On 17th October 1956, Queen Elizabeth II pressed the switch that activated Calder Hall, the world’s first grid-scale nuclear power station. As the country attempted to reassert world leadership after the trauma of World War II, The Times’s correspondent excitedly recalled that:

Today, with a boisterous wind to display the flags – and nearly wreck the marquees – the colourful and almost Wellsian-looking installation deeply stirs the imagination. Nothing like it exists elsewhere. Truly it has been described as a ‘courageous enterprise’; for Calder Hall represents the inauguration of a comprehensive programme of atomic power stations which, in time, will provide Britain with an ample supply of electricity without the use of coal or oil. Therein lies its magic.

By 1965, Britain had built more nuclear power stations than the US, USSR, and France combined. Stations were approved in months, regularly built in under five years, and operated with an impressive safety record. But in 1970, the UK’s lead faltered and has never recovered.

Hinkley Point C, under construction in the southwest of England, is set to be the most expensive nuclear power station ever built anywhere in the world. Each unit of power generated will cost six times more than one produced by a modern South Korean nuclear power station or an early British reactor. By the time the plant comes online, it will have taken at least 13 years to build and will have run £17 billion over budget. Britain last successfully completed a nuclear reactor in 1995.

Most accounts emphasize the importance of technology. The story goes that the UK’s 1965 decision to embrace a convoluted domestic reactor design created a series of white elephants that rendered nuclear power uneconomic in Britain. After privatization, nuclear power was written off by the markets, and the British nuclear industrial and skills base left to shrivel. This view was also widely held at the time. As early as 1972, Sir Arthur Hawkins, the chair of the UK’s powerful state-run energy company and regulator, dubbed the choice ‘an economic catastrophe we must not repeat’.

There is a grain of truth in this story, but it is incomplete. The tide turned against nuclear only after Britain had switched over to proven American technology in the 1980s. Meanwhile, even the clunkiest British reactors were made to operate efficiently once they were placed in the hands of more professional management in the 1990s.

Instead, the story of British nuclear power more closely resembles the story of the British state in the postwar period. At first, Britons appeared to be living in the age of the technocrat. Talented scientists and engineers armed with a near carte blanche from the government to build with minimal consultation seemed unstoppable. But somewhere along the way, this model broke down. It didn’t take incentives seriously, underdelivered, and failed to adapt to changing public expectations. Experts failed, and the public withdrew the blank check they had given them. The story also serves as a valuable corrective to the idea that the world would work better if we simply handed more power to engineers.

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The first wave

In October 1946, in a bad-tempered cabinet committee meeting, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin thundered: ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it’. Bevin was infuriated by the American decision to cut off all nuclear cooperation with its wartime allies, including those which had helped it develop the atomic bomb. Casting aside Treasury reservations, the government concluded that if it could not share a nuclear deterrent with the Americans, the empire on which the sun never set must have its own.

To arm the bomb, Britain needed plutonium. Drawing on the wartime memory of British scientists who had worked at Los Alamos, the UK built the Windscale Piles. These reactors, named because they were stacks of graphite blocks, would serve as the inspiration for the first civilian UK reactor: the Magnox.

A Magnox reactor packed unenriched metallic uranium fuel rods into a graphite core. The design was named after the magnesium alloy cladding that stopped the uranium fuel rods from reacting chemically with the gas. If you pulled out the fuel rods quickly enough, the neutron reactions taking place in the reactor converted the uranium into weapons-grade plutonium, but if left alone, it also generated electricity.

The Magnox program was born in 1953, when the government gave the go-ahead for Calder Hall. In response to the growing secret cost of the British nuclear weapons program and a desire for greater energy security, the government decided to find a civilian use for the technology.

The most striking element of the Magnox program was its speed: between 1956 and 1971, Britain built 26 reactors. Projects were routinely approved within months, and reactors typically achieved grid connection within four to five years of starting construction. This is all the more impressive given that there was no standard Magnox. The Atomic Energy Authority played a significant role in coordinating research and design, as well as in training consortium staff, but as there was no British company with the skills and capacity to build an entire nuclear power station, the plants were built by competing consortia, each to slightly different designs.

The approvals process was straightforward. The Central Electricity Authority, the body responsible for managing Britain’s nationalized energy supply, conducted site studies and consulted local authorities to identify suitable locations. This consultation would factor in space, proximity to a water source, terrain, and existing development plans. Once the authority had selected a site, the minister would publish a notice in The London Gazette and in the local press, as well as notifying anyone who owned or leased land within 300 yards of the site. They could then submit a letter of objection to the Ministry of Power.

If they received significant objections from either locals or a public body, the minister would hold a local planning inquiry. Before 1957, there was no legal requirement to do so, but ministers held them anyway as a means of avoiding local discontent.

The early nuclear planning inquiries were sedate affairs. In 1958, the minister ordered an inquiry into the prospective Trawsfynydd nuclear power station in Snowdonia. The local authority and community were both supportive, but the National Parks Commission was concerned about the impact that the station would have on the scenery. Over three days, one inspector from the Ministry of Power and another from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government heard representations from both sides. Their final report, including appendices, ran to just 50 pages. Just the environmental assessment for Hinkley Point C ran for over 44,000 pages.

After the inquiry, the minister would give consent to build the power station under the 1909 Electric Lighting Act, the standard legal mechanism for approving new electricity generation at the time. The minister would then invoke section 35 of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which allowed the government to grant planning permission for public developments without involving the local authority.

This straightforward approach reflected broad public support. For example, while conservation groups were concerned about the damage Trawsfynydd might do to the landscape in Snowdonia, the local community welcomed the power station. Merionethshire, the county that hosted the site, had lost 20 percent of its population since 1880 due to economic stagnation. Former residents wrote letters expressing their hope of moving back if the power station created new jobs.

This system needed refinement. These early nuclear power stations were run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, a government body that enjoyed immunity from civil liability and most regulation. The government’s ambition was that as nuclear scaled, it should be treated like any other energy source, rather than a special technology to be built by a secretive government body.

Against this backdrop, the UK introduced its first licensing system for nuclear power in 1959 by legislation. The Minister of Power would be responsible for issuing licenses and setting conditions. The government also created the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate within the ministry, initially with a team of just 13 inspectors. By comparison, the modern Office for Nuclear Regulation has over 400 specialist technical staff.

In 1960, the ministry granted the first prospective license under the new scheme to Bradwell, a Magnox station in Essex. The license was a modest affair with just seven conditions attached to it. These were light touch by modern standards and included obtaining the consent of the minister before fueling the reactor, keeping records, and testing equipment and materials.

Trouble ahead

The Magnox reactors served Britain well. Wylfa, the last Magnox standing, only came offline in 2015. Reconstructing Magnox lifecycle costs is tricky. But they appear to have been cheap. One reconstruction, which factored in numbers from early Magnox decommissioning, placed the lifecycle costs of electricity from Magnox reactors at eight pence per kilowatt hour in modern money. This would be 5.3 pence per kilowatt hour cheaper than electricity from Hinkley Point C.

The design undoubtedly had its flaws. It relied on natural uranium, which is good for producing weapons-grade plutonium, but not for power generation. Britain initially had little choice but to go down this route as it lacked domestic enrichment capabilities, and the US refused to export enriched uranium. At the time, enrichment was difficult, and involved converting uranium into a gas and forcing it through thousands of porous metal barriers. By the time Britain’s first specialist enrichment facility kicked into gear in the mid-1950s, the country had already settled on a design for civil reactors.

The usable fuel content in natural uranium is quickly burned up, forcing frequent refuelling. The fuel’s Magnox coating corroded rapidly, losing strength when temperatures in the reactor rose above 400 degrees Celsius. These limits meant the reactors had to run cooler, producing lower pressure steam and wasting more of the heat generated by the fuel. As a result, the Magnox reactors generated electricity about one third less efficiently than American light water reactors.

By the early 1960s, the government was searching for a new design. An intense bureaucratic battle played out behind the scenes. The Central Electricity Generating Board was predisposed towards an inexpensive American light water reactor design, as the US had resumed nuclear cooperation with the UK a few years earlier. Meanwhile, the Atomic Energy Authority feared that a switch away from gas-cooled, graphite designs would deprive them of valuable R&D and design work.

Instead, they championed the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR), an upgraded version of the Magnox, which the Atomic Energy Authority had prototyped a decade earlier. The AGR used enriched instead of natural uranium, and each fuel rod was sealed in stainless steel, which could handle much higher temperatures. This allowed the plant to run at twice the temperature of the Magnox and, theoretically, higher levels of thermal efficiency than a light water reactor. This was scientifically elegant, but untested at scale. Choosing the design would also drive orders towards British firms.

In 1965, the Ministry of Power decided on the tender for Dungeness B, the second reactor to be built on the Dungeness headland in the south of Kent. In the end, through a combination of sharp bureaucratic elbow work and low skulduggery, it went ahead with a twin-reactor AGR station.

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The original sin of British nuclear?

Amid stiff competition, Dungeness B is arguably the worst British infrastructure project of the modern era.

Atomic Power Constructions Limited, which won the tender to build Dungeness B, was a borderline moribund company. It had submitted a token bid with no expectation of winning, as a way of signaling to the Central Electricity Generating Board that the company was still alive and hopeful of future work. The Atomic Energy Authority covertly helped the company produce its supporting technical documentation. It underbid significantly on price and committed to an ambitious four-year schedule, promising to beat Magnox timelines while building a significantly larger and more complex first-of-a-kind design.

As one former employee observed later: ‘Nobody was more surprised than the staff of APC when their offer for an AGR secured acceptance.’ Major technical problems and shoddy work blighted almost every element of the plant. Engineers had to redesign the boilers after they couldn’t fit them into the available space. A key supplier of gas circulators went bankrupt, which forced the project team to scramble for replacements. On site, workers welded the steel poorly and installed the wrong materials in pipe and boiler supports, while the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate ordered extensive redesigns. Atomic Power Constructions went bust four years into the project and other companies had to step in and rescue the project.

Even so, work had already started on further AGR stations at Hinkley Point B, Hunterston, Hartlepool, and Heysham, split across different consortia. Having different companies build different reactors to a similar specification had worked well enough for the small and comparatively straightforward Magnox units, but it underperformed for the novel and more complex AGR. Different teams ran into similar engineering issues with the reactor and boiler and invested time resolving them independently. All ran behind schedule.

By 1974, nine years after the start of the program, Britain still had no operational AGRs, while costs had escalated by an average of 50 percent. The Central Electricity Generating Board concluded that ‘no further orders for AGRs can be contemplated in the near future’. For three years, officials contemplated another design switch.

By the end of the decade, even the AGR’s most ardent bureaucratic defenders had given up the ghost and advised dropping the design in favor of the American pressurized water reactor (PWR). But Tony Benn, then Secretary of State for Energy, ordered another two twin-unit AGR stations in 1978. In what reads like a parody of industrial strategy, Benn justified the move on the grounds that it would preserve the jobs of turbine and boiler makers.

The first reactor at Dungeness came online in 1983, 13 years behind schedule, four times over budget, and operating significantly below capacity.

In many accounts, the selection of the AGR was the original sin of British nuclear: a bad technology choice that tainted everything that followed. By the mid-1970s, a steady chorus of voices was already labeling the program a costly mistake and drawing unflattering parallels with Concorde, another high-profile, state-led, technically ambitious program that was insulated from market forces. There is clearly some merit to this view.

But simply blaming the AGR for the failure of UK nuclear seems unsatisfactory. While the early builds were disastrous, the last two stations that Benn ordered, Heysham 2 and Torness, were completed in eight years. Heysham was constructed within five percent of its original cost estimate. In 1973, Britain abandoned the consortium model, merging the different construction companies into the National Nuclear Corporation. This improved coordination and meant that, unlike earlier AGR builds, these latter stations shared a common design.

In short, the AGR wasn’t perfect, but by itself, the technology choice didn’t have to be fatal. And it is striking how little impact the shortcomings of the AGR program had on either public or elite opinion about nuclear power. As late as 1978, when the Dungeness B saga was widely known, 57 percent of the British public and every major political party continued to support nuclear power. The debate was confined to the technocrats, who were focused on design choice as opposed to the merits of pursuing a program at all.

The tipping point

Ironically, British nuclear’s downfall really came after the government decided to back the right technology. When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, her government saw nuclear power as a vehicle for breaking the power of the coal mining unions that had held successive governments to ransom.

Sharing none of her predecessors’ desire to preserve technological independence from America, and keen to adopt a standardized design, the government embraced the PWR. While the PWR was less fuel efficient than the AGR on paper, it was simpler. By using the water for both cooling and moderation, the PWR combines both functions into one sealed, high-pressure circuit, avoiding the AGR’s separate graphite core and gas coolant system. The Central Electricity Generating Board agreed, arguing that the PWR had ‘substantially lower capital costs per unit of electricity than AGR’ and was ‘proven mainstream worldwide technology with some 150 reactors in operation worldwide, compared to 5 AGR stations in the UK’.

Unfortunately, in 1979, a PWR plant was involved in what was then the worst ever civilian nuclear accident. The meltdown at the Three Mile Island Generating Station in Pennsylvania, despite causing no deaths or illnesses, catalyzed opposition to nuclear power around the world. A plurality of the British public remained supportive, but only narrowly so. The old approach of debating nuclear policy among technocrats with little public input appeared to be reaching its end.

To allay these concerns, the government decided to pursue a policy of maximum transparency. Announcing the government’s planned PWR program in December 1979, the Secretary of State for Energy David Howell spoke of ‘the Government’s determination to ensure that full information is in the hands of Parliament and of the public before and as we make decisions to expand our nuclear capacity’. They decided to subject Sizewell B, the first PWR, to a full-scale inquiry, intending it to reassure the public about its safety.

Sir Frank Layfield, a distinguished planning lawyer, was appointed to lead the inquiry, which started work in 1981. The government gave Sir Frank unusually broad terms of reference. As well as the impact of the development on the local environment and amenities, the inquiry would cover the safety features of the design itself (something normally confined to the licensing process) as well as the need for a power station at all and the government’s long-term energy policy.

The resulting inquiry sat for 340 days. Instead of reassuring the public about the safety of Sizewell’s design, the inquiry descended into a public debate about government energy policy in general. Weeks were dedicated to military uses of nuclear technology, the ethics of importing uranium from Namibia (then occupied by apartheid South Africa), the impact of uranium mining on Australian aboriginal land rights, and other countries’ experimental reactor designs.

The technocrats, unprepared for this degree of scrutiny, acquitted themselves poorly in the public gaze. The Central Electricity Generating Board had not completed crucial safety documentation before the start of the inquiry and repeatedly filed addenda. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate gave the impression of being subordinate and entirely reactive to the Board.

The inquiry was also dissatisfied with the quality of the evidence the Board supplied on construction timelines and the economics of nuclear power versus fossil fuels, dubbing it ‘insufficient for a proper understanding of either the approach or the assumptions adopted’.

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Overreach

This might not have mattered too much if it had been the sole example of bureaucratic arrogance. During the 1970s, against a backdrop of growing concern about the environment, British Nuclear Fuels Limited began negotiating contracts to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from Japan at Sellafield, the nuclear site in the north of England that hosted Calder Hall and the Windscale Piles. While the plan had openly been discussed and written about in the nuclear trade press, it largely escaped public and political attention, until a 1975 Daily Mirror front page warned of the ‘Plan to Make Britain World’s Nuclear Dustbin’.

The ensuing public outcry prompted the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution to study the question of nuclear’s impact on the environment. Its 1976 report recommended that: ‘There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of longlived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future’.

Amid this outcry, industry was largely silent. In the eyes of both the officials and engineers, nuclear waste wasn’t a real problem, so they refused to take the public debate seriously. They assumed that nuclear waste would be recycled and used to fuel fast breeder reactors, which would convert the uranium in spent fuel into new plutonium for energy generation. As a result, waste was left to pile up in tanks on the basis that it would be resolved later.

The fast breeder reactor proved uneconomical and the British program never progressed beyond a small demonstrator plant. It also had another undesirable side effect. As the fast breeder reactor produced plutonium as a byproduct, it was seized on by opponents of nuclear power as proof that the civilian program was supporting military efforts. Frank Barnaby, a former nuclear scientist at the Atomic Energy Authority, had written Man and the Atom, a passionately pro-nuclear book in 1971. The book went as far as advocating nuclear explosions to dig canals. In 1975, after the fast breeder reactor program was unveiled, he published a new edition of the book. While much of the text was reproduced verbatim, he drew much more pessimistic conclusions and advocated for non-proliferation.

Disposal facilities in the UK met significant backlash in more or less every community where they were proposed, while the Sellafield site became a focal point for protests. In 1978, a year after its formation, Greenpeace began to publicize the dumping of nuclear waste at sea by the Atomic Energy Authority. After five years of embarrassing publicity led to the threat of a boycott by ship and transport workers, the government stopped the practice. The failure to anticipate the public outcry is arguably all the more confusing, given that nuclear waste had sparked outbreaks of local resistance as far back as the 1950s. In 1954, two years before Calder Hall opened, the Atomic Energy Authority had proposed to dump waste in the Forest of Dean, only to be defeated by local residents invoking obscure thirteenth-century land rights.

This persistent failure may have been a product of the industry’s culture. The founders of the Atomic Energy Authority and godfathers of the British nuclear industry were figures like Christopher Hinton, John Cockcroft, William Penney, and Edwin Plowden. They were products of World War II nuclear research, where they enjoyed sweeping authority to pursue a high-level mission with little interference or need for consultation. This mindset suffused the industry they helped to build.

In their defence, the technocrats were struggling to keep up beyond nuclear. Public opposition to megaprojects reached boiling point during the 1970s.

Between 1965 and 1973, the newly created Greater London Council embarked on a plan to build four motorways, stretching for 478 miles, through many of London’s most prized historic neighborhoods. Before the Ringways scheme, the planners almost always got their own way. Opposition to infrastructure of any kind had historically been localized, never widening into a broader movement. With the Ringways, the planners tried to fight too many people at once, lost, and demonstrated that public opposition to megaprojects could work. Similar revolts against high modernist planning were unfolding internationally at the same time. The most famous example was in New York, where Robert Moses’s highway and urban renewal schemes faced neighborhood campaigns led by figures like Jane Jacobs.

Sometimes the technocrats could open the door for the opposition themselves. In 1971, a commission planning a third airport for London selected the village of Cublington in Buckinghamshire. One member of the commission objected on environmental grounds, legitimizing popular opposition. After a political firestorm, the airport was moved to a more expensive site in the sandbanks off the Essex coast, in the Thames Estuary, eventually rendering it economically unviable. The project was canceled in 1974, and various attempts to revive it, most recently in 2016, have flamed out.

Another chink in the armor was visible with the new towns program. The government bulldozed through the opposition of local residents and even court injunctions in the 1940s to designate new towns like Stevenage, Cumbernauld, and Peterlee. These were idealistically planned to relieve overcrowding in bombed-out cities like London and Glasgow. Architecturally, the experimental designs often failed, producing alienating concrete jungles. The last new town project to be pursued to full completion was Milton Keynes in 1967.

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The chill

While the seeds of the backlash were being sown, nuclear licensing was becoming more conservative. In 1974, the government had consolidated workplace health and safety regulation into a single unified body, including sectors like nuclear power. The new Health and Safety Executive, which the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate joined, mandated that risk in the workplace be reduced ‘as low as reasonably practicable’ (ALARP).

Crucially, the Health and Safety Executive was a nondepartmental body. The Ministry of Power had the clear objective of building new power stations. It wasn’t in the minister’s interests to rush approvals and build unsafe stations, but nor was it in their interests to endlessly postpone. The same dynamic is visible elsewhere: France, which undertook a vast nuclear construction program in the 1970s and 1980s, did not have an independent nuclear regulator until 2006, while in South Korea, which builds the developed world’s cheapest reactors, the prime minister’s office is heavily involved in nuclear regulation. When Britain made the licensing process independent, this link was broken. There was no longer an actor in the regulatory process incentivized to say yes.

The influence of ALARP is clear on Sizewell B. While theoretically based on an existing US design, the Central Electricity Generating Board added an extra containment dome, two additional backup systems to complement the two already in the design, and built in greater earthquake protection. This theoretically enhanced safety, but at a high cost. New guidelines, published in 1992, stated that safety measures must be taken until the cost is ‘grossly disproportionate’ to the risk averted. This meant that, depending on the risk, measures could be between two and ten times more expensive than the equivalent harm averted.

The combination of a less deferential population and a system of safety-focused but cost-indifferent regulators increasingly collided with an undiminished bureaucratic appetite for megaprojects. By ignoring concerns about waste, the nuclear industry alienated the public. By being seen to fudge the figures on nuclear economics and attempt to strongarm regulators, it offended politicians. Amid mounting skepticism, the industry was fast running out of friends, just when it began to really need them.

The premature death of UK nuclear?

The construction of Sizewell B began in 1988 and was completed in 1995, making it the last new reactor to be completed in the UK. The project cost approximately £6 billion in 2025 money for a 1.2-gigawatt reactor, making it roughly three times cheaper than Hinkley Point C per gigawatt generated. It was built in roughly the time it took to build a Magnox reactor, despite generating three times as much electricity and facing much stricter safety requirements. Despite this apparent success, the writing was on the wall for the industry.

The government scrapped plans for three more PWRs, keeping only the plans for Hinkley Point C. The Central Electricity Generating Board applied for permission to start work on the project in 1987, triggering a 14-month inquiry that heard from 600 witnesses and navigated 22,000 objections. The final report, completed in 1990, recommended approval, but suggested a final decision be postponed until a full government review of nuclear policy had taken place.

In 1995, the government formally announced that it would no longer fund the construction of nuclear power and that there is ‘no case for Government intervention to distort the electricity market by providing finance or guarantees for one form of generation over another’. It acknowledged that ‘private finance is unlikely to be available at present for new nuclear construction’.

This lack of enthusiasm stemmed from the industry’s most public defeat. In 1987, the Conservatives had won reelection on a platform that included electricity privatization. As investors began to scrutinize the operating record and finances of the AGRs, they came away underwhelmed.

More importantly, they didn’t want to take on responsibility for the cost of decommissioning the stations once they had reached the end of their lives. Decommissioning, which is regulated exceptionally conservatively in Britain, involves removing spent fuel from the reactor and cooling system, dismantling the plant, and decontaminating the site. The Central Electricity Generating Board had valued the decommissioning liabilities at £10.4 billion (in 2025 prices), but when auditors came to scrutinize the numbers, their estimate ballooned to between £22 and £36 billion. Meanwhile, without life extension work, the continued operation of the Magnoxes would generate less in revenue than their decommissioning liabilities.

The government concluded that the Central Electricity Generating Board had been deliberately burying the true cost of the nuclear program for years, subsidizing it with the revenue from coal and oil power stations. In the autumn of 1989, on the eve of privatization and having failed to find private sector buyers, the government decided to keep nuclear in public ownership.

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Nationalization with Thatcherite characteristics

This exclusion from privatization was a public humiliation for the UK’s nuclear industry, but also marked the beginning of a turnaround. With the Central Electricity Generating Board dismantled by privatization, the government shifted the AGRs and Sizewell B into two state-owned companies: Nuclear Electric and Scottish Nuclear Limited.

The sheer scale of the UK’s nationalized system had made it easy to bury losses. Individual stations were not profit centers, so their management had little incentive to drive efficiency improvements. Meanwhile, status lay with engineers and scientists, rather than the managers of individual power stations: the manager of a facility like Torness could not authorize payments above £14,000 in today’s money without consulting Whitehall. The Central Electricity Generating Board, which was keen to buy the PWR, was uninterested in improving the economics of the AGR and thus undermined their own business case.

With nowhere to hide, and the old technocrats replaced with professional managers, performance improved. Managers studied higher-performing American and European reactors and embedded better preventive maintenance. Nuclear Electric ran a quality improvement process that mapped every gap between theoretical maximum AGR output and the actual number of megawatts generated. Engineers who identified cost savings or output improvements received bonuses.

Between 1990 and 1996, the English AGR fleet went from being operational 47 percent of the time to 76 percent of the time. This was the equivalent of adding two new power stations. In 1990–91, Nuclear Electric’s operating loss stood at £1.1 billion. By 1995–96, before Sizewell B had started commercial operation, the AGR fleet was profitable for the first time.

In 1996, the government merged Nuclear Electric and Scottish Nuclear Limited into British Energy and privatized it through a stock market flotation. Over the next few years, it paid steady dividends, cut debt, and was crowned ‘the darling of the utilities’ by the Financial Times. IPO investors were sitting on 355 percent gains by the start of 1999. It even began to expand into the US. But hubris struck. Under pressure from the City, the board handed back almost £1 billion to shareholders in 1999 through dividends and buybacks, stripping away the firm’s financial buffer.

British Energy was then hit by a turn in the market. Privatization helped enable the ‘dash for gas’ in the UK as private companies rapidly built cheap gas generators; gas-generated electricity jumped from 1 gigawatt in 1990 to 23 gigawatts in 2000. Initially, the price was set by the most expensive generator needed to meet the demand in a centralized mechanism called the Pool, which slowed the impact of cheap gas-fired plants. But in 2001, the government abolished the Pool, leading generators to strike direct contracts with electricity suppliers and large customers, causing prices to collapse to their lowest levels since privatization.

British Energy was already locked into expensive fuel reprocessing and waste management contracts. Even with the improved efficiency, operating and maintaining an AGR was expensive. In September 2002, the government stepped in with a £410 million emergency loan to keep the reactors running. As part of a restructure, the government took on responsibility for decommissioning and waste costs, while shareholders were wiped out. In 2009, the government arranged a sale of British Energy to France’s state energy company EDF.

Unlearning nuclear

By the late 2000s, concerns about climate change and rising gas prices led the government to return to nuclear power as an option. EDF revived the idea of building a third nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. Instead of investing directly, the government committed to pay a fixed, inflation-protected price of £92.50 per megawatt-hour generated in 2012 money, or £133 in 2025 pounds. This was significantly higher than the wholesale price has ever been since the electricity market was created, except during the crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

For Sizewell C, the next new nuclear project, the government abandoned this model on value for money grounds. Instead, it had to finance the cost of development upfront and take on 45 percent of the investment itself.

The process for agreeing financing built in significant extra time. The negotiations over Hinkley Point C’s financing took four years, while designing and agreeing the funding mechanism for Sizewell C, Britain’s next planned nuclear project, took six.

By this stage, Britain had the most conservative regulatory regime in the world for nuclear power, excluding the countries where the technology is banned. This system results in designs considered safe in other countries having to go through extensive UK-specific modifications.

For example, Chinese, French, and Finnish regulators judged that the design’s two separate digital instrumentation and control systems offered sufficient redundancy in the event of a software fault. The UK regulator, by contrast, required that an entirely new analog system be designed from scratch. The system took 12 years to develop, approve, and build, and required an additional 76 equipment cabinets in each of the power station’s two units, along with a redesign of a number of auxiliary buildings. The 7,000 changes to the design meant Hinkley Point C required 35 percent more steel and 25 percent more concrete as a result of UK-specific modifications.

Since Sizewell B, the UK’s planning and environmental laws have tightened significantly. During the golden age of British nuclear, the developer needed to secure a single approval to start building. By contrast, modern developers have to assemble reams of parallel consents from different public bodies, operating to their own rules and timetables. The same vetocracy that has slowed the construction of roads, airport runways and tunnels has clamped down on nuclear with a vengeance.

These rules would always be burdensome, but the financing model for nuclear does not incentivize cost control. For example, the model for Sizewell C means that the cost of overruns is ultimately borne by a mixture of the billpayer and the taxpayer, not developers. This also means that developers have little incentive to challenge overly cautious rulings from regulators. There is a formal appeals process against nuclear site licensing decisions, which goes almost entirely unused.

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The twilight of the technocrats

When Queen Elizabeth II flicked the switch at Calder Hall, an electronic dial immediately lit up showing the number of kilowatts the station was generating. Years later, one of the engineers discovered that this was powered by a man turning a handle. Seemingly impressive, but opaque and held together by improvised solutions, this set the tone for the British nuclear industry.

Every successful nuclear buildout, whether it is the Magnox reactors, France in the 1980s, or China today, shares a number of ingredients in common. They all had unambiguous political backing, regulators incentivized to approve promptly, predictable demand, and a supportive or indifferent public. Between 1965 and 1995, every one of those pillars crumbled in Britain. The scientists and engineers who ran the program, and the political class that provided such weak oversight, were at times the victims of bad luck but largely had themselves to blame. Following the revival of interest in nuclear power in the 2000s, the government, with the buy-in of the private sector, tacitly accepted that it would always be uneconomical, giving rise to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At the start of 2025, the UK government commissioned an independent taskforce to provide recommendations on how to reverse rising costs and lengthening timelines. The taskforce’s report, which the government accepted in full, concluded that the sector is blighted by ‘a culture of resignation among dutyholders and regulators who simply accept that nuclear projects must be slow and expensive’. Adopting the taskforce’s more radical proposals would go some way to restoring the ingredients for nuclear success in Britain.

Alex Chalmers is a staff writer at the Cosmos Institute. You can follow him on Twitter.

Print subscribers received the full edition earlier this month. Some articles were previously released online, and the rest of the issue is available on the website today. The issue contains pieces on:

• Why egg freezing is even better than you think;

• How a forty-year old Dutch company came to dominate AI;

• Why Japan has the best railway system in the world;

• How Britain learned, and then unlearned, nuclear power;

• A history of instant coffee;

• What really stopped boat migration to Australia;

• The world’s greatest living tradition of monumental masonry architecture;

• How buses had to be invented twice; and

• Why self-driving cars will create a new tragedy of the commons.

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Public discussion of fertility is riddled with misconceptions. It is often claimed that the probability of conception declines slowly in a woman’s thirties and then drops off sharply; in fact it falls steadily with age. Readers of the New York Times or Vox have read that egg freezing barely works, but these facts come from a study of women who froze their eggs at an average age of 38, by which point their underlying fertility had fallen, which egg freezing cannot fix. When women in their twenties freeze their eggs, their success rates later on in life are closer to 85 percent. Ruxandra Teslo and Luzia Bruckamp explain why they chose to freeze their own eggs early, and why other young women should consider doing the same.

Japan is the land of the train. Twenty-eight percent of its passenger kilometres are travelled by rail, a higher share than in any other developed country. Its railways turn a substantial operating profit. The common explanation is Japanese culture. But Matthew Bornholt and Benedict Springbett argue the common explanation is wrong. Japan has amazing railways because of good policy, and almost every element of the Japanese system could be reproduced elsewhere: vertically integrated regional monopolies that build the cities around their own lines, liberal zoning, private ownership, and privatized parking. The rest of the world can have Japanese-tier railways if it chooses to.

In 1965, Britain had built more nuclear power stations than the United States, the Soviet Union, and France combined. Today, processes that used to take months now take decades, and Hinkley Point C, currently under construction, will soon become the most expensive nuclear power station ever built anywhere in the world. Alex Chalmers argues that technocratic hubris is to blame. For decades, British technocrats dismissed public concerns about waste and efficiency, until eventually both popular support and regulatory presumption shifted decisively against them. If Britain would like to relearn nuclear, it will have to re-earn the public’s trust.

Advanced semiconductors are the most important technology in the world, and only one company makes the machines capable of producing them. ASML was never an obvious candidate for this role. In the 1980s it was a laggard, far behind the Japanese behemoths Nikon and Canon. One industry figure told its leadership that ‘the race has already been run’. To survive, Neil Hacker explains, ASML had to take a series of unlikely decisions. It worked closely with the American government, sold large stakes to foreign competitors, and staked billions on an unproven technology. It now has the most important monopoly in the world.

It’s extremely difficult to remove water from brewed coffee without destroying the flavours that make it worth drinking. Creating instant coffee was an odyssey that took centuries, Oscar Sykes and Benjamin Stubbing explain. Almost every early attempt was rancid. John Dring’s 1771 ‘coffee cakes’ of butter and tallow spoiled quickly, while the concentrates of the American Civil War tasted like ‘axle grease’. But the effort was eventually rewarded. In 1937, Max Morgenthaler, a Swiss chemist, developed the technique of spray drying, which, along with later innovations in freeze-drying and flash-freezing, is responsible for the delicious instant coffee we drink today.

The conventional wisdom in European capitals is that offshore processing is the remedy for the Mediterranean crossings, and that this is the lesson of the Australian experience. Amelia Wood analyses the data and comes up with a different view. Arrivals in Australia rose rather than fell after offshore processing was reintroduced in 2012, and continued rising for some time. The boats were eventually stopped by interception at sea and returned to Indonesia. Since 2014, Australia halted new offshore processing altogether, even as arrivals have stayed at zero.

In the twentieth century, religious architecture around the world was reshaped by modernism. Hinduism is a striking exception, Tilak Parekh shows. Today’s monumental Hindu temples are governed by ancient canons, built from load-bearing stone, carved in India by artisans, and assembled by thousands of volunteers. As Hindu communities have grown more prosperous, their adherence to traditional forms has tightened rather than loosened. This photo-essay highlights some of the most beautiful and ambitious architecture being built in the world today.

Buses do not seem like the sort of thing that needed to be invented. Yet they were, explains Samuel Hughes. Wheeled vehicles existed for millennia before it occurred to anyone to run large carriages on fixed intracity routes, at fixed fares, with fixed stops. Blaise Pascal, of Pascal’s wager, invented the bus in 1662, but it was promptly killed by Parisian regulation. The idea was forgotten for a hundred and fifty years, until a bathhouse owner in Nantes stumbled upon it more or less by accident. Sometimes, the best innovations are not physical technologies, but business models.

The centrifugal water pump created a tragedy of the commons by which American farmers have been emptying the giant Ogallala Aquifer, after centuries of sustainable use. Self-driving cars are about to do something comparable to urban roads, argues Ben Southwood. Once time spent in traffic can be used to work, to sleep, or to drink a beer with friends while your car drives itself, traffic jams will become less painful, ruining the roads for people who need to get somewhere quickly. For now, pricing autonomous vehicles’ road use is politically achievable, but it won’t be for long. The window is closing fast.

Notes on Progress

We released three Notes on Progress.

• What’s new in biology: Spring 2026, by Niko McCarty and Saloni Dattani

• Microbubbles, by Ambika Grover, which explains how scientists are developing crazy new delivery mechanisms to get drugs where we need them to go.

• And Saarthak Gupta reviewed Joe Studwell’s new book How Africa Works.

The Works in Progress podcast

The Works in Progress podcast inspired controversy, and not just about Ben’s clothes.

• Samuel, Ben and Aria debunked some of the too-clever explanations for why buildings seem to everyone to have gotten so much uglier. This, plus some tweets from Sam, set off a wave of debate around the internet about whether UK YIMBYs were really NIMBYs in disguise.

• Saloni and Jacob podcasted about whether everyone should be taking statins.

• Saloni and Ben discussed speeding up clinical trials with Ruxandra Teslo and how we can learn from animals to live longer with Aria.

• Pieter, Ben and Aria discussed the articles of Issue 23 of Works in Progress.

• Pieter, Sam, and Aria argued about why Europe has stagnated.

Works in Progress, Out Loud

Lots of people prefer to listen to articles than to read them, or like sometimes to read articles, when their eyes are tired or they are washing up or walking to work. We are working on recording all of our articles professionally, to serve this large audience. So far, we have released five articles Out Loud:

• Two is already too many, by Phoebe Arslanagic-Little

• How to redraw a city, by Anya Martin

• Sunscreen for the planet, by Dakota Gruener and Daniele Visioni

• The algorithm will see you now, by Deena Mousa

• Inflatable space stations, by Angadh Nanjangud

• The death rays that guard life, by Gavriel Kleinwaks

• And How to spot a monopoly, by Brian Albrecht

Invisible College

Invisible College, our week-long residential seminar in Jesus College, Cambridge, is back! If you will be 18–22 during August 2026, then you should apply to come. Alumni from previous years have won Thiel Fellowships, raised $180 million in Series A funding for their AI startups, and got jobs for Works in Progress, the Centre for British Progress, and other friendly organizations. Attendees often tell us it was one of the most important weeks of their lives and that it substantially altered their life plans.

Apply here.

Hiring

• We’re looking for our first Social Media Lead to help grow WIP’s audience. Apply here.

What we’ve been up to

• Sam returned from paternity leave and has been reading a lot of books as a judge for the Orwell Prize. He spoke at Cambridge University’s Bennett School about why Britain’s economic growth hopes lie in fixing the foundations – housing, infrastructure and energy – and wrote for the Washington Post arguing that the downsides of blanket social media bans for teens mean that giving parents greater controls is a better option.

• Ben lectured WIP’s Parisian subscribers on what Britain admires about France and WIP’s New Yorker subscribers on why we need a surge tax on autonomous vehicles. His tweet about UK housing centralization drew a response article from Matt Yglesias. He also wrote effort-tweets on British electricity pricing, declining British political legitimacy, and the dangers of implicit taxation.

• Saloni gave a TED talk at the main conference in Vancouver! It will be released in the coming months. She’s also been writing about the history of clinical trial reforms and the case for sharing individual data from clinical trials for other researchers to learn from.

• Pieter met Works in Progress subscribers in Washington, New York, and Dublin, gave a talk about metascience in Brussels, and spent a lot of time thinking about the Comanche.

• Aria went viral for writing about sexiness and is currently in Berkley, volunteering as a writing adviser for Inkhaven. She hosted a dinner for some of our Bay Area subscribers yesterday evening.

• Samuel has been in Dublin, Paris and Washington DC, talking about housing and meeting subscribers. He is writing about whether ugly architecture generates opposition to development.

• Atalanta returned from a three-week art residency at Xenia creative, a great example of contemporary arts patronage. Her favorite recent book is Peter Godwin’s memoir Exit Wounds.

• Will has been to Dublin for the Issue 23 launch, read Sebastian Mallaby’s biography of Demis Hassabis, and has spent a lot of time, and a few too many tokens, coding tools for the WIP team

• Ryan has been working on an updated version of the WIP website and a new Substack for Stripe Press. In his free time, he saw a repertory screening of Romeo and Juliet (1996), vibe coded a few fun mini apps, and started reading London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe.

• Magnus fulfilled his dream of seeing Akira on the big screen at the Imax and went to Iceland to see friends and family enjoying the last bit of snow before the summer.

• Ellen has been to Dublin to meet Works in Progress subscribers, and at home in London enjoyed bluebells, long walks, and a play about antimicrobial resistance.

Thanks for reading!

You can also listen to the episode on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Since 2014, around three million people have crossed the Mediterranean Sea to claim asylum once they reach European shores. These crossings are extremely dangerous: 33,000 people are missing, presumed dead, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration, a mortality rate of one percent. Unicef reports that at least 3,500 of them were children.

These crossings are deeply unpopular with Europeans. The vast majority of European voters tell pollsters ‘the fight against irregular migration’ is important or a priority. Three quarters say they favor a reinforcement of the EU’s external borders. Populist-right parties across Europe have garnered significant political support thanks to their opposition to the asylum system in its current form (as well as their opposition to other kinds of immigration).

In response, Europe’s leaders are alighting on a curious solution with a dull name: offshore processing. This involves sending and holding asylum seekers overseas while their claims are adjudicated.

Britain’s previous government spent two years trying to send its asylum seekers to Rwanda permanently in order to discourage arrivals on boats who had crossed the English Channel from France. The European Union disavowed that plan, but many of its members now want to try something similar.

Italy is arguing with European courts that it should be allowed to send the asylum seekers its border force collects at sea to Albania for processing. They would only be allowed to go to Italy if their asylum claim is granted. Denmark has passed legislation to enable it to process asylum seekers offshore in the hope that ‘people will stop seeking asylum in Denmark’. In June 2026, it is likely that the EU as a whole will follow suit.

The European Commission plans to loosen rules restricting offshore processing across the bloc. The changes allow more asylum seekers to be processed offshore and a greater number of third countries to host asylum seekers. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, says the changes allow her country’s Albania plan to be put into action.

Europe’s politicians are keen on offshore processing because they think that there is one rich country which has solved its own boat problem with the same approach: Australia. Unauthorized boat arrivals to Australia peaked at over 25,000 people in a 12-month period spanning 2012 and 2013. Then a new policy regime, which included offshore processing, kicked in. Australia did not see a single boat arrival for almost a decade thereafter.

European policymakers are so convinced of Australia’s offshore processing success that Britain’s government appointed an Australian official to help draft its Rwanda plan. It even copied Australia’s ‘Stop the boats’ slogan. Meanwhile, officials from Denmark’s immigration ministry traveled 13,000 kilometers in 2024 for a fact-finding trip to a processing site on Nauru, the small island nation off Australia’s northeast coast.

There is just one problem with this narrative: offshore processing did not stop asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia. Instead, Australia’s success lay in turning boats back to their country of origin before they reached Australian shores.

Many readers will disagree that it is ever right to discourage people from seeking asylum in safe, developed countries. Nevertheless, there are three reasons to take Australia’s example seriously. The first is that many European voters want to reduce the number of asylum seekers coming to their countries, and their elected officials are looking for ways to do that. If they misunderstand the example they are trying to follow, they will spend billions of euros on an approach that is both less effective and less humane than it should be.

The second is that the status quo is awful. Tens of thousands of people have already died attempting to reach Europe. Until Europe’s governments come up with a durable solution, more people will die, including children.

The third reason is that Australia demonstrates that control of the border can preserve some consensus about the asylum system as a whole. As Ruvendrini Menikdiwela, a UN Refugee Agency official, put it, ‘the institution of asylum worldwide is under more threat now than it has ever been’.

But not in Australia: the country is accepting a growing number of asylum claims at a time when most other rich countries are attempting to cut back. Three times as many people applied for asylum in Australia in 2023 as did in 2013, at the height of the boat wave. Today, Australians hold more positive views about the asylum seekers living in their country than people in any of the other 28 mostly rich countries surveyed by Ipsos. The right policy measures can strengthen public trust instead of destroying it.

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The first and second waves

Unauthorized boat arrivals to Australia have a long history. In the 1970s, when the Vietnam War came to an end, Vietnamese refugees sailed for safer countries across the Pacific. By the end of the decade, about 2,000 had reached Australia, forming the country’s first wave of boat arrivals. They were generally well received. One girl recalled a friendly immigration official teaching her her first English word: ‘kangaroo’. Almost all who came were quickly granted refugee status and brought to major cities to start new lives. Arrivals tapered off once the region’s turmoil subsided, and no more boats landed in Australia for most of the 1980s.

The second wave started in 1989 with a single boat carrying 28 asylum seekers. For the following nine years, around three hundred people arrived in Australia by boat annually, mainly to outlying Australian islands in the Indian Ocean like Christmas Island or the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. They were mainly Southeast Asians, arriving in too small a number to cause controversy.

Then something changed. In 1999, the number of boat arrivals rose tenfold. By 2001, it had nearly doubled again. The background of those reaching Australia’s shores changed with the volume. From 1999 onwards, ‘boat people’, as Australians had come to call them, were increasingly from the Middle East or Central Asia. These arrivals often flew to Jakarta before hiring smugglers to evade Indonesian border patrols and arrange a boat destined for Australian territory from one of Indonesia’s southern islands.

Neither the rising number of asylum seekers nor the new role of smugglers was popular with the Australian public. But Australia’s government, led by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, did not think much could be done. Australia already had a policy of detaining all new boat arrivals while their status was ascertained. And while the first wave of arrivals from Vietnam had been granted asylum with little hesitation, the second wave had been treated with more discernment: around 70 percent of arrivals between 1989 and 2001 were not allowed to stay. Those that were granted refugee status were no longer entitled to have their families join them. But these changes were not sufficient to discourage people from setting sail.

In August 2001, a small fishing boat carrying 433 Afghan asylum seekers set sail from Indonesia. Overcrowded and dilapidated, the boat sank before it reached its destination of Christmas Island, an Australian territory near the Indonesian coast. A nearby Norwegian container ship, the MV Tampa, rescued the passengers.

The Tampa first turned back towards Indonesia but then continued on to Christmas Island after the rescued asylum seekers insisted. The Howard government denied the ship entry into Australian waters. After the Tampa entered Australian waters anyway, the government ordered the navy to board the ship and prevent it from landing.

The spectacle of the Tampa affair, which drew worldwide attention, led Australia to adopt a much tougher stance towards boat arrivals. The government’s refusal to let the Tampa land had been hugely popular with the public: 77 percent of Australian voters supported it, according to one poll. The Howard government was heading towards an election in the autumn. After the Tampa affair, it drew up a new, tougher border strategy to discourage further boats from reaching Australia, which it called the Pacific Solution. A new border protection act was passed to retroactively condone the government’s actions over the Tampa affair and to enable three new policies.

First, Christmas Island and other Australian islands near Indonesia were excised from Australia’s migration zone. Asylum seekers reaching them were thereafter not considered to have legally entered Australia (a requirement for applying for asylum). This stretched the journey boats would have to make from Indonesia to reach a part of Australia which still counted for asylum from 200 miles to 400 miles or more.

The second policy was offshore processing. Boat arrivals that did reach the Australian mainland to claim asylum became liable to be sent to Nauru or Papua New Guinea or even back to Christmas Island while their asylum claim was considered. Only successful applicants were to be allowed into mainland Australia.

The third policy was called Operation Relex. The Howard government ordered the Australian navy to intercept all boats during their journey to Australia. Those intercepted were either brought to offshore processing centers directly, without ever reaching mainland Australia, or else turned back, meaning that the navy escorted the boat back to its point of departure, usually the southern islands of Indonesia.

Around 12 boats, collectively carrying about 1,700 people, were intercepted under Operation Relex between September and December 2001. Boats carrying about 500 people were turned back to Indonesian waters. This angered the Indonesian government, which expressed private objections to Australian officials. But, in the end, it opted not to make a public fuss and acquiesced to the Australian approach. The other intercepted boats were brought to offshore processing centers.

The Pacific Solution was not cheap. Together the policies were estimated to have cost around A$1.4 billion ($900m) in today’s prices, mostly due to the cost of accommodating the 1,637 people sent offshore. Nor was it easy. People often reacted badly to the prospect of being turned back or brought to offshore processing centers. Several times those on board engaged in hunger strikes, sabotaged their boats, or jumped overboard. At least once, a small child was dangled overboard by one of the adults and dropped into the water, before being rescued by another passenger. The goal was to force a rescue by Australian authorities that would make an onshore asylum claim possible.

Nevertheless, the impact of the Pacific Solution on boat arrivals appeared almost instantaneous. Only a single person landed in Australia in 2002, compared with 5,516 in 2001. Boat arrivals remained below 150 annually thereafter. In 2004, John Howard turned the success of his approach into a resounding election win.

When change happens, it can be hard to separate cause from effect. At the time, many denied that the Pacific Solution was responsible for the fall in migration. One academic suggested that it was the spectacle of the Tampa affair itself that had discouraged many subsequent attempts. Others argued the overlap between the fall in arrivals and Australian policy changes was just a coincidence. Conflicts in the Middle East had calmed down at the same time, leading fewer people to flee. And, even if the Pacific Solution did make a difference, it was not clear which of the three measures – narrowing Australia’s migration zone, offshore processing, and naval turnbacks – were responsible for the fall.

Australia is interesting because this whole episode more or less happened again several years later. The Pacific Solution never won a cross-party consensus. It was formally ended by Kevin Rudd’s Labor government on 8th February 2008. Labor’s immigration minister called it a ‘cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise’. What happened next provides a laboratory for understanding exactly what discouraged boat arrivals.

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The third wave

With the end of the Pacific Solution came the return of boats. The number of arrivals rose by a factor of 17 in 2009 and continued to climb in the years following. Having campaigned against the Pacific Solution, the Rudd government found itself in a bind. In 2010, 78 percent of Australian voters were somewhat or very concerned about asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat.

Halfway through 2012, arrivals surpassed the previous 2001 peak. The government, then under Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard, decided to pivot. In August 2012, the legislature passed an amendment to reinstate offshore processing on Nauru and Papua New Guinea as a ‘matter of urgency’. The first asylum seekers arrived in Nauru the following month.

This time, it didn’t work. In the six months following the reintroduction of offshore processing, ten thousand more people arrived on Australia’s shores by boat. By the end of November, the Immigration Minister announced facilities in Nauru and Papua New Guinea were overwhelmed. Further arrivals to Australia’s shores would be given bridging visas to live in Australia while their claims were assessed.

The continuing upswell of arrivals led to an even tougher stance. In May 2013, mainland Australia was itself excised from the migration zone. In July of the same year, after Rudd returned to power, the government legislated that arrivals on or after 13th July 2013 would not only be sent offshore, but would never have the chance to settle in Australia even if their asylum claim were granted, a harder line than had been taken under the Pacific Solution.

Refugees could either settle in Nauru or Papua New Guinea, or hope that another country would agree to their being resettled there. To make space in offshore facilities, the government moved all those currently resident to Australia on temporary visas, so that the space could be filled again with new arrivals.

It was not enough to save the Labor government. In September 2013, Rudd was voted out in favor of an opposition coalition that promised a still tougher approach. Within days of election victory, the new government, led by Liberal politician Tony Abbott, introduced a policy it called Operation Sovereign Borders.

Under this approach, offshore processing was kept, but the emphasis shifted to boat turnbacks. Australia resumed navy-led policing of its borders. As during Operation Relex, the navy was charged with intercepting and turning back any boat that tried to reach the mainland’s shores. In the early stages, from September to December, intercepted boats were escorted to offshore processing facilities. After that, the policy changed to turning boats back directly to Indonesian waters.

Indonesia was again displeased, announcing in November 2013 that it would not take back asylum seekers rescued by Australian ships in Indonesian waters. Australia apologized, but continued to haul ships back.

The turnback operation had grown more sophisticated. During Operation Relex, attempting to turn back rickety, often-sabotaged, overloaded boats was a perilous task. Sabotage led to fire on board at least once, after a migrant boat was intercepted and passengers were told they might be turned back. At least five people were killed, and many others severely burned, in a separate well-reported incident in 2009 (authorities did not intend to turn the boat back, but passengers believed they were going to).

By Operation Sovereign Borders, the navy had taken to towing commercial lifeboats onto which they transferred passengers before bringing the lifeboat back to international or foreign waters. These commercial lifeboats were gradually replaced with purpose-built vessels. The navy’s equipment was also upgraded. This made turnbacks easier and safer to carry out.

In 2014, only a single boat made it to Australia. None did for almost a decade afterward.

Offshore processing didn’t work. Turnbacks did.

What can we learn from these two rounds of boats and policies? The first is that it is clear the policies made the difference. In both instances, arrivals fell sharply when the government introduced some combination of offshore processing and boat turnbacks. Arrivals rose after such policies were lifted.

The evidence was enough to satisfy politicians. Though the Labor party had initially resisted and eventually undid the Pacific Solution, by 2016 all major parties supported offshore processing and boat turnbacks. Even Operation Sovereign Borders’ strongest opponents eventually changed their minds. Anthony Albanese was deputy prime minister in Rudd’s government and argued against the policy in opposition for several years. In 2018, he conceded that it had stopped the boats. Now he is prime minister, his government regularly turns back boats which attempt to reach Australia.

The two most impactful policies were offshore processing and boat turnbacks: boat arrival numbers to Australia reached their minimums in 2001 and 2013 when both were in place. But of the two, turnbacks were by far the more decisive.

One key point of evidence is that Gillard’s reintroduction of offshore processing did not quell arrivals: numbers hit record highs in the year after its reintroduction. People set sail undeterred, likely because offshore processing no longer presented a credible blocker to eventually settling in Australia.

The sheer volume of arrivals quickly overwhelmed capacity offshore, such that a new boat arrival under Gillard was unlikely to be sent for processing there: only about 1,000 of the around 20,000 arrivals eligible over this period were sent offshore. Even if an arrival was sent offshore, the lesson of the Pacific Solution was that it might not matter: about 70 percent of the roughly 1,600 people sent offshore during the Pacific Solution eventually made it to Australia or another rich country.

Despite offshore processing, there was a good chance a prospective asylum seeker would eventually achieve their goal of settling in Australia. It appears thousands concluded that it was still worth taking that chance.

Arrival numbers did not fall immediately, even after the Rudd government re-emptied offshore facilities and removed the prospect of those processed offshore ever settling in Australia. More than 1,500 people on at least 20 boats arrived in Australia in the 16 days after Rudd’s change, compared with a few hundred in the same time period after Operation Sovereign Borders began later that year.

This is still not conclusive: given the lengthy trip involved, it is possible any policy could lag in taking effect, and the gap between Rudd’s strengthening of offshore processing and Abbott’s shift to pushbacks was only about two months.

In addition, Rudd’s rules for offshore processing were stricter than what had come before. A much higher proportion of people were sent offshore than under Gillard, which may have had a stronger deterrent effect, and under Rudd, even those granted refugee status were told they would not ever settle in Australia.

But the final and definitive proof in favor of turnbacks is what happened after Operation Sovereign Borders got underway. The Australian government still had a capacity problem, as facilities offshore had rapidly refilled. So, over the course of 2014, it quietly ended transfers to Nauru, Papua New Guinea, and Christmas Island and swapped to using only turnbacks for new boats. The last boat sent offshore was in 2014. Nevertheless, boat arrivals remained nil for years after. Turnbacks alone proved to be enough.

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Learning the wrong lessons

It is understandable that offshore processing appeals more to European leaders than intercepting and turning back refugee boats. Those sent offshore are out of sight and out of mind. Meanwhile, operations on the water are visible, risky, and may lead to legal difficulties.

The European Court of Human Rights has judged that some cases of turnbacks count as ‘collective expulsion’, prohibited under European human rights law. Processing asylum claimants offshore also provides a way to relieve the domestic asylum system of those who have already reached Europe, which boat turnbacks cannot.

But that does not mean offshore processing is actually the most effective way to reduce boat arrivals. Australia’s success has been easy to misinterpret. Australia’s offshore processing received prominent, sustained coverage in the press around the world. Meanwhile, the boat turnbacks received comparatively little publicity; the government kept most details about Operation Relex and Operation Sovereign Borders secret, regularly refusing to comment on operational matters.

There are other reasons to question offshore processing. It is hugely expensive. The Australian government spent A$1.5 billion ($1 billion USD) a year on offshore processing after it reintroduced the policy in 2012. That is in part because it is practically difficult.

An interested government must pay another country for the privilege. Britain, for example, paid Rwanda £270 million ($365 million) simply to sign up to its plan. Facilities must be big enough to house a rapid inflow of arrivals, or they are pointless. Australia maintained several thousand places, which turned out not to be nearly enough. And it is the government’s responsibility to support those it sends offshore.

Offshore processing can also be a cruel policy. Those ineligible for asylum elsewhere in the world remain stuck offshore if they do not wish to return home. Even those deemed legitimate refugees were not permitted to settle in Australia; they had to wait for another country to agree to take them.

Five years after offshore processing was reintroduced, well over a thousand people were still living offshore on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea, over half of whom had been recognized as refugees. One person remained in Nauru for 11 years. Six people committed suicide while offshore. In the end, most did eventually settle in Australia, but they endured a long, uncertain wait first.

Turnbacks have their own costs. They may stop legitimate refugees from reaching any safe country. And there is the risk that something could go wrong while attempting to turn back boats of questionable seaworthiness. All sailors have an international obligation to ensure the safety of lives at sea. Sometimes the Australian navy would abandon a turnback attempt because they judged the boat could not make the return journey. Offshore processing was then a helpful backup to ensure that overall deterrence was maintained.

But, on net, Australia’s turnback policy has made its waters much, much safer than they were. Between 2008 and 2013, when turnbacks were not in force, over 1,200 people drowned attempting to reach the Australian shore. Yet no one is believed to have drowned in the years after turnbacks were reintroduced. By ensuring those attempting the crossing would have no chance of reaching Australia, Australia removed the incentive people had had to risk their lives, and people smugglers lost the market for their unsafe boats.

In the meantime, Australian hostility to asylum seekers has softened. In 2010, 78 percent of Australians told the Lowy Institute they were concerned or very concerned about unauthorized asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat. By 2022, the proportion of Australians who thought boat turnbacks and asylum seekers were an important election issue had halved.

Asked by Ipsos last year whether refugees make a positive contribution to their country, 57 percent of Australians agreed, 17 percentage points higher than the average in the European countries surveyed. Three in four supported the global right to asylum, more than any European country except Sweden and the Netherlands. Three times as many people applied for asylum in Australia in 2023 as did in 2013, at the height of the boat wave, to little public outcry. At 120 claims per 100,000 people in 2023, Australia has become more welcoming to asylum seekers than the famously welcoming Scandinavian countries.

It’s no wonder Europeans are so interested in how Australia solved its boat problem. So far, though, they have drawn the wrong conclusions about what it actually did. Turning boats around, not processing people offshore, is what really worked.

Amelia Wood is a writer and journalist. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Organ transplants have become much more efficient. Most organ transplants in the US come from deceased donors, and technology has made it much easier to recover those organs and keep them alive for transplants. A new study, looking at all organ transplants from deceased donors, finds a massive rise in the number of organs recovered for donation in the last five years. In 2000, around 2 percent of donors who died from circulatory death were able to donate their organs; that figure rose to 49 percent in 2025.

The authors attribute this to the use of normothermic regional perfusion, a procedure that’s used to restore blood flow to organs after they’re removed from deceased donors, which became more commonly used since 2019, and new machines to perform this procedure for the liver, which were approved in 2021.

Semaglutide doesn’t slow down Alzheimer’s disease. GLP1 drugs like semaglutide have shown benefits for weight loss, diabetes, kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease, and observational data suggested they might also reduce dementia risk. But two large phase three trials of nearly 4,000 patients with early confirmed Alzheimer’s disease have found no effect on disease progression across cognitive and functional measures.

[Saloni: I expected a slight benefit of GLP-1 drugs through their cardiovascular effects in reducing vascular dementia, which can co-occur with Alzheimer’s, though not a direct benefit.] It’s a useful reminder of the importance of randomized controlled trials, even when there’s plausible evidence or observational data supporting an effect. In this case, it was likely the result of confounding. Sadly, the list of failed Alzheimer’s drugs is long.

A transformative new drug for pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is one of the deadliest cancers, with a five-year survival rate of just 13 percent; advances in therapy against the disease have been slow. A key reason is that around three-quarters of these cancers are driven by mutations in KRAS, a protein that has been considered essentially undruggable because it lacks an obvious binding site for a drug molecule. A new treatment, called daraxonrasib, gets around this by first binding to another protein in the cell, cyclophilin A, forming a complex that can then latch onto and block mutant KRAS, cutting off the signal that drives tumor growth.

In a phase three trial of around 500 patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer who had already progressed while on chemotherapy, the company reported a median overall survival of 13.2 months with daraxonrasib versus 6.7 months with chemotherapy, roughly doubling survival.

That is an unprecedented result for a cancer that has so far been devastating and stubbornly resistant to progress. These are topline numbers released by the company, and detailed data on safety and subgroup analyses will help understand the result better. The drug also appears to cause significant side effects, including serious bleeding and skin problems. But it may also be one of the biggest cancer breakthroughs of the year, if not decade.

This trial enrolled patients with late-stage pancreatic cancer, but phase three trials are also underway testing the drug as a first-line treatment and as an add-on for patients whose tumors are still surgically treatable. The drug is also being tested in lung cancer, and could be expanded further; KRAS mutations drive roughly 20 percent of all human cancers. Since a viable mechanism for targeting KRAS has been demonstrated to work in patients, researchers can focus on iterating, improving safety, optimizing dosing, testing combinations, pushing the drug earlier in the disease course, and expanding its use for other cancers.

Weight loss drugs that also preserve muscle mass are moving through the pipeline. A well-known side effect of GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide is that around a quarter of the weight lost comes from lean tissue rather than fat, because the drugs work by suppressing appetite rather than directly targeting fat.

A new phase two trial tests whether combining semaglutide with bimagrumab, a new antibody, can address this. Bimagrumab blocks activin receptors, which normally promote fat storage and limit muscle growth, and the idea is that the two drugs work through distinct mechanisms, so their effects on fat loss should be additive, while its muscle-preserving action could offset muscle loss from semaglutide. The trial found that people lost much more fat on the combination treatment than with semaglutide alone, 34 percent compared with a 21 percent reduction in fat mass, while they retained most lean mass, with a 1–2 percent reduction compared to a 7 percent in the semaglutide-only group.

It’s worth noting that bimagrumab has its own drawbacks: it’s given by intravenous injection, which will likely reduce its usage, and likely caused muscle spasms and acne in roughly half the patients in the trial.

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Cell simulation caveats. Researchers built a computational model that simulates one cell division, about 100 minutes of biological time, for a single bacterial cell. Each simulation takes four to six days to run on two NVIDIA A100 GPUs and includes some randomness, meaning each simulation plays out slightly differently. After running the simulation 50 times and averaging the results, researchers found they could make a few predictions about how cells work without fitting to experimental data. For example, the simulated cells divided every 105 minutes, which matched experiments, and mRNA molecules had an average half-life of 3.63 minutes, which is close to ground truth.

The cell they’re modeling is JCVI-syn3A, a highly-engineered bacterium with a minimal genome of just 493 genes, compared to over 4,000 for E. coli. Its proteome, transcriptome, and metabolism have all been studied in depth, making it a really good starting point for whole-cell simulation. Rather than simulate every molecule individually (which would vastly exceed the capabilities of any modern computer), the authors instead wrote down all the stuff that happens inside a cell, like transcription, translation, and metabolism, and decided which type of mathematical model would be best-suited to describe each thing. Some cell processes were modeled deterministically, others had ‘spatial’ elements, and other parts were relatively random.

The final simulation had four parts: A Reaction-Diffusion Master Equation (RDME), used to model the individual proteins, RNAs, and ribosomes; a Chemical Master Equation, used to model things where spatial location doesn’t matter as much; Ordinary Differential Equations, used to model changes in metabolite concentrations, and Brownian Dynamics, which simulated the chromosome as a physical chain of beads.

All four models are run together, using a script that synchronizes their results with each other. The Reaction-Diffusion equation takes time steps of 50 microseconds of biological time. Every 12.5 milliseconds of biological time – or after the Reaction-Diffusion equation runs 250 times – the simulation pauses so that the other models can synchronize based on the latest state of the simulation.

This simulation seems to be a major advance over any other existing whole-cell models, but it still does not include a lot of things. For example, the simulation doesn’t account for polysomes, which are clusters of ribosomes that all latch onto a single mRNA and translate at the same time. Polysomes are really common inside of cells, but this simulation assumes that each mRNA can only be translated by one ribosome at a time. Also, it does not include polycistronic transcription. In bacteria, genes are often grouped next to each other on the chromosome and thus transcribed – turned into mRNA – all at once, together. The majority of genes in E. coli, for example, are arranged in these operons, and the authors of this paper acknowledge that many syn3A genes are likely co-transcribed the same way. But the simulation doesn’t capture it.

With that said, this paper is important because by trying to simulate a cell, we are able to figure out what we don’t yet understand and, therefore, which experiments we ought to perform to reconcile those gaps.

A highly effective new hypertension drug. The body regulates blood pressure partly through aldosterone, a hormone that tells the kidneys to retain salt and water. Some people with hypertension have very high aldosterone levels.

A new drug, baxdrostat, blocks the enzyme that produces aldosterone, reducing how much salt and fluid the kidneys retain. This phase three trial tested the drug in patients with ‘resistant hypertension’, who were already on ≥3 blood pressure drugs but still couldn’t get their readings within recommended levels, <140 mmHg. Researchers measured their ambulatory blood pressure with a monitor worn for 24 hours. That’s much better than single clinic readings, which can be inflated by anxiety and miss overnight blood pressure, which is a strong predictor of heart disease risk.

After 12 weeks, baxdrostat reduced systolic pressure by about 14 mmHg compared to placebo; that makes it one of the largest reductions seen with an antihypertensive drug.

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The brain shields tumors from the immune system. For a new study, researchers mapped how a lung tumor talks with the brain in mice. Lung tumors secrete proteins that attract sensory nerves from the vagus, which connects internal organs to the brain. Some of these neurons, which are marked by a specific protein called NPY2R, then send signals from the tumor through the brainstem. In response, the brainstem ramps up sympathetic nerve firing, coaxing noradrenaline to go into the tumor and shield it from attacks by the immune system. When researchers destroyed this circuit, either by silencing the sensory neurons with chemicals or deleting the proteins involved entirely, the lung tumors grew more slowly, the immune system, specifically T cells, was more active, and the mice lived much longer. The next step will be to figure out whether similar circuits exist for other cancers and in other organisms, including humans, before building medicines to disrupt it.

We finally know how plants make nicotine. Nicotine, the molecule, was first isolated nearly 200 years ago by German chemists. It is made from two ring-shaped molecules fused together, but nobody quite knew the enzymes responsible for that final step; the fusion. A new study in Cell, from a group in Shanghai, identifies the enzymes responsible and maps the full pathway for the first time.

An enzyme called A622 strips carbon dioxide from one of the rings, called nicotinic acid, thus making the molecule highly reactive. This reactive intermediate then attacks the other ring, joining the two halves together. Other enzymes strip off a lingering sugar group to make nicotine. Figuring this out took many years of work, as the scientists grew 643 inbred plant lines by crossing together 26 different parent tobacco plants. They finally stumbled upon a mutant plant which was not able to make nicotine, and then sequenced its entire genome. They also crossed back this plant and inbred it for two generations to find the mutation responsible; a single C-to-T swap. With these data and other metabolism experiments (in which plants are fed with heavy isotopes, and those atoms get tracked through the plant), they identified the missing enzymes and biosynthetic steps. And then, just for good measure, the researchers rebuilt the entire pathway in yeast, tomato plants, eggplants, and peas using synthetic genes, just to prove it all worked as they thought.

Did AI cure a dog of cancer? The most viral health story of late concerns Paul Conyngham, a Sydney tech entrepreneur with no biology background who used AI tools to design a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog, Rosie. Conyngham paid $3,000 to sequence Rosie’s tumor DNA, used AI tools to study the sequence, and then worked with a nearby university to manufacture and inject a custom mRNA vaccine. ‘The tennis ball-sized tumour on Rosie’s hock has shrunk in half’ as a result, according to reporting in The Australian.

Making a one-off mRNA vaccine is not especially hard, as bioengineer Patrick Heizer explains. Researchers cure mice of cancer routinely. It’s much harder to prove that a therapy is both safe and effective in human trials. The $3,000 figure mentioned above is also only the cost of the sequencing itself. The actual cost for these experiments, including reagents and labor, was likely far higher.

Palli Thordarson, Director of the RNA Institute where the work was done, further clarified that not all of Rosie’s tumors responded to the vaccine. The team is investigating whether the dog’s various tumors each mutated in unique ways, which may have made the vaccine less effective against some of them. Thordarson also said the treatment involved the co-administration of a checkpoint inhibitor, anti-PD-1, which is itself a highly effective anticancer drug. This confounds the results, making it unclear whether the mRNA therapy or the anti-PD-1 drug was most useful for Rosie.

This story is most useful, in our eyes, for what it says about the ridiculous, bureaucratic hurdles required for clinical testing, even on dogs. ‘The red tape was actually harder than the vaccine creation, and I was trying to get an Australian ethics approval and run a dog trial on Rosie,’ said Conyngham. ‘It took me three months, putting two hours aside every single night, just typing the 100 page document.’ Similar bureaucracy pervades clinical trials in the US and UK, and we should urgently find faster ways to design and test drugs in human patients.

Egg freezing is much more effective than most people think. Articles in major publications like The New York Times (‘Sobering study shows challenges of egg freezing’) and Vox (‘The failed promise of egg freezing’) have reported that only about two fifths of women will be able to successfully have children from their frozen eggs. Articles about adjacent topics, often criticizing companies for offering egg freezing as a perk, give a needlessly pessimistic tone: ‘the odds are stacked heavily against you.’ (Glamour magazine); ‘Success rates for frozen eggs vary widely, but rarely go above 30 per cent’ (Financial Times); ‘Despite the growing popularity of egg freezing for women who want kids eventually but not right now, doctors don’t actually recommend the procedure for this purpose’ (Business Insider).

These articles usually reference a study from 2022 that finds that only 39 percent of patients had a baby, but what this coverage misses is that the average age of the women was 38 when they froze their eggs. Their fertility had already begun a precipitous decline. But declining fertility in women is largely about egg, not womb, aging, meaning that a woman who freezes her eggs in her twenties will have roughly the same chances of successful IVF in her forties. The oldest woman ever to give birth using a young donor egg was 74.

Anti-egg freezing media has real life consequences. Women, in general, do not know how successful egg freezing is. Even the women who undergo egg freezing don’t know quite how good it is. Even medical students and doctors don’t know.

Rather than freezing their eggs in their twenties, when it would be optimal, women often freeze their eggs as a last resort. The rate of egg freezing for women aged 18–34 is the same as that for women between 43 and 44. This is despite the fact that women aged 43 to 44 who use their own eggs have a success rate of less than ten percent even after multiple rounds of IVF, versus about 85 percent for women under 35.

Ultimately, the choice of whether to freeze eggs is personal and will depend on finances, life plans, relationship status, and career choices. Like any medical procedure, it is not guaranteed to succeed. Some women are infertile or just very unlucky. But it is possible for most women and much easier than the press would have you believe, as long as it is done in time.

We are both women in our late twenties. We are freezing our eggs to make sure we can have the number of children we want whatever happens in our lives and careers. One of us is a biologist (Ruxandra) and the other is an economist (Luzia). We have teamed up to demystify a process that is both emotionally charged and improperly covered, and explain why more young women should consider freezing their eggs too.

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Why fertility falls with age

Why does the ability to get pregnant decline with age? The conventional wisdom is that fertility is relatively constant and then drops sharply after 35. Accurately measuring this is challenging as many studies use small samples or adversely selected populations, like those undergoing fertility treatment, but recent research shows that reality is more complicated than the conventional wisdom might suggest.

One issue is the confusion between fertility and fecundability. Fertility refers to the observed number of births per woman in a population over a given period, while fecundability is the monthly probability that a woman who has regular unprotected sex will conceive a viable pregnancy. Fecundability reflects the biological capacity for conception, whereas fertility reflects the actual number of children a woman has chosen to have.

Historically, researchers could observe only fertility. One of the most consequential studies in this regard comes from 1986, when researchers analyzed a mix of historical populations (including seventeenth-century Genevan bourgeoisie and twentieth-century Iranian peasants) and produced an age-fertility curve that became the foundation for modern beliefs about age-related reproductive decline. Their figure showed a concave pattern, in which fertility was stable through a woman’s twenties and early thirties before dropping sharply after the age of 35.

However, this fertility data is a poor proxy for fecundability. Many of the younger women in these historical populations were biologically incapable of conceiving, either because they were pregnant or because they had recently given birth. Including these women in the denominator artificially depressed fecundability estimates for younger women. Older women, who were less likely to be pregnant or postpartum, did not suffer the same bias.

Modern data shows that the cliff is a statistical illusion. Once you restrict the denominator to women who can actually conceive, fecundity declines roughly linearly from the early twenties onward, with no abrupt mid-thirties break. But it does decline. This decline in fertility with age is underpinned by two factors: a decrease in the quantity of eggs and a decrease in the quality of eggs.

Running out of eggs

Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have, each sitting in a protective sac called a follicle. Most of the eggs are immature, kept in the spare pool called the ovarian reserve. Only a small number of them grow to become antral follicles. These antral follicles are the eggs that the body will mature and release during ovulation. They will either be fertilized or removed in a menstrual cycle. They are also the eggs that can be recovered in an egg freezing cycle.

Women can be born with anywhere from two to six million eggs in their ovarian reserve, but most will ovulate only three to four hundred over a lifetime. The vast majority of primordial follicles are instead destroyed through a quality control filter that eliminates follicles whose eggs or surrounding cells are metabolically stressed, damaged, or poorly supported.

This steady attrition drastically reduces the ovarian reserve over time. By the time a woman hits menopause, only a thousand of the original two to six million remain. As the ovarian reserve declines, the antral follicle count declines almost proportionally. There is a strong correlation between antral follicle count and age. This relationship helps explain why IVF success rates decrease with age.

Egg quality

Egg quality declines with age too. As she ages, a woman’s eggs lose their ability to maintain the correct number of chromosomes.

Unlike most body cells, which routinely divide and make new proteins, eggs spend decades in a hibernation-like state that lasts until they are ovulated. Protein turnover is minimal during this period. Although eggs live for a remarkably long time compared to other cells, this hibernation does not stop all the effects of aging: oxidation, DNA damage, epigenetic drift and mitochondrial dysfunction all still happen. As a result, the proteins that run cell division become damaged or depleted, and the molecular pieces needed to guarantee the right number of chromosomes start to fail.

The cohesin complex is a ring of proteins that clamps each pair of chromosomes together until the moment they should separate. When the cohesin complex ages, the clamp degrades, potentially leading to a premature separation of the chromosomes.

Centromeres, the protein docking sites on chromosomes, also lose structural integrity with age. Normally, these form sturdy attachments to spindle microtubules, the protein cables that move chromosomes during cell division. When they weaken, chromosomes are more likely to attach improperly or be pulled in the wrong direction.

Together, weakened cohesion and faulty attachments cause chromosomes to split unevenly. This means more eggs end up aneuploid (with too many or too few chromosomes) and a smaller share remain euploid (with the normal set). Aneuploid eggs give rise to aneuploid embryos, which usually fail to implant, or result in early miscarriage. In the rare cases that aneuploid embryos can be carried to term, they grow into people with severe developmental disorders such as Down syndrome (three copies of chromosome 21, called trisomy 21), Patau syndrome (trisomy 13), and Edwards syndrome (trisomy 18), all of which increase in incidence with maternal age, sharply after 28.

The egg freezing and IVF journey

Before starting an IVF cycle, women undergo a series of medical evaluations, including blood tests and hormone measurements. The baseline transvaginal ultrasound measures the antral follicle count, the best estimate of how many eggs can be retrieved, and in turn the best indicator of IVF success that we have, given a woman’s age and health.

The actual IVF cycle begins with a drug regimen that induces multiple follicles to mature over 10–12 days. During this time, the patient undergoes ultrasound monitoring every two or three days to track follicle growth. Once the follicles reach the desired size, they are collected through a minor surgery. Roughly four fifths of all follicles removed yield eggs, and roughly four fifths of those eggs are suitable for fertilization. The suitable eggs are then inseminated and cultured for about a week before they are ready for transfer. This stage suffers from high attrition, and only about half of the fertilized eggs complete it. Of these, one is typically selected for transfer to the uterus in the hope of achieving a pregnancy and live birth.

​​Egg or embryo freezing follows the same course, except the process either stops after the eggs have been retrieved or after embryos have formed. The collected eggs or embryos are instead frozen and stored until the patient is ready to get pregnant. Historically, this relied on slow freezing, a gradual cooling method that took several hours and often formed damaging ice crystals inside the cells. Since the mid-2000s, a rapid flash freezing technique, which cools eggs to minus 196 degrees Celsius almost instantly, has been used instead, preventing ice crystal formation and dramatically improving survival rates. Once frozen, the biological clock for these gametes or embryos is effectively stopped. Large-scale studies show that frozen eggs almost always retain their quality and chromosomal integrity, and thawed eggs that survive defrosting perform as well as fresh eggs of the same biological age.

How many eggs can you expect per cycle?

Women between 18 and 34 in developed countries undergoing embryo freezing cycles collect a median of 14 eggs per cycle. There is a lot of natural variation. A cycle can yield anything from zero to more than 50 eggs, even among women at peak fertility. But since roughly 80 percent of a woman’s antral follicles are retrieved as eggs, knowing how many antral follicles a woman has allows us to predict how many eggs a cycle will yield accurately.

This number is whittled down by the embryo stage. As in normal IVF, half of fertilized eggs become suitable for transfer, and two thirds of these have the right number of chromosomes. Ultimately, for the median egg yield of 14 eggs you can expect 2.9 healthy frozen embryos on average, or to put it another way: young women who go through even one cycle of embryo freezing can often freeze enough euploid embryos to have a majority chance of a live birth.

The numbers are even more optimistic for women in their twenties. Data on egg freezing is often combined across the 18–34 age range, which can lead to an underestimate of the number of eggs retrieved for younger women in that group. The largest study on egg donation programs, carried out on 9,539 women with a median age of 26, reported a median of 20 retrieved eggs and six usable embryos.

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The practicalities of egg freezing

Having outlined how egg freezing works and the probabilities that determine its success, we now turn to the main practical considerations that shape how women pursue it: cost, location, and clinic choice

Many women assume egg freezing is prohibitively expensive because they are exposed to American prices ($17,000 per round) or, to a lesser extent, the UK (where it costs around $8,500). Egg freezing at a Spanish clinic uses the same state-of-the-art techniques and equipment, but costs only around $5,000. Spain is internationally recognized for its excellent IVF and has been a pioneer in adopting innovative reproductive technologies. For example, IVI Valencia was among the first clinics to adopt vitrification for egg freezing and published research on its success rates, helping to establish the technique in everyday fertility practice.

The full egg-freezing process takes about two to three weeks, but many Spanish clinics partner with clinics in the UK and other countries so that all pre-retrieval monitoring can be done locally. In that case, you need to travel to Spain only for the egg retrieval, requiring just a four-day stay, and then again for IVF some years later. For every year you wait, you will likely save several hundred dollars, as storing frozen eggs costs about $500–$1,000 in the US and $200–$500 in Spain. At worst, the price difference pays for two trips to Spain. At best, you will save several thousand dollars on top.

A second major issue is clinic quality, which varies dramatically. For example, low oxygen levels are important in embryo culture because early embryos are not adapted to the high oxygen concentration found in room air. In the body, mammal embryos develop in the fallopian tube and uterus at oxygen concentrations of around two to eight percent, far lower than the 21 percent oxygen of atmospheric air. Yet many clinics still fail to use natural oxygen levels in their embryo culture chambers.

These differences matter: success rates are not uniform across the industry. The top clinics achieve success rates above 60 percent per embryo transfer, more than double those of the lowest-performing clinics, which are closer to 30 percent. Verifying your clinic’s success rate is extremely important: we recommend the CDC website in the US; the UK fertility regulator’s Choose your clinic tool; and the Spanish Reproduccion Asistida ORG.

Clinics do not all use the same metrics and the variation is often confusing. The three most meaningful metrics are success per embryo transfer, which measures the number of live births once an embryo is transferred, success per IVF cycle, which measures live births from the start of an egg retrieval cycle, and frozen egg survival rate, which is the proportion of eggs that survive thawing years later.

We recommend relying on statistics from official agencies rather than the headline numbers advertised by clinics themselves. Agencies across countries report success per embryo transfer and per IVF cycle. No regulatory body requires fertility clinics to report frozen egg survival rates, despite this being a fundamental determinant of whether egg freezing ultimately pays off. While overall clinic quality is correlated with egg-freezing success, patients should look for more specific indicators. Positive signs include clinics that have published peer-reviewed research on their egg-freezing programs, clinics with large and well-established egg donation programs, and clinics with long-standing experience in egg freezing.

Should you freeze your eggs?

Egg freezing’s problem today is opacity, not ineffectiveness. We are freezing our eggs. If you are a woman in your twenties or early thirties who can afford it, and think you are very likely to want to have children, but are not sure exactly when, then we think you should freeze yours too. If you face expensive British or American prices, go on holiday to Spain, where it is equally state of the art but many times cheaper. If you definitely do not want to have children, or want only one and have a partner lined up already, then you may not need to bother.

To achieve a strong chance of a future live birth, we recommend freezing approximately 20 eggs in your late twenties or early thirties. This estimate is based on interpolating across the largest available studies, though the literature is not fully consistent. For example, a 2016 study from Spain found that for women under 35, the cumulative live birth rate plateaued after about 15 frozen eggs, reaching 85.2 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval between 60.5 and 100 percent. Other studies suggest a slightly higher cutoff, closer to 20 eggs. When donor eggs are used, where the donors are selected for high fertility and health, the cumulative success rates reach almost 100 percent.

Whatever you do, do not listen to the articles that say that egg and embryo freezing do not work. Not only do they work, but they work almost as well as the best way to guarantee your fertility, which is to be young when you try to conceive. Egg freezing is the best way to give women the freedom to control when they have children, without having to worry they will not be able to.

Ruxandra Teslo leads the Clinical Trial Abundance Initiative. You can follow her on Twitter.

Luzia Bruckamp is an economics PhD student at the London School of Economics. You can follow her on Twitter.

Read their guide to all the other practical details of egg freezing here.

Japan is the land of the train. 28 percent of passenger kilometers in Japan are travelled by rail, more than anywhere else in the developed world. France achieves 10 percent, Germany 6.4 percent, and the United States just 0.25 percent. Travel in Japan is over a hundred times more likely to be by rail than travel in the United States.

Japan’s vast railway network is divided between dozens of companies, nearly all of them private. The largest of these, JR East, carries more passengers than the entire railway system of every country other than China and India. Each year, JR East carries four times as many passengers as the whole British railway system, even though it has fewer kilometers of track, serves about ten million fewer people, and competes with eight other companies. Japan’s railway system turns a large operating profit and receives far less public subsidy than European and American railways.

In most developed countries, the railways have struggled since the rise of the automobile in the 1950s. From this point on, North America saw the near-total replacement of passenger trains with cars and planes. In Europe, it meant vast government financial support to keep the lines open.

Japan’s different trajectory is often attributed to culture: the Japanese are conformists who are content to take public transport, unlike freedom-loving Americans who prefer to drive everywhere. Europeans are somewhere in between. Culture is also used to explain the incredible punctuality of Japanese railways.

These cultural explanations are wrong. The Japanese love cars, but they take trains because they have the best railway system in the world. And their system excels because of good public policy: business structure, land use rules, driving rules, superior models for privatization, and sound regulation have given Japan its outstanding railways.

This is good news for friends of rail. Culture is built over centuries, and replicating it is hard. But successful public policies can be emulated by one good government. Much about Japan’s railway system could be replicable around the world.

Japan’s railway companies

Today, the most striking institutional feature of Japanese rail is that it is privately owned by a throng of competing companies.

The railway arrived in Japan in 1872, during the Meiji Restoration, which opened the country up to foreign trade, ideas, and technologies. Like most Western countries, Japan nationalized its railways in the early twentieth century, creating what became known as Japanese National Railways (JNR). But it did not nationalize all of the lines, focusing only on mainline railways of national importance, and new private railways were still permitted.

Between 1907 and World War II, Japan saw a boom in new private electric railways, coinciding with rapid urbanization. Technologically, most of these private railways were similar to the famous interurbans in the United States: they were basically electric trams, but running between cities as well as within them. The American network eventually withered, and almost nothing of it survives today. In Japan, however, the network consolidated, and the light tramlines gradually evolved into heavy-rail intercity connections.

These companies are today known as ‘legacy private railways’ on account of their having been private since their inception. There are eight legacy private railways in the Tokyo metropolitan area, five in the Osaka–Kobe–Kyoto megalopolis, two in Nagoya, and one in the fourth city of Fukuoka. There are also dozens of smaller ones elsewhere. In the three largest urban areas, these operators account for nearly half of railway track and stations, as well as a plurality of ridership. The largest, Kintetsu, not only operates urban services, but a whole intercity network stretching from Osaka to Nagoya.

These companies often compete head-to-head. At its most extreme, three separate commuter lines compete for the traffic between Osaka and the port city of Kobe, running in parallel, sometimes fewer than 500 meters apart.

Meanwhile, the nationalized railways were managed by JNR. In the postwar era, JNR was responsible for building the famous Shinkansen system, as well as running commuter and long-distance lines throughout Japan. But in 1988, it was largely privatized, broken into six regional monopolies for passenger services together with a single national freight operator. These are collectively known as the Japan Railways Group (JR).

This means that Japan has ended up with six railway companies that trace their descent to the nationalized railways, the sixteen big legacy companies that have always been private, and a host of minor legacy railways, as well as numerous underground metros (some private, some municipally owned), monorails, and tram systems. This institutional diversity is striking enough. But equally striking is the consistent business model that has evolved amidst this pluralism: the railway that builds a city.

Railway-led urbanism

If I take a train to go for a solitary walk in the countryside, the railway company can capture some of the value it creates by charging me for the journey, just as other companies capture the value of the goods and services they provide by charging for them. However, if I take a train to visit family, clients, a theater, or a shop, an important difference appears. The railway can capture the value it creates for me by charging me a fare, but it cannot capture the value it creates for those at my destination. As transport infrastructure creates benefits that produce no revenue for providers, free markets rarely build enough of it.

Japan has partly solved this problem by enabling railway companies to do a great deal beside running railways. Take the example of the Tokyu corporation, one of the legacy private railways in southern Tokyo. You can not only travel on its trains, but also ride a Tokyu bus, live in a Tokyu-built house, work in a Tokyu office complex, see a doctor in a Tokyu hospital, buy groceries in a Tokyu supermarket, spend an afternoon at a Tokyu museum-theater-cinema complex, take your children to their amusement park, and even die in a Tokyu retirement home. The positive spillover effects of the railway on these things are captured by Tokyu because it owns them. The president of Tokyu has said:

I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company. In Europe for instance, railway companies simply connect cities through their terminals. That is a pretty normal way of operating in this industry, whereas what we do is completely different: we create cities and then, as a utility facility, we add the stations and the railways to connect them one with another.

This model was pioneered in the 1950s by what became Hankyu Railways. Hankyu’s network connects central Osaka to its northern suburbs, as well as Kyoto and Kobe. Its innovative founder Kobayashi Ichizo first built suburban housing, then a department store at the terminal station; he then created a hot spring resort, a zoo, and his own distinctive brand of all-women musical theater, the Takarazuka Revue. He also began to run bus services to and from his stations. Other companies emulated Hankyu’s example: Tokyo Disneyland is a collaboration between Disney and the Keisei Railway, while Hanshin in Osaka owns the Hanshin Tigers baseball team.

Core rail operations are profitable for every Japanese private railway company, but they usually only account for a plurality or a small majority of revenue. The rest is contributed by their portfolio of side businesses. There is a natural financial synergy between the reliable but unremarkable cash flow of train fares and the profitable but riskier real estate and commercial side of the business. Railway companies’ side businesses also attract people to live and work on their rail corridor, reinforcing the customer base for the railway services themselves.

This virtuous circle is enabled by transit-oriented development. Japan’s liberal land use regulation makes it straightforward to build new neighborhoods next to railway lines, giving commuters easy access to city centers. It also enables the densification of these centers, which means that commuters have more places they want to go.

Railways cost a lot to build, but once they are built, they can move enormous numbers of people, far more than a road of similar size. This means that they work best in cities with a high density of people, jobs, and other activities. In 2019, New York City was the only American city where rail had a higher modal share than cars, in part because Manhattan has 2.5 million jobs, two million residents, and 50 million tourist visits crammed into 59 square kilometers.

This does not mean that rail-oriented cities must be structured like Chinese cities: islands of high-rise apartments connected by metros and separated by motorways. Japanese cities have the lowest residential density in Asia, and a plurality of the Japanese live in houses, usually detached ones. The urban area of Tokyo, the densest Japanese city, has a weighted population density less than that of many European cities, including Paris, Madrid, or Athens. Japanese cities have vast low-rise, predominantly residential suburbs, built at densities that might be higher than what is typical in the United States, but that would be quite normal in Northern Europe.

What makes Japan’s cities particularly suited to rail is thus not their residential districts, but their huge and hyperdense centers. These really are special: the cores of Tokyo or Osaka are unlike anything that exists in Europe or North America. Many of their features are famous worldwide: the vertical street zakkyo buildings, underground streets, shopping streets under rail tracks, covered arcades, elevated station squares, and vertical cities. Getting millions of commuters and shoppers into these downtowns is where rail excels because its extreme spatial efficiency means that infrastructure with a relatively modest footprint can transport vast numbers of people into a small area.

None of this emerged from a coherent masterplan of transit-oriented development like Copenhagen’s Finger Plan or Curitiba’s Trinary System. Postwar Japanese opinion was committed to decentralization both to rural peripheries and to the suburbs through greenbelts, motorways, and new towns.

Instead, this variety and adaptability around railways is possible because of the way Japanese urban planning works. Since 1919, Japan has had a standardized national zoning system, but it is much more liberal than development control systems in Western countries. The Japanese authorities did not intend or even desire dense urban centers, but they did not prevent them, rather like nineteenth-century governments in the West.

This liberal zoning system is reinforced by private access to city planning powers. Thirty percent of Japan’s urban land has been subject to land readjustment, where agreement among two thirds of residents and landowners in an area is enough to allow its replanning, including compulsorily taking and demolishing land for amenities and infrastructure. Initially land readjustment was used only to assemble rural land for urbanization, but over time it was increasingly used to redevelop already urbanized areas, and new variants were created to build the skyscrapers that surround the major stations of central Tokyo.

The history of the private railway companies could be written as a story of land readjustment projects: the initial building of the lines in the interwar years proceeded through one land readjustment project after another. Postwar improvements such as double-tracking, platform lengthening, and constant redevelopment of stations and their immediate thresholds were only possible because the railways could secure land takings cooperatively with local businesses and landowners.

Perhaps the greatest example of this phenomenon involved Tokyu. In 1953 the company decided to build the Den’en Toshi Line, or Garden City Line, to serve a rural area southwest of Tokyo. This would be enabled by a series of land readjustment projects collectively among the largest in Japanese history.

Over 30 years, 3,100 hectares were covered, of which only 36 percent was devoted to residential and commercial development, with 20 percent for forest and parks, 17 percent for roads, and much of the rest for watercourses. The population of the land readjustment zone would rise from 42,000 in 1954 to over 500,000 in 2003.

By connecting the affluent southwestern suburbs to Tokyu’s main real estate hub next to Shibuya station, now the second busiest in the world, the Den’en Toshi Line allowed Tokyu to become the largest private railway by revenue and ridership. The Japanese government and academics generally consider the Den’en Toshi Line to be the best corridor of transit-oriented development in Japan.

But the railway-as-city-builder model is not the only reason Japanese railways have been able to thrive. European countries usually prohibited railways from running real estate side businesses, but in the United States and Canada the practice was extremely widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many famous railway suburbs were developed this way. Despite this, passenger rail in these countries collapsed in the mid-twentieth century. Part of the difference was that Japan did not extend the same implicit subsidies to cars as Western governments did.

Pricing driving

The land of Toyota, Nissan, and Honda is not an anti-car nirvana. In fact, Japan has excellent motorways, and across the country as a whole a small majority of journeys are made by car. But Japan is a place where cars and car-oriented lifestyles compete on a level playing field.

Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.

Since parking on public land is banned, municipalities are not worried about overspill parking from developments with inadequate private parking. They therefore have no reason to impose parking minimums on developments: the market is left to decide whether parking is the most valuable use of private land. Where land is abundant, as in rural areas, suburbs, or small towns, private parking is plentiful. But in city centers, it is outcompeted by other land uses. According to the late Donald Shoup, central Tokyo has 23 parking spaces per hectare and 0.04 parking spaces per job, compared with 263 and 0.52 for Los Angeles. Even Manhattan, the densest urban area in North America with the lowest levels of car ownership, has about 60 parking spaces per hectare.

Japanese roads are expected to be self-financing. Motorways are run by self-contained public cooperatives, very similar to the statutory authorities that ran English roads and canals between 1660 and the late 1800s, and funded by tolls on their users. Vehicle registration taxes, which are allocated to localities for road construction and maintenance, are worth three percent of the Japanese government budget.

These measures, adopted in the 1950s, were not intended to suppress car use – the point was to fund a massive road expansion – but they have forced private vehicles to internalize many of their hidden costs. In the Tokyo urban area, the average household spends 71,000 yen ($450) each year on public transport fares and 210,000 yen ($1,350) on car purchase and maintenance costs.

But the private car was not the only competitor faced by the private railways. For eight decades in the twentieth century, they also had to face the juggernaut of Japanese National Railways. Its privatization in 1988 removed the final obstacle to creating the world’s best railway system.

Privatization

Railway privatization in Britain, New Zealand, Argentina, and Sweden has had a mixed reception, and all of those countries, apart from Sweden, have taken steps to reverse it. In Japan, it has been so successful that the government subsequently privatized the metro systems in Tokyo and Osaka.

In the postwar period, JNR enjoyed real successes. It built the revolutionary Shinkansen, the first high-speed railway in the world. It also aggressively electrified and double-tracked major trunk lines, quadruple-tracked lines into and out of major cities, and added city-center loops and freight bypasses. But these achievements were overshadowed by two problems.

The first was politics. Many countries adapted to the rise of the car by closing the least profitable parts of their passenger rail network, like the consolidation of American freight rail into the Class I operators or the Beeching Axe in Britain. In Japan, however, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party drew its support from rural constituencies, whose support it retained with pork-barrel politics. Its ‘rail tribe’ group, led by rural MPs, prevented JNR from adapting itself to mass motorization.

JNR therefore did not amputate gangrenous rural and freight services that imposed heavy costs with few benefits. Worse, it continued to build new loss-making rural railway lines, known in Japanese as Gaden-intetsu, or railways pulled into the rice field.

The second problem was organized labor. In general, Japanese trade unions are known for their moderation and responsibility, a generalisation that also held true for the unions at the legacy private railways. The JNR unions, however, became highly militant, secure in the knowledge that their nationalized employers could never go bankrupt. Their largest series of strikes in 1973 provoked riots from commuters.

The railway unions imposed overstaffing on revenue-generating urban services, at a time when both international and private domestic operators were reducing staffing requirements against a backdrop of higher wages and the growing automation of signaling and ticketing. As a result, 78 percent of JNR’s costs were related to labor, compared to 40 percent for other Japanese railways. The average worker at a private railway was 121 percent more productive than their JNR counterpart.

By the early 1980s, only seven out of 200 JNR lines made a profit. Successive governments deferred serious reform, running up debt, cutting down investments in new urban lines, raising ticket prices to twice those of comparable private railways, and increasing subsidies – which rose until annual subsidies equaled the total cost of the Shinkansen.

In 1982, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone started to privatize the railways. Unlike other countries, Japan simply returned to the traditional private railway model of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: tracks, trains, stations, and yards were owned by vertically integrated regional conglomerates.

There are substantial advantages to vertical integration. Railways are a closed system that has to be planned as a single unit. Changing the timetable at station A can affect the timetable at station Z; buying new trains that can travel faster might require changes to the infrastructure so they can reach their top speed, which in turn requires rewriting the timetables. This becomes especially complicated if different services share tracks. To prevent delays from propagating from one service to another, the timetable needs to be carefully designed to make best use of the available infrastructure.

The starkest effect of privatization was a massive and immediate increase in labor productivity and profitability relative to the legacy private railways. In fact, this began before privatization: its mere threat strengthened the government’s hand when bargaining with the unions and forced JNR to begin closing rural lines.

Privatization saw a general trend of productivity improvements, following a big one-time improvement between 1982 and 1990, when the workforce was cut by more than half, 83 loss-making lines were removed, and JNR’s debts were transferred to a holding company.

The second great advantage of privatization was to allow the JR companies to emulate the railway-as-city-builder model of the legacy private railways: for instance, JR East owns two shopping center brands, a ski resort, a coffee chain, and even a vending machine drink company. The JR companies have not ignored their rail business: they have continued to build new high-speed lines and urban tunnels, upgrade stations, and implement a host of other improvements such as the introduction in the 1990s of smart cards that allow passengers to pay their fare with a tap.

Regulation

This does not mean that the Japanese railway industry is a pure creature of free enterprise. No railway system ever has been. The Japanese system has found an equilibrium that makes rail policy explicit and limited. Leaving aside railway safety and business regulation, there are two main policy levers: fare maximums and capital expansion subsidies.

Price controls are often cited as a classic example of misguided government intervention, whether through rent controls, caps on the price of gasoline, wage freezes, or minimum agricultural prices. Tokyo’s infamously crammed trains are a symptom of underpriced rush hour traffic.

Railways have market power because the substitutes for railway trips – coaches, cars and planes – are quite a different product. This monopolistic position has historically meant trouble: monopoly systems, whether private or public, have a tendency to abuse their position to charge higher prices and run bad services. For this reason, the private monopolies that were common in the Western world before World War I often had price controls imposed on them. For example, most of the American streetcar networks were operated as long-term, price-controlled franchises granted by the city.

Price maximums, if set too low, could have ruined Japan’s railways. This is exactly what happened to many Western transit services after the First World War. But the postwar Japanese practice has capped fares generously. The system is explicitly designed to maintain profitability per rider, which in turn incentivizes the companies to maximize ridership. That buys political legitimacy for the privatized system, which is necessary for the continued provision of capital expansion subsidies. Indeed, during the long deflation era between 1992 and 2022, it was common for operators to charge below the maximum, and the real value of railway fares continued to rise. Fare maximums are set on the basis of the average cost structures of all railway operators in a region, so companies with below-average costs like Tokyu would often charge below the cap to maintain a competitive edge, prevent public backlash, and maximize traffic to their side-businesses.

Other than the fare maximums, the railways are free to make their own decisions about timetables, service patterns and day-to-day operations, a highly specialized and technical task which requires deep expertise. This contrasts with the government meddling with, say, Amtrak’s routes.

Carefully designed public subsidies also play a useful role. Although Japanese railways do not receive subsidies for day-to-day operations, they do receive government loans and grants for capital investments. These are typically tied to public priorities, such as disability access or earthquake-proofing, or to projects that have large spillovers that the railway company would be unable to internalize, like removing level crossings, or elevating at-grade railways or trams in order to reduce road congestion and accident risk. Generally, the local prefectural government will match the contribution of the national government. Larger new build projects are subject to lease back or debt-payment conditions that fare revenue is expected to pay back.

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The recipe for successful railways

Railway companies invested heavily in real estate businesses, often funding lines through selling land for housing around new stations. Liberal spatial policy meant that such development happened easily, even as it enabled dense development in urban cores where radial rail lines converged. Rail companies were generally vertically integrated regional monopolies, owning the land, track, and rolling stock, setting their own timetables, and employing their staff. The state imposed controls to stop them exploiting their monopoly position, but it did so cautiously, allowing them to make sufficient profit that incentives to invest were preserved. Capital subsidies were targeted at providing specific public goods that normal commercial operations overlooked.

The above paragraph could be written by a historian of the future about contemporary Japan. But every word in it could also be written by a historian today about the United States in the nineteenth century – usually seen as the epitome of capitalist individualism. This striking fact contradicts the idea that America’s supposed individualism foreordains it to be the land of the car, or that Japan’s supposed communitarianism foreordained it to be the land of rail.

It also puts pressure on the idea that the demise of rail is the inevitable consequence of cars. All countries saw some shift to cars in the twentieth century, and all rail industries had to respond to that. But public policy had an enormous effect on how successfully they did so. The rise of zoning restrictions on density, excessive price controls, nationalization, and vertically disintegrated privatization have hampered Western rail in remaining competitive against cars since the 1920s. By maintaining and restoring the institutions that built the first railway systems in the nineteenth century, the Japanese have created the mightiest railway system of the twenty-first.

Matthew Bornholt is an urban planner and transport researcher. You can follow him on Bluesky.

Benedict Springbett is a writer and Bar student. You can follow him on Twitter.

Last year, we received over 350 applications, from which we accepted 30 students for the program.

Stripe Press’s Tammy Winter said our previous attendees were some of the sharpest students she had ever met. This is true: two of last year’s attendees are currently employed within our network, several have won Emergent Ventures grants, and one led his company to a $180 million Series A raise, among many other impressive achievements.

Attendees said Invisible College was ‘energizing’, ‘added considerable human capital’, and that they ‘cannot emphasize enough the power of being around supportive, high-agency people’. One student said he gained ‘new mental models for thinking about the world, a network of progress-oriented peers [and a] reinvigorated passion for documenting graph crimes’. Others have described it as the most important week of their lives so far.

We intend that this year is even better than the previous iterations. During the week, we will aim to give attendees a thorough grounding in three of the topics most important to us: how the world got rich; what is going wrong with science today; and the political economy of housing, urbanism, and cities.

Doing so will involve lectures, discussions, and other classes led by the people that we think are making the biggest impacts on these subjects today, including Works in Progress authors such as Stuart Ritchie, Samuel Hughes, Anton Howes, and Aria Babu.

The program’s name comes from the supposed group of seventeenth-century thinkers known as the Invisible College, led by the Irish chemist Robert Boyle and the English economist Sir William Petty.

Attendance is open to anyone around the world who will be aged 18–22 in August 2026. You don’t have to be at university to apply, but you must be within the age range. The main requirement is that you are thirsty for knowledge, curious about new ideas, and excited about shaping the world of the future. Please forward this invitation on to anyone you think might fit the bill.

The exact dates are 17th-22nd August: students will arrive on the Monday afternoon and leave on the Saturday morning. It is free to attend, and we will provide accommodation and meals for the week. Sadly, we cannot cover travel expenses.

To apply, simply fill out this (very lightweight) application form. Please submit your application as soon as you can, as we will assess applications on a rolling basis, and by Friday 8th May at the latest. If you have any other questions, feel free to email me (Ben Southwood) at bswud@stripe.com.

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You can also listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

Transcript

Ben Southwood [00:00:00]: The mainstream media is lying to you. ‘Sobering study shows challenges of egg freezing"‘. That’s the New York Times. ‘The failed promise of egg freezing’. That’s what Fox calls it. ‘Success rates for frozen eggs vary widely but rarely go above 30%’. That’s what the Financial Times says. Glamour Magazine says ‘the odds are stacked heavily against you’. This is all extremely misleading; it’s true that women in their forties who freeze their eggs, which is most women who freeze their eggs, have relatively low success rates, but that’s because they have relatively low fertility. If women freeze their eggs in their twenties, then when they unfreeze those eggs and use them, they have the fertility of their twenties. Eggs age, but uteruses don’t as much.

The oldest woman to ever give birth was 72, but she did it with donor eggs. Where did I learn these facts? Issue 23 of Works in Progress. So I’ve brought my colleagues, Aria Schrecker, Peter Garicano, I’m Ben Southwood, to discuss the latest issue of Works in Progress, issue 23.

Pieter Garicano [00:01:00]: Ben, I don’t even think that’s the most interesting fact in that whole article.

The much more interesting story the article tells you is that you’ve been lied to about fecundity curves. People often think that your probability of giving birth or your fertility, declines very gradually between ages 18 and 35 and then very steeply as women enter middle age. This is the story you hear in school, this is the kind of graph you see, this is the kind of general wisdom that people will accept. The problem is this is totally not true. It’s based on the fact that in the past we couldn’t observe actual fertility, which is like your probability that you’ll give birth if you’re having unprotected sex. We could just observe how many people were having children.

So we have these big data sets of German peasants. We have the datasets of Iranian farmers. It turns out the fertility curve correctly measured, including just non-pregnant women, is totally linear. It declines just as much between 18 and 25 as it does between 25 and 30. And importantly, this means that actually it’s quite a bit higher as you get older than what is commonly assumed when you look at the concave line.

Ben Southwood [00:02:00]: The key thing is, this isn’t looking at someone’s fertility throughout their life, in which case it would catch all of the children they had had previously to the study or after the study because they were pregnant or they’d recently given birth. Instead it’s just looking at if they had a child this year. And one of the main reasons you wouldn’t have a child this year is because you had a child last year, or you’re going to have a child next year.

Pieter Garicano [00:02:24]: If you actually plot monthly birth rates in non-pregnant women, it’s an extremely steep, basically linear curve between 18 and 40. It doesn’t go slowly and fast. It’s every single year that you wait, it becomes harder and harder to become pregnant.

Ben Southwood [00:02:39]: But there is no steep decline after age 35. It’s flat. There’s no particular year where fertility drops off a cliff. It’s just a steady decline throughout a woman’s life.

Aria Schrecker [00:02:49]: So fertility aging is much more like regular aging than it’s like going through puberty.

Pieter Garicano [00:02:56]: Exactly. And of course the key point is that what is aging is not the ovary or the uterus, it’s the eggs themselves.

Women start their lives with 2 to 6 million primordial follicles, of which roughly 400 will be menstruated. But the vast majority of them will die off throughout a woman’s life at a very linear rate. Which means that when you’re doing, for example, egg harvesting to freeze them, it becomes increasingly hard.

Now Aria, you may know something about this.

Aria Schrecker [00:03:21]: I may have some relevant information. I’m currently about to lay about 44 eggs on Saturday.

I’m going through the process of egg freezing currently. Top line review is, it’s not as bad as people say. People say it’s very painful, that you get very bad mood swings, that it’s very rough on your body, that it probably won’t work.

There are lots of things that you generally hear when people are weighing up whether or not to do it. They say it’s expensive, and it is kind of expensive, but not for what you’re buying, which is the insurance of getting to have children in the next 10 years or so, being able to have children maybe when I’m 40, which I might not be able to otherwise.

Ben Southwood [00:04:16]: Ruxandra and Luzia, the authors say that the world capital of fertility for that purpose is Spain. Are you going to Spain?

Aria Schrecker [00:04:39]: I’m not going to Spain. I’m going to a lovely place in London.

Pieter Garicano [00:04:42]: I don’t think they say the world capital is Spain. they say Spain is very cheap and also generally a nice place to be. And so if you’re going to be there anyways, you might as well take a day off.

Ben Southwood [00:04:53]: That’s the starting point for a flood of international egg tourists turning up and getting their eggs frozen.

Aria Schrecker [00:05:04]: I’m not against it. It’s much more convenient to do it in London. The price differential doesn’t seem to be that extreme. My husband would also need to come to the place that we extract them so the costs compound because we’re not just doing egg freezing.

Ben Southwood [00:05:24]: What is a typical price to pay?

Aria Schrecker [00:05:29]: A typical price would be about £5,000 in Britain and then £200 per year for keeping them frozen.

Ben Southwood [00:05:37]: So I remember being quite interested in the piece about how the eggs winnow down from the starting point. Is that something you’ve experienced?

Aria Schrecker [00:05:49]: Before you even start any hormones, they just want to make sure it’s actually going to work if they do it. They’ll give you an ultrasound and they’ll look at your ovaries to make sure they look healthy and they can roughly get a ballpark number of how many available follicles you have that plausibly would develop into mature eggs.

They literally just do a count; you can see it on the screen and they you can see the little black holes that the ultrasound doesn’t go through. I don’t really know what the typical numbers of something like this were. I had high twenties in both ovaries, and then once you start the injections, most of those do actually start to mature.

And so when I say I’m going to lay about 44 eggs, that’s what I’m referring to. There are 44 mature follicles. After that point, you should expect a winnowing at each potential stage, once they take the eggs out of the follicles, only about four fifths of them will end up being mature eggs.

And after that point, only a certain number of those are actually going to be successfully fertilized. After that, only a certain number of the successful fertilizations are going to actually develop and grow. And after that, only a small proportion of those are going to end up not having any chromosomal abnormalities.

And then when it comes to implantation, you lose a lot in implantation as well. You should expect from 44 follicles to result in something like five or six children.

Ben Southwood [00:07:14]: The message of this piece is that egg freezing and embryo freezing are both much more effective than many people have been led to believe.

Aria Schrecker [00:07:49]: When you’re talking to the doctors and nurses, many of them express that they wish all of their patients came to them at a younger age.

They wish they were working with people in their twenties. They’re saying part of the reason the symptoms aren’t that bad is because you’re quite young, we don’t have to pump you with as many hormones. This is actually just much easier.

Obviously to some extent, everyone who works in that industry are trying to sell their goods, but you can tell that they’re actually very enthusiastic and in favor of more people doing this while they’re young.

Pieter Garicano [00:08:19]: They say in the piece, the average age someone currently does this in the United States is 37 or 38. It’s extremely late to be going through a procedure like this one.

Aria Schrecker [00:08:28]: It’s very sad that when tech companies and private insurance schemes offer egg freezing, people often view it quite cynically, as the company trying to basically buy their workers extra time and trying to hope that they’re encouraging them to delay making family formation decisions.

It’s very rare that that would be persuasive to people or that companies are thinking in that sort of homo economicus kind of way. There are lots of people who have this perk available to them as a side thing from their job that they never think about that it would actually be essentially free for people in 20% of young employees.

Also, I’ve decided not to sell my eggs. This also has an interesting reason, because you can’t sell eggs in Britain. That’s fine. I can travel abroad and I can take my eggs with me. But the main market for egg selling is America.

And because I was born in 1996 in Britain, we had mad cow disease and you cannot donate any blood or organs or anything in the United States if you lived in Britain for more than six months, from a period that ends at the end of 1996. So technically, I’m eligible to sell my eggs in America because I was born in August.

I did not live in Britain for six months. I wasn’t around for six months in 1996, but I get screened out by all of the donor websites pretty quickly. And so I would have to come up with a bespoke brokerage agreement. And that seems like a lot of work. But if you tick like a bunch of boxes, a whole bunch of them saying you a normal weight, are you, did you go to a good university?

Especially if you’re South Asian, because Indian people love having children and they hate donating eggs. You can actually make a lot of money from selling your eggs. So if you are worried about being able to afford it, you could earn between 30-50 grand per cycle of eggs.

You can come up with a bespoke arrangement, so if you want to freeze them, then you can also plausibly come up with a freeze and share agreement with a couple that would like a couple of your eggs.

Ben Southwood [00:10:44]: So basically, egg freezing is really awesome and it’s great that we have this technology.

Pieter Garicano [00:12:58]: My hope with this article is that it corrects some pretty big misconceptions. In this case, you’re being told it doesn’t really matter if you’re 25 or 35. It really does matter, and the fertility curve has a different shape, and just having that information in your mind will allow people to make more informed decisions.

But correcting big misconceptions is a broader theme in this issue because the article immediately after the egg freezing article is about how Australia stopped the boats by Amelia Wood. Now, you may have heard of things like the Rwanda deal in Britain or Netherlands has the Uganda deal. Italy has the Albania deal. The idea behind all these deals is that if you have Illegal immigrants, or asylum seekers which come to you by boat or by land, and they arrive in your country to process their asylum requests. You can process their requests offshore and in the case they are rejected, they’re no longer in your country. Many countries around Europe and indeed around the world are really keen to try out this model of offshore processing. And why are they all doing this at the same time? Well, because there’s one country in the world, which had an asylum problem, and they solved it by doing offshore processing; Australia. And in this article by Amelia Wood, Amelia pretty definitively proves that in fact, offshore processing is not what Australia did, and is not necessary at all if you would like to reduce the amount of legal immigrants arriving in your country.

Ben Southwood [00:14:32]: So explain how she does this?

Pieter Garicano [00:15:29]: So Australia’s had very low rates of boat migration since the seventies.

Initially it was people coming from Vietnam, and then towards the eighties it really started picking up and you start getting people coming from the Middle East as well. They often fly to Indonesia, and in Indonesia they’d pay a smuggler to bring their boat to Australia. And in the late nineties the Australian populists had enough and a liberal, which is in Australia conservative Prime Minister, decides to put a halt to it.

And so he does two things. One thing is that he started offshore processing. He takes people who come by boat and brings them to Christmas Island and to Nauru, which are territories or islands near Australia, and processes them there. But the other thing they do is turnbacks. A turnback is that the the Australian Coast Guard encounters your ship, or the Navy encounters your ship and then very gently either tows you back or invites you on board and brings you back to the beach.

Aria Schrecker [00:16:25]: Where do they tow you back to?

Pieter Garicano [00:16:26]: Indonesia.

Ben Southwood [00:16:27]: How far is Indonesia from Australia?

Pieter Garicano [00:16:29]: Extremely close, like 200 miles.

Pieter Garicano [00:16:32]: Christmas Island in particular. So they were heading for a offshore Australian territory at Christmas Island, which is off the coast of Java. So it’s really not far at all. It’s also because the Australian navy and Coast Guard were basically camping outside the Australian EEZ.

They just wait for people to come. And so it wasn’t as if they were dragging them a hundred miles. They would drag them 20, 10 miles back.

So these both things at once, that offshore processing was very high profile, very controversial, and then Turnbacks were actually done in secret because this whole process was classified in part because Indonesians, as you might expect, were not very happy about this. And they complained. That’s the end of the first wave from Australia. This doesn’t give us any evidence which of the two things actually works, but Australia’s actually interesting and the media shows this because they had a liberal, a left wing prime minister who came afterwards, who ended both programs.

And as expected between 2012, to 2013, the whole thing happened again; a huge wave of people came from Indonesia, 30,000 people tried to move to Australia. And there they actually staggered the two approaches. So first they tried offshore processing, and then a few months later they started Operation Sovereign Borders, where they did a very large scale term expiration.

And if you look at the time of arrivals, almost no one is deterred immediately after the introduction of offshore processing. It’s only once turnbacks are happening that people stop trying to come. And the most important and the most surprising bit of evidence that she gives in this whole article is that since 2014 Australia hasn’t done any offshore processing. They secretly wound it down, and since 2014, they’ve only done turnbacks and nonetheless they’ve had zero arrivals overseas.

Aria Schrecker [00:18:19]: Why doesn’t offshore processing work?

Pieter Garicano [00:18:20]: It might work, but it’s extremely expensive. Even Australia had to spend billions and billions of dollars on their programs in Nauru.

Ben Southwood [00:18:29]: And it gets full.

Pieter Garicano [00:18:30]: It’s so expensive that you only have a capacity of 1000 to 2000 people. And so almost everyone that was taken off offshore was actually, eventually released into Australia because when too many people came at once, they decided to clear the camps by bringing people to Australia to post them there.

And so offshore processing is so hard that it is incredible. And so it doesn’t work as a deterrent.

Aria Schrecker [00:18:53]: So it’s just a gateway drug to onshore processing.

Pieter Garicano [00:18:56]: You could call it that. The people who are being processed see it that way. They expect that de facto they will be posted onshore.

Aria Schrecker [00:19:05]: Also depending on the situation you’re fleeing, maybe just being offshore processed is better than what you’ve left behind. So you don’t mind languishing in those camps.

Pieter Garicano [00:19:15]: The camps seemed pretty bad. Part of the story here is that a mix of circumstances, the fact the camps were so bad that like the NGOs made a very big deal of it and the press made a big deal of it, and the fact that Indonesia hated Turnbacks.

And so the Australian government kept it secret, which meant that almost everyone who studied the Australian migration story only heard about the offshore processing.

Aria Schrecker [00:19:57]: So do we think anywhere else is going to do Turnbacks? Could Britain do turnbacks?

Pieter Garicano [00:20:06]: So the problem is that Turnbacks currently are seen as illegal on the ECHR because it’s collective punishment. You’re always meant to treat everyone as an individual.

Ben Southwood [00:20:23]: Firstly, that’s inconsistent with the Turkey deal -So after Libya fell, you get the migration crisis coming to Europe from North Africa and the Middle East.

And in 2016, if I remember correctly, they signed a deal with Turkey, which said we’re going to turnback every migrant and you’re going to take them. You can turnback every migrant over the border, you’re going to take them, but we’ll take someone else from you. So they’re not treating them as individuals.

They’re saying that migrants are an undifferentiated mass and we are accepting people, different people from the people who walked over the border, we’re turning about the ones who come over the border and we’re giving asylum to the same number of people, but just without an incentive to come over the border.

And that seemed to have worked in that case. But is that not inconsistent with ECHR?

Pieter Garicano [00:21:17]: Officially, the Greeks say they do no pushbacks.

Aria Schrecker [00:22:08]: Seems like it would be in a lot of European countries’ interests because obviously, everyone’s kind of slightly defending their borders against each other, probably to focus a lot more Navy effort over there.

Pieter Garicano [00:22:20]: Yeah, and also it seems much more- It’s both cheaper than doing a Rwanda deal or an Albania deal. And also it seems much more humane.

Aria Schrecker [00:22:28]: what’s very appealing about this framework is it appeals to my sense of what I would call decision theory about how you should devise rules for your country.

So a lot of people like to think of policy, immigration policy and refugee policy is a very classic version of this, where they see the problem that they have on hand at the moment they have it. So they see that they’ve got these people, a lot of them are very sympathetic people and you decide, okay, what do we do?

How many of these people do we want to take? Whereas you should actually be thinking, what rules do we want to set earlier so that we have the best way of making these decisions in the future? And turnbacks are appealing because obviously if you’re picking your refugees that you want to take from the whole world of refugees, you’re not going to simply choose the people who happen to end up on your shores.

There are loads of much more appealing things you can do. Like the Hong Kong refugee scheme is a perfect example of this. But your press and your general political establishment cannot be relied upon to allow you to make those decisions when you’re actually pressed with the problem. So it is nice that you can kind of take that option away from them and give yourself the ability to make those rules by doing the turnbacks instead of the processing where you are already stuck with those people.

Ben Southwood [00:23:46]: So the public is a principle and it has its agent, the government. Government is not completely reliable on delivering what the public wants at all times. One thing the public wants is we want these refugees but we don’t want those refugees. Right? There are many in the public who are very sympathetic towards Hong Kong and Ukraine war refugees, and then there are other cases of people they refuse. If you see a protest, people say they’re all male. If they were refugees from a war, they would not all be male.

And that might not be true actually, because of who can get there, etc. But when people say stuff like that, they’re worried that people are taking advantage. What you are suggesting, which I like, is that you can only get the trust that allows you to have the other refugees if you bind yourself in the case of some refugees.

My understanding is that Australia has quite a generous and well respected asylum system relative to most European countries, which are, where most European countries are voting far right parties or most European countries are seeing a lot of distrust in mainstream parties.

One of the causes is distrust in the immigration system. But it, see, my understanding is that that’s not true in Australia.

Pieter Garicano [00:25:05]: this is the most convincing point in favor of this policy. Is that Australia now has more refugees per capita than any country in Scandinavia.

In fact, it takes three times as many people right now than it did at the very height of the boat wave. So it turns out by being very predictable and consistent by building trust amongst the public, you actually get a much, much more generous overall policy than you do in this kind of uncontrolled principle agent world.

And in Australia, in fact of all the countries pulled by Ipsos in OECD the Australians were by far the most positive on asylum. In fact, 60% of the Australian public think refugees make a positive economic contribution to the country, which is really incredible compared with Western European countries where people are quite skeptical.

Aria Schrecker [00:25:55]: This is a white pill. I would say.

Pieter Garicano [00:25:57]: It’s a huge white pill. You can do a thing which is both cheaper, more humane and allows you to have a much more generous immigration policy.

Aria Schrecker [00:26:04]: The thing that really is appealing about it is that I have always kind of believed that Anglo countries aren’t actually racist.

And then you see all the new news from Britain and America and you think, oh no, what if they actually are? And it’s very satisfying to say, I think that Australia can continue to have actually quite a high proportion of people who aren’t white, quite a high proportion of refugees. Just the sense that they’ve got their borders under control is enough to make them happy with that circumstance again.

Ben Southwood [00:26:33]: I do think that ideological entrepreneurs, including far right racist ideological entrepreneurs, have an easy time of it when most mainstream parties won’t tackle issues that the public has - like that a significant subsection of the public has a strong opinion on. I don’t think that’s an excuse for people doing nasty stuff or having nasty opinions, but that it’s probably a predictor.

We were just talking about the principal agent problem between the public and its representatives, and did you know that in 1965 Britain had almost more reactors - nuclear reactors than all the rest of the world put together?

Pieter Garicano [00:27:18]: Because you talk about it every single day.

Ben Southwood [00:27:20]: Because I talk about it every single day and it was not true. So I originally thought they had more reactors than all the rest of the world put together, because a source I saw that seemed plausible and then another source backed it up, said that in fact, Britain had 19, the rest of the world had 21 put together, so it wasn’t far off, but it wasn’t quite true when I said that originally.

Aria Schrecker [00:27:42]: Can we slightly change the bounds of the question so that two of them don’t count?

Ben Southwood [00:27:53]: You can, so here’s one way of really changing the bounds.

So I have said many times that Britain had the first civil nuclear reactor. Britain did in fact have the first full scale civil reactor delivering power to a grid. Now if you take away all of those adjectives, it’s not definitely true.

Both the Soviet Union and the US can claim a certain first reactor that produced power. It’s just a question of where you set full scale and supplying energy to the grid. But because it was all in such a short time period and during 1952 this, everyone was getting there at the same time.

One of our articles is by Alex Chalmers, who sadly no longer works at Works in Progress. But while he was here, he did wonderful things on Nuclear energy. And in one year his incredible advocacy was clearly the main reason why John Fingleton’s review of nuclear regulation was so influential.

And the government said that they were going to repeal things, but he tells a very interesting story of British nuclear power. Britain, relatively early during the 1950s, quickly built 20 reactors in 10 years, we planned and delivered the first one in three years.

We commit to it, come up with the design for it, completely construct it, and it’s plugged in within three or three and a half years, maybe four years. And then that continues happening through the program. One of the big memes of the moment on how you should deliver nuclear reactors is that you should do it in fleets. The countries that do it best today, like Korea, and some of the countries that have done it best in the past, like France, have taken the design and then copied and pasted it around the country. In France, they rule that if you find a change that will be good, they will implement it, but during the next wave, as to not delay things or change things immediately.

Aria Schrecker [00:30:12]: That’s also our rule for editing the podcast.

Ben Southwood [00:30:14]: It’s also our rule for editing the podcast. And it is a great rule. Britain didn’t do this. Britain basically had totally flexible designs. The Magnox reactor, every Magnox reactor is totally different.

Britain builds out a bunch of reactors quickly; they do it with a really flexible design, they do it very cheaply. By today’s standards, these are small modular reactors, although obviously they’re neither small nor modular.

These are 80 megawatts or up to 200 megawatts, the last wave of Magnox reactors. But then after 1960s, despite building out the Magnox reactors pretty cheaply, and despite doing it quickly, and despite being a nuclear leader, after the 1960s everything goes wrong.

And there’s a common story of why this is, which is that when we built the Magnox reactor, it was a special kind of reactor design that no one else decided to do at scale; using the Advanced Gas-Cooled reactor, known as the AGR Advanced Gas Reactor. In the world today, about 75% of reactors are something called a pressurized water reactor. Which is the simplest kind of a reactor you can imagine.

You just have a core chain reaction going off, heat, some water that heats some other water. It’s like this, it’s the simplest possible reactor.

Aria Schrecker [00:32:36]: I saw a good meme on the internet that was like, we’ve invented a new form of power. You invented a new form of power? Or is it just steam again? Just steam again.

Ben Southwood [00:32:43]: Yeah, exactly. It’s the same old thing. The magnox is a bit more complicated than that. The reason we went for it is that it generates plutonium, weapons grade plutonium as a side product. Britain wanted lots of plutonium at the time, now we don’t want it.

The common story is that when a new design went ahead for the Advanced Gas-Cooled reactor, the difference was that they didn’t need a pressure vessel; their view was they didn’t need a vessel at all. It was completely safe automatically, there was no way it could ever go wrong, it had built in safety features. And to be fair, they ran a bunch of them for a long time and none, never had a disaster. So maybe it was true, but there was no containment vessel.

The AGC reactors were going to run at a much higher heat than if it was with water, as you can’t heat water past a certain point, but you could run gas at a higher temperature such as 600 degrees.

So that was all going to happen and then it went wrong. Alex takes a different view. He says that a lot of things went wrong at the same time, and it’s related to the fact that they chose a bad reactor design. But if you look later on, once the Advanced Gas-Cooled reactors were privatized and handed over to professional managers, they actually ran them pretty well and they were pretty good designs.

They had some flaws. They have to be retired more early than the standard reactor designs, but it wasn’t an utter disaster. The problems were the public started getting antsy about all government projects during the 1960s and 1970s in the UK. And this is not just nuclear. Everything starts going wrong.

Everything started after a certain point, takes ages to finish, goes through constant fights with everyone who’s nearby it in a way that just wouldn’t have happened before. When they were building out the first nuclear program the Minister for Power might do an inquiry that finds that the National Parks have said that this is going to damage the national park. Then the decision is that the benefit of cheap electricity outweighs that damage, and one week later they can start construction.

It seems this problem began during the 1970s. So Alex’s view is that the technocrats who ran everything were widely accepted when they made the right decisions, but once the public as the principal lost trust in its agent, in the state to make these decisions on its behalf, everything went to pot and perhaps the technocratic model was backfiring.

Aria Schrecker [00:36:38]: And you would say that in the 1970s we had a period of high inflation. And this is why the public lost trust.

Pieter Garicano [00:36:57]: So I am skeptical of the inflation story. You know, ‘68 happens before the oil shock. And also, for example the country worst hit by the oil shock in Europe was the Netherlands, because Netherlands was most pro-Israel.

And so the Netherlands embargoed for the longest. In fact, Netherlands embargoed for so long, the French volunteered to join the Arab embargo if in exchange, they got oil from the Arabs. So the Dutch had the worst inflation shock, yet didn’t have a big upswing in social disorder. But let’s disregard inflation.

We dedicated a whole episode to this question. I’m trying to understand what you mean by technocrats, or people losing trust in technocrats. Is it that the technocrats who were in charge of nuclear mismanaged the programs such that people were then against nuclear? Is it that different technocrats who are responsible for planning screwed it for everyone else because they made all products hard to deliver?

Or is this a third thing, which is kind of this general sense of how elites want ugly things, they believe social change is not good, that modernity is going the wrong direction. Therefore I’m generally distrustful whether they are technocrats in government or business elites or art elites.

Like which of these three stories, or maybe a fourth story is actually the Ben Southwood view for why people lost trust.

Ben Southwood [00:38:33]: Here are my suspicions.

Suspicion one is that the AGR did cause the problem. Not because it was really bad, because it turns out that the AGR was still five times cheaper than the supposedly good design that we’re implementing now in Hinkley point C and Sizewell C, which is basically a pressurized water reactor.

The AGR was supposedly worse than them, but it was much cheaper in real terms than those, and they still ran them for 40 years with no accidents. Once they worked out how to use them, it was completely fine. So it wasn’t that bad of a design. Now, the thing that it hurts the program through, was by being perceived as a really bad design and by having really bad hiccups for the first 10 years. It did have some clear flaws, but the main reason they hurt the nuclear program is not because it was so unworkable, but because they actually did make it workable and they could have kept building them.

And if we continued the program even at that cost, we would have saved tens of billions of pounds in the Ukraine crisis, and on the subsidies that Britain paid for energy during that time alone. I do think that the fact that it messed up initially punctured faith at the same time as a lot of other things punctured faith.

Pieter Garicano [00:39:57]: What’s the pattern there, that the technocrats were very consumed by glamorous technological super projects? Is it just a kind of cultural fad that happened to pass over?

Ben Southwood [00:40:09]: Think of the general experience you’ve had, which is that if the technical people are in charge, they always want to do the technically perfect idea.

They don’t want any other considerations. They’re not very good at trade offs if given complete control, they’re extremely useful people to have around, maybe the most important, but you don’t want them to be in charge of everything. If it was a bridge, they’ll build the coolest possible bridge that could take a hundred earthquakes at the same time, not the cheapest bridge that does the job sufficiently.

On another note, the laws that came in weren’t designed explicitly to hamper nuclear power. To make this more general, there are lots of things that got destroyed by 1970s reforms where the thing being targeted wasn’t really what ended up getting destroyed.

So the US Clean Water Act type; they brought in an NEPA review system that means you can’t reclaim land. And we just disagree with them about whether claiming land was good and maybe we’re right, maybe we’re wrong, but we just disagree.

But there are some other things similar to nuclear power here. A lot of the review systems that were brought in could have just been written except energy projects with the national security element.

And there are contingent factors that led to that happening and then unwinding that is difficult over time, because you build up stakeholders who like the system as it currently is. Now why did people lose faith in their system as a whole? There are a wide range of things that were happening at the same time.

So people will forget it now, but there was a lot of worry about immigration in the 1970s in the UK and there were in lots of other countries as well. Maybe that’s a UK specific factor, but it definitely seems like it was an important new case specific factor. It is clear that high inflation periods tend to be periods with more social dynamic, people voting for weirder parties. And so that was an important factor.

And then I do think that like the elites of the post-war era had a lot of different opinions from the public they represented and they did because of their especially strong powers that they had at that time, especially in Anglo countries where they had overwhelming power to expropriate to take decisions on behalf of society. There were lots of administrative systems that would’ve stopped the German government taking decisions quite so quickly on nuclear power during the 1940s, fifties and sixties.

Whereas the British government could decide within a day whether it was starting a nuclear power program. So many of these decisions were taken in ways that the public decided it didn’t like over time, it gave them a lot of benefit of the doubt. And then when things came to a head, they came to a head altogether.

Pieter Garicano [00:43:23]: So if I had to combine the reasons, it’s a mix of contingent nuclear specific mistakes plus elites who were generally very out of touch with the population. Plus a very, very responsive political system, plus a very responsive state, plus high inflation, all of which combines to ensure that British nuclear loses its way.

Aria Schrecker [00:43:45]: So these stories about bad British technocrats should bring us onto a piece about good technocrats, good American technocrats, good Dutch technocrats. We should talk about ASML, which is another piece by Neil Hacker in the issue 23 of Works in Progress.

It’s plausibly the most important company in the world, depending on what you think about AI.

But lots of people are very familiar with TSMC and Nvidia as being the two big chip companies that you should buy stock in, that you should be watching, but both of those companies are totally reliant on this other company, further down in their supply chain called ASML.

What ASML does is they make what is called an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine. One of the features of chips is that they cut patterns in very, very small to transmit information across. They used to cut them with physical tools, but once you’re getting down to the 10 nanometer, 3 nanometer sizes, physical tools start to leave enough residue that the lines aren’t perfect.

So instead they are cut with pure energy, light, and ASML make the only machines in the world that are capable of doing this. Other companies tried to make extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, but they’ve all failed up to this point. It’s an incredibly complicated machine.

We call it the world’s most complex machine because of how many parts there are inside of it to make this very precise technology. ASML would not be here without the American government, probably without the Belgian government and possibly without the Dutch one as well.

Pieter Garicano [00:45:20]: I don’t have a big Ben Southwood theory for ASML, but I do think there’s a few interesting lessons that I learned from this piece.

For example, the American government, so ASML has EUV technology, Extreme Ultraviolet technology, because the American government gave it EUV technology in the 1990s.

There were big cuts to the Department of Energy. And so they closed this EUV program and instead they asked the private industry to come and take care of it. Intel provided most of the funding, and they were looking for a manufacturing partner to actually make the machines. At the time there was a little worry about Japanese companies, for example Canon and Nikon, which were the two primary chip manufacturers. They were excluded from the competition and instead the sole contractor were ASML and a Californian company which soon went bankrupt and was bought by ASML, which left ASML as the only participant in this consortium.

Aria Schrecker [00:46:23]: What’s particularly interesting about that is it seemed like their initial instincts were to make it only American companies, and the whole project would’ve likely failed if they’d stuck with their gut instinct there.

Pieter Garicano [00:46:34]: Well, but in some ways the product also failed because when the Americans gave the technology to ASML, they required ASML to make 55% of the components in America, it was one of these classic JVs. The technocrats wanted to have spillovers in America and make sure America still controlled the technology. But it turns out that once you hand over all the IP and all the knowhow to a company like ASML, it’s really hard to enforce the contract obligation they had to create 55% of their components in America.

Aria Schrecker [00:47:06]: And ASML now basically have the opposite stance, which is they guarantee that maybe a third of their supply chain is EU specifically because they don’t want to be disrupted.

Pieter Garicano [00:47:14]: Correct. ASML has huge suppliers in Europe, they buy a lot from Germany and Belgium in particular. They buy most of the components from Eurasia. And so the Americans — it’s kind of a time inconsistency problem here — where they invited a foreign firm, set a set of requirements, and by the time the transfer happened there was no way to enforce the rest of the contract.

Aria Schrecker [00:47:34]: They did get their primary goal, to have a significant part of the chip industry outside of East Asia, because at that point that was a big geopolitical problem for them.

The people who started the program probably have a strong preference for this to be happening in Europe than in East Asia. And they probably are happy with the results.

Pieter Garicano [00:47:52]: I don’t think this outcome we got is bad at all. The national security fears they had were very overblown, but it is notable that even in a case where you’re making a deal with a company based in a very friendly country, there is no way of actually enforcing these contracts oftentimes.

Aria Schrecker [00:48:06]: Europe’s greatest industrial strategy from America.

Pieter Garicano [00:48:51]: I also think, by the way, ASML entirely fits the model I described; when we say that the labor markets are the main problem for European innovation, because the kind of innovation ASML has done has been extremely incremental.

They were given the big jump, the big bet part they were given, and the rest of it was the kind of thing Europeans have always been very good at. And so as Neil describes in his article; ASML has some of the longest tenures of any company of its size; their CEO joined 30 or 40 years ago when he was 29.

Many of their senior engineers are people who joined during its founding in the eighties. And so in many ways, ASML is an example of incremental innovation, the kind of innovation we actually predict that Europe would be good at.

Aria Schrecker [00:49:46]: This is why lots of the chip industry is in either Asia or Europe, it seems like it fits that business model more because it seems like it is just squeezing out more and more efficiency out of something that we already have rather than coming up with something totally new and disruptive.

And it matches my stereotypes about East Asian and European economies.

Ben Southwood [00:50:05]: That makes sense. But you have to remember that the chip industry is now fabs and designers, right?

Pieter Garicano [00:50:13]: It’s mostly just files. Just software.

Ben Southwood [00:50:15]: So it’s split perfectly along the lines that you would expect if the Peter story of the world is true, they’ve actually broken the firms down the middle so that the Americans can do the radical design elements, and in fact, Britain to some extent and the Europeans can do the incremental innovation.

Pieter Garicano [00:50:33]: Another great fact that I really enjoy in this issue of Works in Progress is in our article about buses by Samuel Hughes. The bus actually is not very radical technology. You need stable roads, you need pretty sophisticated carriages, but you can do it with horse drawn carriages, which we’ve had for the last 5,000 years. So why does it takes so long for bus to come about? Well, we invent buses once in the 1660s. It turns out Pascal, famous for Pascal’s wager invents the bus, the very first bus service in history, and he has a bus that runs around Paris.

Pascal was defeated by the great enemy of all innovation, which is regulation. The workers of Paris are very angry to see in the 1660s to see the bourgeois in their fixed little route coming around through the streets of Paris, and they riot and they make the bus illegal.

And then the bus technology is lost for the next 150 years until 1824, when it is once again invented by a different Frenchman who has a bathing house, I believe in Rennes or in Nantes.

He just has a service where he brings people to his bathing house. And then he realizes that people who know that he has a bathing house service will get on his carriage and then get off later, without reaching the bathing house because they know he is going to pick them up anyways.

And he figures out this is actually something you can commercialize. And within six years, the bus technology spreads from France to London, to Manchester to Birmingham. It spreads across the ocean. Like the moment people figure out you can just run a carriage in predictable routes, predictable times, the bus technology is everywhere, unfortunately for the inventor of buses, there’s a market crash in 1829 and he kills himself.

And the tragedy is that his bus company, which he invented, is actually the main founding company of the current Parisian power transport monopoly. And so the guy who invented buses, still lives on both the fact that his buses exist and his company exist, RATP.

Aria Schrecker [00:53:02]: Actually this segues surprisingly well onto Ben’s piece. I have always thought since UberPOOL and obviously since the great death of UberPOOL in London, that we are clearly very, very close to not not needing buses exactly, but being able to have a bus like thing where you can hire it and it gets a whole bunch of people in the same vehicle and moves you around.

And it feels like once we have autonomous vehicles regularly driving on London roads, that should be a very, very easy technology to be accessible to everyone.

Pieter Garicano [00:53:32]: Will it really? Will we have autonomous vehicles driving everywhere on London roads? Or will we have total gridlock because I read a piece arguing in fact we’re doomed to gridlock unless we do one simple fix.

Aria Schrecker [00:53:47]: Unless we impose a very particular form of tax slash regulation.

Ben Southwood [00:53:51]: So I’m not the only person to have ever said this. I’m not the originator of this thought, lots of people have predicted that autonomous vehicles, without some sort of change in our institutions would lead to gridlock, because you can have an office, you can have a bed, you can have a little bar with your friends. Like all of these things are possible. They reduce the cost of sitting in traffic to basically zero.

Once that’s zero, then you are completely indifferent about sitting in traffic. Though there might be some people who still need to get where they’re going- for those people, it’s still an enormous problem. I call this the Ogallala trap, after the Ogallala aquifer, which is this gigantic aquifer under the Midwest, which is why all the way from Texas up to Montana is some of the most productive farmland in the world. In the 1940s, farmers invented these centrifugal pumps that were cheap. Everyone could get and could pump tens of thousands of gallons of water per week. And so it started off as a seemingly endless resource, the water down there in the aquifer, and now many places have cut a hundred feet off this apparently endless resource and in decades, in some places it’ll be almost dry. Obviously they need to come up with some way of charging for it, replenishing it, etc. And there are many cases, the passenger pigeon, for example, survived until the telegraph allowed people to send quick messages about where the passenger pigeon flocks were going. This drove it extinct within a few years. Once they got sonar and all the other tools that allow- and diesel boats that could stay out at sea for a long time, the Atlantic whales died quickly after that. Common pool resources will get destroyed by technology in certain cases.

My opinion is that the roads are going to be just like that. Now, that’s actually not a very original contribution, this is well known. The thing that is slightly original from me is that there’s a wide perception that charging people more to use the roads is just completely impossible. That’s mistaken.

There have been lots of successful road pricing schemes introduced around the world. People often artificially restrict their range of what paying for the roads counts as so they say only Singapore has introduced variable time of use pricing on all its major expressways, so therefore only Singapore has road pricing, everywhere else just has a kind of tolling system. But tolls are also paying for the roads on the margin, and the interesting thing is that these schemes work on two very simple principles; with a toll road, tolls are very unpopular if you put them on roads that people are already driving for free.

If you build a new road and put a toll on it, people might grumble. There are always whingers out there, but people will think this is a new thing, I can choose whether I want to use it or not. They consider the roads they already drive on to be something they can’t choose.

Don’t change the rules of the game. So if you want, you can charge on new things, but not on old things. And the second is if you want to charge for stuff, then giving people stuff in return makes it much easier to sell.

And so the classic example of this would be how in most European countries, fuel duties and road taxes pay for more than the cost of building and upkeeping roads, right? So people are very willing to pay for that, which in most countries it’s been justified as something you pay in exchange for getting the roads.

And drivers have generally been the people who pushed it into existence in the beginning because they wanted more money for roads, which they wanted to drive on. So if we were to use both of those things to think about auto autonomous vehicles potentially causing massive gridlock, we would put a tax on autonomous vehicles now, perhaps a surge pricing style tax, as with an Uber when it’s in higher demand. The people who already use Waymo’s in the small number of places where it exists won’t like it, could become much more expensive, but almost no one uses autonomous vehicles. But once they become omnipresent, it’ll be built into what people think of as using it.

And the second thing is that if you really want to build a strong constituency for this tax surviving and not getting ground down by inflation or changes, make it go to something that the people who pay it want. If at least 50% of this money is going towards building new roads, tunneling roads, building bridges, things like that, then if you put the money raised from this to something that drivers want, they might not oppose it as strongly.

Pieter Garicano [00:58:44]: And you have some very notable examples in your piece of this happening, especially in the United States, which people commonly associate as being very pro driving and very anti-tax. I myself live in Washington DC in Virginia, around the corner from me is a huge network of expressways, which are private highways, which you pay a huge toll for.

They’re very expensive. It costs you $30 or $40 to go from DC to the airport. And the trick is the expressways are only new roads added afterwards that are built by private companies that pay down the road with a tolling. There’s huge support for them. One of the reasons people like them is that the police don’t operate on them. So you can in principle go as fast as you want.

It’s a trust system and as far as I can tell people abuse it only slightly, and so my point being that America’s actually very supportive of tolling and paying for roads.

Ben Southwood [00:59:39]: Through Florida there are loads of cases where you add the lanes onto existing roads, so Lexus lanes they sometimes call them, but I actually don’t think it’s because the people who use them are exclusively well off people.

It’s people who need to get somewhere fast. And they have them across the US like there are enormous numbers of these additional lanes where the lanes are paid for, the road widening is paid for by charging for those lanes. And very often those lanes have varying prices based on how busy the road is.

I always enjoy driving through France. In Britain, most of our major roads are built on exactly the site of our old minor roads. Some of them are Roman roads, some of them medieval, but they’re all very old. Whereas in France they left those roads, you can still drive on them; many of them became dual carriageways, and became major roads.

But their best roads were built again by private companies, these are massive motorways near to but not the same alignments, so you always have the choice of any journey that can be done on a slower, more winding, but still good road. But you always have the choice of upgrading, and you pay about 10 euros every hundred kilometers.

Aria Schrecker [01:01:44]: I have another additional take on one of the pieces, which is I was deeply curious about the giant neo trad Hindu temple piece.

I was surprised at how colorless all of the Hindu temples are, because my family is from South India. And so if I imagine a Hindu temple, I imagine it blue and pink and green. It’s gaudy, kind of quite similar to our classical statues piece from before; I imagine these things to be painted. I was disappointed to see they’re all white. They’re very ornate. Sure, they’re like neogothic buildings, but they’re not exciting.

Pieter Garicano [01:02:37]: We all agree, temples are very pretty and it is genuinely very cool that the stone is load bearing. I never knew this. Almost every building being built today is load-bearing steel.

But the temples are almost the only buildings being built in America, in Britain, in Spain, where the actual load-bearing part of the building is the masonry.

Ben Southwood [01:02:59]: The modernistic impulse, which is similar to the gothic impulse, is to say that authenticity is extremely important, right? You should never lie with a building, and this leads them to the view that facades in themselves are lies.

And you should never have ornate, beautiful, ornate or in any way beautiful facades. You should be making a building maximally functional, and it should be truthful and show you what it actually is. In this case, the important thing is if the facade is not load-bearing, it should not look like it’s load-bearing.

So it’s obliged to have a curtain wall style aspect, or you can even see that it’s glass the whole way down, so it couldn’t possibly even hold itself up. I object to this very strongly because once you look into the history of architecture, you find that almost nothing passes their standard of authenticity and truth.

Aria Schrecker [01:04:03]: In fact, Samuel says this is maybe one of the solid trends in what people find beautiful in buildings, which is that people like to be able to see how they think it’s load bearing. That seems to be a source of comfort, people don’t like it if columns are too spindly.

Ben Southwood [01:04:18]: Unless they’re made out of steel, because then you can tell they’d be very strong anyway unless they appear to be made out of steel.

And so my view is that it’s kind of more noble if a building is not showing its structure on the outside. because that’s thumbing its nose at the modernist impulse thing, which is the wrong impulse.

Pieter Garicano [01:04:35]: I’m totally with Aria here where you need very elaborate counter signaling about the snobbish modernness, but I believe thick walls are cool.

And so I see these temples and they look very massive. They look very permanent. I don’t really care if it’s fake or not, I just think the thick wall looks cool and I’m glad they’re making them.

Ben Southwood [01:04:50]: Yeah, It’s a slightly perverse impulse of mine, but I want it to be fake, to show that fakeness is not in itself bad and that what we should care about is what the building looks like, and how we experience it and how enjoyable it is to be around, and not some idea of how true the outside is to the inside or those kinds of considerations.

Aria Schrecker [01:05:09]: Of all of our pieces this is probably one of the ones that I would most recommend be read on the physical magazine rather than online, because obviously the whole point is to look at the temples and see the descriptions and line it up, and the way that is set on the page has been a real triumph of our art team.

I’m sure it’ll look nice on the website, but this is the piece that is most enjoyable in this format.

Ben Southwood [01:05:32]: That’s all we have time for. Thank you very much for listening to the Works in Progress podcast. If you’re not a subscriber, you can subscribe by going to worksinprogress.co/print if you are a subscriber, I hope you’re enjoying issue 22. Thank you.

This is the second article of Issue 23, which print subscribers will start receiving this week. Not yet a subscriber? You can sign up for the magazine here.

The convenience of instant coffee masks a surprisingly difficult problem. Coffee’s appeal lies in the hundreds of volatile compounds that create its flavor and aroma, exactly the substances most likely to disappear during processing. Creating instant coffee required developing techniques to extract the soluble molecules in coffee from the insoluble plant matter without destroying the fragile compounds that make coffee worth drinking.

The first attempt at the drink was, by all accounts, terrible. In 1771, over two centuries after coffee reached Europe, Londoner John Dring filed a patent for a ‘coffee compound’. Dring’s method involved mixing ground coffee with butter and tallow, then heating the mixture on an iron plate until it thickened into a paste that could be shaped into cakes. These cakes were then dissolved in hot water to make coffee. The purpose of the animal fats isn’t entirely clear. They may have been intended to extract and carry soluble compounds from the coffee grounds or to preserve the ground coffee from oxidation. Whatever Dring’s aim, the method wasn’t commercially viable because the fats went rancid, causing the cakes to spoil quickly.

During the mid-1800s, several firms produced instant coffees as thick liquid concentrates that could be reconstituted with water. In 1840, the Scottish company T & H Smith developed a ‘coffee essence’ by brewing coffee and reducing it to around a quarter of its original volume. This thick liquid was mixed with chicory extract and burnt sugar syrup, creating a molasses-like concentrate. One or two teaspoons mixed with boiling water made a drink, though it tasted more like coffee flavored molasses than proper coffee.

Another attempt came during the American Civil War. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson had replaced soldiers’ daily spirit rations with coffee beans and sugar. This created a heavy logistical burden for the army, with a 20-day supply for 100,000 troops weighing 250 tons, all needing transport by horse-drawn wagon. Roasting, grinding, and brewing coffee in the field was also time-consuming for soldiers.

In 1861, the Union Army began investigating instant coffee as a solution. They procured a coffee concentrate from the firm HA Tilden & Co, consisting of a mixture of thickened coffee and sweetened, condensed milk. This halved the weight and size of the coffee, but was unpopular with soldiers, who compared its consistency to axle grease.

These essences were made by boiling down brewed coffee to concentrate it. This damages the flavor, producing a bitter, unpleasant drink, hence the old saying that ‘coffee boiled is coffee spoiled’. That’s why they were syrups. Boiling away all the water to create a dry powder would have destroyed whatever coffee flavor remained. To make a viable instant coffee powder, producers needed a way to remove the water from brewed coffee without boiling it.

A spice merchant’s solution

The first genuine instant coffee powder emerged in 1889, created by David Strang, a spice merchant in Invercargill, New Zealand. He developed a ‘Dry Hot-Air’ method that removed water from coffee by blowing heated air over it, likely using a spice dryer he’d patented a few years earlier. While hot air dehydration had been used in France since 1795 to dehydrate foods like pasta for commercial sale, Strang was the first to apply it to coffee.

The method works by warming the air around the coffee rather than the coffee itself. Turning water into vapor requires energy, which evaporating water draws from the heated air passing over it. Because this energy comes from the air rather than the liquid, the coffee surface actually gets cooler as it evaporates. This keeps the liquid below boiling temperature even as it dries.

As a dry powder, it was lighter and more shelf-stable than previous attempts at instant coffee, making it more practical for shipping and storage. The product achieved modest commercial success in New Zealand, being advertised as ‘Far superior to any so-called coffee essence’. But the taste was still far from ideal, coffee expert Arjun Haszard notes: ‘This process, given what we know about what happens to coffee with heat and air would have undoubtedly resulted in heat damaged, oxidized coffee. Portable, yes, but also most likely horrible’.

George Washington goes to war

The first instant coffee to achieve widespread commercial success came in 1909 when Belgian-British inventor George Constant Louis Washington launched Red E Coffee. Washington kept his method a trade secret, so the exact process remains unknown, but the result wasn’t clearly superior to previous attempts, with the taste described as ‘disagreeable’. Washington’s success seems to have come mainly from being the first to build an industrial-scale production facility, located at Brooklyn’s Bush Terminal industrial complex.

The coffee was fairly popular in its first few years of production, but demand surged when World War I began. The military procured the entire available production, which peaked at 37,000 pounds (16.7 metric tons) per day. Despite the poor taste, the sheer convenience of instant coffee provided a significant morale boost to the troops. One soldier’s letter home captures this sentiment:

I am very happy despite the rats, the rain, the mud, the draughts, the roar of the cannon and the scream of shells. It takes only a minute to light my little oil heater and make some George Washington Coffee . . . Every night I offer up a special petition to the health and well-being of Mr. Washington.

By the end of the war, the American army was being called the best-fed on Earth. Instant coffee rations, no doubt, were an enviable luxury.

Solving the sticky problem

In 1929, the Wall Street Crash devastated Brazil’s economy. Brazil relied heavily on coffee exports, which made up half of its total exports, and the US was its biggest customer. Coffee prices collapsed 90 percent within a year, contributing to the 1930 revolution that overthrew the government. To stabilize prices, the Brazilian government burned 10.3 billion pounds (4.6 million metric tons) of coffee over multiple years. This was the equivalent of three years’ worth of global coffee production. A 1937 Time article described the scene: ‘huge grey-green piles of coffee beans smouldering slowly away under great smoke plumes, barges lumbering out to sea to dump coffee overboard, workmen mixing coffee and tar into briquets for building’.

During the crisis, Banque Française et Italienne pour l’Amérique du Sud, the French and Italian Bank for South America, found itself with a huge surplus of coffee in its warehouses. To find a use for the excess beans, they approached Nestlé chairman Louis Dapples, a former employee of the bank, with a proposal to develop a better instant coffee product.

Swiss chemist Max Morgenthaler was put in charge of the project in 1932, but with no signs of success, Nestlé cut funding for it in 1935. Undeterred, Morgenthaler purchased his own coffee beans and continued his research from home, occasionally using equipment from the factory laboratory during quiet periods. In April 1937, he achieved a breakthrough and presented samples to Nestlé’s executive board. They were well received. One attendee exclaimed, ‘Mother Nestlé has produced a beautiful baby!’

Morgenthaler’s process involved passing hot water through multiple columns of ground coffee to create a coffee extract, which was then spray dried. Spray drying is a technique invented by chemist Samuel Percy in 1872 for converting liquid into powder. It works by spraying liquid as a fine mist into a heated chamber, where hot air rapidly evaporates the water, turning the droplets into powder.

Spray drying had been successfully used to make milk powder since the early 1900s, but applying it to coffee presented unique challenges. Coffee’s natural sugars and acids have low molecular weights, meaning they soften and become sticky at relatively low temperatures. During spray drying, this causes the coffee to clump together into a paste rather than forming a free-flowing powder. Morgenthaler’s solution was to mix the coffee with roughly equal parts carbohydrates like maltodextrin or glucose before drying. These larger carbohydrate molecules remain solid at higher temperatures, raising the point at which the mixture becomes sticky and allowing it to dry into proper powder particles.

Despite using much higher air temperatures than previous methods (typically 150–250 degrees centigrade), spray drying actually causes less heat damage to the coffee as the droplets spend only seconds in the heated chamber, and the evaporating water keeps them relatively cool.

The product was launched in 1938 as Nescafé. It was an instant hit, and a year’s worth of stock sold out in two months. World War II boosted sales massively. In 1942, demand from the US military was so great that the government classified it as a ‘commodity vital to the war effort’, with the entire output of Nestlé’s US plant dedicated to supplying the armed forces.

From ice to vapor

While Morgenthaler solved the technical problem of spray drying coffee, the added carbohydrates diluted the coffee flavor significantly. Nestlé resolved this in 1952 by discovering they could extract natural carbohydrates from the coffee itself. The method worked by first passing water through ground coffee at very high temperatures (up to 175 degrees centigrade) under pressure, breaking down cell walls and releasing carbohydrates called polysaccharides that don’t dissolve at normal brewing temperatures. The liquid then flows through additional columns at around 100 degrees centigrade to extract flavor compounds, as in the original method. The result was 100 percent pure coffee powder.

Spray drying kept heat exposure brief, but manufacturers wondered if they could avoid high temperatures altogether using a process called freeze drying. The method involves freezing materials, then placing them under low pressure, turning the ice into vapor without passing through a liquid phase. This happens because at very low pressures, water can exist only as solid ice or as vapor, not as liquid, so gentle warming turns the ice straight into vapor, a process called sublimation.

Various cultures had practiced forms of freeze drying for centuries – the Inca freeze dried potatoes in the high Andes in the thirteenth century – but industrial interest grew during World War II when trying to find a way to preserve blood plasma and penicillin. Without reliable refrigeration, these supplies often spoiled before reaching patients. Freeze drying removed the water content, allowing them to be stored at room temperature and quickly reconstituted when needed.

In 1963, Maxwell House, a coffee brand owned by General Foods (and now part of Kraft Heinz) released the first freeze-dried instant coffee. Nestlé followed in 1965 with Nescafé Gold. The process involves freezing coffee extract to between minus 40 and minus 45 degrees centigrade, and then breaking the frozen slabs into granules and sieving them to size. These granules are placed in vacuum chambers where controlled heat causes the ice to sublimate over several hours, leaving dry coffee powder.

Freeze drying retains flavor much better than spray drying. One study found that freeze drying maintained 77 percent of volatile compounds compared with 57 percent for spray drying.

Another advantage is texture. Freeze drying produces coarse, porous granules that dissolve quickly and completely in hot water. Spray drying, by contrast, produces fine powder particles that tend to float on the surface rather than dissolve. To address this, manufacturers now often add an agglomeration step where spray-dried powder is exposed to steam as it tumbles in the air. The moisture causes particles to stick together and form larger granules.

Freeze drying has drawbacks. The process takes 8–16 hours and requires expensive vacuum equipment and condensers. Freeze-dried coffee typically retails for roughly twice as much as spray dried coffee, which is why spray drying remains the dominant method.

Premium instant

Instant coffee has spent most of its history as the cheapest, quickest, and most portable coffee, but with a reputation for low quality when it comes to the flavors that coffee lovers seek out. That has begun to change: a market for premium instant coffee has opened up over the past two decades. Today, specialty roasters like Verve and Supreme offer freeze-dried versions of their coffees, often selling for around $2.50 per cup, 35 times the price of standard instant.

Making this possible required technical breakthroughs. One issue was aroma loss. While freeze drying helped preserve more volatile compounds during drying, delicate aromatics could still be lost during earlier stages like roasting, grinding, and extraction. Retaining more of these compounds required improved aroma recovery methods that capture volatiles early in the process, store them separately, and add them back after drying. Primitive forms of aroma recovery had existed since the early twentieth century, but advances since the arrival of freeze drying gave manufacturers better tools to preserve the subtle characteristics that distinguish specialty beans.

Flavourtech’s spinning cone column, originally developed for dealcoholizing wine, has become a popular aroma recovery technology in premium instant coffee production. The device consists of a vertical cylinder containing alternating fixed and rotating cones stacked like ice cream cones. A slurry of ground coffee and cold water poured in at the top cascades down, with each rotating cone flinging the liquid outward into a film roughly a millimeter thick. Low-temperature steam (40–50 degrees centigrade) rises through the column, collecting volatile aromatics from the coffee before cooling and condensing into concentrated aroma extract. The process is quick: coffee spends only 25 seconds in the machine.

Even with gentler methods, flavor compounds are inevitably lost during the drying process. Flash-frozen coffee avoids this by skipping dehydration entirely. Flash freezing is an existing technique, but was adapted to coffee by Massachusetts-based company Cometeer, founded in 2016. It involves brewing coffee at ten times normal strength, then exposing it to cryogenic temperatures using liquid nitrogen. At this extreme cold, the coffee freezes almost instantly, fast enough that ice crystals remain small and don’t damage the coffee’s structure or degrade volatile compounds. The frozen concentrate is then sealed in aluminum capsules.

Flash freezing isn’t cheap. It requires expensive cryogenic equipment and frozen distribution infrastructure, because products must be packed in dry ice and delivered quickly to avoid thawing on the way to the end consumer’s freezer. As a result, Cometeer’s capsules start at around $2 per cup, with prices reaching $7.50 for the most premium beans.

Texture and mouthfeel presented another opportunity for improvement. Fresh-brewed coffee contains oils that coat the tongue and fine particles that create body. The water extraction process used to make instant coffee leaves these behind. Because they don’t dissolve in water, they can’t be captured in the soluble powder. Without them, instant coffee tastes thinner.

Microgrounds offered a way to address this. In September 2009, Starbucks launched VIA Ready Brew, a product that had been in development for nearly 20 years under Don Valencia, the founder of Starbucks’ R&D division. The innovation combined soluble instant coffee with roasted coffee particles small enough to suspend in water rather than fully dissolve. Competitors quickly developed their own microground offerings, with Jacobs Douwe Egberts (now JDE Peet’s) launching Millicano in 2011 and Nestlé launching Nescafé Azera in 2012. However, this hasn’t been universally adopted in premium instant coffee. One issue is that the microgrounds leave a layer of sediment at the bottom of the cup.

Technology alone wasn’t enough to create a premium instant market. The economics of production also had to change. Instant coffee production requires multi-million dollar capital investments in extraction batteries, concentration equipment, and drying facilities. Historically, only manufacturers running at massive scale could justify these costs, leaving specialty roasters with no realistic path into the category.

This changed in 2016 when Nate Kaiser founded Swift Cup Coffee in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, pioneering what you might call instant coffee as a service. Today, a vibrant market of contract processors exists to serve specialty roasters. These processors brew roasters’ beans to precise extraction standards, freeze dry in small batches, and package the finished product under the roaster’s own brand. This converts lumpy fixed costs into variable costs, letting roasters test the market without major investment.

While instant may never be the coffee connoisseur’s preferred drink, decades of innovation have earned it a role in millions of people’s lives. From troops in the field to rushed mornings and camping trips, it offers a practical solution when time or equipment are scarce.

Benjamin Stubbing is an economic analyst. Oscar Sykes is a software engineer. You can follow him on Twitter.

To overcome these problems, researchers have long experimented with vessels that could transport drugs to their destination while shielding them from the body’s defense system. These include nanoparticles, which are tiny structures made from metals, polymers or lipids that are about a thousandth of the width of a single human hair; liposomes, which are fatty spherical pouches whose walls are made from the same material as cell membranes; and nanobots, hypothetical miniature machines that could perform tasks at the molecular or cellular level.

But all of these face challenges. The liver and spleen intercept a large fraction of nanoparticles before they ever reach the target (though they still show promise for certain breast and lung cancers, as they can more easily permeate blood vessels). Liposomes face a similar problem: macrophages in the liver recognize and engulf most of them on the journey. Working nanobots are still a distant prospect. And most are blocked from reaching the brain. These are some of the barriers that microbubbles may be able to cross.

Boy in the bubble

Microbubbles are just what they sound like: tiny gas-filled bubbles. Scientists have engineered them further, to be coated with a protective outer shell and made capable of carrying drugs or genetic material to cells in the body. They are microscopic, roughly the width of spider silk, but still hundreds or thousands of times larger than nanoparticles or liposomes. This means they’re too large to leave the bloodstream. Instead, microbubbles deliver drugs by bursting on command.

As they burst open, they briefly force open biological barriers that are otherwise impenetrable, such as the blood-brain barrier, allowing treatments to pass through. The force of their bursts can even be the treatment itself, as they could also be used to break apart kidney stones.

Microbubbles were first developed to help radiologists read scans. In the late 1960s, doctors at the University of Rochester were using ultrasound to take pictures of heart structures when they made an accidental discovery. When they injected saline into a vein near the heart, their ultrasound image lit up with a cloud of bright signals. The flashes had been created by tiny air bubbles, formed by the rush of fluid from the injection: sound waves passed through blood and tissue fairly smoothly, but once they encountered gas, the change in density reflected the waves back to the sensor.

That discovery became a standard technique for spotting structural defects in the heart: if bubbles crossed from one chamber to the other on the scan, it indicated a hole. But the bubbles were short-lived and inconsistent in size, so researchers began experimenting with other injectable substances, including blood and medical dyes, to produce stronger, more stable signals. These efforts to engineer reliable contrast agents for ultrasound imaging mark the beginning of what we now call medical microbubbles.

Over the following decades, researchers moved from experimenting with whatever was at hand to deliberately designing microbubbles from scratch, giving them thin shells of lipids, proteins, or polymers to control their size and keep them stable long enough to be clinically useful.

One approach to create a protective shell was to use albumin, which is familiar as the protein in egg whites but is also the most common protein in the bloodstream, where it is used to ferry molecules through the body. Since the body already produces it in large quantities, it doesn’t provoke an immune response and can be used medically. It also has useful structural properties: it unfolds and hardens into a shell sturdy enough to survive circulation, but is brittle enough that it can fall apart when hit by focused sound waves. Albunex, an albumin-coated and air-filled microsphere, was approved by the FDA in the early 1990s for use in cardiac ultrasounds, specifically to make the inner walls of the heart’s left ventricle visible on a scan. Unlike air bubbles, these albumin-coated microbubbles were stable with refrigeration for at least two years.

Researchers also found they could make even sturdier shells through sonication: blasting a protein-rich liquid with high-energy sound waves. The intense energy causes the protein molecules to assemble spontaneously with their water-repelling sides facing inward toward the gas, and their water-loving sides facing out, and as they do, the acoustic energy chemically cross-links them in place, forming a rigid shell. Unfortunately, air inside dissolves readily into the surrounding blood, causing the bubbles to collapse within seconds. Scientists found they could dramatically extend bubble lifetime by replacing the air with heavier, less soluble gases, such as perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride, which linger inside the shell long enough to be clinically useful. These second-generation microbubbles can persist in the bloodstream for several minutes, and can meaningfully enhance ultrasound images of the heart and liver.

Microbubbles, being bubbles, have many other interesting properties beyond reflecting sound and carrying material: they can expand, contract and burst.

This behavior, known as cavitation, was already familiar to physicists: when a bubble collapses, it generates a brief pressure pulse that can push on surrounding material. Lawrence Crum, a researcher from the University of Washington, had shown this in larger bubbles, but the question was whether the same forces could be harnessed usefully in living tissue.

A group at Stanford found that they could. At lower intensities, cavitation didn’t destroy cells. Instead, it temporarily loosened the walls of blood vessels and punched small, reversible pores in cell membranes, in a process called sonoporation. This opened a new possibility for drug delivery, especially in the brain, where the blood-brain barrier tightly regulates what can enter. Sonoporation offered a way to open that barrier temporarily and locally, letting drugs through without permanently disrupting it.

Bubbles also move with what surrounds them: wind, water, blood. In the bloodstream, that would usually mean being swept along by the current, with no control over where they end up. Scientists from Northwestern hypothesized that by steering the bubbles, they could control the drugs. They eventually cracked it in the early 1980s by attaching magnetic nanoparticles to microbubble shells made of albumin and treating rats with tail tumors by injecting microbubbles into a nearby artery and using a magnet to capture the bubbles at the tumor site.

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A microbubble future

Microbubbles have been used in diagnostics since the 1990s, but haven’t yet been approved for delivering medical treatments. Part of the reason comes down to how they’re tested. Imaging microbubbles, which are already in clinical use, are relatively straightforward to evaluate. Therapeutic bubbles are harder, because their success depends on both whether the bubbles reach their target and whether the treatment they carry actually works. The external ultrasound system adds another layer of complexity, as researchers need to make sure the ultrasound pulses are working correctly and reliably too. Imaging bubbles also had a head start: they were developed first, and built up a safety record in thousands of patients through large multicenter trials in the 1990s, while therapeutic microbubbles are still catching up.

But researchers are exploring their use across a wide range of conditions: dissolving blood clots in stroke patients, delivering chemotherapy directly to tumors, opening the blood-brain barrier for brain cancer treatments, and even targeting genetic material like mRNA to specific tissues.

Microbubbles are different from many other delivery platforms because they can be steered. But some use cases are more promising than others: treatments where the target is physically accessible, such as a tumor with a clear boundary or a clot in a vessel, are better suited to microbubbles than diffuse conditions where the problem is spread across many tissues.

Brain cancer is likely one promising area: microbubbles can open the blood-brain barrier and early trials in glioblastoma patients have shown the approach is feasible with manageable side effects such as passing headaches. In one small pilot trial, the cavitation effect from bursting bubbles was used to oxygenate tumors, which are otherwise harder to treat with radiation.

Pancreatic cancer is another: in a small 2016 pilot trial, patients treated with microbubble-delivered gemcitabine survived on average eight months longer than the control group, and tolerated more treatment cycles. These are small trials, and results like these need to be replicated at scale.

The same idea is likely to extend beyond cancer. To treat ischemic strokes, doctors currently deliver a clot-dissolving protein called tPA intravenously, but because it circulates through the whole body, it also interferes with healthy clotting elsewhere. Microbubbles could release tPA directly at the clot site, avoiding that tradeoff. Similarly, they also offer a way to deliver chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin and gemcitabine directly to tumors, sparing the heart, liver, and bone marrow from the damage that comes with high systemic doses. And for mRNA therapies, including vaccines like those developed against Covid-19, current delivery systems distribute the vaccines across many tissues, wasting much of it.

Kidney stones are another option, as a physical object that could be broken apart with microbubbles. Researchers have proposed equipping microbubbles with chemical tags that bind specifically to the mineral in most kidney stones, then triggering cavitation with an ultrasound pulse to burst them from inside. Focused ultrasound devices for kidney stones have already received FDA clearance, which suggests regulators are comfortable with the broader approach.

Most drug delivery is systemic: drugs circulate through the entire body, and only a fraction reaches the intended site; the rest is either wasted or can cause off-target side effects. Microbubbles, on the other hand, could carry a therapy through the bloodstream and release it precisely where it’s needed, guided by an external ultrasound pulse. It turns out that to solve some of medicine’s unsolved problems, you sometimes need to think very, very small, and then burst through.

Ambika Grover is an undergraduate at Harvard University.

The Ogallala Aquifer sits under eight states and 111.8 million acres of US farmland. A windmill can lift only a few gallons per minute, useful for drinking water but useless for agricultural purposes. In the 1940s, electrification reached the Great Plains and a Colorado farmer invented center pivot irrigation, a sprinkler line on wheels that rotated around a central wellhead. The 1949 version could lift thousands of gallons per minute and irrigate 40 acres.

Since then the aquifer has lost 286.4 million acre-feet of water, comparable to draining Lake Erie entirely. The parts of it beneath arid states have seen much bigger drops. Large parts of Western Kansas have lost 50 percent of their aquifer depth. Texan wells are down as much as 265 feet. On current trajectories, the water there will be gone in 20–30 years.

Before center pivot irrigation, everyone could use as much of the Ogallala Aquifer as they were physically able to extract without any risk of depletion. An incredible invention created a tragedy of the commons. The southern Great Plains will have to ration water use by some mechanism, probably water charges, or face the total end of irrigated farming.

This is only one example of a common historical story. Fish catch sizes were limited until radar, sonar, and diesel engines; the North Sea Cod population collapsed a few decades after their invention. The telegraph led to the extinction of the passenger pigeon by letting hunters easily communicate about the whereabouts of the flocks. Chlorofluorocarbons almost killed the ozone layer. Technologies can collide with common-pool resources and drive them into extreme scarcity.

The Roadgallala aquifer

This is about to happen again. Road transport, especially the private car, is the dominant mode of transport in every country around the world. None of these countries charge at the point of use for the bulk of their road networks. When traffic gets slow enough – ten miles per hour in Tokyo and eight in Paris – people switch to other modes of transport because they can’t do much else when they are stuck behind the wheel.

This constraint is about to be lifted. Self-driving cars are not a hypothetical future but a familiar part of the urban background in San Francisco. I have driven in them several times and the novelty of seeing a steering wheel turn itself has pretty much worn off. During 2026, Waymo service will expand to Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Orlando, and Miami, joining Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix.

Right now, self driving is a premium experience, more expensive than a human driver, in part because Waymo uses new cars, and in part because there are still relatively few Waymos on the road, spreading operational overheads thickly on a small fleet. Over time, Waymo and its competitors will become cheaper than human-driven taxis.

You make driving fun

Self-driving cars need not look like traditional cars inside. Normal cars are heavy and bulky, in large part due to safety requirements. Despite sharing the road with human drivers, Waymos already have 80 percent fewer accidents. When self-driving cars become 90 percent of the cars on the road, they will be able to platoon and join up into little trains, saving the space usually spent on gaps between vehicles and doubling road capacities.

They can be more comfortable as well. The Volkswagen GEN.TRAVEL has seats that fold out into flat beds, with passenger restraints for safe sleeping while moving and lighting designed to generate natural circadian rhythms. The Volvo 360c offers a first-class private cabin with a classic Volvo touch: a special safety blanket that acts like a seatbelt, usually loose and comfortable but tightening instantly on impact. In theory it can be an entertainment space or a mobile office too. Simpler, working versions of this idea, like the Amazon Zoox, are already driving around Las Vegas and San Francisco.

With imagination, you can see how a wide range of functions could be performed in a car: working, sleeping, eating, and even socializing, effectively bringing back the bar cars once enjoyed by New York commuters to Connecticut. I already buy cans of beer for long train rides with my friends. Train lines created entirely new seaside resorts like Atlantic City in the US, and Heringsdorf, Ahlbeck, and Bansin in Germany. Just imagine the trips people would make with the ability to effectively travel business class in their cars, driving overnight.

Our gridlocked future

Autonomous vehicles are the centrifugal water pump of the roads. Just like the Ogalalla Aquifer, most roads are currently free at the point of use. And just like the Ogalalla Aquifer, they will be overused if we do not charge for the privilege of drawing on them. Anyone who needs to get where they’re going quickly will be stuck in traffic with all the people enjoying a beer, working from a mobile office, or having a nap. There will be total gridlock.

Though taxes on fuel and registering cars are universal across the developed world, imposing charges at the point of use has been trickier. It took New York City 60 years to impose congestion pricing, and it was almost revoked several times along the way. London’s congestion charge has survived, but attempts to extend it out of the very inner core have not. Dutch voters destroyed per-mile charges, the Kilometerheffing, in 2010. Hong Kongers rejected such a scheme in the 1980s, despite an effective trial.

These attempts failed for a range of reasons. But a major one is that they aimed to change the rules of the game for everyone at the same time, creating a lot of people who lost out under the policy while giving them nothing in exchange.

Tax doesn’t have to be taxing

There are two tricks to making new levies politically durable. First, a quid pro quo: drivers are much happier to pay if they get something in exchange, usually infrastructure. Second, grandfathering: drivers don’t like the price of anything they have already accounted for, including road access, to change, but they don’t mind high prices on new things. Fuel taxes are an example of a quid pro quo: in most developed countries, they entirely cover the cost of road construction and maintenance. Tolls, which are usually charged on new tunnels, roads, lanes, or bridges, are an example of both.

The Harris County Toll Road Authority, created by referendum in 1983 to fund the construction of two new roads, now manages 128 miles of roads around Houston, Texas. Voters have continually opted to expand it. Forty-three percent of the lanes added to California highways between 2018 and 2023 have restricted access, whether by requiring vehicles to carry multiple passengers or charging a toll.

Nearly all of France’s motorway system was funded by tolls, as are Japan’s and Austria’s. Voters accept these charges because they both generate a quid pro quo, new infrastructure in exchange for new money, and they keep old infrastructure free.

Voters will even tolerate variably priced toll lanes. Colorado added dynamic tolling, calculated by an algorithm to balance supply and demand, to a congested stretch of a major highway. The state’s Department of Transportation says that throughput there has gone up by 20 percent. The I-4 near Orlando has two express lanes that run for 21 miles. They range from $0.50 to $3.00 per three-mile segment. Cars on these segments go eight miles per hour faster than on the regular lanes during the evening peak. These Lexus Lanes have faced grumbling, but no serious opposition.

One simple trick to make road pricing popular

Grandfathering can work not just by location – new bridge, new tax; old network, no tax – but by vehicle type, if that new vehicle type is not currently being used by most drivers and voters. This is exactly what the UK government did in late 2025, despite being one of the country’s most unpopular governments ever, by imposing a charge of £0.03 per mile on electric vehicles. The new charge was possible because only 5.2 percent of the market is electric.

This shows the path for other countries: imposing a charge that falls only on autonomous vehicles. Since current drivers will not face any unexpected charges, they will tolerate the new tax. If governments want to charge the tax at a high rate, they should give autonomous vehicle owners and users something in return, most likely new road infrastructure. This needs to happen now. When AVs are dominant, users will balk at a big change.

If governments follow these rules, they can charge variable surge prices in busier locations and at busier times, clearing the market so roads flow, as surge pricing already does for Ubers and Lyfts, and as variable pricing does on Singaporean expressways. And if they wish, governments can dispense with gantries and numberplate cameras and use location trackers. Voters are comfortable with location tracking that they opt for themselves, as in ride shares or many of their apps.

If we continue to treat our roads as a common-pool resource, we will drain them like the Ogallala Aquifer. The good news is that if we act quickly, before autonomous vehicles become dominant, we can prevent this surprisingly easily.

Ben Southwood is an editor at Works in Progress.

By late January 1945, the end of World War II finally seemed in sight. American business leaders began thinking about introducing products delayed by the war. The most anticipated was nylon stockings, which debuted in 1939 only to have the new fiber diverted to military applications. Another was television, which had entranced visitors at the 1939 World’s Fair. But the new medium was a much tougher sell than high-tech hosiery.

‘Television presents a vicious triangle’, JJ Nance, a Zenith Radio Corp executive explained to Wall Street analysts. Television shows were far more expensive to make than radio programs. Producers needed advertising revenue to cover the costs. But advertisers demanded large audiences. ‘We can’t get a mass audience’, Nance said, ‘until we have provided the American peo­ple with assured continuous entertainment, pleasing enough to stimulate the buying of receivers by the million’. Hence the vicious triangle: attracting viewers required programs, which required advertising, which required viewers...

It’s a dilemma every new technology platform faces – only more so. To catch on, television needed to sell hardware, create content, and find revenue. Few contemporary platforms have to do all three. Most build on an installed base of hardware. Social media gets its content free from users. In theory, TV might have paid for programming with a license fee on sets, like the tax that still funds the BBC. But Americans, accustomed to free, ad-supported radio programming over public airwaves, fiercely resisted any such suggestion.

Yet just a decade after Nance’s speech, two thirds of American homes had a TV set, including 78 percent of those in cities. As early as 1948, public housing officials were already debating whether tenants in subsidized apartments should be allowed sets and antennas. Television was one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history.

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To escape the vicious triangle, broadcasters exploited ready-made productions, complete with their own stages, fan bases, and well-established stars: sports. Showcasing athletic competition was the new medium’s killer app. ‘For the next few years, at least, sports coverage will be far and away the most important single element in television programming’, the sports manager for Chicago’s WGN station wrote in 1948. ‘It’s a safe bet that up to 50 per cent of television hours, both live shows and films, will be in the field of athletics’.

The postwar rematch between heavyweight boxers Joe Louis and Billy Conn in June 1946 was an early success. Broadcast from New York’s Yankee Stadium, the fight reached north to Connecticut and south to Washington, DC. Fans ‘saw everything that went on in that 24-foot square, and they saw it in much better detail than most of the 45,266 persons who paid their way’, enthused a New Jersey sports reporter, putting the TV audience at about 100,000. ‘You could hear the roar of the crowd; the count of the referee; the ring of the bell’, he wrote. A Brooklyn bar owner who crammed in 150 fans to watch his television said he’d turned away at least 500 more.

Bars were critical to television’s early success. ‘More people see television sets in bars than would ordinarily see them in showrooms’, said the director of a Chicago station. ‘The bars are helping sell sets to private homes’. Although some bartenders complained that sports fans contented themselves with a single beer rather than multiple cocktails, most reported that television brought in more customers, ultimately raising sales. Sometimes a bar would place a large magnifying glass in front of the screen to make the broadcast more visible at a distance.

TV’s early appeal can strain the twenty-first-century imagination. Broadcasts were in blurry black and white, with pictures plagued by shadows, snow, and jitters. Screens were tiny, typically about 52 square inches, and a basic set cost around $325 (about $4,400 in today’s dollars). An exceptionally well-capitalized bar might splurge on the UST Tavern Tele-Symphonic, featuring a 25” x 19” screen, at a cost of $1,995, or nearly $30,000 today. But those were rare luxuries.

With their one-on-one action and limited ring size, boxing and wrestling were well suited to the small screen. New wrestling fans, particularly women, were a common trope in newspaper reports. ‘A lot of frail women are enjoying the sight of Danny MacShane cracking a man’s head into a steel post and having his head cracked in turn’, observed a sports columnist. Wrestling might or might not be a sport, but it was definitely entertainment.

Amid widespread fears of ‘juvenile delinquency’, television promised to keep kids out of trouble. ‘There’s no juvenile delinquency here’, proclaimed an ad for TV sets, portraying a family seated around their living room console. The tavern connection contradicted that wholesome image. Minors weren’t supposed to enter bars, but young sports fans often peered in the windows.

In response, churches, Boys Clubs, youth centers, and YMCAs began buying their own sets. On a summer evening in 1948, a Methodist church outside Philadelphia attracted a crowd of 125, mostly teenagers, to watch a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Cincinnati Reds. Pastors around the country reported that TV was drawing in the kids. ‘Our church set is used primarily for hockey games, prize fights, and other sports events’, said a Presbyterian minister in Chicago. ‘We’re sorry we didn’t think of it before’.

Sports were so perfect for television that many feared the new medium would devastate ticket sales. ‘It’s inevitable that sports attendance will crash to a national calamity’, declared a columnist, reporting that boxing authorities in the nation’s capital were lobbying for legislation requiring broadcasters to cover match expenses. Football coach Rip Engle, then at Brown University and soon to move to Penn State, foresaw a shakeout. ‘I won’t be surprised if there are only ten college football teams left in a few years’, he said in 1949. ‘That’s what’s going to happen if games involving the big schools are widely televised’. Others predicted the death of minor league baseball. Why turn out for the local farm team when the big leagues were on TV?

Nonsense, said optimists. Veteran sports columnist Ed Danforth cited history and initial results. Baseball owners were always against change. ‘Look how they resisted the avalanche of money night baseball brought them’, he wrote. He ticked off the televised events of 1947 – the World Series, the Notre Dame–Army football game, the Joe Louis–Jersey Joe Walcott fight, the Sugar Bowl featuring the University of Georgia’s undefeated football team – and noted that they all set attendance records. ‘Big events played to capacity, whether they were televised or not’, he wrote. Television was ‘publicity for these sports and publicity that was PAID for at the source’. Television, he predicted, would only increase the popularity of sports.

Eight decades later it’s safe to say he was right. In 2024, US sports events attracted a staggering 292 million in-person fans, reports sports-marketing firm Two Circles. Far from shrinking to a handful of teams, college football games endure as a major cultural experience, and sell the most tickets of any US sport. At the same time, sports continue to support television in its many forms. Whether viewed on an enormous flat screen or a palm-sized phone, sports offer a compelling form of visual entertainment, with real stakes and unknown outcomes. And they still draw fans to bars.

Virginia Postrel is a contributing editor and author at Works in Progress.

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