to provide. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School and the leading educationalist of Victorian Britain, remarked that ‘rather than have physical science the principal thing in my son’s mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the Earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament’. (By contrast, girls were not usually taught classics, meaning that, rather surprisingly, affluent Victorian girls generally followed a more modern curriculum than their brothers.)

Victorian adults had little occasion to use their classical languages, so they tended to forget them. ‘I have gladly forgotten all my Latin, and don’t ever want to remember it again’, wrote the war poet Charles Sorley, one year after leaving school; at least he did better than Winston Churchill, who remarked that ‘In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet’. The most that can be said for Victorians’ classical education is perhaps that, like schooling in any difficult subject, it trained students in self-discipline, memorization, and applying rules.

The Victorians themselves occasionally hinted that they regarded the official curriculum of school as something of a MacGuffin. In the hugely influential 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days, Tom’s benevolent father muses, ‘I don’t care a straw for Greek particles… What is [Tom] sent to school for? … If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want’. In a similar spirit, Thomas Arnold wrote that ‘what we must look for here is, first, religious and moral principles; second, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability’.

Under such circumstances, it is perhaps unsurprising that the share of time spent in the classroom was relatively modest. At Rugby School, weeks were divided into three ‘full days’, three ‘half days’, and Sunday. On a full day, students spent about five hours in the classroom, compared with maybe two hours on a half day. Other schools varied, but nearly all left many hours unfilled. In general, classroom hours were certainly not longer, and probably rather shorter, than those in normal schools today. They also tended to be shorter than those of contemporary elite schools in France, Germany, or Italy, where the curriculum was normally more academically rigorous.

The focus on character formation led to increasing interest in how students spent their time outside the classroom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, they were still mostly left to their own devices: their preferred pastime seems to have been roaming the local countryside and generally making a nuisance of themselves. During the Victorian period, school authorities introduced programs of organized sports, chiefly cricket in summer and various forms of ‘football’ (including what became rugby) in winter. Many schools ultimately had four, five, or even six afternoons of sports per week: a student would certainly spend ten hours a week on the sports field, and might well spend twenty.

The Victorians thought extremely highly of sports, believing that they instilled team spirit and endurance, fostered mutual loyalty, channeled energy and competitiveness, and taught men how to win and lose graciously. An extreme but not entirely unrepresentative example was Hely Hutchinson Almond, headmaster of Loretto School, who described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’. The cult of team sports was generally not shared in continental Europe, and European visitors were often bewildered by how seriously the English took schoolboy ballgames. But it spread across the Anglophone world, and it is still embodied in the traditions of American high school and intercollegiate sports today.

Another distinctive feature of the public schools, relative both to modern education and to other nineteenth-century school systems, was student self-government. The Victorians thought that close supervision by schoolmasters would inculcate servile habits in boys, compromising what one headmaster called ‘the great glory of an English public school – its free development of character, its social expansiveness, in short its liberty’. As a result, a system of prefects was developed in which, in theory, the more benevolent and mature boys were given extensive pastoral and disciplinary responsibilities over the others. The prefects would receive an apprenticeship in leadership, while the student body as a whole would come to see authority as something emanating from their peers rather than imposed upon them by an alien entity.

It is not hard to imagine how a self-governing oligarchy of teenage boys might go wrong. Victorian educationalists were themselves concerned about the potential for abuse, and various checks and balances were developed, like jury systems and rights of appeal before punishment. It is hard to say how often the prefect system operated unjustly, reliant as we are on the impressionistic evidence of personal memoirs, but it is beyond doubt that it was sometimes brutal. It is important to understand, however, that it was intended not simply as a system of domination, but almost as one of ‘elite liberalism’, whereby students would not only be subjects of authority, but also to some extent its legislators and executors.

Share

University

From school, most elite Victorian men went on to Oxford or Cambridge (‘Oxbridge’). Oxbridge was not necessarily a big step up academically. Virtually everyone who applied was accepted. Once you were in, you could pursue one of two tracks: either an ‘honors’ degree, which involved at least some serious study, or a ‘pass’ or ‘ordinary’ degree, which involved sitting only some very easy exams in classics and religion. In the early Victorian period, most Oxbridge students were ‘pass men’; this changed gradually as the century drew on, but there were still plenty of pass men around as late as 1914. The pass degree was particularly popular among aristocratic students, who tended to prioritize rowing, feasting, and social polish over disciplined study.

Many honors students took their studies more seriously. But even they were not very practical in orientation. Oxbridge tutors believed overwhelmingly that the purpose of an undergraduate degree was neither training for work nor even preparation for academic research, but rather a general moral and intellectual formation that would fit students for any professional role they might later pursue. ‘No man will be a first-rate physician or engineer who is not something more than either, who has not some taste for art, some feeling for literature, or some other interest external to his profession’, said Benjamin Jowett, the influential master of Balliol College. Jowett aimed to convey this ‘something more’ to his undergraduates, leaving them to acquire specific technical knowledge later.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, such theories led the universities to exclude almost everything except classics and (at Cambridge) mathematics from the curriculum. Natural and applied sciences were viewed with suspicion on the basis that they were, in the words of the famous Oxford professor Edward Bouverie Pusey, ‘confined to the reception of information on matters of fact’ and do not involve ‘continued reasoning’. Between 1855 and 1860, just 8.1 percent of honors degrees were awarded to science students; in 1910–1914, it was still only 13.7 percent.

Nearly all students lived together in colleges. This contrasted with the situation in continental Europe, where students generally rented rooms off campus. Victorian pedagogues believed that colleges provided religious, cultural, and social formation, and that they prevented English students from acquiring the bad morals and habits of their continental peers. A typical day began with chapel; honors students and the less indolent pass men would then spend the morning reading and preparing assignments. Students normally ordered lunch to their rooms: rich students could have elaborate feasts brought up from the college kitchens, like Sebastian Flyte’s lunch in Brideshead Revisited. In the early afternoon it was customary to go out for rural walks or sports, especially rowing and cricket.

Around 4pm, students returned to college. Once or twice a week this was the time for ‘tutorials’, one-to-one or small-group discussions with tutors, often over tea or sherry. The tutorial system contrasted sharply with the more didactic and lecture-based teaching that prevailed in other university systems, and was seen as a way of inculcating independent thought. If a student had no tutorials, he would probably spend the early evening reading, socializing, or at one of the university’s various cultural, discussion, or debating societies, notably the Oxford and Cambridge Unions. The day concluded with a formal dinner in the college hall, often followed by conversation over dessert, digestifs and tobacco in college rooms.

Although the tutorial system was seen with pride, the quality of tutoring was decidedly uneven. Until the 1870s, most fellowships were open only to Anglican priests. Fellowships were comfortable positions, but much less comfortable than well-paid positions in the Church of England, especially since fellows were generally not allowed to marry. The typical Oxbridge don of the mid-nineteenth century was thus in his early or mid-twenties and regarded his fellowship as a holding post, which he would leave as soon as a desirable parish became available. Many of these young men would have been very bright, but few were serious researchers or experienced teachers. Fellowships were opened up to laymen in the later decades of the century, but Oxford and Cambridge did not become world-leading research institutions until they were transformed by German scholars fleeing Nazism in the 1930s.

The dominance of Oxbridge in British culture was unusual: these institutions educated a much larger share of the elite than was the case for any two institutions in any other country, with the possible exception of the top grandes écoles in France. Nonetheless, some elite and quasi-elite Victorian groups followed alternative educational pathways. For example, for much of the nineteenth century the colonial civil service in India was educated at a training college called Haileybury. These programs were not, however, necessarily more rigorous than the usual Oxbridge track. I cannot improve upon David Gilmour’s description of a day in the life at Haileybury, distilled from the memoirs of the civil servant John Beames:

At eight in the morning, the students rushed to chapel, many of them wearing only a nightshirt under a gown or overcoat. Afterwards they returned to their rooms for breakfast, which often turned into parties with ‘tankards of beer or claret’. Breakfast was followed by smoking a pipe and dealing with tailors and other tradesmen who had arrived from Hertford. At ten o’clock the bell rang for lectures, which lasted two hours on some days, three on others. The studious minority known as the ‘steadies’ took notes; the others yawned, drew sketches of their teachers and fooled about. After a lunch of bread, cheese and beer, they were free to do what they liked. The oarsmen went to the river, the cricketers went to their cricket pitch, the ‘steadies’ went for a ‘solemn constitutional’ along the lanes, and the ‘fast men’ either slipped off by train to London or else clattered off in dog-carts to play billiards at Hertford or Ware. Dinner took place in Hall at six followed by evening chapel at eight. Then the ‘steadies’ retired to their rooms and read far into the night, most of the others sat about drinking and singing, and at about two in the morning the ‘fast men’ returned very drunk from Broxbourne Station after catching the last train from Shoreditch.

Beames’s account was particularly colorful, but nobody seems to have had a good word to say about Haileybury as a teaching institution. Everyone, however, including Beames, agreed that it engendered much esprit de corps among its graduates. The future prime minister Lord Salisbury commented on the ‘close friendships formed there, which softened the rivalries of after life and secured devoted instead of perfunctory co-operation’. Perhaps something similar might be said for much of the elite Victorian education system.

Adulthood

One virtue that upper-class Victorian education signally failed to inculcate was early rising. Although Victorian schoolboys and university students got up fairly early for chapel, the day of an upper-class Victorian adult started late. The great prime minister of the early nineteenth century, Pitt the Younger, breakfasted at 9am. The great prime minister of the Victorian period, William Gladstone, hosted a social breakfast starting at 10.30am (claret was served), continuing till about noon. His rival Benjamin Disraeli attended breakfasts hosted by Lord Houghton, which started at 10am, but which Disraeli would join at about 11.30am. Elite Victorians generally had flexible working hours and were free to work from home unless they had meetings elsewhere. Many spent the whole morning at home, reading the newspaper, answering letters, and preparing for later meetings. The Edwardian prime minister Arthur Balfour generally did all this literally in bed, rarely emerging from his bedroom before lunchtime. As we shall see, mornings must often have been even later from February to July, when many leading Victorians would have spent much of the night partying.

At some point in the late morning, the Victorian would finally make his way to the office. By the end of the century, some wealthy people lived in suburbs and commuted by railway, especially in industrial cities like Birmingham and Manchester. In general, however, Britain’s elites were slow to suburbanize, and in 1914 most still lived in centrally located row houses and walked to work. Every day a great herd of frock-coated men emerged from Belgravia and Mayfair and poured through Covent Garden to their offices in Parliament, Whitehall, the Inns of Court, and the City.

The exact timetable for the middle of the day varied by period and profession. In the early Victorian period, the upper classes often went without a serious lunch but dined early at 5 or 6pm. This changed drastically in the third quarter of the century, perhaps because of improved artificial lighting, so that by the 1870s many Victorians had a substantial lunch with wine, usually with professional peers at a club, sustaining them until dinner at about 8.30pm. Politics was a part-time job for most members of Parliament (MPs) and peers, so Parliament typically did not start sitting until 4.30 or 5pm; the majority of part-time politicians could wind up a gentlemanly day at the office in time for this, while the minority of full-time politicians could spend the day on party management, or (if they were ministers) at government business in their ministries.

Provided Parliament did not interfere, however, an elite Victorian would stroll home to dress for dinner. Upper-class Victorians of both sexes paid great attention to their clothes. For an informal dinner at home, a man would change into evening dress, usually including a starched collar, cuff and shirt front, patent leather shoes, and gold shirt studs and cufflinks.

Dinners were rich and elaborate. The number of courses naturally varied, but it was invariably more than a modern dinner at an equivalent grade of formality. A typical dinner began with soup and sherry, then proceeded to fish with hock (Rhineland whites), passing on through a sequence of meat courses with champagne or red wines, and finishing with various desserts and savories served with port and madeira. The Victorians loved drinking and drank a lot by modern standards. Men drank more than women, but women drank a good deal too: one conduct guide noted that ‘young ladies seldom drink more than three glasses of wine at dinner but married ladies, professional ladies, and those accustomed to society, and habits of affluence, will habitually take five or even six, whether in their own homes or at the tables of their friends’.

For about five months a year, between February and July, the elite of Victorian Britain congregated in London for what was called ‘the Season’, essentially a sequence of parties and social events. They usually owned or rented houses in Mayfair and Belgravia, two small neighborhoods that face each other across Hyde Park, meaning that the bulk of the ruling class would live literally within walking distance of one another. Parallel institutions existed in most Western countries at the time – the social seasons in Paris, Vienna, St Petersburg and New York were famous – but the London Season had a particularly dominant role in the national life because it coincided with the Parliamentary session, making it a forum for political networking as well as elite matchmaking and court rituals.

During the Season, the upper-class evening continued long beyond dinner. Balls were the flagship evening entertainment. They started late, at nine or ten, and guests would filter in gradually, with the dance floor really full from about 11pm. Around midnight a meal called ‘supper’ appeared, comprising soups, salads, cold meats, shellfish, fruit, and ice cream. The beverage most associated with balls was ‘negus’, a hot drink made of port, spices, sugar and oranges or lemons. Lemonade, tea and coffee were on hand throughout the evening, and champagne, hock, port and sherry were served at supper. In addition, an 1867 guide for aspiring ball hosts observed, ‘Bottled pale ale and stout are quite permissible – in fact, they have become indispensable’.

After supper, dancing recommenced; a good ball peaked after 1am. Guests gradually returned home in the small hours, and the most determined might continue until dawn. It was good form to slip out quietly, and there was no requirement even to say goodbye to the hostess. ‘The great thing is to avoid making your departure felt as a suggestion for breaking up the party, as you have no right to hint by your movements that you consider the entertainment has been kept up long enough’, an etiquette guide notes.

Balls naturally had special significance for people in the marriage market. Arranged marriage in the strict sense had largely died out by the nineteenth century, but upper-class young people and their parents still hoped they would make advantageous matches, and balls furnished opportunities to do so. It would be quite wrong, however, to think that balls were simply mass dating events. Courtiers, bankers, judges, and cabinet ministers would have shared the dance floor with debutantes. In fact, with some exceptions like club lunches, the social events of the Victorian elite were notable for their lack of segregation by age or sex. A Society ball discharged the functions of both a teenage house party and a business networking convention: in fact, it was both a teenage house party and a business networking convention.

Unmarried young people (and their unfortunate parents) might go to three or four balls per week, while other Society members would go to one or two. But the other nights were scarcely less busy. Opera, theatre and concerts were important, especially opening or gala nights. The bread and butter of the Season was soirées, card parties, conversazione, receptions and less formal dances, as well as midnight ‘supper parties’, all mostly hosted in private homes. These elements were modular. An MP might miss dinner for a late sitting of Parliament, but still drop into a soirée at 10.30pm, turn up to a supper party at 11.45pm, and then arrive at a ball at 1am. From February to July, the Victorian upper class led a remarkably nocturnal existence, with bedtimes in the small hours and the mornings something of a write-off.

By one definition, then, elite Victorians did remarkably little work: they could easily spend just four or five hours a day actually in the office. But by another definition, they were working all the time. Lunches, balls, and dinners were certainly fun, but they were not just fun. In the words of the historian Leonore Davidoff, these social occasions provided ‘access to a vast information network: information about jobs, investment possibilities, secret political decisions’. Many Victorians were intensely ambitious and drove themselves hard: sleep deprivation, exhaustion and burnout were familiar companions. The distinctive feature of elite Victorian lifestyles was not laziness, but an extreme weighting toward what we might call team building and professional networking, and the near-total fusion of personal and professional life.

Method in their madness?

The sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies famously distinguished Gemeinschaft – community, held together by ties of sentiment and tradition – from Gesellschaft – society, held together by explicit laws and contracts. As societies grow more complex, he thought, Gesellschaft tends to replace Gemeinschaft. But the Victorian elite was a little Gemeinschaft at the apex of an enormous Gesellschaft, an intimate community bound together by ties of common culture, shared memory, intense status competition, loyalty, and love. Its members strove for one another’s envy, esteem and gratitude, and to achieve this they would go far beyond what was contractually obligated or financially advantageous. It is not altogether fanciful to think of the Victorian elite as functioning like a big premodern village, though its members were geographically dispersed across the kingdom and its vast empire.

All the practices I have described in this article helped to maintain this emotional village. The ruling class were educated together from an early age, in schools and universities designed to inculcate shared values, a common identity, and ties of mutual loyalty. As adults they congregated every year in an area of central London that actually was village-sized, where they spent every night in one another’s company. Young members of the Victorian elite tended to meet their future spouses during these glittering evenings, so that the elite came to form, to some extent, a literal family.

Maintaining this community required a lot of time and effort, which obviously had opportunity costs. All else being equal, rich and powerful Victorians must have been less productive for spending four hours a day in the office rather than twelve. But the creation of a single ruling Gemeinschaft may have had compensatory advantages.

One of these was unity. In some ways, rich Victorians were quite diverse. They came from every part of the British Isles. They included landed aristocrats and urban bourgeois, with the latter steadily superseding the former over the course of the century. Most landowners were Anglicans, but many of the new rich were Nonconformists (non-Anglican Protestants), and some were Jews or Catholics. With the conspicuous exception of the Irish Catholics, all these people were successfully folded into a single British elite, rather than forming hostile counter-elites working to overthrow the social order.

This obviously had advantages for Britain. The elites of the American South had a very different identity to those of the North, and ultimately led the country into civil war. Spain, Italy and France suffered from incessant conflicts between urban bourgeois and rural nobility. Germany was riven with strife along geographical, religious, and class lines. Some of these tensions existed in Britain, but except in Ireland, the elite finessed them peacefully. A Nonconformist Manchester businessman probably supported the Liberal Party rather than the Conservatives, but the idea of violently seceding from Britain to form a Methodist Republic of the North would never have occurred to him.

Maybe the Victorian elites also had advantages relative to elites today. One strength of all Gemeinschaften is that they can reward their members with prestige rather than money, which is useful in contexts where adequate financial rewards are for some reason impossible.

This might be an important advantage sometimes. For political reasons, most modern societies pay politicians and civil servants vastly less than they pay people with a similar level of responsibility in the private sector. As a result, they struggle to persuade their most talented people to enter and remain in public life. The Victorians did not have this problem. Until the 1880s, most local government roles in Britain were conducted on a completely unpaid basis by local landowners. They also administered the rudimentary welfare system, sat as magistrates in the lower courts, and staffed the boards of most schools and hospitals. A landowner who ignored these responsibilities would suffer no material consequences, but he would be diminished and resented in the eyes of his peers, and for most, that was inducement enough.

Something similar applied to Parliament. Nineteenth-century MPs were unpaid and covered most of their own election expenses. In the 1880 General Election, the average Parliamentary candidate bore about £150,000 of expenses in an urban constituency and £450,000 in a rural one (in today’s money). MPs had to take this massive financial hit repeatedly, every time there was an election. They also had to bear all of their costs upon assuming office, including staff, travel, and accommodation in both Westminster and their constituency. And yet there was no difficulty filling Parliament: many of the richest and most powerful people in England competed fiercely to enter, simply because being an MP was intensely prestigious in their social milieu.

Maybe this identification with the social system affected how politicians behaved in office, too. In The English Constitution the political writer Walter Bagehot noted that parliamentary democracy creates powerful incentives for opposition parties to damage the country by corrosively undermining the government when it makes difficult but necessary decisions. But in practice, he thought, English politicians did not do this as much as one might expect:

In abstract theory these defects in our present practice would seem exceedingly great, but in practice they are not so. English statesmen and English parties have really a great patriotism; they can rarely be persuaded even by their passions or their interest to do anything contrary to the real interest of England, or anything which would lower England in the eyes of foreign nations. And they would seriously hurt themselves if they did.

It is hard to know how seriously to take claims like this. But it is certainly true that the MPs of both parties overwhelmingly belonged to the community described in this essay, sharing friends, relatives, memories, and values. Perhaps the elite village could punish them for defecting from norms in ways that are impossible today, making political life less prone to divisiveness, demagoguery, and brinkmanship.

Would modern societies work better if their local and national government were conducted by a tight-knit community of extremely rich and successful people? Maybe not: the downsides are obvious. But the problems would be interestingly different from those that they have in reality. Imagine a San Francisco whose Board of Supervisors featured Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, each feeling this responsibility to be the greatest glory of his career, each hoping that he might one day attain the greater glory that is the House of Representatives. It might not be paradise. Maybe it would be a disaster. But it would certainly be interesting.

Samuel Hughes is an editor at Works in Progress.

Read the issue

Print subscribers start to receive the full edition this week. Online readers will receive the articles over the next few weeks.

Two pieces are already out online:

• Maya Rosen on the eradication of mosquitoes

• Patrick Fitzsimmons on the Bronze Age collapse

The issue also contains pieces by:

• and on the formula for lovable cities

• on porcelain

• on the invention of supermarkets

• Tyler Cowen on Brazilian food

• on science myths

• on the causes of the sexual revolution

• on Victorian elites

• on modern warfare

• on biology hedge funds

  ---

Features

In the 1980s, Geely was a refrigerator parts manufacturer in the provincial city of Hangzhou, China. Today it is an auto giant that owns Volvo, Lotus, Polestar and part of Aston Martin. Look almost anywhere in China and you’ll see similar stories of transformation and explosive growth. The world’s largest suppliers of electric vehicles, LiDAR, display panels, and batteries are all young Chinese companies.

Many attribute China’s success to wise and foresighted winner picking from the Chinese Communist Party – its willingness to be strategic in a world otherwise governed by the ruthless pursuit of the bottom line. But really, write Robin Rivaton and Ben Southwood, China’s secret ingredient is that it takes many of the things that make America so successful to extreme, exaggerated degrees: cheap capital, a huge market, and intense competition at every level. China’s mayors and regional leaders effectively work as venture capitalists, investing to bring about growth in their areas, and creating powerful ‘local growth machines’ that make the country rich.

Everyone loves old cities like Bruges, Prague, and Avignon. But this isn’t just because they have beautiful historic buildings: the layouts of medieval city centers make them feel cosy, human, and organic. The Austrian architect Camillo Sitte theorized in 1902 that the recipe for lovable cities like these involved small, enclosed squares, curved streets, public art sitting on the edge of plazas, not in the middle, and asymmetry. Above all, cities were the voids between buildings, rather than the buildings themselves, which should join together into a warm, hugging wall. His work was hugely influential in its own time, but has since been forgotten – an oversight that Phoebe Arslanagic-Little and Samuel Hughes try to correct in their article explaining Sitte’s principles.

There’s nothing quite like porcelain, writes Charles C Mann. Invented three thousand years ago by Chinese potters, it is produced from a special kind of clay, kaolin, that essentially produces glass when heated, creating the material’s distinctive, translucent delicacy. It later became an object of obsession for European royalty and alchemists who experimented for centuries to discover its secret. Today, innovation in porcelain and related materials is producing high-tech kitchen equipment and bone replacements. Porcelain is a reminder that the drive to create new types of matter has long played a powerful role in human history.

Successful people get up early, work long hours, never drink or smoke, and submit themselves regularly to high-intensity interval training, meditations, and ice baths. Right? Well, the Victorians didn’t think so, writes Samuel Hughes. The upper class of nineteenth-century England learned relatively little at school or university, and instead spent much of their time playing rugby and hazing each other. As adults they often started their days late after long nights of feasting and drinking. You might be skeptical that this was a recipe for success, but it created a powerfully bonded elite with very high levels of internal trust, which oversaw the largest empire the world has ever seen.

Mosquito-borne disease is, in theory, a solved problem. In the last decade biologists have come up with several techniques that can either make mosquito populations immune to diseases like dengue and yellow fever or suppress their populations by making them sterile. These techniques are effective and, because their effects are so precise, have minimal effects on the environment (unlike the insecticides traditionally used). Why, then, is dengue on the rise in the United States? Maya Rosen investigates how American regulatory agencies have spent years sitting on the tools that would help.

Bronze Age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians were powered by bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was scarce, meaning that anyone who could control it could create a near-monopoly on violence, and control huge territories. That changed with the invention of the bloomery, which allowed the mass production of iron weapons. Iron, argues Patrick Fitzsimmons, is why no new empires rose to fill the power vacuum created by the Bronze Age collapse 3,000 years ago. It’s not that iron weapons were better than bronze ones; rather, they were easier to get hold of, meaning that warlords and bandits could now arm themselves against superpowers. What new technologies could do the same today?

Some years ago, Samuel Hughes’s colleague Ben Southwood sent him a handful of grainy online pictures showing some recent buildings in Pakistan. He was struck by the assurance of the designs and the quality of the materials, craftsmanship, and detailing. These buildings were the work of Kamil Khan Mumtaz, a Pakistani architect widely admired in his home country but almost invisible abroad. Samuel wonders whether Mumtaz might be the world’s best architect. With Mumtaz’s support, Works in Progress presents a portfolio of his work, most of it never before seen outside Pakistan.

Read the issue

The new print magazine

Issue 26 is our sixth print issue and marks the one-year anniversary of the print magazine. The new issue includes a few improvements based on what we’ve learned over the past year. It turns out people treat the magazine more like a book than something they carry around, so we’ve moved to more premium matte paper and a wider format. We’ve enlarged and changed some of the fonts to make it more readable. And we’ve introduced columns, which will hopefully help break up the features. Our print subscribers are like royalty to us, and we hope, if you aren’t one yet, you’ll join them soon.

What we’ve been up to

We’ve celebrated the launch of Issue 26 with drinks in Washington, DC, met lots of lovely readers at the Stripe Press London pop-up, and hosted subscribers for a talk by Aria Schrecker in San Francisco.

We also have a subscriber-only launch coming up in San Francisco this Sunday. Sign up to the print magazine to get the details!

Most Americans think of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue as problems that affect people in other countries, not their own. Until recently, they would have been largely correct: malaria and yellow fever were eliminated in the United States in the twentieth century, and dengue had become extremely rare, with most cases brought back from abroad. But as temperatures have risen and mosquitoes have developed resistance to pesticides, these diseases have become a growing problem again in the United States.

In 2024, the country reported almost 4,000 cases of dengue, a 360 percent increase over the average of 830 per year over the previous decade; Florida, California, and Texas all saw locally acquired transmission; and Puerto Rico declared dengue a public health emergency. Ten locally acquired malaria cases were reported nationwide in 2023, the first reported in twenty years. And though yellow fever remains gone for now, the mosquitoes capable of spreading it are still present.

But we don’t have to accept this threat. We have new ways to wipe out mosquito-borne diseases with minimal environmental cost. The United States is sufficiently well-resourced, and its disease-carrying mosquito population sufficiently small, that it can stamp out this problem entirely within its own borders.

The reason we haven’t is that the technology has spent fifteen years in regulatory limbo. Ending this impasse would allow us to eliminate many mosquito-borne diseases from the United States, and eventually the rest of the world.

Subscribe now

The lethal gene

Genetic engineering can suppress mosquitoes: researchers insert a gene into male mosquitoes that means their offspring will not survive, and then release them into the wild, where they mate with females, prevent those females having any surviving offspring, and collapse local populations. In 2000, biologists at the University of Oxford demonstrated that this idea could work in fruit flies. They engineered the flies to carry a gene that makes a protein called tTAV, harmless in small amounts but lethal when it builds up. In the lab, the insects are reared in a medium laced with the antibiotic tetracycline, which keeps the gene switched off. But, in the wild, where there is no tetracycline, the gene switches on, and the offspring die before adulthood.

The scientists then formed a company, Oxitec, which was intended to work with governments to research and deploy the technology. They engineered the same gene into male Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads dengue and yellow fever. In this strain, the lethal effect is tuned to kill only the female offspring, while the males survive and pass the gene on for a few generations before it disappears. This approach means the gene continues driving down mosquito numbers for several generations without needing a fresh ‘top up’ of engineered males, but it is also self-limiting: the females that inherit it die off each generation, so the lethal gene steadily declines in the wild. Yet the technique is hugely effective. Sustained releases cut a wild Aedes aegypti population in the Cayman Islands by 80 percent, and in a field trial in Juazeiro, Brazil by about 95 percent. The company submitted its data to seek approval in the United States in 2010. But it has been slow going.

Until that point, engineered insects had been used only for agricultural pest control. Since the 1950s, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) had been using the ‘sterile insect technique’, sterilizing male insects with radiation rather than genetic modification, which would mate with wild females and produce no offspring, steadily driving the wild population down. The technique’s major success was in fighting screwworm: an extremely nasty insect that lays its eggs in open wounds, and whose larvae then hatch and burrow into the flesh of any animal unlucky enough to be afflicted (usually livestock), killing them within days. The United States used the sterile insect technique to clear out this pest in the 1960s, and eventually pushed it back as far as the southern tip of Panama. This is estimated to have saved American cattle farmers close to $800 million per year, with billions more in benefits to the wider economy. But containment broke, and in June 2026, Texas detected the United States’ first case of screwworm in 60 years, likely aided by cattle smuggling from Central America, where the pest has resurged. With billions of dollars in damages, Texas officials are once again deploying sterile flies to contain its spread.

The Mediterranean fruit fly, which attacks more than 300 kinds of fruit and vegetables and is considered the most destructive fruit pest in the world, has been beaten back the same way, with sterile flies released over California and Florida. It’s estimated that, if the fruit fly resettles in California, the resulting crop damage could cost over a billion dollars per year in that state alone.

Subscribe to print

When Oxitec first sought approval for its gene-edited Aedes, it applied to the agency that had long managed mass insect releases, the USDA. But it took a year and a half for the USDA to reject the application and inform the company that it should instead apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA had claimed jurisdiction over genetically modified animals under its authority over veterinary drugs. Its guidance stated that ‘altered genomic DNA in an animal is a drug … because such altered DNA is an article intended to affect the structure or function of the body of the animal’. Until then, the USDA’s insects had been sterilized through radiation, which damages an insect’s sperm so that it leaves no viable offspring. Oxitec, by contrast, had inserted a new gene. Even so, the category was a poor fit for Oxitec’s mosquitoes.

Oxitec’s application sat with the FDA for another five years. Like the USDA, the FDA could not work out how to apply existing rules for veterinary drugs to an engineered mosquito, eventually concluding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which oversees pesticide registration, was a better fit. The FDA issued new guidance stating that they did not regulate products ‘intended to prevent, destroy, repel, or mitigate mosquitoes for population control purposes.’ The FDA had essentially created a bespoke carve-out for genetically engineered mosquitoes, recognizing that its regulatory frameworks weren’t set up to evaluate something like this.

In its third review, at the EPA, Oxitec’s mosquitoes were subject to the rules governing pesticides, which often require both scientific assessments and field trials before the product can be lawfully sold and distributed. In May 2020, a full decade after Oxitec first sought approval, the EPA granted them an Experimental Use Permit, which didn’t allow them to sell their product but did finally allow them to test it to obtain the safety and efficacy data needed for commercial registration by running field trials in delimited areas.

The location they chose for those field trials was the Florida Keys, an island chain off the southern tip of Florida, where dengue had resurged. Local authorities were eager to use genetically modified mosquitoes and in 2021, Oxitec ran the first field trials in the United States that demonstrated female mosquitoes that inherited the gene died before adulthood. In 2022, the EPA expanded the trials to California, clearing the release of up to 2.4 billion genetically engineered mosquitoes across the two states, but the releases were paused after public pushback.

Oxitec’s permit expired in April 2024, meaning no further mosquitoes could be released without new authorization from the EPA. A full commercial registration requires another review from the agency, this one focused on field trial data. Their full registration remains pending, over two years after the end of their field trial permit. A scientific advisory panel reviewing the case was supposed to convene in November 2025, but the meeting was postponed with, at the time of writing, no new date set. As Florida Keys Mosquito Control District Executive Director Andrea Leal said, ‘our biggest challenges have been awaiting regulatory approvals.’ Luckily, this district had another mosquito control option to try out: Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes.

Subscribe now

Smaller still to bite ’em

Around the same time as genetically engineered mosquitoes were becoming viable, an alternative technique emerged. It rests on a bacterium called Wolbachia, which naturally infects roughly 60 percent of insect species, including butterflies, fruit flies, and bees. Wolbachia has two effects on insects that make it useful for preventing mosquito-borne disease. First, it makes them less able to carry viruses, including those that infect humans. Second, the bacterium is passed on to future generations – specifically, infected females pass it on through their eggs, and infected males can only produce offspring if they mate with infected females; if they mate with uninfected females, the offspring will not develop. By releasing infected male and female mosquitoes, wild mosquito populations can be seeded with Wolbachia until most of them carry it, becoming resistant to viruses like dengue and spreading their resistance to future generations. And since this approach does not involve genetic modification, it ought to be able to bypass much of the regulation that stalled Oxitec’s gene-modified Aedes.

In 2009, after decades of research, scientists in Australia successfully introduced a strain of Wolbachia into Aedes aegypti. They also confirmed that Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes that mate with wild females produce eggs that don’t hatch, making them effectively sterile without infected females to mate with. This is the basis for an alternative strategy: releasing only males has the same effect as the sterile insect technique, collapsing local populations. The approach has succeeded at the scale of cities. In a randomized trial in Singapore, releases of Wolbachia-infected males cut mosquito populations by 85 percent compared to control areas and dengue infections by roughly 70 percent.

In April 2024, after fifteen years working its way through the system, MosquitoMate became the first company to receive full nationwide commercial registration for a live mosquito biopesticide. MosquitoMate’s insects can now be deployed across the United States, subject to local approval. Mosquito control districts have moved quickly to make use of the technology, including the Florida Keys in 2025 and the San Gabriel Valley in 2026. The technology is also attracting interest from larger players. In June 2026, Google’s Debug project requested the EPA’s approval to release 64 million Wolbachia mosquitoes in California and Florida (in this case, targeting a different species: Culex quinquefasciatus, which carries West Nile virus). But it must complete the Experimental Use Permit process from the beginning, even though the basic underlying technology is the same.

Regulating biotech better

In the last few decades, biotech has developed enormously. We can edit DNA, treat diseases by silencing harmful genes, and engineer bacteria to eat plastic waste and oil spills: all things that would have sounded like science fiction not even fifty years ago. But the regulation that governs the use of these new technologies hasn’t kept pace. No major new biotech regulation has been passed since the 1980s, and the agencies responsible for review are not resourced or designed for speed. The 1986 Coordinated Framework remains the governing structure, and it divides jurisdiction according to categories designed for the previous century.

Sometimes, it’s not even clear which regulatory body should have oversight of a new technology, a question which can create years-long delays before testing even begins. Cell-cultured meat faced this problem: was it a food, and thus under the jurisdiction of the FDA, or an agricultural technique, under the jurisdiction of the USDA? The deadlock broke only when Congress forced them to split the review. In Oxitec’s case, a single early meeting to resolve the tensions would have saved years. A few years ago, Washington seemed to agree. President Biden’s 2022 executive order directed the agencies to resolve regulatory uncertainties, and they committed to formally update how the 1986 Coordinated Framework is implemented. But almost none of it happened; President Trump rescinded the order in March 2025, and the updates never materialized.

Even aside from harmonization and safety testing, it can still take years for products to be reviewed. Other programs might expedite the process. The EPA introduced a Vector Expedited Review Voucher program in 2022, which rewards companies that successfully register a novel mosquito control product with a voucher entitling them to expedited review on their next application. This ought to ensure that many of the best applications would be fast-tracked. But it doesn’t do anything about the long regulatory backlog itself. Much better would be to grow regulatory agencies’ capacity to review and approve applications, to speed up the pipeline as a whole. Currently, the EPA unit responsible for reviewing new mosquito control products is a small office that reviews a wide range of products from biochemical compounds to genetically engineered mosquitoes, and mosquito products are generally reviewed with the same protocols as other conventional pesticides, even though they raise different questions than pesticides on dispersal, inheritance, and their impact on populations.

Reforming these departments and clearing their backlogs is possible. Because of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, passed in 1992, two thirds of the FDA’s budget for human drug review now comes from industry fees. In the late 1980s, the median time to review a new drug was 29 months; under the fee system, the targets are ten months for a standard review and six months for a priority one, and the agency now meets them in the large majority of cases. Increased staffing helped drive the speed up: it’s estimated that review times fell by roughly 3.3 months for every 100 reviewers the FDA added. The EPA, by contrast, is much more reliant on congressional appropriation, with two thirds of its budget coming from Congress and only one third from fees.

It shouldn’t have to take fifteen years to deploy effective products that can save lives. New technologies mean that mosquito-borne disease is now a choice in the United States. We have the power to eliminate it; all we have to do is choose to.

Maya Rosen is a writer interested in biotechnology policy.

Over three thousand years ago, on a plain beside the Orontes River in Syria, two great armies clashed in what may at the time have been the most colossal battle ever seen: the Battle of Kadesh. The two combatants, the Egyptians and the Hittites, together put forward tens of thousands of soldiers and over five thousand chariots, making the number of combatants comparable to some smaller First World War battles, and quite likely bigger than Agincourt, Hastings, and Yorktown. It was also the first battle whose events can be reconstructed in detail, as Pharaoh Ramesses II afterwards commissioned elaborate stone reliefs depicting the battle as a monumental victory, which remain in temples dotted across modern Egypt to this day.

The Egyptians and the Hittites were two of several great powers then dominant in the eastern Mediterranean. Others were the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and Mycenaean Greeks. All were bureaucratically complex societies, in some cases controlling territories of hundreds of miles, capable of mobilizing armies, extracting taxes, and completing ambitious infrastructural projects. But just a few centuries after the Battle of Kadesh, all had vanished or dwindled to a fraction of their former power.

The Bronze Age collapse – as this sudden disappearance of regional powers is known – is one of the great mysteries of ancient history. The usual explanation points to a series of catastrophes around 1200 BC: droughts, mysterious invaders called the Sea Peoples, famines, and internal revolts. But such explanations are insufficient as catastrophes like these often create political upheaval without permanently ending civilizations. The question is not why the Bronze Age empires fell, but why, after they fell, nothing like them returned for centuries. Why did it suddenly become so hard, seemingly, to build and sustain an empire?

If you go to see Ramesses’s stone reliefs today, your tour guide might tell you that both sides at the Battle of Kadesh wielded bronze weapons, common for imperial armies of the time. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and the tin in those bronze weapons would have had to have traveled thousands of miles from distant mines, perhaps in modern Afghanistan or in Western Europe. The difficulty involved in mining and transporting tin is one reason that access to bronze weaponry remained concentrated in military and elite institutions. The average citizen still largely relied on tools made of copper, stone, bone, or wood. But just a few centuries after Kadesh, ordinary Hittite and Egyptian farmers had access to a new material: iron.

Because iron could be produced locally, imperial centers no longer had such a strong advantage over their subject peoples. The invention of iron weaponry meant the political equilibrium was forever changed.

Today, we live in an era where access to the tools of violence has been exceptionally concentrated, allowing superpowers far larger than those of the late Bronze Age to reign largely unchallenged. But as military technology evolves, another age of upheaval may be approaching.

Scissors beat rock

The invention of bronze had already displaced an earlier metal: copper. The Copper Age began around 5000 BC and ran until around 3000 BC, when bronze weapons began appearing in the archaeological record. Copper was accessible enough and easy enough to work that it allowed early proto-states to reliably arm their warriors with something better than stone weaponry, which often chips or breaks under impact. Copper is a soft metal, hence its use in pipes and wiring today. But it generally won’t break, and though it does bend easily it can also be bent back into shape. This marginal benefit was enough to give groups with copper weapons a significant advantage.

Copper-wielding groups pushed into surrounding communities who used stone tools, beginning a process of prehistoric political consolidation. We see an increase in the number of fortified settlements, rising inequality in the grave goods with which people were buried, suggesting deepening hierarchies, and complex smelting sites as far as sixty miles away from where copper was mined, suggesting increased economic specialization.

Copper weapons were eventually made obsolete by the invention of bronze, made by combining copper and tin. Bronze is harder and stiffer, and will hold a sword’s edge for longer, which gave bronze-wielding groups a strong military advantage.

The spread of bronze preceded a wave of imperial conquest across the eastern Mediterranean. The Annals of Hattusili I, a cuneiform tablet found in the 1950s, details the expansion of the Hittite empire from its core in central Turkey to the Aegean Sea in the west and the Euphrates in the east during the 1600s BC. While the tablet is royal propaganda, the Hittites evidently viewed their history as one of conquest over surrounding groups: the tablet boasts of foreign cities sacked and burned, with weeds sown on the sites where they once stood. Egypt also saw its territory grow to incorporate large parts of Nubia and the Levant at around this time. These military successes would not have been possible without bronze.

Copper had come with a growth in social complexity and political consolidation as the metal required knowhow and social organization to mine, transport, anneal and smelt, and gave groups employing it an edge over stone users. Bronze entrenched this advantage due to a single geological fact: while copper had been somewhat rare, the tin required to transform it into bronze was even rarer.

The major tin deposits accessible to Bronze Age peoples from 3000–1200 BC were in modern Afghanistan, France, Iberia, and Cornwall, in southwest England. Distinctive chemical features of individual deposits mean we can track just how far tin mined in these places spread. Tin with trace levels of indium, particular to the Cornish deposits, has been found in shipwrecks near Israel and southern France, showing that Cornish tin traveled for thousands of miles. Smaller deposits existed in Turkey, the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and Iran.

The city-state of Mari in modern-day Syria acted as a tin hub, importing the metal from sources in the east and shipping it west up the Euphrates River. Texts from the eighteenth century BC record that Mari’s tin traveled over five hundred miles from a kingdom called Elam, which was itself another thousand miles from the Afghan mines that were its likely source. In addition to the distance and the difficult terrain, an ancient trader would have to worry about roaming bandits and aggressive foreign states along the way. Tin was extremely difficult for Bronze Age people to get hold of, making bronze weapons expensive.

This had a profound political consequence: elites had a major advantage in accessing the tools of violence. While smaller city-states could also get their hands on bronze, larger and more complex empires could do so more reliably. It was easier for them to obtain supplies, secure trade links, create stockpiles and replace losses. A Bronze Age king could field and sustain an army that smaller forces simply could not match. Peripheral communities at the edges of empires might resist for a while, but maintaining a seriously competitive army over time required state capacity that smaller forces generally lacked.

The Bronze Age collapse

At the time of the Battle of Kadesh, the eastern Mediterranean and Near East were filled with competing great powers: the Hittites had conquered most of Anatolia, the Egyptians controlled an area that stretched down into Sudan, the Assyrians and Babylonians vied for dominance in Mesopotamia, and southern Greece was ruled by a constellation of principalities including Mycenae, Pylos, and Thebes. These were advanced, bureaucratically organized societies that extracted labor, taxes and tribute from subjects and surrounding peoples.

Around 1200 BC, the system broke down. The archaeological record shows the imprint of bursts of violence before great empires disappeared. Greek palaces show ‘destruction layers’, archaeological evidence of burning, from a short period around this time. Similar scorch marks and scattered bones have been unearthed at Troy in a layer contemporary with the end of the Bronze Age.

In Greece, the kingdoms that had ruled the mainland collapsed so completely that the ensuing centuries were termed the Greek Dark Ages. The Hittite Empire, which had matched Egypt at Kadesh, virtually vanished. A centuries-long record of clay tablets detailing the culture’s laws, rituals, and literature abruptly stops at around 1200 BC. Egypt itself survived, but shrank, losing its Levantine territories and never recovering its former reach or imperial power. Similarly, Assyria contracted back to its inland imperial capital, and Babylonia, shaken by the collapse of the 440-year-old Kassite ruling dynasty, barely managed to limp on.

The resulting power vacuum set the stage for new empires to emerge, but that did not happen. Something was preventing the reconsolidation of small polities into vast empires. The causes of the Bronze Age collapse are still debated by historians: a series of severe droughts; the sudden appearance of mysterious Sea Peoples, who raided along the Mediterranean coast; the disruption of the tin trade routes; internal revolts; or possibly all of these at once. But there is another unifying factor that could have prevented the resurgence of empires: iron.

Share

The blooming of iron

Iron itself was not a new discovery. Bronze Age people had encountered the metal when it fell to Earth in meteorites, but they largely lacked the ability to mine and extract it for themselves. Objects made of meteoric iron were luxury items: they have been found in royal tombs, including Tutankhamun’s, and are referenced in religious texts as ‘metal of the sky’.

This changed towards the end of the second millennium BC, when people discovered how to extract iron from deposits in the ground and work it into tools and weapons. The problem is that iron requires much higher temperatures to melt than the metals used so far. Tin melts at 232 degrees Celsius, easy to reach in normal fires. Copper melts at 1,085 Celsius, achievable with a basic clay or stone furnace. Iron requires 1,538 degrees Celsius, which was impossible with the technology of the time. But Iron Age metallurgists found a way around this problem: the bloomery.

Bloomeries are a type of furnace that use bellows to push in extra air (and thus oxygen), creating a hotter fire that could reach 1,200–1,300 Celsius. This wasn’t hot enough to melt iron, but it didn’t need to be. The key was that the impurities in the iron ore would be drawn off, leaving pure iron. Ancient metallurgists were working with ores of iron oxide. A bloomery burned charcoal to create carbon monoxide, which drew oxygen out of the iron oxide; other impurities melted down into a liquid runoff, some of which could drain out of the resulting chunks of softened iron. These chunks would then be removed from the fire and, while still slightly softened, hammered to push out remaining impurities and weld the iron into a denser mass, leaving usable metal that could be reheated and worked into different shapes.

We don’t know for sure where this technique was invented. One possible origin is in India, where we find iron and bloomery byproducts in deposits with radiocarbon dates from around 1400 BC or even earlier. Another possibility is modern Georgia, where we find evidence of copper workshops experimenting with new methods of metal production. Quite likely there were several independent origins of the new method, similar to the multiple origins of bronze metallurgy or agriculture. The method reached modern-day Iran, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean over the next few hundred years, but it would take a millennium to reach the western Mediterranean at the same level of production.

The advantage of the previous technological leap, from copper to bronze, was that bronze is a stronger, stiffer, tougher metal superior in battle. Iron is different: it is not a better material than bronze. Good bronze is both harder than iron and more predictable. It also has the advantage of a lower melting point, meaning a broken bronze sword can be melted and recycled into a new one. So why did iron become dominant?

Abundance mindset

While the tin needed to make bronze could be found only in a few deposits in far-flung corners of the known world, iron is the fourth most abundant element in Earth’s crust. Many iron ores are also easy to spot on the surface of the ground. Goethite has recognizable black-brown color; limonite is a variant of goethite with a yellow tinge (when mixed with sand and clay it is known as ‘yellow ocher’, giving its name to the color); and hematite is a reddish-brown variant that leaves a rusty red streak when marked against a surface. An ancient miner could easily identify deposits as long as they knew what to look for.

Subscribe now

Transporting tin required a trader willing to assume the cost and risks of a journey, but the average Iron Age smith could find sources much closer to home. One analysis of Iron Age artifacts in Denmark found that the iron was derived from ‘bog iron’ ores that were abundant in local wetlands, smelted with charcoal from local forests.

This new technology had momentous political implications. Since iron could be smelted locally, previously peripheral communities could arm themselves with weapons that were, for practical purposes, comparable to the weapons of the elite in the empire’s core. In contrast to bronze, iron democratized violence.

The effects of iron were so stark that ancient writers in the subsequent centuries began separating human history into the bronze and iron eras. Hesiod described the age of iron as a time of suffering and strife, where no man knew a day or night free of toil or pain. Herodotus writes in his Histories that working iron was ‘the woe lying upon woe, since iron had been invented to the detriment of mankind.’ These writers associated iron with war and decline; some also alluded to the idea that iron had democratized violence. The Hebrew Bible records that the Philistines attempted to limit access to smiths as they were worried others could easily make iron weapons. Lucretius describes the Bronze Age as a time when ‘naked men gave way to well-armed foes’ but said that iron made ‘the odds of war equal as they had not been before’. With the advent of iron, the cost of warfare fell: a king could not keep others from accessing a military technology found in local soils.

The end of empire

On maps of the eastern Mediterranean before and after the spread of iron, the difference is stark. There are no early Iron Age empires as large as their Bronze Age predecessors. The collapse of the Hittite Empire left a political vacuum in modern Turkey and Syria, but instead of another empire emerging in its place, we see a patchwork of smaller states, none of which approach the same levels of dominance and organization for centuries. A similar story can be told in mainland Greece, and in the parts of the Levant previously occupied by Egypt.

Subscribe now

The archaeological record allows us to compare rates of violence before and after iron. A recent study looked at skeletal remains from the Middle East across several millennia. By looking at fracture patterns, researchers can infer whether skeletal damage was sustained while someone was alive, or after they were already dead and buried (for instance, damage caused by animals or by physical weathering). Researchers can also make inferences from factors such as the angle of fractures and where they are located. In the case of skull trauma, for instance, fractures caused by violence usually occur above where a hat would rest on your head. Once the skeletons are dated, we can track the trend of weapon-inflicted injuries over time. Compared with the Middle Bronze Age, before the invention of iron, skeletons from the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age show more signs of violence.

Databases of battles, made with evidence from archaeological sites and historical records, allow a comparison of the amount of warfare before and after the adoption of iron. My study based on these databases finds a sharp rise in the number of battles in the century after regions adopted iron compared with the one before. Whether this increase is caused by iron or if the databases represent a complete sample is up for debate.

Ancient records allow us to build timelines of rulers of Babylon, Assyria, and Athens across the Bronze and Iron Ages. These aren’t perfect datasets (in the case of the Athenian records, they are clearly only semi-historical: known historical figures appear alongside mythological entities such as Cecrops I, recorded as a half-man, half-serpent king in the sixteenth century BC). But insofar as we can rely on them, they show a clear change after iron is introduced. The average length of reigns across the sample of Assyria, Babylon, and Athens taken together falls 29 percent, and Babylon sees almost twice the number of kings in the centuries after iron adoption. These frequent changes suggest growing political instability resulting from a profound shift in the balance of power.

The iron revolution and its consequences

History has seen the ebb and flow of centralized and decentralized technologies of warfare ever since. Castles allowed barons of medieval Europe to subjugate the peasantry while also contending with their kings, until the gunpowder revolution eventually made castle walls obsolete. Gunpowder led to firearms, which strengthened states while they were new, scarce, and expensive, but then became cheap and easily accessible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shifting power to peripheral groups of soldiers and rebels. On the world stage, nuclear weapons have massively increased the costs of one country invading another; for a small state, achieving nuclear status can be a powerful equalizer. With each development, the balance of power shifts.

To understand the political consequences of new technologies, we need to understand how they shape power. Some technologies, like castles, change the offense-defense bias – whether it is easier to attack or defend. Others, like iron, change who has access to weaponry. A clear modern-day parallel is drones, which have been transformative in the Russia–Ukraine war and are reportedly responsible for up to 80 percent of recent casualties in that conflict as of 2026. A drone costing just a few hundred dollars can threaten a tank, artillery gun, or command post worth many times more. Drone combat has lowered war’s cost of entry and could make it easier for small guerrilla groups to challenge dominant powers.

Another parallel can perhaps be seen in AI. Access to AI is decentralized in that many individuals can use it, to potentially destructive effect. However, AI providers have the capacity to concentrate power. Access can be cut off, centralizing the use of AI in the hands of the companies that own it and whomever they choose to allow access, similar to the advantage enjoyed by Bronze Age kings who controlled stores of tin.

Iron and its consequences laid the foundation for new institutions that underpin our modern lives. Greek democracy, Phoenician commerce and writing, and the Abrahamic religions all developed within the new political environment of the Iron Age. The world was changed not by an apocalyptic event, but by the products of small village forges, which meant the violence potential that had been concentrated in palaces was distributed to the lowest farmer, ending the equilibrium that had sustained imperial lineages for a thousand years. The next millennia will be similarly shaped by the military technology of today.

Patrick Fitzsimmons is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1983, a biochemical company called AGS filed an application to release genetically modified organisms into the environment. AGS had deleted a single gene from a common leaf-dwelling microbe that encoded a protein around which ice crystals nucleate. By removing it and spraying the modified microbes onto plants, AGS hoped to prevent ice from forming on crops during cold California mornings.

At the time, there was no dedicated regulatory process for engineered microbes, so applications defaulted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had laid out voluntary rules and approved AGS’s request to run field trials. But an activist named Jeremy Rifkin then sued to stop the experiments, arguing that the NIH had skipped a required Environmental Impact Statement and that the engineered microbes could scatter into the wild with ‘possible effects on rainfall’. AGS eventually won the right to begin trials on strawberry plants in California in 1987, only for a group of activists to cut through the chain-link fence around the field and uproot about 2,000 of the 2,400 plants.

Rifkin’s lawsuit forced the question of how engineered microbes should be regulated. After the court case, staff at the White House gathered lawyers and regulators from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to figure out how to handle engineered microbes moving forward. They concluded that no new laws were needed: the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), written in 1976 for industrial chemicals, would apply to engineered microbes as well. These civil servants essentially decided that since genomes are made of chemicals, and novel chemicals are already regulated under the TSCA, engineered microbes with modified genomes were likewise covered.

Subscribe to print

Since that decision, development of microbes covered by the law has frozen. The TSCA is a regulatory black hole: between 1987 and 2018, researchers filed more than 240 applications. Only a few were ever approved for widespread use.

The world has produced all kinds of marvelous microbes in the last forty years. Genetically engineered microorganisms, for example, can pull nitrogen from the air and detect buried landmines by releasing gases visible to satellites. But almost none have been used, thanks to an American law never meant to regulate biology.

Microbes in limbo

In 2016, Japanese researchers discovered a microbe, Ideonella sakaiensis, growing near a recycling plant. That microbe is able to digest PET, the plastic in water bottles and most polyester clothing. Though technically recyclable, PET must first be shredded, melted, and remolded into new forms, so most just accumulates in landfill.

These wild microbes took an existing protein that degrades cutin (the waxy material on plant leaves) and evolved it to eat plastic instead. But natural forms of the PET-eating enzymes are slow; when the microbes were cultured on top of a thin PET film and incubated at 30 degrees centigrade, it took them six weeks to break it down.

Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin therefore took these PET-eating enzymes and used computational tools to make an improved variant, called FAST-PETase. This enzyme is 98 percent identical to the natural version but digests PET plastics in less than 24 hours. The next step could be to place FAST-PETase back into living cells and release them onto landfills. But even putting the gene back into its original host, I. sakaiensis, triggers TSCA, ensuring that the reconstituted organism can’t be used.

Engineered microbes could also be employed to detect heavy metals in streams and rivers at low concentrations far more cheaply than existing methods. Researchers have already created E. coli that can detect as little as five parts per billion of cadmium ions. In 2010, Chinese students engineered E. coli cells to sense mercury ions in water down to a seven-nanomolar concentration, seven times lower than the EPA’s contamination threshold. But none of these strains can be used outside the lab as all contain intergeneric DNA sequences, meaning they fall under TSCA.

Mining is another missed opportunity. Most metal in ore is discarded, because purification processes generally extract only a single target metal, rather than several at once. The US has enough active mines to meet all of its domestic mineral needs if it could capture 90 percent of the remaining byproducts in the ore. Yet when recovery does happen, it is energy-intensive and usually involves harsh chemicals that release toxic gases.

Bioleaching, a process that uses microbes to recover metals, might be a better option. This is typically done by employing microbes to oxidize iron and sulfur in sulfide ores, kicking off a chain reaction that dissolves out the copper. The same reactions happen without microbes, just too slowly to be industrially useful. Microbes are self-powering and could do the job without making toxic byproducts.

To make bioleaching more efficient, researchers turned to Gluconobacter oxydans B58, a microbe that converts sugars into mineral-dissolving acids. In a 2021 study, Cornell researchers found that 89 genes are involved in making these acids and that, by deleting some while overexpressing others, they could make a variant that extracts rare earth metals 73 percent faster than the ordinary microbe. Those changes didn’t cross genus lines, but even this kind of workaround is frowned upon because deleting a particular gene in a microbe requires introducing a marker, typically an antibiotic resistance gene from another organism, that allows only engineered cells to survive when exposed to antibiotics. As this gene comes from a different organism, adding it can trigger TSCA all by itself.

Subscribe to print

How the microbes got their prison

Regulating something under the TSCA means it falls under the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). On the basis of the 1986 decision to use the TSCA to regulate microbes, the agency issued a warning that it now had to approve any plans involving microorganisms formed by combining genetic material from organisms of different genera. (A genus, plural genera, is the subdivision that comes above ‘species’ in the tree of life. Humans, Homo sapiens, are the only surviving species in the genus Homo.)

Only a few have ever been approved for commercial use. One, in 1997, was a microbe approved for limited commercial use, as a nitrogen-fixing biofertilizer in alfalfa. Companies do not always know why the EPA rejects their applications for engineered microbes as the EPA has never published a checklist of requirements. Companies submit applications based on their best guesses about what the EPA will want to know. At the end of this back and forth, the agency gives one of three verdicts: no unreasonable risk, in which case the company can move ahead after a ninety-day waiting period; unreasonable risk, meaning the application is fully blocked; or a Section 5(e) consent order, equivalent to indefinite regulatory purgatory.

The consent order is meant for cases where the agency can’t rule out risk. It essentially amounts to a ban on using the microbe as it was intended. It caps production volumes and dictates how the microbes must be destroyed. In some cases, the agency has ordered companies to incinerate every soil sample, liquid, or surface the microbes touched until none can be detected.

When used to regulate chemicals, the TSCA obliges the EPA to make application details available to the public. But the EPA mandates the opposite for engineered microbes. Applications filed under the biotechnology rule are kept private, meaning that people living near proposed release sites have no way of knowing which organisms are being tested. This privacy also means that companies cannot learn from earlier filings, wasting millions of dollars on developing microbes that will never get approval.

Escaping the labyrinth

A handful of companies have found workarounds. Pivot Bio, for example, sells genetically engineered microbes that colonize plant roots and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. The company says that their microbes can replace about a quarter of the synthetic fertilizer that farmers normally use without affecting crop yields. This would reduce the amount of fertilizer leaching into water, save farmers money, and also save an enormous amount of energy, since making synthetic fertilizer currently accounts for 1–2 percent of global energy use. Pivot’s microbes are sprayed over millions of acres of land each year and, in 2022 alone, replaced an estimated 32,000 tons of synthetic fertilizer.

Pivot dodged TSCA by reshuffling genes within a single organism instead of importing DNA from another species. While the method works, gene shuffling is not always possible. For many tasks, like leaching metals or degrading plastic, the necessary genes don’t exist in any organism that’s easy to engineer or hardy enough to survive in the field.

Some engineered microbes have avoided the black hole of TSCA because the way they are classified means they are evaluated elsewhere. Microbes meant as pesticides go to the EPA’s biopesticide office. Agricultural products may be reviewed by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Ingestible therapeutics go to the FDA. These microbes still end up in the environment anyway, via runoff, sewage, and toilets, but because they avoided the TSCA, they can be developed quickly and sold to consumers.

Bacillus subtilis is a very common bacterium that lives in soil and decaying organic material, and on the surfaces of plants. A company called ZBiotics has engineered a strain of the bacterium that breaks down acetaldehyde, a molecule created when the body breaks down alcohol, and responsible for much of the bodily damage caused by drinking. The engineered bacteria are sold as a small probiotic drink to be consumed before drinking alcohol. The FDA does not require pre-market approval for foods or dietary supplements, so all ZBiotics had to do was show that the organism they’re using, B. subtilis, is Generally Recognized as Safe, which it is, and then start selling it.

Another company, Lantern Bioworks, sold an engineered microbe designed to prevent cavities. A major cause of cavities is a bacterium called Streptococcus mutans that lives in the mouth and secretes acid that erodes teeth. Lantern created a version of S. mutans that was identical except for lacking the gene to make the acid and producing a targeted antimicrobial compound that kills the original S. mutans instead. The idea was that it would form a permanent harmless presence in the mouth, outcompeting the cavity-causing natural Streptococcus.

Subscribe now

Critics argued that the company should be required to go through FDA approval if it wanted to make claims about cavity prevention, but Lantern marketed their engineered microbes as a cosmetic, rather than a drug, and so were able to get around the FDA’s more rigorous drug approval process. Unlike ZBiotics’s modified B. subtilis, which pass through the digestive system, Lantern’s bacteria were designed to colonize the mouth permanently. Long-term effects on the oral microbiome are not known, and it is also plausible that the engineered microbes could transfer to other people through kissing, for example.

These two cases show how easily engineered microbes are evaluated and reach consumers when a different agency is in charge. Engineered microbes designed as biopesticides use intergeneric DNA, but go through the EPA’s biopesticide registration process. ZBiotics similarly uses intergeneric DNA in its bacteria, but because those organisms are eaten rather than released into the environment, they fall to the FDA.

The case for caution

The White House staff had reasonable grounds for covering engineered microbes with the TSCA. In the mid-1980s, almost no field data existed on engineered microbes in the wild. No one knew whether they would persist, outcompete native species, or cause harm. The worry was that a microbe, unlike a chemical, would keep replicating after release. Microbes can also swap DNA with native organisms, so an uncontrolled release might spread engineered genes in unpredictable ways.

For chemicals, TSCA treats every novel molecular structure as a ‘new chemical substance’ requiring full pre-market review. Even a single atom difference between two molecules is enough to trigger this regulatory process. Once the White House staff decided in the 1980s that microbes were also ‘chemical substances’, they needed a test for novelty, and picked the genome. Under a 1997 EPA rule, combining DNA from species across different genera triggers review, even if the resulting organism is demonstrably safe.

But using the TSCA to regulate biology doesn’t make scientific sense. The White House team assumed cross-genus gene transfers were rare in nature, and that they therefore deserved extra scrutiny. They were wrong. Cross-genus DNA transfers happen constantly in the wild. One study of 93,000 microbial genomes found cross-genus DNA swaps in roughly a third.

Another problem is that genera are human constructions to help organize species into a taxonomy, rather than directly observable traits of organisms. Taxonomists frequently rearrange relationships between species, especially among microorganisms, where lines of genetic descent can criss-cross confusingly. In 2020, researchers reclassified hundreds of microbial species in the Lactobacillus genus, including many organisms found in probiotics and fermented foods. Swapping genes between these organisms before 2020 would not have triggered TSCA, but would today.

In the forty years since the White House’s decision, researchers have collected much more data about engineered microbes in the environment. Dozens of field trials have tracked how long engineered microbes persist, how far they spread, and how often they swap genes with natives.

These data show that engineered organisms introduced into the environment mostly die off quickly, because they are not adapted to that environment and get outcompeted by native organisms. A population of E. coli from the laboratory, for example, dropped 100,000-fold in soil within eight days. Engineered microbes do swap DNA with locals, but inconsistently, and it’s not clear yet when and why.

The risks are still real, though. Some microbes engineered to live alongside plant roots persist in soil for decades. An engineered phenol-eating microbe released by Estonian researchers in the 1980s left traces of its inserted gene in the soil that can still be found today. In some cases, engineered genes can linger in the environment for decades.

Reforming TSCA, therefore, shouldn’t mean throwing open the doors to any and every engineered microbe. Instead, it should mean setting clear standards for data and field trials, so that microbes with obvious benefits and minimal risks can actually be used, while riskier ones are restricted.

The EPA does not even apply TSCA consistently: it is harsher on microbes than on chemicals. If researchers want to run a small-scale experiment with a new chemical, TSCA allows exemptions from the EPA review process. But if researchers want to do the same thing with an engineered microbe, the EPA revokes these Congressionally-legislated exceptions.

The fix everything easily switch

The TSCA could change tomorrow. Because Congress never codified TSCA’s application to biology, the EPA administrator could fix it by memo, clarifying evaluation criteria, releasing three decades of old case files, and telling companies what data the agency actually wants. No acts of Congress would be required.

The other option is to act through Congress. In 2016, Congress authorized the EPA to collect user fees from chemical companies that submit TSCA applications. These funds help fund the agency. However, that authority expires midway through 2026. Congress needs to pass legislation to renew it, so there is a unique opportunity to also attach broader reforms to that bill.

Subscribe now

Other countries have working systems. Brazil approved the first unconstrained, environmental release of an engineered insect, a variant of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries diseases like dengue fever and Zika virus. The modified males carry a gene that kills their offspring at the larval stage. Adding them to the population means they compete with ordinary Aedes males for mating opportunities. Since females mate only once, females who mate with them produce no surviving offspring. In Brazilian cities where they’ve been released, wild populations have dropped 80 to 96 percent. Brazilian companies have also received government approval to ferment engineered bacteria in bioreactors and then spread the spent biomass onto farmland as a soil treatment.

Israel is even more efficient with its approval process. Any scientist who wants to release engineered microbes into the wild simply sends an application to a panel of government representatives and academics led by the Ministry of Agriculture explaining their plan. The committee requests data, and then provides a definitive yes or no. This process usually takes only a few months. In 2017, researchers created microbes that could sense explosives and emit light in response. They received approval to release them in the Israeli desert in under a year.

It is not necessary for the United States to adopt anything as permissive as this. But America does need regulation that biotechnologists can actually navigate. As written, the Toxic Substances Control Act is the black hole of biology. It’s why plastic-eating and mine-seeking microbes, for all their promise, have never left the lab.

Niko McCarty is the founding editor at Asimov Press.

With thanks to Yonatan Chemla, Christopher Wozniak, and Jai Padmakumar for their comments.

In the early hours of 5th June 1967, Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, the revolutionary leader of Egypt, received good news from his commanders. The Egyptian Air Force had destroyed three quarters of the Israeli Air Force and was laying waste to what was left of the enemy’s airbases. This information was immediately telegraphed to Egypt’s allies – Syria, Jordan, and Iraq – who enthusiastically entered the fray, expecting a walkover.

Nasser’s commanders hadn’t been entirely honest. Three quarters of an air force had been destroyed, but it was the Egyptian one: the Israelis had bombed 298 of Egypt’s 420 combat aircraft on the tarmac. In the face of the lightning Israeli ground offensive, Egyptian officers jumped in their staff cars and abandoned their men. The ensuing Six-Day War saw the coalition of Arab states lose 70,000 square kilometers of territory, despite fielding many more troops, tanks, and aircraft than their Israeli opponents.

In Armies of Sand, former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack explores why Arab militaries have underwhelmed on the battlefield, despite routinely enjoying advantages in men and materiel. This is not simply a product of superior Israeli military sophistication. Gaddafi’s Libya suffered a series of defeats at the hands of poverty-stricken Chad, while Saddam Hussein mounted what Pollack dubs ‘one of the most pathetic military offensives of the past century’ against Iran.

There are a few common theories among experts. For example, many Arab states relied heavily on Soviet doctrine and training. This emphasized preplanned operations and centralized control. When the situation on the battlefield changed unpredictably, officers froze. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Syrians broke through Israeli defenses on the Golan Heights. But instead of pressing their advantage, the Syrian troops paused, in line with their pre-war plan. In the meantime, the Israelis rushed reserves forward and retook the territory.

Subscribe to print

Another common explanation is politicization. Leaders often feared their own militaries more than those of their opponents. This led to promotions based on loyalty and purges of experienced officers. At one point, Saddam Hussein had as many as sixteen different security services, which devoted an inordinate amount of time to spying on each other.

Pollack finds these explanations lacking. Cuba and North Korea both relied on Soviet doctrine and performed creditably in their twentieth-century military engagements. After substantial depoliticization in the 1970s, Egyptian military performance remained as dismal as ever.

Instead, he argues that these failures stem from patterns common in many Arab cultures: deference to authority, loyalty to the in-group over outsiders, a premium on personal honor, and horror of shame. The fear of shame explains why Nasser’s commanders told him he was winning, while the deference to hierarchy explains why battalion officers would stick to orders long after they ceased to make sense.

Pollack locates much of this culture in formal and informal education. The Arab family is large, patriarchal, and built around the father’s unquestioned authority. Modern Arab education has its origins in the Quranic schools that were, for centuries, the main form of education in much of the region. In these schools, knowledge comes down from a higher authority, and pedagogy is based on memorization.

When governments built mass public school systems in the 1950s and 60s, they changed the syllabus but preserved the teaching methods, which emphasize rote learning over problem solving. This tendency seeps into military training, which often consists of rehearsing pre-scripted maneuvers. An American trainer working with Egypt’s elite F-16 pilots recalled that ‘they know where to turn, and where to pretend to fire munitions, and who is going to win’ before exercises started and that they would get ‘extremely upset when someone did something he was not supposed to do’.

Subscribe now

In most Arab offices and government ministries, authority is concentrated at the top and risk taking isn’t rewarded. Bosses behave as patriarchs who lend money to staff, mediate personal disputes, and intervene in family matters. In one study of Egyptian, Saudi, and Sudanese bureaucracies, 90 percent of senior officials deemed their subordinates ‘unqualified to innovate’. The Egyptian or Iraqi lieutenant standing on the battlefield has been immersed in this worldview, likely for decades, across successive institutions.

The exceptions largely support Pollack’s case. Hezbollah emerged as a highly capable fighting force after reducing its numbers following the Lebanese Civil War. This meant they retained only the small minority of culturally atypical individuals who’d proven themselves on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Islamic State, at its 2014 peak, drew its most gifted commanders from Chechens, Uzbeks, and Tajiks.

Anyone who has interacted with a bank or government ministry in the Middle East will recognize many of the traits Pollack describes. They continue to pose a challenge for regional efforts at social and economic reform.

Alex Chalmers is a staff writer at the Cosmos Institute and a former editor at Works in Progress.

In many affluent countries, existing land use regulations constrain the housing supply. Zoning directly restricts what can be built in a neighborhood or ‘zone’. To circumvent zoning rules, developers seek variances that require complex, multistage, and lengthy approval processes. Design rules, environmental assessments, and labor requirements further increase construction costs, decreasing what can be built. Cumulatively, these restrictions drive up housing prices and generate extraordinary social and economic costs.

The high costs of land use restrictions have led many groups to campaign for reform. Since these regulations are usually set by local governments, reformers have targeted higher levels of government (like state governments in the United States and the national government in Britain) to circumvent local land use restrictions. This is the preemption strategy, by which higher levels of government override (or preempt) land use restrictions set by lower levels of government.

The preemption strategy has produced important successes. California has seen a boom in accessory dwelling units (ADUs) after restrictions were relaxed beginning in 2016. Just recently, following a decade-long effort, housing reformers achieved a significant milestone when California passed Senate Bill (SB) 79 to upzone areas around transit stops in major metropolitan areas. Similar legislative victories have occurred elsewhere in the US and other countries.

Yet challenges remain even after legislation is passed. Entrenched interests defending land use restrictions are often able to mobilize against housing development by delaying implementation at the local level, launching court challenges, and even reversing reforms. While the effects of the most recent reforms are uncertain, past examples indicate that preemption proposals are just as likely to provoke resistance and retrenchment as they are to succeed at expanding the housing supply.

This record invites us to consider more radical models of land use reform. In recent years, a variety of communities have had striking success with increasing housing through direct democracy. The preemption strategy presumes that local residents must be forced to accept more housing development, which they invariably resist. But when given the choice, neighborhoods across different contexts have directly approved the construction of new housing through referendums.

Due to its political durability, empowering local residents holds a key advantage over preemption. As all reformers agree, there are enormous benefits to building new homes. Mechanisms for direct democracy at the very local level assure existing residents that they can share in these benefits. When shared, these benefits provide majorities of local residents a reason to override the objections of extreme opponents of development and allow many more homes in their own communities.

With a broad coalition organized around sharing the massive material benefits of new housing, reformers can overcome persistent political barriers and transform land use around the world.

The limits of preemption

As many as one in ten American households lives in a home that costs more than twice as much to buy as it would to build. On the California coast, median home prices are roughly three times construction costs. The situation is similar in other economic centers internationally, including London, Paris, Sydney, and Toronto.

In most markets, supply would rise to meet demand. But in the case of housing, land use regulations effectively cap supply, increasing prices. Empirical evidence bears this out: greater land use restrictions are associated with less housing and higher prices.

The predominant strategy to alleviate the housing shortage is to preempt local land use regulations. This strategy is based on a theory of incentives facing different levels of government. By this view, local residents experience real costs of development, including construction noise, traffic congestion, and pressure on local services. But the benefits of new housing are enjoyed by future residents or diffused across the wider economy. This disjuncture between the costs and benefits of development at different geographic scales provides local governments a reason to oppose development, even when the overall social benefits far outweigh the local costs. Consistent with this, more local representation appears to reduce housing construction.

Following this logic, reformers have sought to transfer decision making over land use to higher levels of government. At wider geographic scales, most voters benefit from the positive economic impact of new housing but experience no cost, so they would seem to have an incentive to support land use regulations that facilitate development. Housing reformers have therefore encouraged higher levels of government to preempt local zoning rules.

Promising reforms . . . alongside disappointment

The core critique of existing land use policy is correct: regulatory barriers to new housing and associated obstruction by Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) neighbors together inhibit housing development. With too little housing being built in recent decades, prices have spiked. Policies like subsidizing homebuyers or prohibiting large institutional investors from owning single-family homes do not change this basic fact. And by attacking the core problem – land use restrictions on development – reformers have produced important results through preemption.

In New Zealand, after the center-left Labour Party attained power following the 2017 election, the new government built on earlier reforms by abolishing parking requirements and requiring all major local councils to allow housing development up to six storeys near transit stops, commercial centers, and city centers. The Labour government even collaborated with the conservative opposition National Party on a subsequent reform to effectively upzone the entire country to allow three-storey townhouses on every lot. Parliament enacted this policy, the Medium Density Residential Standards, in 2021.

In 2023, Montana enacted an extensive range of zoning reforms. The ‘Montana miracle’ eliminated single-family zoning in cities with over 5,000 residents, required cities to allow ADUs on plots with single-family homes, and restricted local discretion in setting building codes. Additional legislation in 2025 allowed taller buildings, capped impact fees on developers, and curtailed parking requirements, among other reforms.

California has also seen notable successes. In 2021, SB 9 reduced local discretion over approvals for subdividing or building duplexes on existing lots, and in 2025, reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) created exemptions to promote multifamily infill development. In October, California’s governor signed SB 79, preempting local governments by upzoning land near rail stations and rapid bus lines in eight (soon to be nine) of the state’s 58 counties.

These laws exhibit real success, but they also lay bare the limits of preemption. In many cases, dramatic reforms have yet to show a positive effect on housing construction. This is plausibly because many have been, by political necessity, surgically targeted at specific areas like transit stops, while reforms with potentially wider impacts face backlash and retrenchment. Despite aiming to eliminate opportunities for obstruction, land use reforms have often left NIMBY opponents more motivated than ever to block new housing.

After passing New Zealand’s Parliament, the Medium Density Residential Standards generated widespread backlash. Local councils slow-walked implementation, and the National Party reversed its support after its usual minor-party ally, ACT, attacked them for backing the reforms and the ACT leader began beating National’s leader in polls. National then withdrew its support for the Medium Density Residential Standards and defeated Labour in the 2023 election. The bipartisan consensus favoring reform managed to bring New Zealand’s housing production up to the level of Australia’s but collapsed in the face of public opposition.

In the case of Montana, an effect on housing supply and prices is not yet evident. A lawsuit by a homeowners’ group delayed implementation. The reforms survived, but the vehement opposition raises the possibility of future erosion should the political context change. Montana has a distinct mix of cost-burdened longtime residents and wealthy newcomers from high-cost states. This political dynamic could yield increased opposition in the future, and Montana’s unique housing politics may not provide political lessons for other places.

Like Montana, California has yet to see an aggregate increase in housing construction, but this follows ten years in which over a hundred pro-housing laws have been passed. Due to carveouts, loopholes, and ‘strenuous opposition by local governments’, these bills have had ‘limited to no impact on the state’s housing supply to date’, according to the pro-housing group YIMBY Law (YIMBY stands for ‘Yes in My Back Yard’). Following SB 9’s enactment, UC Berkeley’s Terner Center found that the law has barely been used. Disconcertingly, building permits issued for new private housing units in California show little change since 2015: still hovering around 9,000 per month in a state of nearly 40 million people. By comparison, Texas, with a smaller population, issued roughly 17,000 permits per month during the same period. Perhaps SB 79 and the recent CEQA rollback will succeed where prior laws failed, but both are incremental reforms involving important compromises, and California has a lot of ground to make up.

These examples are only a sample of notable cases. A series of ambitious reforms in Oregon since 2017 appears to have had no impact so far on overall housing production, as is also true following the 2018 elimination of single-family zoning in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Across the US, land use reforms have faced homeowner lawsuits and court injunctions. In Australia, New South Wales Premier Chris Minns swiftly backtracked from a ‘sweeping’ 2024 plan for transit-oriented development in response to opposition from localities and the Australian Greens party. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson’s government backed down from a ‘radical’ 2020 proposal to, among other things, establish a presumption in favor of development in defined areas across the country. The backlash was so intense that land use rules ended up stricter than before.

Share

The political problem

Preemption faces three intertwined problems. First, the opponents of development are still represented at higher levels of government, meaning that land use reforms inevitably involve compromises and concessions to these opponents. Second, these compromises enable extreme opponents of development to wield their continued capacity for obstruction, imposing high costs on developers. Third, these high costs make it impossible for developers to compensate the broad majority of residents for the downsides of development near them. The result is public opposition to development and prohibitively high costs for developers.

Though proponents of preemption seek to circumvent local opponents of new housing, local preferences are reflected within higher levels of government. Policies to expand the housing supply often depend on support from representatives of affluent, homeowner dominated, and politically powerful regions, such as Marin County, California. The YIMBY Act, first introduced in Congress in 2019, generated optimism among advocates of preemption, but the key senator behind the bill notably emphasized that it does not impinge on local decision making.

In the US, strong traditions of federalism, localism, and separation of powers provide myriad opportunities for opponents to halt even those reforms with majority support. In California, legislative leaders have blocked pro-housing bills, and the same occurred with Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed reforms in New York. Elsewhere, governors in Connecticut and Arizona vetoed legislation to liberalize zoning rules. Opponents of development may be weaker at higher levels of government, but they are far from powerless.

As a result of this political obstacle course, land use reforms are often watered down, leaving room for opponents to regroup and continue fighting. For instance, after the New Jersey Supreme Court compelled municipalities to provide for their ‘fair share’ of housing, lawsuits and political deadlock eventually led to the dissolution of the state body charged with enforcement. Other reforms seek to avoid this fate through narrow targeting, such as SB 79, which applies to fewer than one percent of California’s transit stops, or additional compromises that undermine effectiveness.

Despite aiming to preempt local opposition, these reforms usually leave many opportunities for committed project opponents to obstruct and delay project approval. Often, all it takes is a single aggrieved neighbor to threaten a lawsuit or object at a zoning board meeting to delay a proposal, force the developer to alter it, or block it entirely.

As a result, developers can spend millions of dollars per project navigating the approval process. According to one estimate of housing development costs in New York City, a two-year review process can, on its own, add $58,000 per unit for a low-rise 40-unit project, meaning a $2.3 million increase for the whole project.

Furthermore, many development restrictions simply allow interest groups to extract value for themselves, regardless of the preferences of local residents. The resulting morass of regulatory requirements, including design codes, labor standards, and environmental protections, can dramatically increase the expense of building housing and infrastructure. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, it costs an estimated $531 per net rentable square foot to build market-rate housing and over $700 for affordable projects, which have even stricter rules. At $531, a modest home of 1,500 square feet costs around $800,000. At $700, even a tiny apartment of 150 square feet, smaller than a standard parking space, costs over $100,000.

Political pressure also compels developers to spend astonishing amounts on environmental preservation when that money would almost certainly do more for the environment elsewhere. For example, Britain’s High Speed 2 railway project is spending £120 million on a tunnel to protect three hundred bats. In California, a court recently awarded opponents of eight proposed apartment units $1.2 million in their lawsuit demanding further environmental review.

These high costs diminish the economic benefits that developers can share with local residents without giving residents a reason to support development. Developers often attempt to increase public support for project proposals by dividing some of the profits from development with nearby residents, typically in the form of local public goods such as parks or infrastructure improvements. But this source of benefits for residents is lost when developers spend huge sums navigating project approval processes and meeting complex regulatory requirements.

To be sure, some residents are immovable. There is the Berkeley ‘zucchini lady’, who brought a zucchini to a public meeting to dramatize what the shadows from a small development next door would destroy. And there is the person who sent 24,000 noise complaints to a single airport in just one year. But despite outsized media and political attention, the hardcore opponents of development are far from representative. A much larger group of moderately skeptical residents experience some downsides from nearby development but weigh both costs and benefits of project proposals. In surveys, most individuals appear to have imprecise views about housing policy, and multiple polls even show a surprising openness among respondents to new housing. At the same time, many people are acutely sensitive to conditions in their own neighborhood.

When local residents are asked to accept the costs of development without sharing in any of the benefits, it is unsurprising that they express opposition. Development provides a large surplus in principle. Yet after accounting for the costs of project approval, labor requirements, design codes, and environmental standards, as well as reduced profits due to affordability mandates, developers have little left to share with residents. This is a bargaining failure: both developers and a majority of local residents could be better off, but land use procedures eliminate the benefits that could be shared.

Not being compensated for local costs, these residents not only oppose specific project proposals, but also broader reforms to increase development. The opposition of moderately skeptical residents necessitates compromises in pro-housing reforms that hardcore opponents of development – who otherwise would not have much political influence – can then exploit.

How to solve the bargaining failure

Conceptualizing local opposition to new housing as a bargaining failure implies an alternative strategy for land use reform. By simplifying regulatory procedures and empowering majorities of local residents to directly approve development, reformers can enable bargains between residents and developers that increase development approval as well as overall public support for pro-housing land use policies. Preemption seeks to steamroll local residents; facilitating bargains brings them into a broad coalition supporting new housing. This alternative approach holds the potential to transform housing politics.

The bargaining-failure theory of NIMBYism is an application of the Coase theorem. Proposed in Ronald Coase’s 1960 paper ‘The Problem of Social Cost’, the Coase theorem holds that when property rights are clear and there are no transaction costs in bargaining, the allocation of property rights does not affect economic efficiency. If one party has the right to engage in an inefficient behavior, like blocking new housing, then the other can offer compensation to induce them to stop. But bargaining is prone to fail when transaction costs are too high or property rights are unclear.

Local opposition to housing development happens because the assumptions of the Coase theorem fail to hold. In land use policy, zoning operates as a kind of de facto and dysfunctional property right, and existing procedures involve high transaction costs.

In response to this bargaining failure, the preemption strategy seeks to transfer rights over development from local communities to higher levels of government. But this provokes opposition from local residents, who understandably resist having their rights taken away. This makes pro-housing reforms less likely to pass, while watering down the reforms that are actually enacted.

The Coasean solution is to grant a clear property right over development to local residents and minimize transaction costs within land use regulation. With a clear right over development, local residents can guarantee that developers provide benefits matching local preferences without these benefits being wasted in vain attempts to placate hardcore opponents. By enabling local residents to benefit from development, this strategy can transform moderate skeptics into reliable supporters of new housing. Hardcore opponents will no doubt remain, but as a small minority unable to impose their preferences on the majority.

Many reformers may be skeptical that local residents can ever be persuaded to support housing development. Yet numerous examples from around the world demonstrate that local residents often embrace development when they benefit from it. NIMBY preferences are not hardwired; people respond to incentives. And when institutions change, attitudes follow.

Subscribe now

Empirical evidence

Israel has two programs to increase the density and safety of its housing stock: Pinui Binui (‘evacuate and rebuild’) and TAMA 38. Established in 1999 and 2005, respectively, both programs revolve around bargaining between existing homeowners and developers. TAMA 38 has been especially fruitful, allowing developers to bypass the typical zoning process if a supermajority of property owners accepts the developer’s proposal. Upon approval, the developer obtains the right to replace the old building with a new, larger one; existing residents receive a new home, and the developer profits from the sale of additional units. In Tel Aviv, these two programs are together responsible for over half of new housing.

The economic incentives created by these programs have transformed the politics of land use in Tel Aviv. Residents of upscale neighborhoods are known to object to local plans that have inadequate upzoning rights. Upon the scheduled expiration of TAMA 38, Tel Aviv’s replacement TA/5555 plan is expected to increase the maximum scale of redeveloped buildings by double or even quadruple what was previously allowed.

In Britain, ‘estate regeneration’ is used to redevelop public housing estates, which were mostly built in the decades following the Second World War and at low or medium densities. Under this process, developers replace existing homes with higher quality housing, while adding market-rate units. Because the land can be extremely valuable, the profits generated by the market-rate units go toward the costs of replacing and adding public housing units.

In 2018, London introduced a requirement that estate regeneration proposals obtain resident approval in order to receive city funding. The result? Regeneration proposals have achieved overwhelming support among residents. Of the 21 ballots held between their introduction and 2022, all but one were in favor. The average level of support for regeneration was 80 percent, with an average turnout of 72 percent. At least ten more have been held, and approved, since 2022. In many cases, the redeveloped estates have added hundreds of units along with local amenities such as parks, community centers, or gyms.

A related procedure, known as land readjustment, has had a major impact on urban development in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Since 1919, Japan has allowed developers to negotiate with groups of adjacent property owners to redevelop their land by redrawing plot boundaries to enable the construction of roads, railways, parks, and much larger buildings. Under current policy, approval by two thirds of landowners allows the plan to proceed. An estimated 30 percent of urban land in Japan has been redeveloped in this way. In South Korea, roughly 40 percent of urban residential areas have utilized a similar program, as have over 17,000 hectares of Taiwanese cities.

Evacuate and rebuild, estate regeneration, and land readjustment – each based on a principle of negotiation, profit-sharing, and resident approval – have an analog in the US. Land use referendums in California force interest groups and developers to keep their eyes on voter preferences when negotiating over economic benefits. In many cases, these referendums are successful and new housing is built. Unfortunately, the length and complexity of existing approval processes, to which referendums are an added step, reduce the potential profits that developers can share with residents, eliminating the possibility of mutually beneficial agreements. When development referendums work in the US, it is often for very large developments with enough profit remaining after the planning process to share with local residents.

Although existing residents may be skeptical of development, they are responsive to both costs and benefits. With institutions to facilitate bargaining while granting local residents approval power over development decisions, residents can ensure they share in the benefits of development. When a majority of local residents benefit from new housing, they have reason to support policies that enable more housing.

Turning NIMBYs into YIMBYs

Implicitly or explicitly, housing reformers often treat local opposition to development as inevitable. This view leads many reformers to focus on preempting local land use regulations. Yet pro-housing reforms face many of the same barriers at higher levels of government that they do locally. As a result, these reforms have been constrained to small areas, defeated, or riddled with carveouts that render them ineffective. The bargaining framework offers a different path forward.

What kinds of institutions would best facilitate Coasean bargains between developers and local residents? Advocates of this strategy have suggested a couple of alternatives.

One option is street votes, which would allow residents of a single street or block to vote to upzone that area. This could involve allowing ADUs, duplexes or triplexes, or taller buildings. Advocates emphasize that implementing street votes does not necessitate a transformation of the land use process; it simply provides local residents an opt-in mechanism to upzone. Politically, the strategy is similar to that of upzoning in Houston, in which some areas were allowed to opt out.

Another option is neighborhood approval, an old idea that merits renewed consideration. Under this model, elected neighborhood representatives negotiate with developers and then residents ratify the agreement, analogous to a union contract. Following a neighborhood vote accepting the development proposal, there are no further approval stages, effectively granting the developer an instant zoning variance and incentivizing it to offer an attractive proposal to residents.

For resident-developer bargaining to succeed, the size of the decision-making unit needs to balance two factors: it must be large enough to cover the most important externalities, such as traffic and shadows, and small enough that a share in the development’s economic benefits makes a noticeable impact for individual residents. Many US cities already have neighborhood-level institutions as part of the planning process: empowering these to approve development could transform them from yet another veto point into a channel for more housing. A benefit of using existing institutions is that doing so allows reformers to avoid tricky questions such as where to set neighborhood boundaries.

To work best, such institutions will likely involve tinkering. For instance, Israel has reduced the threshold for resident approval from 80 percent to two thirds; the government also provides organizational resources to assist residents in negotiating with developers. The localism of this strategy facilitates experimentation and incremental adjustments to discover the most effective solutions.

The preemption strategy has achieved some crucial successes and activated a large movement in favor of housing reform, but the next stage requires more ambition. Majorities of local residents can and will support new housing if they share in the benefits of development. By embracing local democracy, housing reformers can turn entrenched opponents into powerful allies and, with a broad and durable coalition, build more housing.

David Foster is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Florida State University.

Joseph Warren is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Most of us accept rats as a fact of life. They live in tunnels and sewers, gnaw through walls, contaminate food, and resist nearly every attempt to push them back. A 2023 estimate put New York City’s rat population at about three million animals, roughly one rat for every three human residents. Almost nowhere do authorities try to get rid of rats altogether. The goal is usually to reduce sightings of them, limit the damage they cause, and coexist as painlessly as possible.

That makes one place stand out. Alberta, a Canadian province, is rat free, and has been for more than seventy years. On a map of global rat distribution, Alberta is a blank spot in an otherwise unbroken sea of rodents.

Other places have eliminated rats too: South Georgia and a handful of New Zealand islands have done so to protect endangered birds. But these are tiny, uninhabited landmasses surrounded by ocean, with no permanent human population to speak of. Alberta, by contrast, has almost five million people and two cities of over a million each. It shares land borders on all sides with provinces and states that rats colonized in the 1950s, and its farmland and trade links make it an obvious target. Yet it stopped them. After Antarctica, Alberta is the largest rat-free area on Earth.

This half a million square kilometres of rat-free land exists because Alberta acted fast. Rats could only enter the province through a narrow corridor along its eastern border, which the government sealed before they could establish themselves. Had it waited, the opportunity would have been gone for good – like its neighbors, Alberta would now be spending millions a year managing a permanent infestation. It’s also an example of the day-to-day maintenance that civilization is built of: Alberta’s rat control program is in a never-ending fight against new incursions. If it were to lapse, the province’s rat-free status would be lost forever.

Subscribe now

An invasive species

Rats are not native to the Americas. The first rat, the black rat, travelled across the Atlantic with the conquistadors, and slowly spread through Central America and the Caribbean, and into the port cities of North America’s eastern seaboard. But around 1775, a stronger competitor showed up: the Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus, also known as the brown rat or sewer rat, carried across the Atlantic on European ships. Bigger, stronger, and better adapted to colder climates, it rapidly displaced the black rat as the dominant rodent in North America.

Once Norway rats move in alongside people, they are very hard to get rid of. They live in our buildings, eat what we throw away, and can have 50 to 80 surviving young a year. Rats can overrun an area in months, and once they have, controlling them becomes a permanent, expensive job. New York City, for instance, has a dedicated ‘rat czar’ and spends $4.7 million per year directly on rat mitigation, but this is not enough to prevent rat populations from growing.

In the decades after their arrival, Norway rats entrenched themselves in major Atlantic ports like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, where they lived in dense housing, warehouses, and wharves. As cities grew during the industrial revolution, the animals moved along railroads, and settled across North America. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Norway rat was endemic in most large cities.

Norway rats reached the countryside more slowly, but just as surely. Beginning in the 1920s, Norway rats moved steadily westward across the North American prairie, advancing roughly 24 kilometers per year through the Canadian province of Saskatchewan by hitchhiking between towns with human travelers on cars, trucks, and trains.

After crossing Saskatchewan, the rats would reach Alberta, whose farms were close to a perfect home: warm, full of grain, and almost free of predators. Once settled in Alberta, rat populations would have exploded and destroyed crops, gnawed through infrastructure, contaminated food, and spread disease.

So when field crews from Alberta’s Department of Health studying sylvatic plague (caused by the same bacterium responsible for bubonic plague in humans) in local gopher populations discovered Norway rats on a farm near the eastern border in 1950, the Alberta government declared an emergency and decided to try to stop the rats’ westward march.

Share

The Rat Control Zone

Rather than attempting to manage rats everywhere, the Albertans concentrated their efforts where the rat invasion was most likely to originate. Rats could enter the province only from Saskatchewan, as Montana was too sparsely populated, the Northwest Territories were too cold, and the border with British Columbia was too mountainous.

William Lobay, a crop protection supervisor at the Alberta Department of Agriculture, came up with the idea of a buffer zone focused on the area of prairie and parkland that was most vulnerable to penetration. In late 1950, Albertan officials approved his Rat Control Zone, a roughly 600-by-29-kilometer strip along the part of its eastern border with Saskatchewan. In the zone, William Lobay and his colleagues surveyed cargo and vehicles that entered the province, and inspected vulnerable sites like farms, grain elevators, feed stacks, barns, sheds, and abandoned buildings, where food and shelter made rat establishment most likely.

When the rats did appear in Alberta, they tried to enter where Lobay predicted. Officials identified 30 rat infestations along 180 kilometers of the state’s eastern border in the fall of 1951. By the following year, rats had spread across 270 kilometers of the border. While most infestations were found very near the border, staying within 10 to 20 kilometers, in three areas, rats had penetrated 50 kilometers into the interior.

In this case, the fact that Norway rats are so dependent on humans was an opportunity. Along much of the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, farms, grain yards, and towns are spaced far enough apart, and the intervening prairie is sufficiently harsh and exposed, that small groups of rats rarely survived long enough to hop naturally from one farm to the next and then into Alberta.

Most rats entering the province and spreading within it were traveling with people, hidden in trucks, trailers, rail cars, farm equipment, or shipments of hay or grain. The Rat Control Zone made regular inspections manageable. Instead of defending its entire land border, which would have spread Alberta’s resources over 100,000 square kilometers of zone, Albertan officials could target a single point of entry 17,400 square kilometers in size.

Subscribe now

The rodent surveillance state

Yet a narrow border helps only if incursions are detected quickly, before the rats get a chance to spread past it. Early on, Alberta had almost no way of doing this. Albertan officials had to distribute preserved rat corpses to local train inspectors: most Albertans had never been in contact with rats before so needed to be shown what to look for. In 1951, the province reassigned five employees previously assigned to weed inspection to provide on-the-ground assistance to municipal pest control inspectors. Agents from the Saskatchewan Department of Health familiar with rats and rat control helped train them.

This arrangement raised a funding question. Initially, the rural municipalities along Alberta’s eastern border were responsible for funding most of the day-to-day costs of rat control, even though their work protected the entire province indirectly. In 1954, after significant pressure from these municipalities, the province agreed to cover half the salary and expenses of a full-time pest control inspector in each border municipality.

Once inspectors had been trained, officials could create what amounted to a rodent surveillance state. Its central pillar was a program of seasonal and annual visits to high-risk sites in the zone, even when nobody had reported a rat. The province also relied on the public to provide additional surveillance. It invested in posters, a radio show called ‘Call of the Land’ put on by the agriculture department, and hotlines for residents to report any suspected rat sightings. The aim was to catch the rats before they could breed and establish themselves.

The campaign borrowed Cold War rhetoric about ‘infiltration from the east’ and the need for constant vigilance against hidden enemies. Archival posters from the 1950s depict Alberta as a clean, clearly bounded province surrounded by swarms of ominous rats massed just beyond its borders, warning that disaster would follow if citizens ‘let down their guard’.

Government communications called Alberta’s eradication efforts a ‘War on Rats’, and official documents spoke of invaders and enemies, urging residents to report and eliminate rats on sight. Not everyone initially bought into rat eradication. One mayor refused to cooperate because he thought the program was a distraction cooked up by the ruling Conservative Party. Another disagreed that rats were present at all, claiming he would eat any found in his town. He changed his mind when presented with a bushel of rats caught at a local slaughterhouse. Over time, public support for the effort grew, widening inspectors’ reach, especially in rural areas.

Eratication

Alberta introduced a law so that ‘every person and municipality’ was obliged to destroy rats they found, and local government was required to send out pest control inspectors to look for them. As the September 21 1955 issue of the Red Deer Advocate, a local paper in Alberta, reported:

Full-time Municipal and Provincial pest officers are engaged in an active rat war to control these pests and prevent their westward movement. Generally very good cooperation is obtained…Occasional indifference, however, may give the pest officer no option but to apply disciplinary measures.

The following year, the province issued 17 notices to control rats, leading to three convictions, the first of which was a farmer in the Altario district who was fined C$25, about C$290 today, for ‘failing to take action to control rats on his property…after repeated warnings and no positive work done’. After 1956, enforcement actions became rare, but so did sightings, suggesting the cases had had their intended effect.

Beginning in 1952, Alberta contracted a private pest control firm to preemptively deploy over 63,000 kilograms of arsenic trioxide tracking powder to treat 8,000 barns, sheds, granaries, and outbuildings across the Rat Control Zone. After treatment, the exterminators returned to kill any survivors.

Only enclosed, permanent structures were supposed to be treated, to ensure that the poison wouldn’t spread. In practice, powder was applied in temporary sheds and outbuildings which might later be moved, opened, or taken down. As a result, some livestock and pets were harmed or killed by the large-scale poisoning, particularly in the first few years of the program. Though there is no data from this period showing actual impact on humans, arsenic exposure is known to pose acute and chronic risks, including gastrointestinal illness, neurological effects, and increased cancer risk.

Some residents were reportedly told the poison posed risks only to rodents, even as Alberta Agriculture sent annual warning letters to all control zone residents until 1955 advising of the dangers of arsenic to humans, animals, and pets. In hindsight, some of this harm was avoidable: stricter controls on application, clearer labeling, and more aggressive site cleanup could likely have reduced exposure.

Warfaring

Alberta’s early campaign used very blunt tools in exchange for certainty that rats would not be allowed to establish a breeding population. Within a few years, reported infestations had halved, from about 600 in 1959 to 300 in 1963. But taking a preventative rather than a responsive approach meant higher upfront financial costs: the initial poisoning program cost C$152,670, or roughly C$1.75 million (USD $1.3 million) today. It also meant accepting a certain level of risk to human and animal health.

Going all out against rats in the first few years bought time to develop the capacity for long-term control. Today, the neighboring province of Saskatchewan spends about C$1.2 million each year on its rat control program, and yet it continues to be thoroughly infested with rats, which cause over C$15 million a year in agricultural damage. Alberta now spends only around C$500,000 per year on rat control, and has negligible costs from rat damage.

Eventually, arsenic was supplanted by the arrival of warfarin, a much better poison. Warfarin is a slow-acting anticoagulant which causes death by internal bleeding. This avoids the problem of rats associating the bait with sickness, so they eat until consuming a lethal dose. It is also significantly safer for other animals or humans who might accidentally ingest it; it is actually approved as a blood-thinning medicine in humans at doses that would be fatal to a rat.

Warfarin was developed in Wisconsin, where finely ground corn was the recommended pairing. As corn was not commonly grown in Alberta, rats rarely took the bait. A series of field trials showed that coarsely rolled oats with five percent icing sugar provided an equally toothsome alternative. Starting in 1953, the province supplied warfarin-laced rat bait to all municipalities in the control zone.

Alberta was lucky that warfarin was invented. Indigenous Canadians in particular were not fans of rats, but because they were only familiar with poisons like strychnine, which can cause serious health issues in humans, they removed baits stocked with warfarin out of fear of potential health harms. But it was easy to prove warfarin was safe: a pest control officer held a series of local meetings where he ate warfarin-treated rolled oats while discussing rat control.

The rat race

The last ingredient was, and still is, persistence. ‘There’s this misconception when we say we’re rat free that rats don’t get in’, Karen Wickerson, the head of the Alberta Rat Control Program today, explains. ‘We have no way to prevent them from getting into the province. We can’t physically inspect every vehicle’. The province remains rat free only because it continues to do what worked in the 1950s.

Alberta’s rat reporting systems still operate. A resident who spots a rat in their yard can report it, and even a single such report can be enough to launch a wide investigation. Provincial officials have received unexpected tips of pet rats (which naturally are illegal in the province) from social media posts. In one case, officials tracked down an illicit pet rat by identifying its owner through photos posted online, eventually tracing the car in the background by its license plate. In another, they helped a woman who was reported by an ex-boyfriend for having a pet rat to rehome it in the neighboring province of British Columbia. But wild rats are rare. Albertans have grown so unaccustomed to rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of the 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats.

Seven municipalities along the Alberta-Saskatchewan border continue to have full-time pest control officers that inspect the thousands of buildings in the Rat Control Zone at least annually. Pest control officers respond to all reports. The only thing that has changed is the funding. Over time, the provincial government has picked up more and more of the bill. Although the costs have risen over time, from C$58,000 in 1969 to around C$500,000 today, rat control still costs each inhabitant less than C$0.11 each year.

New rats keep coming from infested neighbors, and cross-border coordination continues to play a big part in reducing rat numbers. Lloydminster straddles the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, and both provinces have extended Alberta’s pest laws to cover the Saskatchewan half of the city. Saskatchewan launched its own rat control program in 1963, which cut the number crossing into Alberta. In exchange, Alberta shares municipal employees to work on rat control in Saskatchewan.

Alberta’s war on rats never quite ends in victory. Even after years of no major sightings, the province has kept its surveillance, reporting systems, and legal powers active. Rats continue to cross into the province. But so long as none establish a breeding population, the program continues to work.

Deena Mousa is a researcher and grantmaker at Coefficient Giving.

In the twentieth century, a radical change took place in global architecture. The modernist movement emerged in the 1920s, favoring unornamented designs, exposed modern materials like steel and concrete, and the abandonment of the complicated visual patterns of traditional planning and facade design. Modernism came to dominate global architecture by the 1950s, and although it has evolved and fragmented since then, styles of broadly modernist character remain dominant today.

Throughout its history, both supporters and detractors of modernist architecture have agreed that it is not widely liked. In 1940, the English architectural historian John Summerson remarked that the public ‘can’t understand it, never will, and hates it like poison’. In 1977, the German-American architectural critic Wolf von Eckardt prematurely announced the death of modernism, claiming that ‘No one mourned. It was never popular.’ The young Summerson was sympathetic to modernism while von Eckardt disliked it, but they made the same observation about its standing with the general public.

Were Summerson and von Eckardt right? In recent years, researchers have begun to study this more systematically using visual preference surveys. In their simplest form, these are just a comparison of two images alongside a neutral, unbiased question, like ‘Which do you prefer?’ Online panels and better image editing have brought down their cost in recent decades. Since the 1990s, around twenty properly sampled visual preference surveys have been run on popular architectural preferences.

Subscribe to print

Many are British, partly because the King’s championship of traditional urbanism has generated a particularly lively debate about architecture in Britain. However, visual preference surveys have also been run in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Portugal and Chile, and enthusiasm for visual preference surveying is rising internationally.

Early visual preference surveys were often methodologically primitive. A common limitation was that they surveyed responses to images that varied in many respects, such as the angle of the photograph or the weather, making it impossible to claim that architectural style alone had caused any difference in ratings. Over time, however, much has been done to mitigate this, with progressively better editing techniques being used to create more controlled image pairs. In the past few years, artificial intelligence has greatly reduced the time and costs of producing comparable images, making reliable large-scale visual preference surveys far more feasible.

In every survey conducted, over 60 percent of the respondents have favored traditional architecture, with many revealing over 85 percent support. This preference is surprisingly unaffected by age, gender, politics, socioeconomic class and nationality. The results are not definitive, but they suggest that there is substantial public discontent with the dominant trends in modern architecture. Perhaps the anecdotal impressions of Summerson and von Eckardt were not so far off after all.

The birth of visual preference surveying

The story of visual preference surveying begins in 1979, in the small town of Metuchen, New Jersey. Metuchen decided that it wanted data on local opinion to guide its design policies, and so it commissioned a study from the Rutgers University Urban Design Studio. The Rutgers team took hundreds of photographs of streets and buildings in Metuchen, and asked locals to rate them at a large public meeting. Metuchen residents overwhelmingly preferred streetscapes with a traditional, small-town feel, detailed and varied facades, and a walkable, human scale. They disliked blank, featureless buildings, and wide, car-dominated streets.

These preferences may seem obvious. Of course a traditional high street is more pleasant to walk down than a freeway with six lanes of traffic. But at the time, the level of consensus was surprising. The Metuchen survey was the first to show that people tend to have predictable, shared responses to different built environments, responses that are not purely a matter of individual taste. The research team used the results to make recommendations for streetscape improvements, facade renovations, and infill multi-family housing, and Metuchen later developed a design code on this basis.

The Metuchen survey was pioneering, but it had some obvious limitations. First, participants in public meetings are not a representative sample of the local population. Second, the images used in the survey did not offer a perfectly controlled comparison, making it difficult to know what exactly respondents were reacting to. Did people dislike the width of the street, the low ratio of building height to street width, the style of the facades, the absence of greenery, the presence of fast-moving cars, or something else? We cannot know based on their responses to any individual image, although the survey included enough images that robust patterns do start to emerge.

Subscribe now

Britain’s cottage industry in architectural visual preference surveying took off in the late 1980s, beginning with a 1987 study by a Cambridge undergraduate called David Halpern, who later became a leading behavioral psychologist. Halpern showed volunteer students photographs of twelve people and twelve buildings, asking them to rate their attractiveness. Students on different programs had similar views on which faces were the most attractive. But when it came to buildings, architecture students held wildly different views from those in other disciplines. In fact, their preferences were often directly opposite.

Halpern’s study had obvious limitations: the sample was unrepresentative of the general population and small, and the images were imperfectly controlled. But it has become a minor classic, and studies have since been run in Canada in 2001, Britain in 2015, and Chile in 2019 with similar results, showing a wide divergence between professional and lay opinion when it comes to the visual appeal of different architectural styles.

The first properly sampled visual preference survey followed in 1998, run by the British Market Research Bureau for an industry group called the Popular Housing Forum. British respondents were presented with card sets showing newbuild houses of a given style. As before, the pictures were imperfectly controlled, although the use of multiple pictures in each group compensated for this to some extent. 94 percent of potential newbuild buyers said they would prefer to live in one of the more traditional options, and 92 percent of other respondents said they would prefer one of the more traditional options to be built near them.

In the following decades, several more visual preference surveys were commissioned by academic researchers, architecture firms, think tanks, and public bodies. Most of these studies were conducted by professional polling companies, so their respondents will have been largely representative of the general population. However, nearly all of them still used imperfectly controlled image pairs, meaning that it was hard to be sure that responses were caused by differences in architectural style rather than some other difference between the images. And the original images used in some older studies have been lost, making it hard to rest too much weight on them.

However, to the extent that their findings are reliable, they show that while a minority of the public enjoys boundary-pushing modern architecture, the majority prefer more traditional buildings. And different groups respond to architectural styles in reasonably consistent patterns: where demographic data have been collected, it seems there is a weak tendency for men and younger people to be more open to modernist architecture, compared with women and older people. As far as we can tell from these surveys, though, all demographic groups prefer traditional styles: the preference is simply more pronounced in some groups than others. This holds not only for houses but also for hospitals and commercial and civic buildings.

One of the best early visual preference surveys was commissioned by the British architectural practice ADAM Architecture in 2009. Four real commercial buildings were shown in matching perspectives and weather conditions, two in traditional styles, two in modernist ones. Both of the modernist buildings had won prizes, suggesting that they were especially well-designed examples. Even so, only 23 percent of respondents preferred them, compared to 77 percent for the two traditional designs. The images offer the best controlled comparators of any study before the 2020s, with matching perspectives and lighting conditions.

David Halpern’s finding that architecture students differ in their tastes from those in other majors was corroborated by later research. Portuguese researcher Luis Balula carried out a visual preference survey in the small city of Évora in 2008–2009. Balula broke down the results into experts (architects, planners, developers, academics) and non-experts. Both groups gave higher ratings to older buildings, but there was more divergence when it came to modern designs. For example, non-experts had a positive view of the pastiche Mediterranean group of homes pictured in figure 7, while the experts were generally negative. Inversely, the modernist apartment block was rated negatively by the non-experts, but positively by the experts.

Perhaps the difference between lay and expert taste explains why the public’s preference for traditional architecture has occasionally come as a surprise to researchers. Two visual preference surveys were commissioned in 2002 and 2005 by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), a British independent public body, and both found low levels of support for modern styles. ‘The Modern Movement’s concern for light and sun and large windows should give a modern style a clear advantage over more traditional designs, but this advantage does not seem to have been understood by home buyers’, the 2005 report regretfully notes.

Subscribe to print

The golden age of visual preference surveying

While the surveys carried out from the 1970s to the 2010s gave a fairly clear indication that the public consistently prefers traditional architecture, they are not perfect evidence. Imperfectly controlled comparisons and sometimes self-selecting panels mean that their findings can, and often have been, challenged.

In the past five years, however, the evidence has rapidly strengthened. Technological improvements, especially artificial intelligence, have cut the cost of image editing, allowing survey images to be far better controlled. And at the same time, renewed public debate about architecture has driven an increased quantity of visual preference surveys, often led by specialist research groups like Create Streets in Britain or The Aesthetic City in the Netherlands. Something of a golden age of visual preference surveying has emerged, with an increasing number of studies of unprecedentedly high quality.

Perhaps the most famous visual preference survey ever conducted was commissioned by the National Civic Art Society in 2020, looking at federal and courthouse buildings in the United States. It asked respondents for their preferences between seven pairs of photos of actual buildings, controlled so far as possible for massing (the form and volume of a building) and context. In every case, huge majorities of respondents preferred the traditional designs, averaging 72 percent across the seven questions.

As in other studies, most striking is how little the clear preference for traditional designs was affected by demographics. There was almost no correlation with political affiliation, with 70 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Republicans preferring the traditional designs. Women were somewhat more pro-traditional than men, at 77 percent against 67 percent. 75 percent of white Americans preferred traditional architecture against 65 percent of Hispanic Americans and 62 percent of black Americans. No significant correlation was found with income or educational level, and age was only a weak predictor: 77 percent of over 65s preferred traditional architecture against 68 percent of those aged 18–34.

Subscribe now

Many modern visual preference surveys have been carried out in Britain. In 2023, disappointed by the utilitarian design proposal for a new rugby stadium in Bath, England, the small firm Apollodorus Architecture proposed a classical alternative. Create Streets then commissioned a polling company to survey public views on the two designs, holding context and rendering style constant between the image pairs. Respondents preferred the traditional design by 74 percent to 26 percent. There was almost no variation by social class, and only modest variation by political party. Older people were, as in most studies, more traditional than younger people, but even 18–24s still preferred the traditional design by 61 to 39 percent.

The same trend shows up in infrastructure. High Speed 2 (HS2) is a railway under construction between London and Birmingham. Create Streets ran a visual preference survey comparing HS2’s planned concrete viaducts with a brick-clad design emulating Britain’s ubiquitous railway viaducts from the nineteenth century. Again, they held context and rendering style constant, so that only building treatment varied between the images. The survey showed a clear preference for the red brick design, 69 versus 28 percent. These results varied only modestly along demographic lines: support for the brick viaduct was slightly higher among women than men (71 versus 66 percent). Anomalously, the survey also found that Labour voters were slightly more pro-traditional than Conservatives (72 against 69 percent) and younger people more than older people (70 percent for the youngest group against 64 percent for the oldest).

In 2025, Christ’s College Cambridge announced plans for a new library building designed by Grafton Architects, one of the world’s most prestigious architecture firms. Create Streets prepared a counterproposal with the same floor area, using the Gothic style traditionally favored by Cambridge colleges. In a survey of over 2,000 British adults, 71 percent preferred the traditional design, while just 21 percent favored the original proposal. As with the HS2 survey, this pattern held across all demographic groups with little variation.

This preference is seen time and again. The British retailer Marks and Spencer is planning to demolish a 1920s building in central London and replace it with a modern design. Working with the architect Francis Terry, Create Streets proposed an alternative scheme with the same overall floor area, but retaining and extending the existing facade. They then commissioned pollsters to survey 3,130 British adults on images of the two designs, holding the context and rendering style constant. This yielded the strongest difference in preference of any Create Streets study, with 79 percent supporting the alternative proposal, and only 17 percent the original. As usual, demographic breakdowns show little correlation between architectural taste and other characteristics. Londoners were a little more likely to favor Marks and Spencer’s proposal than the national average, but still favored the Terry scheme by 72 against 26 percent.

Create Streets recently ran a slightly different kind of poll on a major proposed development in London called Shoreditch Works. Shoreditch Works would involve the demolition of some postwar warehouses, which would be replaced with much larger office blocks in a style drawing on Victorian commercial architecture and Art Deco.

Subscribe to print

Most of the studies we have looked at aim to control for everything other than architectural style. In this comparison, however, the proposed buildings were drastically taller than the existing ones. The standard view is that the public dislikes high-rise development, meaning that this study could be seen as ‘biased against’ traditional architecture. But in each case, between 76 and 78 percent of respondents preferred the proposed scheme to the existing condition. And, again, support for the proposals was slightly stronger among younger than older respondents.

Continental Europeans appear to prefer traditional architecture by similar margins. In 2025, the Dutch group The Aesthetic City ran a visual preference survey on architectural preferences in the Netherlands. It asked respondents for their preferences between eight pairs of images, and showed a preference for traditional buildings among Dutch respondents ranging from 67 to 92 percent, with an average of 82 percent. The Dutch study is notable for showing how useful artificial intelligence is in visual preference surveying. In all but one image pair, they used a photograph of a modernist building and then used AI to create the traditional alternative. This allowed image pairs to be tightly controlled for context, weather, and massing.

Taking the measure of public taste

The main question of any visual preference survey on architectural style is whether it generalizes. Sceptics often argue that when the public prefers a particular traditional design over a modernist one, it is just because that particular modernist design is weak. A better modernist building, they claim, could have matched or surpassed the popularity of the traditional one. The suspicion of a loaded choice of images is heightened by the fact that most visual preference surveys have been commissioned by organizations sympathetic to traditional architecture, with only a handful of counterexamples like the early CABE studies.

Nevertheless, it is striking that every image pair surveyed so far has generated the same result. Visual preference surveying on architectural style is still in its infancy: perhaps only three dozen fully controlled image pairs have ever been polled on, and these high-quality studies have occurred only in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States. We will be able to draw conclusions with far more confidence in a decade, when we will have tripled or quadrupled the size of our evidence base.

Subscribe to print

For now, the provisional conclusion is that 70 to 90 percent of the population has a clear preference for traditional architecture. This preference is surprisingly unchanged by other demographic features. Men, younger people, and maybe richer people tend to be slightly more likely to favor modern architecture, but these trends are not marked. Every demographic group favors traditional design: men and women, old and young, rich and poor.

If this is true, a greater puzzle comes into view. Almost every architectural school in the world exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles, and probably more than 99 percent of architects practice exclusively in them. In Britain, there has been hardly a single public commission in a traditional style since the 1950s, and only a trickle of commercial and institutional ones. Except in the market for private housing, traditional styles have been virtually extinct for seven decades. Although in some cases this can be explained by anti-traditional planning rules, the broad trend is still evident in jurisdictions whose development control systems are stylistically neutral.

In other words, there seems to be a mysterious divergence between people’s stated and revealed preferences. Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike? There are several interesting possibilities. But investigating them will have to wait for the future.

Robert Kwolek is a senior architectural designer at Create Streets.

Our lead piece is about how ugly buildings hold back development: not by turning locals against construction but by alienating people who live far away.

Print subscribers received the full edition a few weeks ago. The full issue is available online today, except for the print-exclusive letters, classifieds, games, and cocktail recipe. Beyond Beauty In My Backyard, the issue contains pieces on:

• Why you shouldn’t bother recycling;

• The forgotten law that blocks most engineered microbes;

• The miracle of modern medicine;

• Everythingism in transit;

• What kind of buildings people really prefer;

• The kill switch for harmful genes;

• How Thailand escaped being colonized;

• Whether daycare matters;

• Why a 1970s racehorse will never be beaten; and

• A Kuznets curve for animal welfare.

You can get a year of the print magazine for $100 here.

Subscribe now

Ugly buildings don’t actually cause NIMBYism. People oppose new buildings near them even if they look traditional, and restrictive zoning predates modernism by decades. Instead, explains Samuel Hughes, ugliness gives rise to NITBYism: Not In That Backyard – opposition to development from people who live nowhere near it. For centuries, Western cities demolished and rebuilt themselves with little resistance. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, just as modernist architecture became dominant, historic preservation spread almost everywhere. If people are to accept redevelopment, they need to believe that new buildings will be better than what they replace.

Humans collectively spend millions of hours each year diligently sorting their trash, separating bottles and fishing crumpled plastic out from soggy cardboard. They do this because they believe in recycling. This may be important to feel virtuous. But it doesn’t help the environment, argue Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin. Modern landfill is cheap and perfectly clean: well-run sites are sealed with clay and plastic, collect contaminated water, and capture the methane they produce. Meanwhile, a cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times before it becomes greener than a thin plastic one, and a ceramic mug takes around 1,000 uses to beat a disposable polystyrene cup.

There are many headlines like the following: ‘Scientists discover germ that can eat plastic.’ Headlines like this are written about bacteria that can detect landmines, and about microbes that can extract metals from ore. These discoveries sound remarkable. But after the initial burst of excitement, little seems to come of them, and often you never hear about the germs again. The reason, explains Niko McCarty, is an American regulatory decision from the 1980s that regulated engineered microbes as industrial chemicals. Since then, hundreds of proposed microbes have tried to get approval, and all but one have been rejected.

It is easy to underrate the astonishing success of modern medicine. A heart attack fifty years ago would almost certainly have killed you. So would Type 1 diabetes, and childhood leukemia. All are now manageable diseases. But for all its successes, there are many more diseases that could be treated but remain unsolved, writes Saloni Dattani. Malaria vaccines were developed in the 1990s but took decades to reach children. Clinical trials obstruct many promising cures. And as drug discovery accelerates, our regulatory infrastructure looks increasingly out of date. Medicine is much better than it once was, but much worse than it could be. This piece was based on Saloni’s TED talk.

As well as transporting people, American buses are expected to reduce emissions, provide jobs, improve public spaces, create demand for American manufacturers, look good, improve equality, and much else. Each of these goals might be worthwhile, but pursuing them comes with trade-offs, explains Miriam Pinski. Prioritizing all of them often means that the simple mission of getting people from one place to another is neglected.

The standard way to treat disease is to identify the protein causing it and then somehow block it. Unfortunately, most human proteins are undruggable: chemists cannot find molecules to bind to them. But what if, instead of trying to block the protein, we could tell the body to stop making it? Jacob Witten explains how small interfering RNA, or siRNA, allows us to do that. Scientists have already managed to switch off genes in the liver with drugs that often work for months after one injection. The challenge now is to do the same for the brain, kidneys, lungs, muscles, and other organs.

Every single country in Southeast Asia was eventually conquered by a European power except Thailand. France and England could have easily defeated it in a war. To resist colonization, writes Derek Hopper, its royals had to outwit the imperialists. The royal family set out on a deliberate effort to convince potential colonizers that the country was a civilized and sovereign state in no need of foreign government. King Mongkut spoke English and received British dignitaries with cigars and wine, while his son Chulalongkorn standardized the language, fixed the borders, and created schools. Thailand still lost around 40 percent of its territory, but thanks to smart retreats and brilliant diplomacy, it never lost its independence.

Daycare provokes extreme reactions. Politicians present it as an investment that raises earnings, reduces crime, and could transform a child’s life. Rightwing commentators make the opposite argument, calling it traumatic and harmful. The truth is probably much more mundane than either of those views, conclude Phoebe Arslanagic-Little and Ellen Pasternack. Children’s cortisol levels do rise, but that doesn’t show their brains are damaged. Studies do show small educational benefits, but nothing like what is claimed by the optimists. There are many reasons to support daycare or not, but it won’t make a big difference to the course of the child’s life either way.

Most things are continuously improving. Horses aren’t one of them. Secretariat, the greatest horse ever to run, peaked over fifty years ago, when he won the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths. The reason horses don’t improve, writes Sophie Fessl, is the same reason why they are as good as they are: centuries of selecting a group of astonishing stallions from a tiny pool has dramatically reduced genetic variation, making racehorses far more vulnerable to harmful mutations. At least in the case of horses, we may have reached the upper limits of biology.

Some things get worse as countries get richer: pollution, deforestation, workplace safety. But many of these problems then disappear again once a further threshold of wealth is passed, a phenomenon known as Kuznets curves. Martin Gould and Koji Flynn-Do investigate whether the same thing will happen to farm animals. In some of the world’s richest countries, meat consumption has already started falling; in others it has not. But perhaps the amount of meat we eat is the wrong way to measure it. Wealthier countries adopt better standards, like pre-slaughter stunning and bans on gestation crates. If riches don’t make us eat less meat, at least they may make us eat it differently.

Before World of Warcraft, Roblox, or the metaverse, there was Habitat, the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Online game, built for the Commodore 64 in 1986, explains Virginia Postrel. It introduced many of the things we associate with video games today, like avatars and in-game purchases. It did this on a device that had 64 KB of memory and connections that could transmit just a few dozen characters per second.

A common objection when we write about beautiful buildings is: ‘beautiful for whom?’ And architectural tastes do differ from person to person. But they vary far less than people think, writes Robert Kwolek. The budding field of visual preference surveys tests people’s preferences for various architectural styles. In every survey ever conducted, 60 percent of respondents prefer traditional architecture, and often over 85 percent do. This preference holds across age, gender, politics, income, and nationality. Visual preference surveys show conclusively that almost everyone prefers certain styles over others. The question is why architects wholly disagree with them.

Events

We ran Invisible College, a week-long summer school in Cambridge for 18–22 year olds which included talks on spatial economics, beautiful data visualization, the origins of the Industrial Revolution, scientific fraud and bias, and robotic dexterity. If you want to be notified when we open applications for Invisible College 2027, you can register your interest now.

We celebrated the launch of Issue 24 with a party in Cambridge; had drinks with our subscribers in Sydney; and visited Brussels, where Simon Grimm gave a lecture about how Europe can catch up on AI.

Coming up: we’ll be in London on Saturday 3rd October for a Stripe Press pop-up. Join us for coffee, conversation, and to buy Stripe Press books – as well as picking up some limited-edition merch. RSVP here if you can make it.

We have subscriber-only events coming up in San Francisco, Washington, DC, and London. Sign up to the print magazine to get the details!

What we’ve been up to

• Aria gave a lecture at Freedom Week about falling birth rates and will be advocating for monogamous marriage at Slutcon.

• Ben wrote a summary of Samuel Hughes’ thought for his Substack and was on EconTalk to discuss the Glorious Revolution.

• Dan moved onto a narrowboat currently moored in Little Venice.

• Pieter wrote about how the Dutch are filling their gas wells with cement.

• Rachel and Aria walked all the bridges in London from Hammersmith to Tower Bridge.

• Ruxandra published an essay in the New York Times on why Phase I clinical trials are so difficult to start in the US. On her Substack she argued that the biggest barriers to AI transforming medicine are institutional and that the data center backlash is about a fear of a loss of agency. She’s also had her O-1 visa approved and will be moving to San Francisco.

• Saloni released a podcast episode about GLP1s, Viagra, minoxidil and other drugs that have multiple benefits and whether there are many more of these hiding in plain sight. She also wrote a round up of what’s new in biology with Niko McCarty. In April, she did a TED talk which you can now watch online.

• Sam discussed how economic growth and technological progress support human virtue and flourishing on The Sacred podcast.

• Samuel gave talks at the Edington Fellowship, the Scrutopia Summer School, the Create Streets Summer School, and the Architecture of Home conference.

• Simon was selected as a Rhine Group Fellow. He appeared on MTS and ETN to discuss European AI issues, and wrote about why AI front-runners are hard to catch up with.

Behind the first massively multiplayer virtual world was a home computer that was comically underpowered by today’s standards. Introduced in November 1982, the Commodore 64 was named for its then-generous 64 kilobytes of memory. In its twelve years on the market, it became the best-selling desktop computer in history. A conservative estimate puts its sales at 12.5 million machines worldwide.

The C64 sold for $595 in the US, compared to about $1500 for an Apple II with just 48 kilobytes of memory, and £399 in the UK. The computer, which looked like a thick keyboard, could use a TV as a monitor. Its operating system and the BASIC programming language were built into its hardware, requiring no disk to boot up. Typical for the time, an external drive to store and read software on floppy disks cost extra. Commodore, declared CEO Jack Tramiel, made ‘computers for the masses, not the classes’.

The C64’s low price was made possible by an unusual selection of chips. The CPU was a cheap, efficient, stripped-down industrial controller. The sound chip was designed for music synthesizers, the graphics chip for video games. The result was an inexpensive machine whose sound and 16-color palette were ahead of their time.

Subscribe now

In the 1980s, its gaming chops made the C64 low status. ‘The dismissive label of “game machine” implied that because the C64 was good for playing games, it was “too much fun” to take seriously and could not also be used for ‘serious’ things like word processing (which it was used for)’, writes video game scholar Jesper Juul in Too Much Fun, a 2024 history of the Commodore 64. ‘The label also meant that if you wanted to be “serious”, you should get a much more expensive computer with nearly identical capabilities except for the ability to play good games’.

But the C64’s cultural implications were quite serious. It helped move video gaming out of arcades, where sessions had to end quickly so players would feed more coins into the machines. It permitted open-ended play at home, enabling a far wider range of games, including one that heralded, for good and ill, today’s hyperconnected world.

Four years after the C64’s introduction, a cosmetically refreshed version dubbed the Commodore 64C came bundled with new software, including a word processor, and offered the option of a Mac-like icon-based operating system. Crucially, it included a telecom program connecting C64 users to a dedicated information network called QuantumLink. Known familiarly as Q-Link, the system offered access at significantly lower prices than competitors like CompuServe.

By buying transmission capacity after business hours, the company paid pennies on the dollar. Unlike its competitors’ terminal setup, it also used then-exotic client-server architecture, requiring less back-and-forth transmission and permitting more users at the same cost. The result was a connection price that started at $3 an hour in 1986, when the business-oriented CompuServe was charging $8 off-peak and $22.50 during weekdays. (Q-Link’s hourly rate soon rose to $3.60 and eventually higher still but remained cheaper than competitors.)

Q-Link encouraged real-time interactions among C64 owners. Like CompuServe subscribers, they could use online chat, join forums, and play games together, including chess, blackjack, and hangman, with other users. But Q-Link’s most revolutionary game took a few more years to roll out. Developed at Lucasfilm’s games division, it was called Habitat.

Observers at the time, including Q-Link’s marketing team, had trouble explaining what it was. One journalist called Habitat a ‘world simulation game’, another ‘an adventure game…which will involve players from all over the country playing the game at the same time’. A feature in Compute! magazine described it as ‘an intriguing combination of telegaming and straight online chatting’. Author Kathy Yakal wrote that ‘Habitat, unique to this point in the history of computer entertainment, is an early version of the kind of entertainment often predicted by industry futurists: the interactive motion picture’.

Subscribe to print

Unlike a movie, however, Habitat had no plot, and unlike an adventure game, it had no goal. It instead offered the tools with which to create a mini-society.

‘It’s the first virtual world’, says Alex Handy, founder of the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE), a video game museum in Oakland featuring playable exhibits and demos. ‘It was the source of almost all of the original terms that have to do with online worlds’.

Habitat introduced the term avatar as now used in online contexts. It offered the first in-game currency – players got 2,000 tokens when they started and 100 more each day they logged on – and the first chance for players to buy and sell among themselves. It let them customize their avatars. ‘It was the first time you could pay for cosmetics in a game, which is a multibillion-dollar industry now’, says Handy. Players owned houses they could decorate. They gathered at the central fountain and chatted in speech balloons with other avatars. They threw parties. One published a newspaper called ‘The Rant’. Another started a church, The Order of the Holy Walnut.

The game ‘was deliberately open ended and pluralistic’, creators Chip Morningstar and F Randall Farmer explained in a 1990 paper called ‘The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat’.

With such open-ended possibilities, even testing with a few hundred participants produced unpredictable outcomes. A puzzle-based treasure hunt took weeks to build. One player solved it in just eight hours, before many others could even get started. ‘The result was that one person had had a wonderful experience, dozens of others were left bewildered, and a huge investment in design and setup time had been consumed in an eyeblink’, wrote Morningstar and Farmer. They had to stop thinking like traditional game designers and more like rule makers.

In another case of unintended consequences, players discovered an arbitrage opportunity. The game included machines called Vendroids, where players could buy items like storage chests or avatar heads, and Pawn Machines, where they could sell them back. Often referred to as vendos, the vending machines were another Habitat first. They produced the items on demand, with no production cost. To make play more lifelike, prices varied from place to place.

But the creators made a mistake. They priced dolls at 75 tokens at one Vendroid and 100T at a Pawn Machine across town. Worse, crystal balls were for sale in one place at 18,000T and could be hocked at 30,000T in another. A few wily players spent hours going back and forth buying and selling dolls, then used their profits to do the same with crystal balls. Each wound up with hundreds of thousands of tokens, quintupling Habitat’s money supply overnight.

‘I gotta say, that was a Monday morning I’ll never forget in my life’, says Farmer. It was the first example of what is now known as a ‘dupe bug’, or money in a game seemingly coming out of nowhere.

When asked about their suddenly expanded bank balances, the arbitrageurs replied, ‘We got it fair and square! And we’re not going to tell you how!’ They eventually explained, and the bug was fixed. Farmer, who served as Habitat’s administrator (‘the Oracle’), communicating with players, let them keep the money. They used it to sponsor treasure hunt games for the community, giving the incident a constructive conclusion.

Subscribe now

A happier surprise was the spontaneous emergence of performing arts groups. To coordinate their movements despite the latency of their slow connections, performers practiced using stopwatches and telephone calls. ‘It looked like it was done in synchrony when in fact it was all wildly asynchronous and decoupled’, Morningstar recalled in a 2022 interview. ‘The fact that people would go to the kinds of lengths that were required, the kinds of obsessive attention to detail, to engage in that kind of creativity – it speaks to something very powerful about people’s drive to interact with each other and be creative.’

Such devotion is all the more impressive when you consider that by 1988, when paid beta testing began, players were paying $4.80 an hour for connection time. Some enthusiasts ran into trouble. A teenage tester ran up a $600 bill in a month, leading his father to demand that he quit. Another player complained that Habitat had made Q-Link too expensive. In his first two years on Q-Link, he’d spent just $35 total. ‘But in the last month, while I was playing Habitat I spent $270!!! I can’t afford that’, he wrote. ‘You need to make it cheaper’.

Habitat was a remarkable technological achievement, built on a platform with just 64 kilobytes of memory and 100 kilobytes of disk space, using 300-baud modems that sent 30 characters a second. Creating the impression of rich visual interaction was almost a magic trick under these conditions. It required an innovative allocation of most code to the server, with the player’s client using a simple list of object definitions and commands like GET. ‘​​That really helped keep things speedy’, says Stuart Cass, known online as Stublad, who serves as Habitat’s volunteer archivist and historian. ‘This kind of technical model became much more commonplace later on but it was still novel at the time.’

Announced in 1986, the game didn’t reach the general public until 1989 because the problems were both difficult and novel. ‘Debugging distributed systems was a new thing’, explains Morningstar in an email, and ‘introducing a population of humans into the picture added an entire new tier of testing and debugging that nobody anticipated (even though in retrospect it should have been obvious) and nobody had any experience with, so we had to learn as we went. A couple of very big learning curves to overcome.’

Farmer puts it succinctly: ‘We did the impossible.’

When Habitat finally launched for all Q-Link subscribers, the company rebranded the game as Club Caribe, eliminating the pilot test’s weapons and magic wands and some of its fantastic elements. The change saved money, and framing the world’s open-ended play as an island vacation seemed more understandable to a mass audience. Much of the code remained unchanged, however, and soon some of the weirder features, including alien avatar heads, reappeared.

Club Caribe had its own special qualities, including a ‘nude beach’ where the avatars’ clothing was replaced with pink pixels, only to reappear once they left the area. Penguin races were popular sports. ‘Wave teams’ held monthly competitions, performing slow-motion routines that looked ‘very much like cheerleading on Valium’, combining steps, gestures, and text.

Subscribe to print

Long before social media, Habitat revealed the complexities and dangers of online interactions among many individuals. Some players proved upstanding members of the community, while others went rogue. Different people have different goals, personalities, and moral codes, and Habitat demonstrated that in an online setting ‘people will do everything that can possibly be done – good, bad, evil, neutral, weird, crazy’, says Handy, whose museum has organized the game’s rebirth as Neohabitat.

Farmer and Morningstar, he says, ‘learned from Habitat that people are kind of horrible, and if they’re given anonymity and free rein, they will do horrible things, and they will do against-the-rules things, but they will also do wonderful things and form communities. It’s like some kind of weird coral reef phenomenon where you get wonderfully delicious fish and super-poisonous fish. They’re all there. You don’t get to choose. It all comes together.’

Virginia Postrel is a contributing editor and author at Works in Progress.
Illustration by Dan Cox.

Alex Chalmers and Rob Wiblin explain why recycling isn’t quite what it seems.

Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land forever.

What if that picture is wrong? What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste? It turns out that for much of what we throw away, the humble landfill beats the recycling bin.

Single-use is often better

The case against landfill has two parts. The first part is that there are efficient, cheap, or environmentally friendly ways to practically reuse or recycle materials, rather than landfilling, meaning that there is a reasonable alternative. The second is that landfill itself is unsustainable, or environmentally unfriendly, meaning that we need an alternative. Both are false.

It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases.

Subscribe now

Producing tiny slivers of plastic uses almost no energy. Making the polyethylene resin for a single thin plastic bag, then blowing and sealing it, uses something like 0.6 megajoules, roughly the same energy as boiling a kettle of water. By contrast, cotton is extremely energy intensive, partly because cotton bags need to be much thicker to work, and weigh around 200 grams as compared to eight grams for polyethylene. Instead of a simple blowing and sealing process, the cotton must be made into yarn, woven into fabric, prepared, dried, sized, dyed, and finished, which takes around 17.5 megajoules, around 29 times as much energy.

In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic. Denmark’s equivalent public body estimated a similar ratio. Sufficiently well-worn cotton tote bags can beat plastic for environmental cost, but only for the most consistent among us.

The same pattern shows up almost everywhere we have tried to replace disposable goods with durable ones. Steel is more energy intensive than plastic, and a steel straw requires 10 grams of steel, compared to just 0.2 grams of plastic for a plastic straw. So even if the steel is never washed (hot water is also energy intensive), it would take 150 reuses for a steel straw to use fewer resources than a plastic one. And who would go without washing it?

A ceramic mug only beats a polystyrene cup on energy use after 1,000 uses, and even then only if your dishwasher is fairly efficient. Run a less efficient one and the disposable cup wins on energy forever. Cloth diapers feel greener than disposables, but once you account for the cotton, the laundering, the hot water, and the detergent, the UK Environment Agency found the two are roughly tied in overall demand on resources. A returnable milk bottle takes much more energy to produce and much more fuel to transport than a plastic carton, and has to make around ten or more trips to use less energy than a bottle made from polyethylene plastic.

The case for recycling to avoid using virgin material is much stronger when it comes to metals. Recycling 1 kilogram of steel saves 1.4 kilograms of iron ore and uses 65 percent less energy. For aluminum, the energy savings from recycling can be as high as 95 percent. This is because making metal from scratch requires extremely energy-intensive chemical reduction of ores, while recycling primarily involves remelting metals already in their elemental form. Because recycling metals is cheaper than mining, refining, and smelting new ones, the world does an awful lot of it. About 30 percent of the metal used in steel production globally is now recycled scrap.

Are we running out of materials?

The best case for recycling is where the materials themselves are scarce, and we can more cheaply reuse them than finding more of them. Batteries and electronics contain metals like copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel. While we are not about to run out of any of these materials globally in a strict sense, their supplies are limited in practical terms. Plenty of copper ore remains in the ground, but it is getting harder and more expensive to extract as the highest quality and most accessible deposits have been depleted. In the case of cobalt, lithium, and nickel, production is geographically concentrated, meaning countries without natural supplies of their own have an interest in recycling in order to limit their dependence on imports. All of these, especially copper and nickel, are highly recyclable, with little loss of quality over multiple reuses. For these, recycling is sensible.

By contrast, there is no danger of running out of paper. We can always grow more trees, and that is in fact a decent way of removing carbon from the atmosphere. The silicon used to make glass is one of the most abundant elements on Earth.

American plastic comes from ethane, extracted from natural gas. The alternative to making plastic with it is to leave it in the gas stream, slightly increasing the heat it generates. One kilogram of ethane, left in the stream and made into electricity, could power a typical US house for a few hours, or it could be made into 100 shopping bags. The US has estimated reserves of gas that could last for nearly a century at current rates, and this could increase further with the discovery of new deposits.

Share

The rest of the world makes plastics from propane, butane, and naphtha, meaning from crude oil. We will eventually exhaust this source, but not anytime soon. What’s more, plastics use very little, which is why carrier bags are still so cheap. One 13-kilogram propane cylinder, the kind a family might use to power their gas grill, could instead be made into about 1,600 typical eight-gram plastic carrier bags, three years of a family’s ten-shopping-bag weekly shops.

There ain’t no such thing as a free recycle

Recycling is a straightforward process conceptually: collect waste, reprocess it, and turn it back into useful material. That picture breaks down once you look at what happens to waste after collection. Much of what is sent for recycling is never recycled. About 25 percent of items placed in American recycling bins are contaminants: for example, lids on containers, food, or damp paper. The number may be even higher, as the vast majority of US states do not consistently track contamination data. This can make the process energy or labor intensive and therefore expensive.

Reducing the contamination rate is challenging. Education programs have proven largely ineffective. The best single method for discouraging recycling contamination is cart tagging, where waste collection crews check the contents of a recycling bin and leave it unemptied if contaminated, affixing a tag explaining what was wrong. Despite being the single most forceful and labor-intensive curbside method, a cart-tagging program in Ohio succeeded in reducing contamination by only 29 percent over five rounds.

The imperfect recycling process means that putting low-value plastics (such as plastic film, black plastic food trays, or small items like bottle caps and straws) into the recycling bin can sometimes be actively harmful. Since these items are hard to recycle and are often screened out and sent to landfill, they may actually add to the contamination rate (as well as the time and labor needed for processing) without ever becoming useful recycled material.

Many mid-value plastics, like the polypropylene used in plastic bottles or butter tubs, require intensive washing. This removes contaminants but also detaches potentially recyclable plastic fragments, meaning the resulting mulch must be filtered. After the washing, the plastic is melted and filtered for contaminants a second time before being turned into pellets. Yield losses can be as high as 45 percent.

Subscribe now

While the environmental case can hold up for things like plastic soda bottles, where minimal processing is needed, it quickly drops off as you go down the quality scale. For mid-quality plastics like butter and margarine tubs, recycling one ton of plastic prevents the emission of 0.43 tons of carbon dioxide compared with using virgin material. At the same time, recycled tub-grade plastic typically costs hundreds of dollars more per ton than virgin plastic. This means that consumers are effectively paying over a thousand dollars to save one ton of carbon dioxide. By contrast, direct air capture, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, currently costs an average of $490 per ton, and area specialists hope to lower the cost to $100 per ton in the coming decades. Recycling has its virtues, but recycling plastic to save energy just doesn’t add up.

Your plastic toothbrush isn’t killing turtles

Pro-recycling campaigns portray a world where unrecycled plastic bags, straws, and toothbrushes choke the world’s oceans. This worry has led governments to restrict or disincentivize single-use plastics. But much of this is environmental theater.

Richer countries have near-universal refuse collection and almost none of their waste winds up in the ocean. In low-income countries, however, over 90 percent of waste is improperly managed, and typically ends up dumped, burned, or escaping into waterways. Plastic flows into the ocean overwhelmingly come from a small handful of rapidly growing Asian economies. Approximately a hundred rivers, mostly in South and South-East Asia, account for half of ocean plastic. And a substantial share of plastic in the ocean isn’t domestic waste at all, but rather discarded fishing gear.

Ocean litter is a huge environmental problem, and solving it means building cheap, effective, and safe waste management in those countries where it originates (plus perhaps cleaning the oceans up). If you live in a Western country, throwing your trash into the recycling bin rather than general waste makes no difference at all to the amount of flotsam in the ocean: whichever bin you choose, that’s not where it will end up.

Landfill is pretty clean

Even though recycling or reuse is energy intensive, it would be worth doing it if landfill was an environmental disaster. But most people’s image of landfill is severely out of date. They envisage a rotting mound of waste, dumped in an open hole in the ground and leaching dangerous chemicals into the soil. In most of the developed world, this hasn’t been true for decades. Engineers build modern landfills on thick layers of clay and tough plastic liners that contain the contaminated liquid that forms when rainwater filters through decomposing waste.

Operators place waste in thin layers, compact it tightly, and cover it regularly to control smells, litter, pests, and fire risk. As food and garden waste break down, gas wells pull methane out of the landfill body and route it to flares or generators instead of letting it escape into the air. This typically captures around 75 percent of the methane produced, and sometimes as much as 95 percent. Drainage layers and pipes collect contaminated liquid and send it for treatment, while operators monitor the surrounding ground and water, both throughout the site’s life and long after it closes. Regulators shut down badly run landfills.

Much of the leakage that happens in landfills is from legacy sites with poorer liner systems. New York’s environmental regulator reviewed groundwater monitoring for 31 post-1988 landfills, which had collectively operated for about 450 years, and found no adverse impact on groundwater quality.

Out of the garbage can, into the fire

There is another option: burning trash. Perhaps counterintuitively, this can be a very environmentally friendly option and has the advantage of reducing the waste dramatically in volume. Controlled incineration, which burns waste in a sealed, high-temperature furnace, uses systems to catch pollutants, and is more efficient than landfill at containing methane, preventing virtually any from escaping. On top of all this, the heat released can be used to generate electricity.

Unfortunately, controlled burning is more expensive than landfill. In the US, landfill is reliably 20–30 percent cheaper. While it is possible to reduce costs by selling the electricity generated, modern incinerators are among the most expensive power plants to build per megawatt, in some cases costing an order of magnitude more than a conventional natural gas plant.

This is because burning trash comes with specific complexities. The smoke from burning trash contains mercury, lead, and acid gases, requiring expensive pollution control. The acid gases produced would dissolve normal steel, so the boilers have to be lined with either specialized ceramics or a nickel-chromium alloy. This means most municipalities opt for comparatively inexpensive landfill instead.

Subscribe now

Cheap, uncontrolled burning is bad for both the environment and human health; up to 10 percent of air pollution in Delhi comes from incinerating waste, and burning crops during the stubble-burning season contributes another 30 percentage points.

It’s okay to be a landfiller

Every year, around 500 million tons of waste are recycled. US recycling rates have more than tripled since 1980, while close to 50 percent of all waste in the European Union is now recycled. Increasing this number sits at the heart of major international environmental strategies. Yet this is unnecessary and will make us poorer in the long run. Much of the time, we should bury the waste instead.

In the developed world, though there are benefits to recycling, other waste disposal options are perfectly good alternatives. Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space to put them – less than 0.01 percent of the US is used for landfill, less than 0.001 percent of Australia is, and only about 0.02 percent of Germany is. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently. Nor are we about to run out of most of the materials commonly recycled. And because it is less resource-intensive, landfill is far cheaper than recycling.

Instead of paying more to recycle, we could spend that money far more effectively on other environmental mitigation measures like carbon capture. The main exception is metal recycling, which should likely be the primary or even exclusive focus of municipal recycling programs. Inasmuch as some landfill sites fall short of best practices, as some surely still do, improving monitoring and imposing penalties on sloppy operators is likely to pack a much bigger environmental benefit, at lower cost, than trying to divert more materials from landfill to recycling.

And while modern landfill is ideal, worse-run landfill is still an upgrade in regions where the alternative is open waste dumping or burning. It reduces human contact with waste and localizes pollution to one managed site instead of many unmanaged ones.

Subscribe to print

There is a great humanitarian and environmental case for improving waste disposal systems in developing countries. But focusing effort on expensive recycling means getting less bang for our buck. Recycling is complex to sustain: it requires the successful coordination of collection, separation, contamination control, and reliable buyers for the material. If even one part of the chain breaks down, it doesn’t work. By contrast, landfill is simple and cheap. Investing in landfill, even suboptimal landfills, protects more local rivers, forests, lakes, and seas.

Alex Chalmers is a staff writer at the Cosmos Institute.

Rob Wiblin is the host of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

The text of the article incorrectly stated that making a cotton bag required 1,725 megajoules of energy. In reality, it requires about 17.5 megajoules. The dataviz used the correct data. The article has been corrected.