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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyler Cowen is an economist.

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

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

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

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

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

Kaolin

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

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

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

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

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

Alltinktur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dekton

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

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

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

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

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

Charles C Mann is a correspondent for The Atlantic.

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

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

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

In the West, China’s success is often attributed to the central government’s willingness to pick winners and direct its economy from above. Many Westerners have concluded that a similar top-down approach is needed in their countries to create champions that can compete with China’s. But Beijing’s role is more akin to being a rulemaker in a great tournament. Subnational governments – provinces, cities, towns, villages – are responsible for around 85 percent of public expenditure, according to the IMF, the lion’s share of which is spent at city level.[ref 1]

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

Local heroes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Growth is the best policy

China’s mayors and provincial governors turn their cities into venture capital portfolios because of the system of incentives in which they operate. [ref 2] Each cadre (the party members and other officials who run the Chinese state) is scored by their superiors in a secret file built up over the course of their career. Prefecture-level party secretaries evaluate county chiefs, who in turn evaluate their juniors heading up townships, who evaluate village leaders, down to the lowest party member.

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

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

What makes these incentives work is the fact that, unlike in many Western systems, provincial governments get to keep much of the money they generate. After 1980, when China’s economy first started to open up, provinces retained roughly 75 of every 100 marginal yuan they raised. Many provincial governments negotiated deals in which they agreed in advance how much income they would owe to Beijing over the next five years or more, meaning that every yuan they subsequently did or didn’t raise went onto their own balance sheet. By 1990, the average marginal retention rate was nearly 90 percent. Local government incentives were sharpened even more after 1994, when a package of reforms cut the share of VAT that provinces and cities kept, leaving them with a hunger for revenue, but often allowed them to keep 100 percent of the upside from state-owned enterprises, and the ability to sell land-use rights, almost all of whose revenues they could keep.[ref 3]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How local governments create clusters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feeding the growth machines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chicago way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Southwood is an editor at Works in Progress.

Illustration by Micha Huigen.

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

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

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

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

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

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School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adulthood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Method in their madness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Hughes is an editor at Works in Progress.

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

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

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

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

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The lethal gene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Smaller still to bite ’em

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

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

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

Regulating biotech better

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

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

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

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

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

Maya Rosen is a writer interested in biotechnology policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scissors beat rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bronze Age collapse

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

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

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

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

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The blooming of iron

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

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

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

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

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

Abundance mindset

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

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

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

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

The end of empire

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

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

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

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

The iron revolution and its consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microbes in limbo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How the microbes got their prison

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

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

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

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

Escaping the labyrinth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The case for caution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fix everything easily switch

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

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

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

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

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

Niko McCarty is the founding editor at Asimov Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The limits of preemption

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

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

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

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

Promising reforms . . . alongside disappointment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The political problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to solve the bargaining failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Empirical evidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning NIMBYs into YIMBYs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An invasive species

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Rat Control Zone

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

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

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

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

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

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The rodent surveillance state

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

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

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

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

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

Eratication

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warfaring

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

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

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

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

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

The rat race

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

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

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

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

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

Deena Mousa is a researcher and grantmaker at Coefficient Giving.

A car is a difficult thing to steal. It is large, cherished by its owner, difficult to hide and required by law to have identifying metal plates that everyone can see. A good thief changes the plates, and an excellent thief steals a common car in a boring color and hopes to blend in among the crowd. But eventually, no matter what techniques they use, they must drive that car on the road, and roads are public places.

But until recently, finding a stolen car and catching its thief depended on a diligent police officer looking at the right road at the right moment and managing to copy down a license plate number going past at speed, and then remembering he had seen it on the morning briefing’s stolen car hot sheet. America has four million miles of public roads, and almost 50 percent of the country’s police departments employ fewer than ten full-time officers. The odds were in the thief’s favor.

With not much to go on, police officers were forced to operate on vague descriptions and partial plates. While I pulled over a car that happened to be the same color as the suspect’s vehicle, and spent time checking names and licenses; the criminal was usually somewhere else. Imprecision allowed thieves to escape while intruding on the lives of millions of innocent motorists. That is, until the arrival of systems like Flock.

Bare ALPR

Flock Safety, a startup based in Atlanta, Georgia, was founded in 2017 to give police departments better eyes. Its product is a small solar-powered automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera attached to a pole on the roadside. As a car passes, the device takes a photograph of the vehicle, notes identifying features like color and make, and reads its license plate. The license plate is instantly checked against the FBI’s national database of stolen cars or wanted persons. If there’s a match, it sends an alert to police officers in the area, who may be eating their lunch instead of watching the road. As a police officer in the southeastern United States, I have often used Flock to catch wanted criminals.

But ALPR is not new. Originally developed in 1976 by the British Home Office, it was deployed as a prototype on toll roads and tunnels, leading to the first ALPR-enabled arrest in 1981 when a stolen car being driven by its thief was found. The first large-scale trial of the technology was ‘Project Laser’ in 2004, when the project’s cameras read more than five million British plates, resulting in 3,071 arrests. Just a year later, ALPR was used to locate a man who murdered a female police officer. At the time, Chief Superintendent Geoff Dodd of the West Yorkshire Police described it as ‘the best investigative tool we have had since the introduction of DNA analysis’.

Criminals have learned to fear the technology. In London, where I spent five years as a police officer before moving to America, ALPR is so thoroughly embedded in criminal life that rappers discuss it in their lyrics. ‘Bare A[L]PR, bro,’ the artist Central Cee raps, ‘beg you don’t smoke weed in the car’.

For much of the technology’s history, however, it has needed expensive installations or cameras attached to police vehicles, affordable to only the largest departments. Alerts were often neither instant nor accurate. Flock’s idea was to sell a more accurate ALPR camera for an annual subscription of just $3,000, an affordable price given that the typical US police department has an annual budget of $1 million. It worked, and today almost 30 percent of police agencies in the United States subscribe to the service.

It is easiest to imagine the Flock camera, or any ALPR device, as a roadside barcode scanner. I can use a ‘lookup’ tool for either a plate or vehicle description that could be connected to a specific investigation. For instance if a victim of a sexual assault told me the suspect was driving a white Toyota Tacoma with a roof rack, I could while still on scene conduct a lookup in the area filtered for similar vehicles with roof racks and see results from within a particular timeframe. For each search, I am required to record a case number and a reason that is then published in a monthly audit sent to and validated by department administrators.

I have used Flock myself, for instance, to locate a vehicle involved in a hit and run when all there was to go on was a model and color. Using that and an approximate time window, I was able to find an image from when a car entered my jurisdiction, and when it left, with the visible addition of a significant dent from the collision.

What Flock cannot do is search for individuals or show who is driving a particular vehicle that it scans. An ALPR camera does not care about the person driving a car, or its passengers, and even if an officer gets an alert that a vehicle is known to be driven by a wanted felon they must themselves establish who is behind the wheel before having probable cause to stop it.

Stolen cars provide the clearest evidence such a scanner works. American police solve only 8.2 percent of reported vehicle thefts with an arrest. A recent working paper suggests that agencies that adopted the devices saw a 15.9 percent relative increase in car thefts caught, which would raise the national rate to 9.5 percent. But that is just stolen cars.

Vehicle crime takes many forms. It is often the means by which a robber or a murderer arrives at and departs from their crimes. Criminals’ vehicles carry drugs and guns, and smuggle cash. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, vehicles were involved in 53 percent of shootings during the two years before the city expanded its ALPR network. After the expansion, Atlantic City saw monthly averages of motor vehicle thefts drop by 20 percent, property crimes by 34 percent and fatal shootings by almost 40 percent. Seventy-two alert-caused traffic stops located forty stolen vehicles and nine stolen plates.

Flock itself conducted a study claiming that 10 percent of all reported crime in the United States is solved using evidence obtained from their cameras. Not bad for a few thousand dollars a year.

On several occasions, Flock alerts have allowed me to arrest those suspected of serious violent crimes. Local officers knew who they were and had circulated information about what cars they drove to neighboring agencies. Besides automatically cross-referencing from national databases, officers can create their own ‘hotlists’ of license plates that will create alerts, even if they are not on FBI-maintained lists.

These could be hotlists to build intelligence on drug supply or gangs, or plates belonging to drivers in the city with suspended licenses. These officer-created hotlists can be shared locally or nationally, but still require an officer to verify the information and establish lawful reasons to investigate the cars involved. Without those alerts, some of the criminals I arrested would have remained free for longer.

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Good Flock, Bad Flock

And yet, the past month has seen this simple piece of crime-fighting technology become the most reviled piece of street furniture in America. Flock cameras have been sawn from their poles, hammered into shards by teenagers, and rammed by vehicles. Cities have canceled contracts even where their own audits found no evidence that their officers had misused the system. Opposition stretches from Bernie Sanders all the way to the former WWE wrestler Kane, who now serves as the Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, and who describes Flock as ‘unconstitutional’.

More than 150 cities and towns have now deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled contracts with the company. Over the space of a few weeks a startup previously known to just police officers and neighborhood associations has joined data centers, Covid vaccines, 5G towers, pasteurized milk and fracking in the pantheon of American moral panics.

Opponents of Flock tend to believe that it is abused by policemen with impunity, that it can track individuals as well as cars, and that it violates American constitutional protections. None of those things are true.

Obviously a camera capable of finding a stolen car is also capable of finding a car driven by somebody’s ex-wife and so like any software, Flock has been abused. There are stories of police officers who have used it to stalk girlfriends, and there are also innocent motorists who have been stopped by police after Flock cameras misread plates or received old information from national databases. A common issue from my experience is stolen front license plates being entered into a database and the innocent owners of the rear license plate being held on suspicion of car theft.

But Flock comes with protections. As mentioned earlier, each search in Flock must be accompanied by a recorded reason. Similarly entering a plate into a hotlist must have a case number assigned. Results were originally retained for thirty days, but recent changes by Flock mean that recorded plates are now kept for only seven days. Suspicious searches are picked up by algorithms or found in department audits, with the service blocking users until senior officers evaluate and resolve flags. The Institute for Justice, a think tank that is critical of ALPR, studied misuse of Flock in April of this year and found 51 incidents across the United States since 2024, noting that ‘Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired’. Another incorrect belief is that Flock does more than scan vehicles, with some suggesting it scans and tracks passing phones or devices – but it does no such thing.

While Flock is a tool that can be audited, there is nothing to stop a corrupt officer simply following a car when they don’t like the look of its driver, or writing down plates of vehicles spotted outside an ex-girlfriend’s house – they would just be harder to catch. And Flock does not proactively alert officers to cars that do not trigger flags on national or local hotlists. There is no reason state legislatures or Congress could not create harsh punishment or penalties for abuse of ALPR, without getting rid of it entirely.

Another argument against Flock, as espoused by Kane, is that it violates liberties granted by the Fourth Amendment, protecting citizens from unreasonable privacy breaches from law enforcement. But it has been repeatedly established over the last century by courts across the country that cops observing license plates, either with the naked eye or by machine, is not an unreasonable search. After all, your license plate belongs to the government and a highway is a public place.

In 1983, the Supreme Court held unanimously that ‘a person travelling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another’. And in January of 2026, a federal judge in Virginia ruled in a challenge by two civil rights activists against Flock specifically that: ‘An individual scan of a license plate, a vehicle identifier that generally must be displayed under state law, does not invade any privacy interests’.

The problem for Flock is that, if it works, it provides no visible benefits outside the crime statistics: a crime prevented because an offender was afraid of being caught by ALPR produces no victim and no police report. But every misuse has a victim who can describe what happened and a mugshot of a corrupt cop, and every false alert can produce a photograph of an innocent motorist in handcuffs.

Flock did not invent its capabilities and certainly does not have a monopoly on them. There are at least five other companies that offer almost identical products and services to public and private enterprise, some arguably even more invasive. Even some of the cities that have canceled contracts with Flock Safety in recent weeks have signed up to buy similar products from the company’s rivals.

It seems unlikely that America will ever ban ALPR at a state level, let alone a national one. Instead, a patchwork already familiar to American policing will result, where policies and practices diverge across local and political boundaries.

Nor would the cameras actually disappear, even in towns where governments restrict their use and cancel contracts. The already-mentioned Fourth Amendment only applies to the government, not to private enterprise. Police departments may dismantle their networks but homeowners associations concerned about vehicle theft can buy their own network of Flock cameras, as many already do. The people harmed the most will be the residents of the average small town whose police departments cannot afford helicopters, drones or enough police officers to watch every road themselves.

I can remember policing without ALPR. A circulation would go out over the radio to look for a silver Volkswagen Golf, no license plate seen, and so for the rest of the night every single silver Golf we saw got stopped. There was no audit trail of our mistakes because there was no software.

Even when ALPR was introduced, we relied on a complex system that would send alerts through multiple layers of human filtering before finally being sent out to officers – often five to ten minutes after the car had been detected – and so was usually long gone by the time we turned up. With Flock, I can get a notification on my phone and can set my patrol car up to intercept it as it approaches.

Flock’s critics have the important point right: we should want the police to invade law-abiding citizens’ lives as little as possible. But they are mistaken about what Flock actually does. Flock allows us to be more surgical and precise, avoiding pulling over innocent people with all of the risks that involves. More than anything, Flock allows me to leave you alone.

Ned Donovan is a policeman

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Jacob Witten explains why siRNA will change medicine as we know it.

If you want a picture of biomedical research, imagine a boot stamping on a biologist’s face – for decades. The boot is labeled ‘medicinal chemistry’. This should not be taken as an insult to medicinal chemists, who heroically navigate maybe the hardest field in biomedicine.1 Rather, what I mean is this. A biologist might have a clear hypothesis about how to stop a disease, such as: blocking a particular protein will lower blood cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease. Naturally enough, the biologist would like to test that hypothesis. But there is no magic button to switch off this protein; something physical has to do the blocking. Usually, that thing is a small chemical carefully designed to be administered into the body, bind to the protein, block it – and do nothing else. In practice, this almost never goes as planned, which is a major reason most drugs fail in clinical trials.

It’s worse than this: medicinal chemists struggle to come up with ways to interact with most proteins at all. The majority of human proteins are considered ‘undruggable’, meaning that none of the small molecules we can currently synthesize can effectively bind to them, either because those proteins lack a convenient pocket for drugs to attach to or because they are ‘intrinsically disordered’, with little coherent structure.2 Drug discovery ends up focusing on the minority of targets that are druggable, like the proverbial drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp because that’s where the light shines.

Even for those targets, success is far from guaranteed. A drug that works in the lab might be broken down in the body before it reaches its target protein, interfere with other proteins and cause toxic side effects, or fail to be absorbed and distributed to the right tissues. Our ability to predict what small molecule drugs will do in the body is so poor that even if the drug works, it might be for a different reason than originally hypothesized!3

But what if, instead of spending years optimizing small molecule chemistry to treat just one disease, and all that work merely delivering a sharp reminder that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, there really was a magic button to switch off any gene we chose? In that case, we could treat not just high cholesterol but dozens of deadly diseases, from Alzheimer’s to diabetes to Huntington’s disease.

Welcome to the world of siRNA therapy.

Silencing genes

The story of siRNA begins in 1990, when the scientists at the DNA Plant Technology Corporation in California were trying to figure out why their petunias turned white. They had actually been trying to make their petunias darker, by adding an extra copy of the gene for an enzyme that produces pigment. Presumably, adding an extra copy of a gene for an enzyme would mean more enzyme and therefore more pigment. But somehow, the extra copy eliminated the enzyme’s production, rather than boosting it. They named this baffling effect ‘cosuppression’. Subsequent work by other researchers revealed its cause: a special kind of RNA molecule, siRNA, had interfered with the enzyme’s production. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello later won a Nobel prize for this discovery.

Biologists had already known about RNA for several decades. Similar to DNA, RNA is a complex molecule built from a chain of smaller building blocks that encode genetic information. But the two differ in one important detail: the building blocks of RNA have one extra oxygen atom compared to DNA (hence its name, ribonucleic acid, as opposed to DNA’s ‘deoxy’-ribonucleic acid). This oxygen is prone to chemical reactions that can break RNA molecules. DNA is stabler and is therefore used to store genetic information in all multicellular life. RNA molecules tend to be short-lived, and take many different forms within cells, carrying instructions, helping to assemble proteins, regulating genes, and catalyzing reactions.4 And while DNA is ‘double-stranded’, with two linked strands of building blocks twisting into its famous helix shape, RNA often exists as just one strand.

DNA contains the instructions for making proteins, from the enzymes that digest food to the keratin and collagen that form our hair and skin. But to get from DNA to protein, the genetic code is first transcribed into an intermediate RNA molecule, called ‘messenger RNA’ or mRNA, which is then translated into protein. If the mRNA is destroyed, the protein won’t be built.

That’s exactly what siRNA, or ‘small interfering RNA’, does: it’s a short strand of RNA that interferes with the production of protein by destroying mRNA. An siRNA molecule binds to a piece of mRNA with a matching sequence, like a kind of barcode, and targets it for destruction by the cell’s gene-silencing machinery, which cuts the mRNA into pieces.

siRNA also explains what happened in the petunias. Adding an extra copy of the pigment-producing gene triggered the petunias to develop siRNA targeting that sequence, and because the newly introduced gene and the original gene shared the same sequence, both were silenced, the flowers lost their pigment and turned white. This is a naturally occurring process: siRNA is used to ‘silence’ unwanted genes, such as those of viruses that have entered the cell. But we can also use it to artificially block the production of proteins that cause disease.

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siRNA therapy

For some diseases, gene silencing has already succeeded. One example is hereditary transthyretin amyloidosis, a condition caused by a mutation in the transthyretin gene, which makes that protein misfold and clump together in the bloodstream, nerves, and heart. Over the years, the deposits build up, damaging nerves and stiffening the heart muscles, which can eventually lead to heart failure. Until recently, the condition meant a life expectancy roughly a decade shorter than average.5

In 2018, the FDA approved the very first RNA interference drug, called patisiran, to treat the nerve damage caused by this disease. A newer, longer-lasting version called vutrisiran was approved in 2022. Both drugs use siRNA to prevent the production of the misfolded protein so that clumps don’t form, which halts or slows down progression of the disease.

This approach could be adapted to many different diseases, from high cholesterol to Alzheimer’s, whose progression hinges on a small number of critical proteins. RNA interference makes it possible to target those proteins specifically and stop them from being produced.

Have a gene you’d like to silence? Identify the gene’s sequence, synthesize a short siRNA sequence to match it, deliver the siRNA into the right cells, and bam – instant knockdown. It sounds simple enough in theory, but that last step, getting siRNA into the right cells, has proven surprisingly difficult. Only after decades of grinding organic chemistry has it been solved.

The delivery problem

If you just injected siRNA into a patient’s veins, nothing useful would happen. There are at least three reasons for this. First, the body is full of enzymes that recognize and destroy unprotected RNA, including siRNA. Second, even a perfectly intact siRNA molecule would do nothing in the bloodstream, as it needs to get inside a cell to reach its target mRNA. Third, the way it would get into a cell involves being enveloped in a small bubble called an endosome, where it would be broken down by digestive enzymes. So an siRNA molecule would need to stay intact, enter its target cells, and then somehow escape from the endosome without being digested.

One way to solve these challenges is to use nature’s own delivery system: viruses. Viruses have spent billions of years evolving to get past our cells’ defences, find their way in, and release their proteins. So what if we used viruses to carry siRNA into our cells? Researchers have tried to do just that, by engineering harmless viruses to carry and deliver siRNA into specific tissues, including the brain. But viruses come with a drawback: just as they have evolved to infiltrate our cells, our immune systems have spent hundreds of millions of years learning to recognize and destroy them. Even carefully designed viral delivery systems can trigger immune reactions, especially if they’re used repeatedly, which can be risky for patients and make treatments less effective.

Signed, sealed, delivered

Another approach has focused on packaging RNA inside tiny fat-like particles, called liposomes, to protect and help it enter cells. Liposomes were first explored in the 1960s, and could shield RNA from being broken down in the body to some degree. But liposomes were far less successful at entering cells, because they bound only weakly to their outer membranes, and were even worse at escaping endosomes and releasing their payload of siRNA into the cells.

That challenge was overcome in the 1980s, when researchers tweaked liposomes to bind more tightly to negatively charged cell membranes, by incorporating lipids with a positive electric charge. While this helped get the RNA into cells, it came at a cost: the strong positive charge made them interact with cell membranes too strongly and damage them.

The next breakthrough was more subtle. Instead of using lipids that were always charged, researchers incorporated lipids that could change their charge depending on the acidity of their environment, called ‘ionizable lipids’. These lipids are neutral in the bloodstream, minimizing damage, but turn positive once inside an endosome, as endosomes are acidic. This destabilizes the endosome’s membrane, releasing the siRNA into the cell.

Even after coming up with that basic idea, the problem was nowhere near solved. It took more than a decade of tinkering with ionizable lipid chemistry, leading to a thousand-fold improvement in potency, to produce lipid nanoparticles that performed all these three steps of delivery (stability, uptake into cells, and endosomal escape) safely and efficiently.6

Patisiran, the first FDA-approved siRNA drug, was the first success that took this approach, by delivering siRNA in ionizable lipid nanoparticles to silence the mutated transthyretin gene in liver cells and slow the progression of amyloidosis. It was proof that siRNA could be turned into a real medicine. But it also arrived, ironically, just as the use of lipid nanoparticles for siRNA was being eclipsed by a more efficient method.7 What if siRNA didn’t need a carrier at all?

Naked siRNA

So far, researchers had focused on shielding siRNA from being broken down inside the body. But then they tried a new tack: making the siRNA molecule itself sturdier so that it could survive unclothed.

To understand how this was possible, let’s return to the difference between DNA and RNA. RNA has an extra oxygen atom, which makes it vulnerable to reactions that break it apart. By chemically modifying that pesky oxygen – for example, by swapping the oxygen for less reactive fluorine or hydrogen, or linking a methyl group (a highly stable formulation of one carbon atom and three hydrogen atoms) to it – the RNA molecule can be made much more durable. These small, precise chemical changes allowed Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (which also developed patisiran) to create siRNA molecules with almost indefinite protection against degradation when injected naked.

With stability solved, the next challenge was guiding this naked siRNA to its target. The siRNA drugs carried by lipid nanoparticles naturally accumulated in the liver, because lipid nanoparticles impersonate cholesterols which get processed there. This made the liver an easy target for siRNA drugs. But without lipid nanoparticles, naked siRNA molecules wouldn’t concentrate at a target organ. So researchers attached a sort of address label to get them there: three copies of a small sugar molecule called GalNAc. Liver cells have receptors for GalNAc on their surfaces, which recognize the sugar and bring it inside their endosomes. This directed siRNA to its intended destination.

Alnylam had cracked the first two hurdles of delivering naked siRNA drugs: it had created siRNA that did not instantly break down in the bloodstream, got to the cells it needed to, and entered them. That left the final hurdle of escaping the endosome. Without ionizable lipids to break the endosome membrane, how would naked siRNA ever make it out of endosomes and into the interior of the cell? The answer turned out to be unexpectedly simple. While most naked siRNA remains confined in the endosome, a small proportion slips out through some fluke occurrence, and more continues to be released over time. The proportion of siRNA leaking out of endosomes can be well under one percent, but often that is enough because siRNA is so potent – very little of it is actually needed to have its gene-silencing effect.

The result is a massive difference in how long the drug lasts. Patisiran, which is carried by a lipid nanoparticle, needed to be dosed every three weeks. In contrast, Alnylam’s newer drug, vutrisiran, a naked siRNA drug attached to a GalNAc sugar, is approved to treat the same medical condition, but needs to be dosed only once every three months. Other drugs based on naked siRNA and GalNAc now exist that only need to be topped up every six months. GalNAc siRNA drugs also have another advantage. Patisiran, with its lipid nanoparticle, carried the risk of triggering immune reactions, so patients had to be given immunosuppressants alongside it; but this precaution is unnecessary for those attached to GalNAc.

Simply put, temporarily switching off a precise gene in the liver is now a solved problem, and it can be achieved with drugs that require no more than four administrations per year. Multiple siRNA drugs have been approved for treating liver diseases, both rare and common, including treatments for hereditary transthyretin amyloidosis, hemophilia, high cholesterol, and acute hepatic porphyria, a nasty lifelong condition that causes attacks of pain, vomiting, and breathlessness because of a faulty enzyme. Many more siRNA drugs are in late-stage trials, including treatments for high blood pressure, diabetes, and fatty liver disease.

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Beyond the liver

Every success story so far has involved the liver. But of course the liver is not the only organ in the body. The reason the liver dominates the story is not that siRNA will work only there but that the liver was an easy starting point. But once that approach worked, it suggested a broader idea – if siRNA can be stabilized and delivered by attaching a molecular ‘address’ to it, then in principle, different labels could be used to guide it to different organs.

That’s exactly what the field is now trying to do. By swapping out the sugar used to target the liver for other molecules, researchers are developing drugs targeted for other organs, including the kidneys, lungs, fat tissue, muscle, and brain. The competition is intense, and if any company stumbles, many other hungry startups, like Manifold Bio and Soufflé Therapeutics, will be hot on its tail.

Among these efforts, the highest-stakes trials are those aimed at the brain. They target one of modern medicine’s bêtes noires: Alzheimer’s disease. The most influential theory of Alzheimer’s, though it remains controversial, is that the disease is driven by a misfolded protein, amyloid beta, which is produced from a larger amyloid precursor protein. According to the theory, these misfolded proteins accumulate into clumps that trigger the accumulation of another protein, tau, which causes a loss of neurons and cognitive decline. This hypothesis naturally suggests two obvious intervention points: either reduce the production of amyloid precursor protein upstream or the production of tau downstream. Alnylam’s program targets the amyloid precursor, while Arrowhead’s targets tau.

These drugs will face different challenges than earlier siRNA drugs, which targeted the liver. The most immediate is accessing the brain, which is protected by the blood-brain barrier, a tight layer that seals and defends the brain from most molecules in the bloodstream. Alnylam’s current strategy is to bypass this barrier by injecting the siRNA directly into spinal fluid by ‘intrathecal injection’, where a needle inserted into the spine delivers drugs directly into spinal fluid, like in an epidural. Their siRNA is also attached to a fatty acid chain, which they believe will successfully deliver it to the relevant brain cells. But while this approach might prove effective, it’s also uncomfortable for patients and not ideal for frequent dosing.

Arrowhead is trying the bolder approach of delivering siRNA by injection under the skin, using a proprietary targeted siRNA molecule that’s meant to cross the blood-brain barrier itself. There’s a precedent for this approach, but no guarantee it will succeed.

Even if the amyloid hypothesis is correct and delivery succeeds, biology might still limit what siRNA can achieve. Famously, by the time Alzheimer’s disease is diagnosed, the damage to the brain is often extensive enough that clearing amyloid plaques has little effect on slowing its progress. Whether targeting tau might be more effective at later stages remains an open question. Yet the broader point still stands: siRNA delivery beyond the liver is a matter of when, not if. If biologists can identify proteins that are critical to the progression of a disease, those diseases can become treatable or preventable.

The future of programmable medicines

siRNA falls into the category of therapies we could call ‘programmable medicines’. Once medicinal chemists have worked out how to get a programmable medicine into a particular organ, all that’s required to treat a new disease of that organ is to specify a new RNA or DNA sequence while holding the chemistry constant.8 9 So vutrisiran, the siRNA treatment for hereditary transthyretin amyloidosis, works according to the exact same principles as inclisiran, the siRNA that targets PCSK9 to reduce cholesterol levels.

siRNA is not the only programmable medicine in use, and other platforms have capabilities that siRNA lacks. For example, antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) are short strands of synthetic genetic material that can alter RNA and be delivered similarly to siRNA. One such ASO, targeting the tau protein involved in Alzheimer’s disease, has shown promising results in a phase two clinical trial. mRNA vaccines can trigger the production of certain proteins in our cells, and are a blindingly fast way to develop effective vaccines against viruses, as we saw during the Covid pandemic. CRISPR-based gene editing can permanently fix genes, rather than just temporarily switching them off, by directly altering cells’ DNA.10 The common thread is that all these approaches link biological understanding directly to medicine. Once delivery is solved, the medicinal chemistry boot is off the biologist’s face, and they can test new treatments simply by switching out the target genetic sequence.

Each of these forms of programmable medicine has already produced FDA-approved treatments. So far, only one class of problems has been solved by programmable medicine: gene silencing in the liver by siRNA. But sooner or later, the same will be true of other organs. As scientists solve each delivery problem, we’ll experience an explosion of safe, convenient treatments against a myriad of diseases that were once considered untreatable. Soon, they will simply be waiting their turn.

Jacob Witten is a professor at Case Western Reserve University.

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Derek Hopper explains why Thailand was one of the only countries not to be colonized.

At the beginning of the 1833 dry season, a monk named Mongkut set out for Sukhothai, the old capital of Siam. Long journeys by boat and on foot for study, teaching, and religious observance were common for monks like Mongkut. Theravada Buddhism was a huge part of life in premodern Siam, and at any given time, a small percentage of adult men were ordained as monks. As they traveled around the kingdom, locals provided them with food, clothes, and lodging.

But Mongkut was no ordinary monk. He was the 43rd child of King Rama II. Born to one of Rama II’s senior consorts, he was a high-ranking son and in the running to inherit the throne. As such, he would have been traveling with a retinue of attendants as well as fellow monks. The kingdom to which Mongkut was an heir covered most of modern-day Thailand, plus parts of Laos, Cambodia, and Malaysia, and contained around five million subjects. Though most of these subjects were poor rice farmers, Siam’s largest city, Bangkok, was a major trading port, with a dense network of canals lined with houses on stilts, and an ethnically diverse population.

In contrast to the bustling capital, Sukhothai was by this time largely abandoned. From the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Sukhothai had flourished as a political, cultural, and religious center, but it had since been eclipsed by Ayutthaya to the south and, since its founding in the eighteenth century, Bangkok. When Mongkut arrived there, he would have been greeted, as visitors are today, by crumbling stupas (religious buildings), serene Buddha statues, and rust-colored brickwork weathered by centuries of blistering sunshine and tropical rains.

At some point during his stay, Mongkut came across a remarkable object: a four-sided, black stone monolith, about a meter high and inscribed with an unusual script. The stone would become known as the Ramkhamhaeng Stele. Purported to date from 1292, it is often cited as the oldest surviving example of Thai writing.

Mongkut brought the Stele to Bangkok and assembled a committee of scholars to decipher its enigmatic inscription. They compared it to known forms of old Thai and other related scripts, analyzed linguistic patterns, and collaborated with learned monks to interpret unfamiliar words and characters. What they found was extraordinary: the 124 lines of archaic text told of an ancient Thai kingdom ruled by a wise monarch, Ramkhamhaeng. According to the Stele, Ramkhamhaeng’s kingdom combined a literary tradition, a sophisticated legal and political system, independence, sovereignty, secure geographic boundaries, Buddhist kingship, and just rule.

The discovery of the Stele was, as it turned out, serendipitous. Over five centuries, European powers colonized virtually every other territory on Earth, with exceptions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Japan is the best known example. Siam, perhaps the next clearest case of a state that resisted foreign occupation and retained sovereignty, is much less publicized. Siam held out through a combination of diplomacy, reform, and careful image management. By providing evidence of a longstanding complex civilization, the Ramkhamhaeng Stele was just the sort of brand asset the kingdom needed.

The Siamese Holdout

By the 1830s, the Siamese court was watching nervously as British power radiated outward from India. Just a few years before Mongkut’s discovery, during the First Burmese War of 1824–1826, British gunboats sailed up the sacred waters of the Irrawaddy River and humiliated the ancient kingdom of Burma, extracting huge territorial concessions from Siam’s long-term rival. To the east, French missionaries were active in Vietnam and Cambodia, representing the earliest phase of France’s colonial ambitions and its mission civilisatrice. One by one, Siam’s neighbors began to fall and it found itself the sole Southeast Asian holdout against European colonialism.

The vanquished countries pursued a range of resistance strategies, all of them unsuccessful. Burma fought a series of doomed wars against Britain, only to be annexed. Cambodia willingly allowed itself to become a French protectorate, viewing this as the lesser of several evils after decades of encroachment from neighboring Siam and Vietnam, only for that protection to evolve into colonial rule within French Indochina. Vietnam relied on the country’s historic ties to China to ward off France, but its harsh treatment of missionaries and minorities gave Europeans an easy pretext for intervention.

Instead, Siam’s leaders hoped that demonstrating it already had clear markers of civilization would undermine the pretexts for colonization. Even in the nineteenth century, countries did not want to be thought of as engaging in naked land grabs. Successful colonial ventures usually combined ostensibly noble justifications and straightforward power-hungry motivations. Europeans believed that technologically advanced, Christian nations had a moral duty to bring progress to ‘backward’ peoples who lacked proper government, writing systems, and cultural refinement. This ideology created domestic political support and international legitimacy for territorial conquest.

Mongkut’s discovery of the Stele was comparable to finding a lost Magna Carta at just the right moment. Siam’s rulers realized that written language was key to civilizational legitimacy in Western eyes, and the inscription provided exactly what they needed: tangible evidence of a tradition of literary sophistication that overturned European assumptions of primitiveness.

Diplomacy

In 1855, a new British special envoy to Southeast Asia arrived in Bangkok. Sir John Bowring was governor of recently conquered Hong Kong and represented a nation at the height of its powers. By this point, Britain controlled almost a fifth of the world’s land mass, produced over half its industrial output, and had the most powerful navy the world had ever seen. Siam, on the other hand, had been in self-imposed relative isolation from the West since 1688, and had recently been accused of dealing contemptuously with British and American trade missions. John Crawfurd, a British envoy, described the Siamese as ‘unusually sordid, insincere and rapacious’. Under Rama III, Siam’s king and Mongkut’s older half-brother, most people thought Siam was headed down the same path as its neighbors.

After Rama III died in 1851, Mongkut was crowned king, taking the name Rama IV. Mongkut was popular with the British, who thought him more friendly to their interests than the other contenders for the throne. As a monk, he had studied Western languages, sciences, and technology. He spoke English and Latin and had continuous contact with diplomats and Catholic and Protestant missionaries. He was fascinated by the Western concept of material and technological progress, an idea in stark contrast to Buddhist cosmology’s emphasis on repeated cycles of decay.

European diplomats had often found Asian rulers, including Mongkut’s predecessors, to be aloof and disdainful. Arriving in Siam for his meeting with the new king, Bowring would have expected more of the same. Instead, he found a ruler who displayed a sophisticated understanding of the Western world. King Mongkut received Bowring in his private apartments for cigars and wine. They bypassed interpreters and spoke in English. Bowring noted that the king’s library had a vast array of books ranging from Western science to novels by Sir Walter Scott.

British imperialists were unaccustomed to negotiating with Asian rulers who could meet them on their own intellectual ground. This was an era in which Thomas Macaulay, the colonial administrator and historian best known for his History of England, could write that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Bowring, however, was willing to believe the Siamese were cultured. His influential 1857 work, The Kingdom and People of Siam, featured the Ramkhamhaeng Stele, recognizing it as a major historical document that provided evidence of early Thai writing and was crucial to understanding Sukhothai’s sophisticated governance and society.

The treaty that Mongkut and Bowring negotiated was a decisive shift in the relationship between Britain and Siam. Three decades earlier, in 1826, a treaty had opened limited trade between the two countries. The 1855 treaty was by no means generous. It capped Siamese import and export duties at 3 percent and gave significant extraterritorial rights to British subjects, meaning Britons could not be tried in Siamese courts. But the treaty massively increased foreign trade, and crucially, Siam continued to be treated as a sovereign negotiating partner.

The contrast with other countries in the region is stark. Following its defeats in the Anglo-Burmese Wars of 1824–26 and 1852, Burma had been forced to surrender four provinces, pay a crippling £1 million indemnity (about $160 million today), and accept the presence of a British overseer with veto power over the king’s decisions. Similarly, China’s attempt to enforce a ban on Britain’s opium trade in 1839 had resulted in the loss of Hong Kong and the start of what nationalists would later dub the ‘century of humiliation’. Mongkut demonstrated what strategic compromise could achieve when resistance failed.

Xenophilia

Siam’s distinctive approach was not as simple as a cigar-smoking bibliophile king. That was a small part of a broader strategic performance of European norms, an attitude that set Siam apart from other countries in the region.

In response to Britain’s first embassy to China in 1793, Emperor Qianlong dismissed Western technology, declaring that the Middle Kingdom ‘possesses all things in prolific abundance’ and had no need for the goods of ‘barbarian merchants’. Chinese rulers were trained in classical Confucian thought that emphasized China’s cultural superiority, and their insularity and xenophobia made it easy for Europeans to justify their civilizing missions. Similarly, Vietnam’s Emperor Minh Mang rejected French overtures in the 1820s and 1830s. Vietnam’s isolation would later provide France with the pretext for intervention. Both rulers were products of educational systems that viewed foreign knowledge as contaminating rather than useful.

When Asian rulers did embrace modernization, they often did so reactively, after the West had already put them under substantial pressure. Despite having ancient scripts dating back to the sixth century, magnificent Buddhist temples, and sophisticated legal traditions, Burma was systematically dismantled by Britain between 1824 and 1885. The crucial differences between Burma and Siam were timing and agency. Burma was first invaded in 1824, before the ‘civilizing mission’ ideology was in full swing. King Mindon, who ruled Burma from 1853 to 1878, modernized extensively after Britain’s initial conquest, establishing telegraph lines, railways, and modern schools. Yet by then, Britain had generated military and political momentum that rendered Burma’s cultural credentials and reforms irrelevant. When Britain manufactured border disputes to complete Burma’s annexation in 1885, Mindon’s modernization efforts provided no protection against a colonial power that was, by that point, committed to conquest.

Japan also modernized reactively after the US Navy’s ‘black ships’, under Commodore Matthew Perry, forcibly ended the Tokugawa Shogunate’s policy of isolation in 1853. China attempted to do something similar following the humiliation of the Second Opium War, though with much less success. In comparison to its neighbors, Siam strategically adopted and demonstrated the markers of civilization that European powers used to justify colonization elsewhere from a position of relative strength.

In 1868, Mongkut extended invitations to British and French officials to observe a solar eclipse. This was a grand affair with pavilions and accommodation prepared for the attendees, the goal of which was to showcase Mongkut’s commitment to science. Mongkut accurately predicted the timing and location of the eclipse using a combination of traditional Thai timekeeping methods and Western astronomical techniques. According to some stories, his calculations were so precise that they trumped those of the French astronomers present.

The Siamese court knew what to perform to whom. France had long considered science to be the true marker of civilization, while Britain championed international law and free trade. Mongkut demonstrated Siamese civilization through measures that European powers used to justify colonization elsewhere.

Creating brand Siam

Mongkut did not live to see his diplomacy come to fruition: he contracted malaria at the eclipse event and died a few weeks later. His son Chulalongkorn (Rama V) was a minor at the time of his father’s death, but assumed full control of Siam in 1873, finding himself at the head of a multinational, decentralized, and dynastic kingdom.

Across Europe and its empires, traditional monarchies were adapting to an age of nationalism by imposing unified national identities from above. France had established a centralized administrative system with uniform laws, and aggressively promoted Parisian French as the national language, systematically suppressing regional languages like Breton, Occitan, and Alsatian. Meanwhile, Britain more gradually imposed standard English through education reforms and civil service requirements, displacing Welsh and Gaelic. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was, in its Magyarization policy of the 1880s, doing the same: imposing Hungarian language and culture on ethnic minorities like Slovaks, Romanians, and Croats to create a single national identity in the Hungarian part of the dual monarchy. Germany and Italy both transformed from complex patchworks of states to unified nations in the late nineteenth century.

Despite Europeans having only recently created their centralized nation states, this became the new standard for civilization. Many Asian powers lacked the cultural homogeneity, clear boundaries, and single language and government that nineteenth-century Europeans considered civilized. And these diverse and decentralized realms were ripe for divide-and-rule tactics. The British and French depicted non-dominant groups in realms like Burma, Cambodia, and Vietnam as oppressed minorities in need of their protection.

Nineteenth-century Siam was, in theory, vulnerable to the same tactics. It encompassed dozens of ethnic groups and lacked a unified Thai identity. Its people were governed by the mandala system, the traditional premodern governing system in Southeast Asia, its equivalent to Europe’s feudal system. Under the mandala system, rather than fixed borders, the king’s sovereignty faded with distance, with outer parts of the kingdom recognizing overlapping zones of authority from elsewhere.

When the British became neighbors to Siam’s south and west in the 1820s by acquiring the Straits Settlements and annexing lower Burma, their request to demarcate fixed mutual borders baffled the Siamese. European powers, once they understood the system, would attempt to exploit this difference in understanding. The French seized on Siam’s multiethnic structure, arguing that the Lao constituted a distinct race deserving protection from Siamese domination. They also claimed that the Siamese were not a true race, because they had become too intermixed with the Chinese.

Instead of giving in, Siam adapted through a program of nation-building. Chulalongkorn promoted the idea of ‘Thai-ness’, a single national identity that could accommodate Siam’s dozens of ethnic groups while presenting as a unified state to the Western powers. When confronted with French claims about distinct ethnic groups, Chulalongkorn countered: ‘The Thai, the Lao, and the Shan all consider themselves peoples of the same race. They all respect me as their supreme sovereign, the protector of their wellbeing.’

As well as a shared national identity, the people of Siam needed a shared language and clearly defined borders. The Bangkok dialect was elevated to ‘standard Thai’ and was spread through a newly created school system. The mandala system was dismantled in favor of a centralized bureaucracy, reorganized into administrative units that drew inspiration from the old mandala circles but imposed newly fixed territorial control. Modern mapping projects helped draw borders with unprecedented accuracy. A national census counted subjects who, a few decades later, were required to adopt surnames. Telegraph lines and railways created communication infrastructure that solidified Bangkok’s authority.

This approach differed dramatically from that taken by Vietnam. While Vietnam had a coherent identity dating back centuries, the ruling Nguyen dynasty struggled with adapting it to the Western concept of nationhood. Emperor Tu Duc was resolutely committed to maintaining Vietnam’s traditional Confucian order, and rejected reform. Vietnam retained a hierarchical system that privileged ethnic Vietnamese while marginalizing minorities such as the Cham and Khmer. The French capitalized on these self-imposed divisions by governing different regions separately – Cochinchina as a colony, and Annam and Tonkin as protectorates – thereby deepening regional fragmentation. The end result was an effective dismantling of the Vietnamese state.

By embracing the Western concept of nationhood, Chulalongkorn was able to force Europeans to recognize Siam as a sovereign country, rather than as a wilderness in need of conquest. Chulalongkorn embarked on grand tours of Europe in 1897 and 1907, amid sustained British and French pressure on Siam’s borders. Across Europe, he insisted on being received as a monarch of equal rank to his hosts. His entourage wore Western clothing, observed European court customs, and spoke fluent English. Some of his sons, including future Siamese kings, attended elite institutions such as Eton. The message was clear: Siam was a peer.

Modernizing Siam

As well as promoting the idea of a unitary Thai identity, Chulalongkorn took up a comprehensive program of modernization and centralization. In 1885, Chulalongkorn established the first modern public school. He created the Ministry of Education in 1892. By the end of the 1890s, the kingdom had about a hundred schools teaching a standardized curriculum, including the elite Suankularb Wittayalai school that trained future government officials in both Thai tradition and Western knowledge. It is still one of Thailand’s most prestigious secondary schools.

The legal system was also up for reform. The relatively unequal treaties imposed by Britain and France had granted extraterritoriality to European subjects, exempting them from Siamese law in a humiliating denial of sovereignty. Chulalongkorn’s solution was to create a legal system that Europeans would recognize as legitimate. He assembled a team of foreign advisors, most notably the Belgian jurist Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns, who became a key architect not only of Siam’s new civil law code but of its entire diplomatic strategy. The choice of a Belgian was strategic: adjacent to British and French legal traditions but crucially not from either colonial power. Chulalongkorn built modern law courts and staffed them with the burgeoning administrative class trained in Siam’s schools. By demonstrating that Siam possessed a ‘civilized’ legal system, Chulalongkorn could argue for the abolition of extraterritorial privileges.

Chulalongkorn also Westernized the military. He hired German advisors and sent some royals to the Prussian military academy. In line with the Prussian model, military command was centralized under the monarch, noble levies were replaced with a standing army, and a professional officer corps was established.

Religion, too, was reformed to appear more rational by Western standards. Chulalongkorn supported the Thammayut monastic order’s reformation that made Siamese Buddhism appear less superstitious and more disciplined and text based. Even time itself was standardized. The kingdom adopted the Gregorian calendar and aligned its timekeeping with international norms. The quantification and standardization of time was foundational to Western modernity. Mechanical clocks, synchronized schedules, and precise measurement undergirded capitalism, science, and bureaucratic efficiency.

Cultural transformation reached into daily life through the promotion of siwilai, a Thai loan of the word ‘civilized’ that became central to the kingdom’s modernization program. Western-style clothing became increasingly common, often through official encouragement. Practices deemed uncivilized by European observers, such as chewing betel nut, were discouraged.

Perhaps most significantly for Western audiences, Chulalongkorn abolished slavery. Before the modernizations, Siam had a complex hierarchy of debt bondage, war captives, and corvée labor. By the late nineteenth century, slavery had been abolished in most of Europe and the Americas. Thailand followed suit. An 1874 decree freed children born into slavery when they reached the age of 21. It was followed by an 1884 ban on capturing and selling ethnic minorities into slavery. The 1905 Slavery Abolition Act went further, dismantling most remaining slavery and reforming debt bondage by crediting laborers’ work toward their principal debt rather than merely as interest. By 1908, slavery was criminalized and the government had a program of education to prevent former slaves from falling back into servitude.

In 1907, the French newspaper Le Figaro congratulated the king for his successful pursuit of modernization. It drew parallels between Siam and Japan, suggesting that France may now develop a beneficial relationship with an independent Siam. The same newspaper reminded readers: ‘one must not forget that the king of Siam, though his state is Asian, is a king of dignity like that of the Europeans.’

Soft power meets hard power

Siam’s strategy was tested during the Paknam incident in 1893. French gunboats forced their way up the Chao Phraya River toward Bangkok. Officially, the Paknam incident centered on a dispute between the Siamese and French regarding territory east of the Mekong River. In truth, it was prompted by France’s growing colonial ambitions following its conquest of Vietnam.

On 13th July, three French warships attempted to force passage past Siamese fortifications. The Siamese fired upon the warships. The French fired back, killing three sailors and breaking through the Siamese defenses. The French proceeded upriver towards the capital. They demanded that Siam recognize French Indochina’s claim to the disputed territory. In the face of overwhelming military force, Chulalongkorn ceded the territory, making a necessary concession to preserve the kingdom as a whole. Siam was forced to cede territory to the French in what is now Laos and Cambodia, creating much of the modern borders of Thailand. The French established a demilitarized zone along the Mekong, and the Siamese had to pay an indemnity of three million francs. European powers readily resorted to gunboat diplomacy but even here, France felt compelled to frame its demands in terms of legitimate Vietnamese territorial claims rather than naked conquest.

Between 1893 and 1909, Siam would cede around 40 percent of its territory to France and Britain. But the strategic retreat meant Chulalongkorn preserved what mattered most: the political independence of Siam’s core territories. The lost lands, predominantly Lao and Khmer-majority regions along the Mekong, had always existed at the outer edges of the mandala system, where Bangkok’s authority was weakest. Chulalongkorn specifically prioritized the Chao Phraya valley, the Thai-majority heartland, which was the source of the kingdom’s agricultural wealth and political identity. By surrendering territories where their control was already tenuous, the Siamese leadership prevented France from advancing into this core.

Siamese Wins

Some modern historians, many of them Thai, have questioned the authenticity of the Ramkhamhaeng Stele, suggesting that it may have been modified or fabricated to serve Siam’s existential myth-making needs. The Stele’s discovery mirrors other nationalist discoveries of the era, such as the Nibelungenlied, a medieval epic poem that German intellectuals promoted as a symbol of Germanic heroism and unity.

Whether Mongkut’s discovery was a true ancient artifact or a recent creation matters less than what Siam did with it. By the time French gunboats pointed their cannons at the Grand Palace in 1893, Siam had successfully established itself as a civilized nation worthy of sovereignty. The painful territorial concessions it made were closer to concessions European countries were in the habit of extracting from each other. It was not the kind of conquest that Europeans were doing in the New World, Africa, or the rest of Asia.

The kingdom that emerged from the colonial crucible bore little resemblance to the decentralized mandala system that had puzzled British border commissioners in the 1820s. It had become a Western-style nation. The ruling family of Siam had imposed one dialect across the populace, created a centralized state with the capacity to measure and monitor its people, standardized education, built infrastructure, and abolished slavery. They even created a national myth.

Yet rather than becoming Westernized by conquest, this transformation was carefully orchestrated from within. Mongkut and his son Chulalongkorn weren’t to know this, but their strategy may have eventually protected Thailand from a great deal of suffering. Weak institutions built by colonists fell apart after twentieth-century decolonizations, contributing to the deaths of millions of people across Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Burma.

Siam demonstrated that a nation could transform itself on its own terms while others around it lost their chance.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The monk prince who discovered that stone in Sukhothai, armed with his synthesis of traditional Buddhist and Western scholarship, established a template for survival that would serve his kingdom for generations.

Derek Hopper is a writer and university lecturer based in Qatar.

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Martin Gould and Koji Flynn-Do explain why animals’ lives might, finally, be about to get better.

In September 2022, a new kind of pig farm opened in China: a twenty-six storey high-rise in Ezhou, near the Yangtze River. Months later, a second tower went up. Inside, pigs are kept by the tens of thousands on each floor, monitored by cameras and fed, watered, and moved with mechanical precision. More than a million pigs are born, raised, and slaughtered each year without ever setting foot outside.

These high-rise factory farms are only one example of a common pattern. As countries get wealthier, farming consolidates into fewer, larger, more brutal farms. Once average incomes reach around $1,000, chicken farming starts to industrialize. By the time a country reaches $10,000, the vast majority of chickens are raised in battery cages. In countries with average incomes above $30,000, almost all pigs are raised in warehouses.

Factory farming exists to meet rising demand for meat. Meat is tasty, nutritious, and much more expensive than rice or bread. As people get richer, they want more of it. When Park Chung Hee took power in 1961, South Korea’s meat supply was around four kilograms per person per year, less than the weight of two chickens. When his rule ended in 1979, that figure had quintupled. By 2000, it had increased tenfold. Today, the average South Korean eats more than 120 kilograms of meat and seafood combined per year.

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In poor countries, where inadequate nutrition is the norm, rising meat consumption is good for people’s physical development and health. Diet is only part of the story, but the pattern is unmistakable. In South Korea, average male height has increased from around 160 centimeters in 1961 (five feet three inches) to around 175 centimeters (five feet nine inches) today. Chinese men have seen a similar height gain: from around 165 centimeters before the country industrialized to around 175 centimeters today.

But industrially farmed animals suffer immensely for it. Chickens’ beaks are frequently sheared off and their legs are too weak to support their bloated bodies. Pigs have their tails docked and teeth clipped without anesthesia, and mother pigs live much of their lives in gestation crates too small to turn around in. These lives are not worth living. The question is whether such brutal treatment is inevitable.

For many of modernity’s worst problems, a combination of affluence, maturity, and political pressure has created self-correcting mechanisms over time. As countries got richer, things that initially worsened due to industrialization eventually improved. Will industrial meat production follow the same path?

The Kuznets curve

In his 1853 masterpiece Bleak House, Charles Dickens memorably described the air pollution of industrializing London: ‘flakes of soot … as big as full-grown snowflakes’. When Dickens was writing, London’s air pollution had been steadily worsening for decades as Britain industrialized, and it would continue to worsen for nearly half a century longer. But had he returned a century later, he would have found the dirtiness of London’s air to have halved, and by 2000, it would be less than a tenth as dirty.

Growing economies and populations have historically driven deforestation. But improvements in crop yields have halved agricultural land per person since the Green Revolution of the mid-twentieth century. The rate of global forest loss peaked in 1980, and forest loss typically reverses when average incomes enter the range between $5,000 and $15,000, as farming becomes more efficient and marginal farmland reverts to nature.

These trajectories are called Kuznets curves, after the economist Simon Kuznets, who suggested that economic inequality rose as countries first industrialized but then fell as they became even richer. His curves appear in many places. Wealthy areas clean up their local air, forests, and factories. Their inhabitants are less obese than those of industrializing countries, and have more leisure time and better working conditions.

But Kuznets curves don’t appear in all places, especially not when the industrial activity has no direct costs for the rich country. Emissions have fallen substantially in Germany and Britain, but much less in America and Australia, which remain some of the world’s biggest carbon emitters. The total amount of material people consume, and the amount of waste they generate, do not seem to decline but rather keep growing. The question is whether animal suffering is closer to child labor, and will decrease as we grow richer, or to waste generation, meaning animals will continue to suffer in ever-greater numbers.

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How much meat do we eat?

Start with consumption. In about ten European countries, including Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Denmark, meat consumption per capita appears to have peaked. Northern Europeans ate far more meat in the early 2000s than they do now.

Walk into a German supermarket today and the change is visible. The queue at the butcher counter has thinned; the same floor space now splits between marinated chicken, ready meals, and plant-based sausages. Pork, once the unquestioned centerpiece of German cuisine, has lost its grip: consumption fell over 10 percent just in the five years before 2025. The shift is even more noticeable in institutions. Forty years ago, a daily university menu would have centered on schnitzel and pork stew. Today, similar establishments compete to offer the best vegetarian and vegan options. In 2021, 34 cafeterias across Berlin’s universities moved to menus that were 96 percent plant-based.

But many rich countries aren’t like Germany or Denmark. Average incomes reaching $40,000 or $50,000 do not reliably herald a decline in meat eating. A more common story is a plateau. This is not bad news, as it implies that there is something of an upper limit on meat consumption. The plateauing countries, like Portugal, Spain, the United States, Britain, South Korea, and Australia, have all reached a ceiling of around 150 kilograms of meat per person per year.

Whether this ceiling holds may depend on shifting dietary fashions. Faddish new guidelines recommend eating two grams of protein per kilogram of body weight every day. If half of that protein were meat, the average American would need to double their meat consumption to meet the target. Drugs like Ozempic suppress appetite and reduce total caloric intake, but evidence suggests users shift toward protein-rich foods to preserve muscles, which could mean less food overall, but with perhaps a higher share of it meat and dairy.

More importantly, the kind of animal being eaten has changed. While Germans, Austrians, and Danes are consuming less meat, their diets are leading to the farming of more animals. In 1980, the average German diet required the slaughter of about ten farmed animals per year: roughly six chickens, one and a half pigs, and a third of a cow. By 2022, even though Germans were eating a fifth less meat, that number had doubled to twenty animals, largely driven by the shift to chicken and farmed fish: roughly 14 chickens, a bit less than one pig, one sixth of a cow, and six farmed fish.

From a welfare perspective, that makes a tremendous difference. Beef implies perhaps a day or two of suffering per kilogram, whereas chicken implies dozens of days of suffering per kilogram and farmed fish hundreds or thousands, depending on the species.

How we treat farm animals

Perhaps the continued high meat consumption in rich countries should be expected. The Kuznets curves for emissions of sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and water pollution were not created by people consuming less. They were produced by people consuming differently. Cities increased the amount of heating in homes, but replaced coal with natural gas. People wash more laundry than ever, but the detergents no longer include phosphates. The way down the curve might not require people to eat less meat, but simply to produce it better.

For decades, the animal agriculture industry has focused on efficiency: cheaper feed conversion, faster growth, more animals per square foot. The result is that meat, eggs, and dairy are historically cheap. In 1946, the average American factory worker had to work more than half an hour to buy a pound of chicken. Today it takes four minutes. That single-minded focus on cost means there are now a lot of cheap, simple changes farmers can make to improve animal welfare.

Egg production is one example. For almost a century, farmers around the world have confined laying hens to battery cages offering less than a sheet of paper’s worth of floor space per hen. This comes at considerable cost to the welfare of hens, who cannot perform natural behaviors like spreading their wings, dustbathing, and nesting.

In wealthy countries, consumers and companies have shifted to producing and purchasing more cage-free eggs. Today, 45 percent of American, 62 percent of European, and 82 percent of British hens are kept in cage-free facilities. That amounts to hundreds of millions of hens spared from cages each year. Hens get two to three times as much floor space, which means each egg costs one or two cents more to produce. Richer consumers are willing to absorb those small costs.

In some countries and regions, cages for hens have been eradicated at the ballot box. Voters in rich places like Switzerland, Massachusetts, and California have elected to ban battery cages with resounding majorities. The Swedes didn’t even need legislation. By 2025, almost all hens in Sweden were cage-free thanks to retailers and shoppers rejecting caged eggs.

Other practices in husbandry are following a similar path. The European Union and United States now both require cattle and pigs to be stunned before slaughter, though exemptions exist for religious slaughter. Crates that confine pregnant sows and baby cows to spaces too small to turn around in have gradually been banned across the European Union, New Zealand, and several US states since the 2000s. Tail docking and castration without anesthesia, once standard for pigs, are restricted in the European Union and Britain.

New technologies can reduce suffering even further. In ovo sexing allows farmers to figure out the sex of chicks at the embryo stage, discarding eggs containing males. Adopting the technology means farmers avoid gassing or grinding up male chicks on their first day of life. The practice has already spared hundreds of millions of chicks from that fate in Europe, and has only just started spreading in the US.

Overall, these welfare improvements aren’t enough to offset the increased number of animals being farmed around the world. The sheer growth in the number of animals consumed, particularly chickens and fish, swamps the gains from better treatment. But in a few countries, the combination of declining meat eating and improved treatment is plausibly decreasing total farm animal suffering. New Zealand has banned battery cages, restricted sow crates, and mandated pre-slaughter stunning, and is also eating far less meat. The same may be true in Germany, Sweden, and a handful of other wealthy European countries. They offer a glimpse of what the other side of the curve might look like.

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Bending the curve

Income needs to reach a certain level before things can start to change. Whether you ask people in Sudan or Singapore, roughly the same share – between 70 and 90 percent – will tell you that they believe farm animals experience suffering and that their welfare matters. What changes with wealth is willingness to pay. In European surveys, 42 percent of the poorest quintile say they would pay more for higher-welfare products. Among the richest quintile, it’s 72 percent. No poor country has bent the curve: New Zealand has an average income of $45,000, Germany $55,000, and Denmark $65,000.

But income alone doesn’t guarantee progress. There are many countries that have surpassed these income levels and still have increasing meat consumption and less stringent farm animal welfare reforms than their peers. These include large economies like Japan, South Korea, and the United States.

Animal welfare improves fastest when the technology is already cheaply available. Stunning machines for chickens and pigs and cage-free housing systems for hens were cheap and effective before they started to be adopted at scale. Plant-based meat alternatives or lab-grown meat have yet to make any real dent in animal suffering: the entire alternative meat industry has yet to reach more than 2 percent market share for meat overall. This is easily explained by costs.

The only cultivated meat currently sold in supermarkets comes from a Singaporean company: a shredded chicken product that is 3 percent cultivated chicken cells and 97 percent plant-based, and retails at more than twenty dollars per pound. That is roughly ten times the price of conventional chicken and around five times the price of even premium products like pasture-raised chicken.

The failure of alternative proteins to make much of a difference in the past few years does not look so damning when we look at other Kuznets curves. For most of the twentieth century, leaded gasoline poisoned children’s blood across the developed world until lead levels plummeted within a decade of countries phasing it out in the 1970s. The air pollution that Dickens encountered steadily worsened for two centuries before its precipitous decline. Those curves began to bend when the problem became undeniable at the same time as a workable substitute existed. If indeed there is a Kuznets curve for animal suffering, it may take a tremendous amount of time and effort before we see the other side. What we see now is only a glimpse.

Koji Flynn-Do is chief of staff for US policy at LawAI.

Martin Gould is a Program Officer at Coefficient Giving.

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Medical innovation has transformed our lives, but hardly anyone realizes it. You can tell people that global life expectancy has doubled in a century and watch it fail to register – it just sounds like an abstract number, and numbers don’t convey how different life used to be. So let me describe it another way.

If you collapsed with a heart attack in 1950, hardly anyone around you would know how to help. CPR wouldn’t be invented for another decade. If you reached a hospital, a doctor would likely give you morphine, tell you to lie still and hope for the best: the prevailing view was that once the heart stopped pumping, nothing could be done.

That changed in the 1970s. Cardiologists began to understand that with each passing minute, more heart muscle would be starved of oxygen, and once dead, it wouldn’t be able to recover. But doctors could limit that damage by swiftly restoring oxygen supply with a clot-busting drug or a balloon catheter, opening blocked blood vessels and rescuing heart muscle.

In other words, the idea that a heart attack is something you could actively treat is only about fifty years old. Since then, the share of patients who have died within a month of having the most severe type of heart attack has fallen by two thirds.

Zoom out to cardiovascular diseases overall, and the trend is even more dramatic. People in rich countries today have roughly a quarter the chance of dying from cardiovascular diseases as they did in the 1950s at the same ages. Back then, there were no statins, no cholesterol testing, no bans on trans-fats, no anti-smoking campaigns, no bypass surgery, and no implanted pacemakers.

Diabetes, certain cancers, infectious diseases and other conditions have also become far more treatable than they used to be. A century ago, if you were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, your remaining life expectancy would be a few months, and a ‘starvation diet’ would be one of your few options. Today, you’d simply need to wear a small device on your arm to track your blood sugar level and release insulin to stabilize it in real time. A century ago, it was unheard of for anyone to be cured of cancer, except, in rare cases, by a surgeon’s knife. Penicillin hadn’t been discovered, and a simple wound infection could result in sepsis and death. Smallpox still existed. It swept across the world and killed millions globally, year after year.

I think we underestimate how much medicine has progressed because we rarely experience life without it anymore. But it has added years, sometimes decades, to people’s lives. Maybe surprisingly, it’s also reduced inequality in life expectancy: we’ve seen greater gains at the bottom of the distribution, among those who would have died as children or young adults. At the same time, life expectancy has risen at every age.

The statistics go like this. In 1950, the shortest-lived 1 percent of babies born in France lived less than three months. But for babies born after that, that 1 percent started surviving longer and longer: up to six months for those born in 1960, three years in 1970, 18 years in 1980, and 25 years in 1990. Alternatively, you can think about the cohort you went to school with. If you were born in France in 1900, only two thirds of your cohort would still be alive with you when you reached the age of sixty. But if you were born in 1960, 90 percent of them would.1 So here’s another way to think about the rise in life expectancy. It means that far fewer parents lose their children, fewer children lose their siblings, and we grow old with more of our friends and family still alive.

A technological revolution

I used to have the impression that medical breakthroughs were uncommon; sometimes happening by pure chance, sometimes by sheer determination. I now see it as a continuous stream of medical innovation every year.

In the last few years, we’ve had new antiviral drugs against HIV that can prevent infections with nearly 100 percent efficacy, with just a single dose given every six months. There are new drugs that reduce cholesterol levels by 60 percent for people already on statins. There are new treatments that slow the progression of cancers, including certain lung cancers, brain cancer, pancreatic cancer and multiple myeloma, by more than half. And over the past five years, we’ve had the first vaccines against four more diseases: Covid-19 of course, but also the first malaria vaccine, the first chikungunya vaccine, and the first RSV vaccine.

For most of our history, finding effective new treatments really was a rare occurrence. After Edward Jenner discovered the first vaccine, it took nearly ninety years for scientists to work out how to develop the second. People relied on plants and natural remedies for centuries, with little idea of which ingredients worked or why. Some of these remedies were effective, but contamination was common, and without knowing their active ingredients, they couldn’t be produced reliably at scale.

After chemistry matured into a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century, it became possible to isolate and purify compounds, synthesize new ones, and screen hundreds or thousands at once to find those that had medical effects. Chance discoveries could now be made systematically, and chemists discovered medicinal compounds in soil (yielding antibiotics like streptomycin, vancomycin, and tetracycline), fungi (statins and immunosuppressants like cyclosporin), and coal tar and dyes (sulfa antibiotics and early anesthetics like benzocaine). It was a valuable strategy when little was understood about the biological causes of diseases or the mechanisms of drugs.

By the late twentieth century, new tools, theory, and knowledge made it possible to develop treatments based on better biological understanding in an approach that became known as ‘rational drug design’. Scientists learned to decipher the structure of the proteins that drove disease and design molecules to fit into them and block them. They began to grow and study living cells in the lab, engineer bacteria and yeast to bulk-produce proteins (including insulin, clotting factors, and antibodies), and automate the screening of hundreds of thousands of compounds in days. It all became faster and possible at a far greater scale. Back when the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, it cost $50 million and took six months to sequence just one person’s genome. Now it costs a few hundred dollars and takes under four hours. The tools have also gotten sharper. Over the past two hundred years, the resolution of the best microscopes has increased over ten-thousandfold. Until the 1930s, no one had ever seen a virus. Now we can see them down to their atoms.

Advances in AI are taking us further. Tools like AlphaFold can help predict the shape of proteins in minutes rather than years. Others are being used to design entirely new proteins that don’t exist in nature, including enzymes that catalyze reactions no natural enzyme can and proteins that target cancer cells and destroy disease-causing proteins within them. Some tools can identify hidden microbial genes that encode antibiotics but aren’t expressed under standard laboratory conditions. Others have uncovered ancient versions of today’s CRISPR enzymes, much smaller than the ones we use now but still able to protect bacteria from viruses. They have turned up entirely new classes of gene-editing tools that can precisely cut and paste long stretches of DNA, allowing them to fix multiple genes at once.

Much of the early research behind these breakthroughs takes place in academic labs and institutes funded by governments and foundations, before they are developed into drugs, manufactured, tested in large clinical trials, and brought to market by pharmaceutical companies. The first antiviral drug against HIV, for example, came from cancer researchers at the National Cancer Institute, who systematically screened hundreds of drugs to test whether any of them inhibited the virus before eventually identifying AZT. Burroughs Wellcome (now part of GSK) then ran the clinical trials to get it licensed. Similarly, the GLP-1 hormone was identified by academic researchers in the 1980s, but it was scientists at Novo Nordisk who developed drugs that mimicked it and chemically modified them to last long enough in the body to be used medically for diabetes and weight loss.

Competitive pressure generally causes firms to underinvest in open, early-stage research: if they publish it, other firms can use their findings without contributing; if they don’t, others can’t test, challenge or learn from their work. So private firms tend to focus on later-stage research, predominantly for diseases with a large commercial market, as they are better equipped to do the capital-intensive work of running large clinical trials, navigating regulators, and scaling manufacturing than academic institutions and foundations. Together, this process of exploration, discovery, development, and scaling has transformed once-fatal diseases into manageable, and sometimes even curable, conditions.

Medical innovation is one of the most valuable things that happens in a modern economy. Economists estimate that gains in life expectancy in the United States from 1970 to 2000 were worth about $95 trillion to Americans, with roughly half of that coming from reductions in heart disease mortality.

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Bottlenecks and broken incentives

There are almost certainly effective treatments in the pipeline today that won’t reach patients for years, sometimes decades, and it’s not because of the science.

There are few better examples than the malaria vaccine. Malaria is a very complicated disease: it’s caused by a parasite that changes shape multiple times during its life cycle, making it very hard to know what to target with a vaccine. So the first malaria vaccine, introduced just a few years ago, was an amazing scientific breakthrough. But it was actually developed in the 1990s. The researchers who developed it struggled to find funding to test it at every stage of the process. There was little commercial incentive. It’s not profitable to develop vaccines for diseases that affect people in poorer countries, without being able to recoup the R&D investment – even if millions of children might benefit and there’s a huge economic return. It took foreign aid and philanthropy to fund it, and it took literally decades to reach children who needed it, even as half a million of them were dying from malaria every year.

Those children aren’t coming back. But we can prevent this from happening again. Economists have come up with an idea to change the incentives with an advance market commitment, where donors promise ahead of time to buy a vaccine at a certain price per dose. The payout occurs only if it’s developed, and proven safe and effective. The commitment gives companies the confidence to invest, and can bring vaccines into existence that would otherwise never get made. Most importantly, it makes sure they’re manufactured at scale and sold at an affordable price, so they reach those who need them.

That idea was used over a decade ago to develop new vaccines for pneumococcal disease, a deadly bacterial infection of the lungs and brain. Pneumococcal vaccines already existed, but they didn’t include the strains common in Africa and South Asia. In 2009, several countries and philanthropists came together to fund an advance market commitment for new vaccines and it succeeded: several companies developed them and they reached children much faster than usual. It’s estimated that those vaccines have saved the lives of over 700,000 young children since then.

For all that, malaria is one of the better-funded global health diseases. Roughly $4 billion is spent on R&D across all tropical diseases combined each year, or around six cents for every thousand dollars of income in wealthy countries. Two thirds of it goes toward tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV. For the rest, the research pipeline is incredibly narrow, if it exists at all. One example is trachoma, a painful bacterial infection of the eyes that’s spread by flies. Repeated infections scar the eyelids, which gradually turn inward until the eyelashes scratch the eyes. Eventually, the scarring clouds the cornea, causing the person to go blind. Although we’ve made a lot of progress against new cases of the disease with antibiotics, around 400,000 people worldwide are blind because of the disease, and the pipeline of new diagnostics, treatments and vaccines in development for it is nearly empty, with R&D spending in 2023 falling to zero.

Many other tropical diseases, like leptospirosis, scabies, Buruli ulcer, mycetoma, and yaws, receive almost no R&D funding, and have research pipelines so thin they can support only a few dozen researchers worldwide. For some, like mycetoma, even the basic biology is mysterious, with little understanding of which molecular pathways drive the disease or how to target it with drugs.

The problem extends far beyond diseases of global poverty. Rare diseases, conditions affecting fewer than 1 in 2,000 people, are another example. Thousands of rare diseases have been described, and they collectively affect up to 6 percent of the population. But each disease is rare enough that the financial market for new drugs is limited and patients are often abandoned entirely; 95 percent of these diseases don’t have any approved treatment at all. Running trials for these conditions takes thinking differently: using smaller but more efficient trials, more coordination between researchers, and different approval pathways. For instance, many new gene therapies edit or silence specific harmful genes. Once researchers have found a safe way to get these therapies inside the cells where they’re needed, regulatory systems could treat the delivery method as a single platform, allowing the particular genetic sequence to be switched out to target different mutations of the same disease, or even different genetic diseases, without needing new approvals each time.

Or consider childhood leukemia. It used to be very difficult to test treatments for the disease because it is rare, and individual hospitals struggled to find enough patients to run clinical trials. So, from the 1960s onward, researchers built networks to recruit patients from across the US, and later Canada and Europe into larger clinical trials. That collaboration made it possible to learn what worked faster, and it’s why leukemia is no longer the disease it used to be. When I used to hear the phrase childhood leukemia, I’d picture a child who suddenly fell ill and whose parents were told they only had a few years left to live. That has changed. Before the 1970s, only 15 percent of children with leukemia would be alive five years after diagnosis. Now that figure is 85 percent. Most children in richer countries today survive and are effectively cured of the cancer.

These problems fall especially hard on tropical and rare diseases, but poor economic incentives mean we’re missing out on medical innovation across the board. Some of the biggest breakthroughs in medicine have been drugs developed for one condition that turned out to be effective for others, like GLP-1 drugs, which were initially approved for diabetes before being used for weight loss. Or SGLT2 inhibitors, which were also originally developed for diabetes, and have since turned out to be effective for treating heart failure and chronic kidney disease as well. This kind of ‘drug repurposing’, where companies test their own drugs for new uses, can be very profitable, but the incentive is time-limited: once a drug goes off patent and cheaper generics enter the market, the reward for running large expensive trials disappears and firms stop seeking approval for new uses. We don’t find out whether the drugs would have worked, and patients who might have benefited can’t access them.

Often, we may have many plausible candidates but no cheap way to test them. One way to fix this is through platform trials, which test multiple treatments for a single disease using a shared control group, which lowers the cost of testing each one and makes it possible to compare a range of treatments directly with one another. The RECOVERY trial in the United Kingdom, for example, tested over a dozen drugs as potential Covid treatments in a single trial over two years, at a fraction of the typical cost. Within a few months of the beginning of the pandemic, the trial identified that dexamethasone, a generic drug, was effective against Covid, cutting deaths by around a third among the sickest patients on ventilators. Its use is estimated to have saved hundreds of thousands of lives since then. The trial also ran much faster than usual, because participants were recruited through the UK’s National Health Service with simple, streamlined ethical approvals and consent forms.

The deeper problem is that technology isn’t always the barrier: sometimes it’s about the funding, the incentives, and the institutions. While genome sequencing costs have plummeted and the resolution of microscopes has surged, productivity in drug development has actually slowed down: the cost of getting a drug to market has been doubling in real terms every nine years for decades. This phenomenon was first described by Jack Scannell, who coined it ‘Eroom’s law’, the reverse of Moore’s law, which says that transistor chips roughly double in density every two years, allowing smaller and cheaper computers. The slowdown may be part of a broader trend: across many fields, including semiconductors and agriculture, the number of researchers has risen while the output per researcher has fallen and productivity has slowed down.

One explanation is that the lowest-hanging fruit is gone: many medicinal compounds in nature have already been screened, for example, and newer ones take more resources to discover. But given how much our tools of discovery have improved, I’m not convinced. More persuasive, I think, is the ‘better than The Beatles’ problem: new drugs not only have to be safe and effective, they have to be superior to the current standard of care, meaning they must clear a bar that rises with each generation of successful treatments. This isn’t just because older drugs already have some efficacy, but also because many have gone off patent and become generics, meaning they can outcompete new drugs on price as well. And as existing treatments improve and diseases become milder, it becomes statistically more challenging to confirm the benefits of new drugs, requiring larger or longer clinical trials.

It’s also become much slower and more complicated to run clinical trials. Before a drug can be approved, it must pass through successive stages of trials, with more participants and more data collected at each stage, before the data is submitted to regulators and approved for medical use. That overall timeline has grown from an average of six years in the 1970s to eight to nine in the 2010s.

Currently, each trial is built from scratch, with its own infrastructure, contracts and administrative overhead. Before a single patient is enrolled, each hospital or research center running the trial must review the protocol, negotiate contracts, obtain ethics approval and train staff; this process takes several months for each trial. Recruiting enough participants is then another challenge: trials seek out patients who meet narrow eligibility criteria, are willing to be randomized to treatment or placebo (meaning they may not receive the treatment at all), and will return to a clinic for follow-up visits sometimes dozens of times over several years. Around half of trials fail to recruit as many participants as planned; only one in five finish on time, with median delays of over a year. On average, it costs $54 million in the US, or around $37,000 per patient, to run a single late-stage trial for a single infectious disease drug.

The bureaucracy that surrounds trials today is largely a legacy of global regulatory guidelines introduced in the mid-1990s, which the trials industry interpreted defensively to minimize the risk of regulatory rejection. Even when regulators have since rolled back specific requirements, companies have been slow to change. Around a third of trial costs, for example, come from the practice of ‘source data verification’, where a consultant manually cross-checks every data point collected at trial sites against paper records, despite the FDA recommending against it because it catches few errors while adding huge costs. Because less than 10 percent of drugs that enter clinical trials are approved and the costs of development are large, the industry has remained financially risk averse, doing far more administrative work than is required, and far less efficiently than the process could allow.

That doesn’t mean we should sidestep the process of rigorous testing. Clinical trials are the best way to test whether drugs are actually effective, how effective they are, and what side effects they carry. Without them, we can’t reliably identify which drugs actually work, and we can easily be misled by random fluctuations, natural improvements over time, and selection biases that make drugs appear effective even if they have no benefit or actively harm patients. But the whole process could be much more efficient. It’s possible to speed up medical innovation without cutting corners or compromising on rigor, or better, through win-win solutions that improve both.

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A cure for every disease

Far too many diseases are still untreatable. It’s painful to imagine gradually forgetting your children’s names, forgetting how to hold a conversation, how to recognize your own home, and eventually even how to swallow food, while your family watches someone they love disappear. But that’s the reality for over thirty million people with Alzheimer’s globally, and we have almost nothing to offer them. Part of the reason may be because the brain is so complex, or because it’s lined by the blood-brain barrier, a tightly sealed layer of cells which keeps out most pathogens and toxins, as well as most drugs. That makes it challenging to design a drug that can cross the barrier, reach the right cells, and do what it’s meant to do without any unexpected side effects.

Cancer is not a single condition but hundreds of distinct diseases, driven by different genetic mutations, that can evolve rapidly and become resistant to each drug. Treating them often requires combination treatments, which attack cancers from multiple angles to reduce the chances of resistance developing, but many cancer drugs carry side effects that are highly unpleasant or even debilitating. Often, the only available options are chemotherapy or radiation therapy, which attack healthy tissue alongside tumors, causing lasting damage to the body.

I’m hopeful that progress is possible. Many conditions that once seemed untreatable have turned out not to be. Hepatitis C is now curable. Some diseases are now entirely preventable with vaccines, including cervical cancer and many liver cancers. Multiple liver diseases can be halted by new drugs that silence key proteins that drive their progression. CAR-T cell therapies, which reengineer a patient’s own immune cells to kill their cancer cells, mean that several blood cancers can now be put into lasting remission, and sometimes cured. New treatments have given cystic fibrosis patients lives that look much like anyone else’s, when they would have otherwise died in their twenties or thirties.

The most dramatic example is pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancers, which has had a five-year survival rate of just 13 percent. It’s long been thought to be untreatable, because it is driven by mutations in the KRAS protein, which is notoriously hard for drugs to target because the surface of the protein is smooth, without an obvious pocket for drugs to bind to and block. In the last decade, however, breakthroughs in understanding the protein’s structure and interactions have helped develop new drugs that recruit a second protein to grab onto KRAS and block it. A new large phase three trial found that one such drug, daraxonrasib, roughly doubled survival compared to standard chemotherapy. Its side effects are rough, but knowing how to target the protein at all means scientists can build upon it. That work will be slow and difficult, but decades from now, we’ll look back and see the trajectory has changed, as it did for leukemia.

The list of bottlenecks is long, and we need to move faster if we want to solve them before it’s too late for too many people. It takes years to find and recruit patients for clinical trials and clinical trial infrastructure is highly fragmented. Commercial incentives mean that firms have little desire to develop drugs for many diseases whose patients are too few or too poor for it to be profitable, and there’s little incentive to repurpose drugs for new uses once patents run out. People have already come up with some ideas to solve them, including platform trials, advance market commitments, prizes to incentivize drugs for neglected diseases, risk-based monitoring of trials to focus on the highest-risk elements rather than on cross-checking every data point manually, large simple trials that operate through existing electronic health records, and continued randomization after a drug is approved to learn which dosing strategies, treatment durations, and drug combinations work best. But we also need new ideas, and people to test them, scale them up, and see them through.

We can make progress even in the hardest of cases. Ebola vaccines are incredibly challenging to develop through the regular route for many of the same reasons. There was little commercial incentive: Ebola largely affects the poorest, and its outbreaks are unpredictable, which makes it hard to set up trials in time. But what’s amazing is that we have a vaccine for the Ebola Zaire virus. Just over a decade ago, Gavi created an advance market commitment to fund it, and scientists came up with a different way to run clinical trials: ring vaccination. They waited for individual cases of Ebola to appear, and then quickly vaccinated the contacts of affected people, testing how well the vaccine prevented new infections. The World Health Organization coordinated the trials, the US government helped fund the vaccine’s development through BARDA and the Department of Defense, and once the vaccine was licensed in 2019, Gavi, WHO, UNICEF, and the Red Cross set up a global stockpile so doses would be ready for another outbreak. That stream of innovation, I’ve realized, is the result of countless people who thought differently, whether they were scientists, economists, managers or operators. Some of them changed their lives to make it happen. What they recognized was something quite simple: that diseases are not a fact of life, but problems that can be solved.

I’ve been writing about global health and medical innovation for years, and when I tell friends and family how much progress there’s been, the reaction is almost always the same: they had no idea most of it was happening. But progress isn’t inevitable, and breakthroughs don’t just come about when we have the tools to make them; they depend on how innovation happens in the real world. Right now, those processes are bottlenecked by funding, institutions and incentives. But we can change them. I think it’s more important than ever that we do so, because of cuts to spending on science, global health and foreign aid; we need to find ways to make our resources go further.

The central drama of the modern world is innovation against suffering, and we have made incredible progress so far. But we are doing far worse than we could. Millions still suffer from untreatable diseases, because of bottlenecks that we could fix. Fixing them is one of the most important things we can do. You can help make it happen.

Saloni Dattani is an editor at Works in Progress, writes the newsletter Scientific Discovery, and is an advisor to Coefficient Giving on clinical trial reform.

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In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away to win by 31 lengths, nearly three quarters of a football field. The other horses were so far behind they weren’t even in the television frame. Fifty years later, billions of dollars have been poured into breeding and training, yet Secretariat’s record still stands.

This is the paradox of the thoroughbred: breeders have spent centuries trying to create a faster horse, but in doing so, they may have bred away the very genetic diversity that would allow the horse to keep improving, or even to remain robust.

The paradox is not confined to the racetrack. The horse began as a terrier-sized, multi-toed forest dweller and, over 55 million years of evolution and a few thousand years of human intervention, became everything from the compact Icelandic pony to the streamlined racehorse. For most of that history, natural selection shaped horses slowly. Only recently has human ambition taken over, breeding animals for speed, endurance, and docility. The result is extraordinary diversity in form and performance, but also a dramatic narrowing of genetic diversity.

The first horses

The story begins 55 million years ago, deep in the warm, humid forests that covered what is now North America. You’d be hard pressed to recognize the earliest equid. Known as Hyracotherium, it stood only 14 inches tall, closer to a terrier than a modern horse. With four toes on the front feet and three on the back, it was ideally suited to moving gingerly over soft, marshy ground and nibbling fruits and leaves.

When global temperatures rose, between 18 and 15 million years ago, the equid family diversified into more than twenty genera (the subdivision above species living in woodlands and savannas). Most of these lineages have long since died out: today, only the genus Equus survives, which includes horses, zebras, asses, and donkeys.

As grasslands spread, over millions of years, equids developed into the horses we see today. Few evolutionary stories are as well documented. In the nineteenth century, when paleontologist OC Marsh unearthed a rich collection of fossil horses in the American West, their significance was immediately recognized. Here, laid out almost step by step, was evolution in action: horses transitioning from small, many-toed forest-dwellers into large, single-toed animals that grazed on grass rather than eating fruit and leaves.

That single toe, of which the hoof is the toenail, is the evolutionary innovation key to horses’ success. Life on the plains favored animals able to run efficiently over long distances. Rigid, lightweight hooves help with this: they minimize sideways wobble while storing and releasing energy like a spring, much like the shoes a human sprinter might wear, or even the prosthetic running blades sometimes used by amputees.

Over millions of years, the number of toes fell gradually from several to just one. Between 43 and 33 million years ago, Mesohippus still sported three toes of roughly equal size, with each touching the ground. By the time of Hipparion, about 23 million years ago, the middle toe carried most of the animal’s weight: the outer two toes had shrunk into vestiges, and the middle toe had become dominant. Finally, Pliohippus took a pivotal step toward the modern form, with a single weight-bearing toe ending in a solid hoof. This evolutionary streamlining produced the feet of today’s horses: a single, sturdy keratin hoof perfectly suited for galloping over open ground.

The route to the modern horse involved several detours. Hyracotherium, the progenitor of the horse family, appears in the fossil record in North America from around 55 million years ago, disappearing again 8 million years later. Around 12 million years ago, Hipparion, which, though three-toed, otherwise resembled modern horses, colonized Eurasia. Hippidion, which had short limbs and distinctively shaped facial bones, roamed the plains and mountains of South America from around 3 million years ago. Then, around 2 million years ago, the most recent common ancestor of present-day asses and zebras crossed the Bering land bridge formerly joining Alaska and northeastern Siberia.

Within the next half a million years, their descendants rapidly expanded across Eurasia and entered Africa at least two separate times. The descendants of the first migration diversified into various zebras, while the second led to modern donkeys and African wild asses.

Although the Americas were home to the earliest proto-horses, horses (including Hippidion and others) later became extinct in the Western Hemisphere around 10,000 years ago, alongside other megafauna like giant sloths, human-sized beavers, and armadillos as big as cars. All horses in the Americas today, including the free-roaming mustangs of the American West, come from European horses introduced after the Spanish conquest – descendants of the branches of the horse family that crossed into Eurasia and avoided extinction.

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The first horse tamers

Exactly when, where, and how horses were domesticated remained a mystery until recently, because fossils of wild and early domestic horses look very similar. For decades, archaeologists pointed to the Botai people of northern Kazakhstan, who lived around 5,500 years ago, as the original domesticators. Excavations revealed corrals, possible evidence of harnesses, and even pottery with residues of horse milk, a clear sign that the Botai people were not merely hunting and eating wild horses but had integrated them into many aspects of their lives.

While the Botai horses seemed like the obvious ancestors of modern horses, DNA told a different story: when scientists sequenced the genomes of twenty horses from the Botai site, they were not genetically similar to modern domestic breeds. Instead, Botai horses grouped closely with the Przewalski’s horse (pronounced shuh-VAHL-ski), a species discovered roaming the Mongolian steppe in the late 1870s and long considered the only truly wild horse.

This means that, contrary to the long-held belief that Przewalski’s horses were the last surviving truly wild horses, they are instead the feral relatives of the earliest known domestic horses found at Botai. While the Botai likely did domesticate horses first, their culture died out and their horses returned to the wild.

From steppe to stable

The horses we know and love came from a different source. They emerged more than a thousand years later, about 4,200 years ago, in the Pontic-Caspian steppes of what is now southern Russia, the same region that gave rise to famous horse-riding warriors like the Cossacks, the Golden Horde, and the Huns.

Scientists have worked this out through genetic analysis of ancient horse remains, combined with carbon dating to establish their precise age. A foal inherits half of its DNA from each of its parents. This is passed on with almost incredible accuracy, with around 2.7 billion base pairs (the data units of DNA) being copied correctly, but even so a few dozen errors creep in each time. A scientist can take the DNA of an ancient ancestor from a fossil, compare it with the DNA of a modern descendant, and then estimate how many generations have passed by counting the number of mutations that have accumulated.

In 2021, scientists did just this, sequencing genomes from 273 sets of bones ranging from 50,000 to 200 years old. By looking at the mutation rate and carbon dating the bones to confirm their exact age, they could calculate how quickly generations passed. About 4,200 years ago, the generational clock began to tick twice as fast, halving relative to wild horses, suggesting deliberate breeding.

Although bones can’t tell us how ancient horses behaved, their genomes give us clues. The researchers found that certain genetic variants became unusually common in these steppe horses. Such a pattern signals strong selective pressure: something in the environment consistently favored animals carrying particular versions of genes.

One region under heavy selection lies near a gene called ZFPM1, thought to play a role in the development of brain cells involved in mood, fear, and aggression. This suggests that early breeders might have been either deliberately or indirectly choosing animals that were more docile, allowing training, handling, and eventually riding. A second region under strong selection sits just upstream of GSDMC, a gene linked in humans to spinal problems such as chronic back pain and narrowing of the spinal canal. The signal of selection at this locus in horses suggests that breeders may have favored genetic variants associated with stronger, more resilient backs. As horseback riding spread, horses that could bear weight without developing spinal pathologies would have been more desirable.

These steppe horses, known to geneticists as DOM2 (that is, domesticated lineage two), spread like wildfire. By 2200 to 2000 BC, the DOM2 genetic profile spread beyond its region of origin to Anatolia, the lower Danube region, and Bohemia.

Archaeological evidence suggests that as DOM2 expanded, the populations of other wild horses gradually dwindled. By around 1500–1000 BC, almost all had been either absorbed or replaced. The tarpan horse, which roamed Eastern Europe, became extinct in 1909. By 1969, Przewalski’s horse was declared extinct in the wild. All living Przewalski’s horses stem from just 15 individuals captured around the year 1900. Only in 1992 did the descendants, numbering about 2,000, begin to be reintroduced on the Eurasian steppes.

The many so-called wild horse populations found around the world, including mustangs, Sable Island ponies, and Australian brumbies, all descend from modern domestic horses that became feral again within the past few centuries.

Horses for courses

Over time, humans developed distinct horse breeds with a wide range of phenotypes, from the tiny Argentinian Falabella, barely reaching a meter tall at the shoulder, to the towering French Percheron, capable of hauling tons; from horses with the standard gaits (walk, trot, canter, and gallop) to horses able to perform alternative gaits, like ambling, with no bounce, making them more comfortable to ride. The Icelandic horse’s tölt is so smooth that a rider can carry a full glass of beer without spilling a drop.

This diversity is the product of millennia of human intervention, selection, and preference, which left distinct traces in the horse’s genome. Compared with many other species, horses have a lot of diversity in the mitochondrial genome, inherited from the mother, but extremely limited variation within the Y chromosome, passed down from father to son. This contrast suggests a pattern in domestication: many local mares (female horses) were bred with a fairly narrow pool of stallions (males), concentrating paternal lineages while preserving variety in the maternal line.

Ancient DNA has given us a window beyond fossils, allowing us to track how phenotypes changed in ways that don’t show up in the fossil record. After humans, horses are one of the species ancient genomics has studied the most. In fact, the very first successful recovery and analysis of ancient DNA was from 150-year-old tissue from the extinct quagga, a close relative of the zebra, in 1984 – a year before the same was achieved with ancient human DNA. One of the oldest genomes ever successfully recovered and decoded comes from a horse bone preserved in the Yukon permafrost for over half a million years.

Coat color offers another window into early horse breeding. In living horses, the genes behind colors and patterns, like leopard spotting, tobiano patches (like the coloring of a cow), and cream dilutions (that lighten the color of a horse’s coat), are well understood. Genetic variants for dun (gray-gold, or tan), black, and leopard spotting appear in wild horses from the Upper Paleolithic, long before domestication began.

In the early Bronze Age, leopard-spotted horses were abundant at Kirklareli-Kanlıgeçit in present-day Turkey. But leopard spotting comes at a cost: horses with two copies of the gene coding for it have night blindness (the inability to see in low light). Its prevalence in certain ancient populations suggests breeders made deliberate choices, where aesthetic or symbolic value outweighed the trait’s practical drawbacks, to favor certain traits unlikely to persist in the wild. Tastes shifted with time: leopard-spotted horses lost their appeal after the early Bronze Age but gained favor in some regions during the Iron Age. And while spotted coats were popular in antiquity, solid chestnut horses prevailed in medieval Western Europe.

In the Middle Ages, horses were inseparable from power and status. Chivalry itself shares an etymological root with the Old French chevalier, literally ‘horseman’. Breeding and maintaining horses became a major industry of nobility and royalty. But they didn’t think in terms of fixed breeds the way we do today. Medieval writers grouped horses by function: the destrier trained for combat, the courser valued for speed, and the palfrey prized for a comfortable ride. Archaeological evidence backs this up. A large study of horse remains from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century London shows a range of sizes and builds, not the uniformity that we would expect from tightly restricted breeding.

Contrary to the modern idea of the medieval warhorse as a massive, towering beast, measurements from excavated horse bones across England show that most stood around 13 to 14.2 hands high, roughly the size of a sturdy modern pony. Even horses associated with elite or military contexts rarely approached the heights of today’s heavy draught breeds. What medieval riders valued instead were animals that were compact (meaning cheap to feed), strong, and agile enough to handle long distances, uneven terrain, and the demands of warfare.

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The need for speed

By the seventeenth century, horses had been serving human purposes for thousands of years, plowing fields, carrying soldiers, and pulling carts. But in early-modern England, one goal came to dominate: speed. In the 1660s, King Charles II, a fervent horse racing fan, set up a horse breeding and racing center at Newmarket, near London. While horse racing had been popular in previous centuries, Charles II and other racing enthusiasts were the first to methodically breed horses at scale to improve their race performance.

Breeders discovered that horses from Arabia, Central Asia, and North Africa were often faster: they were lighter, had a greater drive to run, and were better able to dissipate heat, allowing them to sustain high speeds without overheating. From three exceptional horses imported to England, Byerley Turk (imported in the 1680s), Darley Arabian (1704), and Godolphin Arabian (1729), breeders created the ‘thoroughbred’, a new type of horse designed for speed. Today, 95 percent of all living thoroughbreds are thought to descend from just one of these stallions, Darley Arabian, through his phenomenally successful great-great-grandson, Eclipse.

Horse breeding used to be guesswork: breeders paired fast stallions with fast mares and hoped for the best. But in 1791, the General Stud Book started recording every thoroughbred’s ancestry, turning pedigree into data. Breeders could now track bloodlines, deliberately plan matings, and see which combinations actually worked. Thoroughbreds today are defined as horses whose ancestry can be traced entirely to horses listed in the General Stud Book.

Harder, better, faster, stronger

Racing and breeding evolved side by side. Races in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involved multiple heats over distances of two to four miles, favoring horses with stamina. Horses didn’t race until they were five or six years old. But by the late eighteenth century, new races like the Derby and the St Leger reset the terms of competition. Horses now raced at three years old, over shorter distances of one to two miles.

This new format meant an increased premium on speed and precocity, and it has persisted, particularly in the United States and Australia. In Britain and Ireland, the tradition of long-distance races held on in parallel, leading to distinct types: horses that specialize in explosive speed at a young age, classic middle-distance horses, and horses bred for the stamina needed to excel in longer races.

After the creation of the thoroughbred and the Stud Book, Anglo-American breeders hit what appears to be an upper limit for speed surprisingly quickly. From the middle of the nineteenth century, when timing and record keeping became good enough to make reliable comparisons, race times improved steadily for about half a century. But although there was consistent improvement, it was small: times only fell by 1 to 2 percent, or 2 to 4 seconds over a 1.5-mile race. Race times for prominent races have not significantly fallen since around 1910. Secretariat’s 1973 Belmont time eclipsed the previous record by a stunning 2.6 seconds. However, the best time since then (Easy Goer in 1989 at 2 minutes 26 seconds) was a full 2 seconds slower than Secretariat’s.

Outside the elite, there has been continued improvement: one study found that between 1997 and 2012, accounting for differences such as ground softness and the number of runners, the average British thoroughbred increased its speed by 0.011 yards per second per year. So while we have likely reached the ceiling for how fast an exceptional horse can run, the median horse is beginning to close in on that limit, too.

The genes for speed

Until 2007, the Stud Book was the cutting edge of horse breeding technology. That changed when scientists sequenced a horse genome for the first time, that of a thoroughbred mare named Twilight. This allowed researchers to study the genetic basis of variation between individual horses far more systematically.

Another step forward in understanding thoroughbred genetics came with a paper published in 2010 that investigated the gene in horses that codes for myostatin, a protein that regulates muscle development. Mice, cattle, dogs, and even humans with mutations in this gene grow outlandishly large muscles because the gene normally acts as a brake on muscle development; with that brake damaged, muscles continue to grow unchecked.

The gene coding for myostatin in horses has around 1,100 base pairs. Looking at the exact sequence of this gene, called MSTN, in 148 thoroughbreds revealed that horses could have three different versions of the gene, differing by just one of those base pairs (either a letter ‘C’ or a ‘T’), and that each version was associated with success in different race formats. Horses with two copies of the ‘C’ version tend to be the best sprinters, those with two ‘T’s tend to be high-stamina long-distance runners, and those with one of each tend to fall between the two running profiles.

Later research found that variations in MSTN correspond with different muscle physiology. Horses with the ‘C’ version have a higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, which enable the explosive bursts of speed required for short-distance sprint racing, while those with the ‘T’ version have a higher proportion of slow-twitch fibers, which allow sustained effort.

Analyzing the DNA of modern horses and museum specimens then showed that the foundation stallions in the Stud Book all had two copies of the ‘T’ variant, and that the ‘C’ mutation probably entered through local British mares. This new variant entered thoroughbred genomes during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as English races like the Derby and St Leger got shorter. But the genetic trend is less pronounced in Britain than the United States, where races are rarely longer than 2,000 meters, and especially than in Australia, which favors 1,000 to 1,400-meter lengths. Commercial tests for this gene are now widely used by breeders and trainers.

The price of success

Horses’ genetic diversity remained large for thousands of years, before collapsing after the introduction of modern breeding. In nature, diversity is maintained by competing selection pressures that balance one trait against another. A wild horse does not just need to be fast. Its bones need to last. It needs to be resistant to disease. Even a domesticated working horse would, before intensive breeding began, face natural constraints on its traits.

In modern thoroughbred breeding, celebrity stallions with the best race records are in high demand. Their owners charge hundreds of thousands of dollars in stud fees, and they can sire perhaps a hundred foals per year. This means that the genes of particular males can quickly sweep to dominance in a population in a way that would be very unusual in nature.

Along with this loss of diversity, modern horses have accumulated harmful mutations as a result of breeding within a small population. In horses as in humans, repeated inbreeding concentrates harmful traits as parents who are related to each other are more likely to share the same mutations, resulting in offspring with two copies of the mutated gene, rather than one mutated copy and one normal copy, which could mask the mutation’s effects.

A genetic analysis of all Australian thoroughbreds, more than 135,000 horses, showed that inbreeding correlates with slower, shorter, and less lucrative careers. Amazingly, ten heavily crossed eighteenth-century ancestors account for over 80 percent of inbreeding in Australian thoroughbreds. Breeders are not blind to these risks. The American Quarter Horse Association, for example, requires breeding stallions to be tested for several genetic diseases.

As genetics has played such a large role in breeding horses, it is small wonder that horse breeders are moving with the frontiers of science. The world’s first cloned horse, called Prometea, was born in 2003. Horse cloning is now big business, despite an American Jockey Club ban, as other equine sports, including show jumping and polo, allow clones.

In 2024, the Argentinian company Kheiron announced the production of the first CRISPR-edited horses: Polo Pureza, an award-winning mare, was the foundation for five gene-edited clones with increased explosive speed. According to reports, the company modified the MSTN gene, so that the animals would develop more muscle fibers and potentially run faster as a result. Even so, the prospects for exceeding current records through gene editing are slim. Today’s racehorses are already tightly optimized for speed, balancing strength against the cost of carrying additional muscle mass. Adding more muscle is relatively low-hanging fruit, and if this were the key to unlocking greater speed, selective breeding would likely already have brought it about.

The thoroughbred paradox

At the Belmont Stakes in 1973, Secretariat ran in a category of his own. His extraordinary performance seems to have been the result of many unlikely factors aligning. After he died, Secretariat’s heart was reportedly measured at almost 10 kilograms – twice as much as normal. This appears to have been a physiological fluke, however, as it isn’t a trait reliably passed down to offspring. Combined with his unusual stamina, exceptionally powerful legs that allowed him to cover 25 feet per stride, favorable race conditions, and a skilled jockey, this produced a race time that has still never been matched half a century later, despite advances in breeding, training, nutrition, and veterinary care.

Secretariat offers a glimpse of the upper limits of biology. But as racehorses have pushed against that limit to become faster and more powerful, their population has become more fragile as the gene pool has narrowed. Our 4,000-year pursuit of the ultimate horse may not have much further to run.

Sophie Fessl is a science journalist.

Western countries used to let landowners build almost anything anywhere. Now, strict rules freeze the character of most neighborhoods, banning change and densification. Why? One theory is that modern buildings tend to be ugly, leading residents to support rules that exclude them from their neighborhoods. If this is true, then designing beautiful buildings could lead to more development. Housing reformists have vigorously debated this theory. Many British reformists are sympathetic, whereas Australian reformists tend to be skeptical, and Americans come down on both sides.

I do believe that ugliness plays a role in hindering development, but not in quite the way usually proposed. Ugliness is probably not a major driver of opposition to development by local people. Local opponents have many other concerns that are at least as important, like disruption from construction, loss of green space, pressure on local services, and diminished social exclusivity. But there is strong circumstantial evidence that ugliness is sometimes a major driver of opposition among people who live nowhere near the development in question. The first group are often called ‘NIMBYs’, for ‘Not in my backyard’. Let us call the second group ‘NITBYs’, for ‘Not in that backyard’.

While a few NITBYs are fervent campaigners, most are only casually interested. Their motives are faint but basically altruistic: their question is whether or not, based on a cursory assessment, a development is an objective improvement to its neighborhood. In certain contexts, the ugliness of a development can summon into being a huge cloud of NITBYs, whose interest in the scheme may indeed be superficial, but who can nonetheless be collectively potent.

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This model is especially compelling in the case of heritage conservation. Until the 1960s, the redevelopment of historic buildings was almost always permitted; today, it is almost always banned by conservation rules. Supporters of conservationism usually portray it as a response to the destructiveness of postwar planners, while opponents see it as a pretext for suburban NIMBYism. In fact, I shall argue, neither explanation is plausible. On the one hand, postwar planners were no more destructive than the Victorians or Georgians had been: the rate of demolition was historically normal, and cannot explain the wildly unprecedented policy response. And on the other hand, there was no need for NIMBYs to invent pretexts to ban new buildings, as they had already successfully prohibited the kinds of development they disliked in the first half of the century.

What had changed, and what generated the host of NITBYs that bore conservationism to victory, was the ascendancy of modernist architecture, a style that most people demonstrably find relatively ugly. Conservationism was a reaction to postwar redevelopment, as its proponents claimed. But it was less a reaction to what the modernists destroyed, than to what they created.

Ugliness and NIMBYism

Most debates about the policy significance of ugliness presuppose a certain model of how it affects housebuilding. On this model, local people resent the prospect of having ugliness inflicted upon them, they therefore oppose ugly developments, and politicians implement antidevelopment policies to placate them. This probably does happen sometimes: ugliness obviously does affect local people, and it would be surprising if this had no effect at all on their behavior. But a closer look suggests that ugliness plays only a minor role in motivating NIMBYism.

One reason for skepticism is that the occasional beautiful developments that do get built still often encounter fevered opposition. I’On (pronounced ‘ion’) in Charleston, South Carolina is one of the loveliest neighborhoods in North America. It has grown gradually since its founding in 1995, occupying a largely empty site between several existing residential subdivisions. Despite its walkable urbanism, tree-lined streets, and exquisitely detailed houses, thousands of local people petitioned against it when first proposed. The town council initially rejected the scheme, and a tortuous legal battle was fought to downzone the site through a local referendum. The NIMBYs were defeated only after the South Carolina Supreme Court found that zoning decisions cannot be made by referendum.

Such stories continue to appear today. The present king of the United Kingdom is an architecture enthusiast, and while he was prince, he orchestrated the delivery of several unusually attractive developments in his official landholdings (which, confusingly, are called the Duchy of Cornwall), including the famous developments of Poundbury and Nansledan. The Duchy is currently proposing a third, at Faversham in Kent. Its proposals show what would be one of the most appealing urban extensions in modern Europe. Nonetheless, it has triggered hundreds of letters of protest, as well as opposition from Faversham Council, the neighboring councils, and the local Member of Parliament.

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Anecdotes like these are only weak evidence, not least because it is possible that the attacks would have been even more intense if the developments had been ugly. But they do suggest that beauty is not a panacea for NIMBYism.

A more powerful reason to doubt the role of ugliness in generating NIMBYism is that it gets the timing wrong. It is true that land-use rules became far more restrictive in the twentieth century. It is also true that the dominant architectural styles became much more unpopular: visual preference surveys consistently find that most people prefer traditional styles to modernist ones. Viewed from a distance, it looks plausible that the two are causally related: new buildings became visually displeasing to most people, and as a result they started to push back against them.

In fact, however, these changes happened in the wrong order. Restrictive zoning emerged in Germany and Austria-Hungary in the 1890s and spread quickly thereafter. Italian cities began introducing zoning plans in the 1900s, Britain created a national framework for zoning in 1909, and France followed suit in 1919. Zoning spread quickly across the United States in the interwar period. The restrictiveness of early zoning varied by country, but it could be very tight: in Germany and Austria most suburbs were capped at their existing densities well before 1914, and retain those densities today.

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Modernist architecture began at least a generation later. It emerged in the 1920s, chiefly in Germany, and spread in the 1930s as a minority style for clients who wanted something distinctively futuristic. In the United States, its impact was particularly faint, and famous American buildings of the 1930s and 40s, such as the Supreme Court Building, the Empire State Building, and Jefferson Memorial, remained resolutely Neoclassical or Art Deco. The global triumph of modernism came only in the 1950s.

This means that the Great Downzoning happened in countries where most new buildings were still in the traditional styles dominant in the nineteenth century, with at most a minority in the novel but decorative styles we now call Art Deco. No switch towards styles perceived as ugly had yet occurred: the general picture was one of continuity with the past. The flats that were banned by early zoning would generally have had classical cornices, pedimented windows, and rusticated basements. In other words, NIMBYism triumphed long before it became true that, in most people’s eyes, the average new building was uglier than the average old one. This suggests that, though making development beautiful might palliate NIMBYism somewhat, the effect would be modest.

Perhaps this should not surprise us. After all, even the most beautiful neighborhood only emerges after several years of extreme ugliness, while the buildings are under construction. And however beautiful buildings may be, development will still have its other well-known impacts on local residents, like loss of light and green space, pressure on infrastructure and services, increase in noise, damage to social cachet, and change in the character of the neighborhood. Removing the problem of ugliness may reduce NIMBY zeal a little, but the number of NIMBYs it satisfies entirely will be small.

Was conservationism a response to modernist destructiveness?

Ugliness is clearly not the main driver of local opposition to new developments. This does not, however, mean that ugliness is irrelevant to housing shortages in the West. Today, American prohousing advocates work to generate statewide or national support for development in order to override the locals, whose representatives control the strict zoning that slows down development and makes housing scarce and expensive. Prohousing advocates have secured some important victories. But one area where they have almost invariably failed is in enabling more development in historic areas. The same is true for reformist campaigns around the world. Old buildings are protected from redevelopment across the West, even when they sit on the most valuable central land.

How did conservation become so powerful? The two most popular theories are (a) that conservation rules arose as a response to the unprecedented destructiveness of postwar planners and developers or (b) that they are a clever pretext exploited by local NIMBYs. I believe the evidence contradicts both. Instead, heritage conservation arose once most people began to feel that new buildings were uglier than old ones, generating widespread opposition to the redevelopment of old neighborhoods by people who did not even live in them.

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The idea of conserving built heritage was not entirely a twentieth-century invention: the artist William Morris was an early proponent of the idea, establishing the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, whose aim was to prevent the overzealous ‘restoration’ of churches and other historic buildings, in 18771. Morris was considered something of an eccentric in his own time, however, and architectural conservationism did not achieve anything like the popular support it has today until much later. In 1960, most European countries protected only a tiny minority of monuments from development, and even these limited restrictions dated largely from the 1940s and 50s. In most American states, the authorities protected nothing at all. Over the next twenty years, this changed drastically. Heritage registers were created, expanded, and strengthened. ‘Historic districts’ or ‘conservation areas’ were declared. Governments halted redevelopment schemes and redirected resources towards refurbishment and restoration.

Taken together, these measures were extraordinarily successful. In Paris, plans for the city introduced in the 1950s foresaw the demolition of two thirds of Paris’s city blocks over the next few decades, the bulk of Paris’s urban fabric from the nineteenth century. In Britain, the government actually did demolish at least 1.5 million homes in slum clearance schemes in the postwar decades. This was nearly 10 percent of the overall housing stock, but since these ‘slums’ were largely eighteenth or nineteenth-century buildings, it will have equated to between fifteen and twenty percent of the prewar stock. The United States seems to have had even higher rates of (privately led) destruction, with one report finding that nearly half of the 12,000 buildings recorded in the Historic American Buildings Survey of 1933 had been demolished or seriously mutilated by the middle of the 1960s.

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Conservation policy brought such demolitions almost to a standstill. In France, 1.8 percent of pre-1949 dwellings were demolished between 1999 and 2013, an annual rate of 0.13 percent. German states report even lower rates of demolition of pre-1919 buildings. In Berlin in 2022, just nine buildings from before 1919 were demolished out of a total of 50,337, a rate of 0.018 percent. In North Rhine-Westphalia in 2023, 56 pre-1919 buildings were demolished out of 445,226, a rate of 0.013 percent. At this rate, it will take North Rhine-Westphalia 7,951 years to demolish its prewar stock entirely. In Britain, government statistics show a paradoxical increase in the number of pre-1919 dwellings between 2012 and 2024, the result of more homes being subdivided than demolished. Old American buildings are demolished rather more often, partly because they are timber-framed and therefore harder to maintain in safe condition. But in the American Northeast, the annual demolition rate of pre-1920 buildings between 1997 and 2001 was still only 0.25 percent, while in the West it was slightly over 0.3 percent2. In all these countries, the old buildings that are demolished are usually decayed and neglected. Many are in deprived post-industrial towns rather than in areas with strong pressure for densification.

The standard account of this shift sees the rise of the conservation movement as a response to the unprecedented destruction of heritage by postwar developers and planners. If we take the above figures in isolation, this seems plausible. The problem is that the destructiveness of 1945–1970 was really nothing new: earlier generations had destroyed just as much of their architectural inheritance without generating corresponding resistance.

A graphic illustration of this is visible on the Rue François-Miron in Paris, where stand Paris’s last two fully intact timber-framed houses. Until the sixteenth century, almost all houses in Paris were timber-framed. In the centuries since, Paris was never annihilated by a great fire, earthquake, or bombing, unlike Chicago, London, San Francisco, and Tokyo. But its tens of thousands of timber-framed houses were demolished for redevelopment, until, by the mid-twentieth century, only these two remained. Many of their sites have since been occupied by several progressively larger buildings, demolished and replaced in sequence.

This rate of redevelopment was not unusual. London’s medieval stock was mostly destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666. But the rebuilt City of London of the late seventeenth century has also vanished. Only somewhere between 100 and 200 homes survive from this period, though more than half a million people lived in the brick-built London of 1700. Some seventeenth-century buildings were destroyed in the Second World War, but the vast majority had already been demolished and replaced in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Assuming 100,000 homes in 1700 and two hundred survivors today, that means a destruction rate of 99.8 percent, considerably more thorough than that of the Great Fire.

This process was perhaps even more marked in the United States, where the lack of height restrictions created intense incentives for redevelopment after the invention of elevators and steel frames in the 1880s. Fewer than twenty buildings of any kind survive in New York from before 1800. Boston has perhaps fifty or a hundred. Almost all of these buildings were already gone before the rise of modernism, demolished in the nineteenth century or in the furious building activity of the Roaring Twenties.

The rate of redevelopment could be even faster for certain types of building. In the Gilded Age, Manhattan had several hundred urban palaces, huge houses of the great business dynasties. Perhaps three quarters were demolished in a remarkably short period in the late 1920s. The Cornelius Vanderbilt II House was demolished in 1926 for the Bergdorf Goodman building, a department store. The Mrs William B. Astor House was also demolished in 1926 for the Temple Emanu-El of New York, a magnificent synagogue seating a congregation of 2,500 people. The Elbridge T Gerry Mansion was demolished in 1929 and replaced by the Pierre, a skyscraper hotel in a French Renaissance style. Ironically, all three of these buildings now have heritage protection, either as individual landmarks or as elements of historic districts.

This destructiveness was not limited to the private sector, especially in Europe, where medieval and early modern city centers frequently stood in the way of government schemes. The most famous case of this was ‘road cutting’, the policy of driving new arterial roads through city centers to improve traffic circulation, which was unnecessary before the age of the car on generously gridded New World streets. Many of Europe’s most famous urban streets were originally cuttings, like Regent Street in London and the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Although cuttings mainly served a practical function, the tree-lined boulevards they created were also seen as aesthetic improvements.

There is one interesting exception to this destructiveness: urban railways. Nineteenth-century railways generated huge clouds of steam and coal smoke, and were regarded as blights on the neighborhoods they passed through. As a consequence, there are almost no cases in which a railway was cut through a city center: this is why cities like London and Paris have a ring of railway termini around the historic core. In other words, nineteenth-century people behaved just like twentieth-century people in respect of the one kind of infrastructure they found overwhelmingly ugly, just as the anti-ugliness theory would predict.

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Not everyone was happy about the tearing up of the old to make way for modern capital cities. People displaced by public works were obviously upset. Some commentators also regretted the destruction of historic buildings, especially when high-status buildings like palaces were replaced by low-status buildings like apartments. On the other hand, many Georgians and Victorians thought that redevelopment generally made their cities better. Although some ancient buildings were prized, normal houses generally declined in value over time, like cars or computers today: the default assumption was that buildings degraded with use, and hence that a new replacement was probably better.

Many people also thought that architects were getting better at designing attractive buildings. In 1868, The Builder, Britain’s leading architectural magazine, proclaimed that:

The overall picture here is one of striking continuity between the modernists and their predecessors. The modernists certainly demolished a lot, but not generally more than the Victorians or Georgians. In a sense, they were much less destructive, since they were halted when they had demolished only a substantial minority of the inherited building stock, while the Victorians and Georgians merrily continued until they had torn down almost all of it. The idea that postwar planners were moved by destructive animus towards the past is mostly a myth. Their views about urban change were historically normal, and had generally been shared by the wider public. The fact that redevelopment lost the consent of the public in the 1960s and 70s requires some other explanation.

Was conservationism a pretext for NIMBYism?

If postwar destruction did not cause the conservation movement, what did? Some readers will sense an obvious answer here. Housing reformers have long suspected that the conservation movement is mostly a pretext for NIMBYism. According to this theory, NIMBYs actually oppose development in order to exclude poor people or non-white people from their neighborhoods, or to sustain high property values, or from pure reflexive dislike of change. But since none of these is a persuasive argument for state coercion, NIMBYs therefore have to invent ‘pretextual’ reasons for opposing development. According to this theory, the idea that we must conserve architectural heritage is one such pretext.

The idea that conservation is a front for some other objection can seem plausible. When I attend planning committee meetings, I often have the overwhelming impression that opponents’ arguments are heavily pretextual: people who have never shown the slightest interest in heritage, and who have perhaps gutted the historic features of their own homes, suddenly become fanatical champions of some trivial historic object when it stands in the way of a development. (Intense interest may also be discovered in bats, newts, hedgehogs, bees, blackbirds, public housing tenants, flood risk, key workers, young people, old people, and so on).

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As a general explanation for the rise of conservation in the twentieth century, however, the pretextual theory is surprisingly weak. The most obvious problem is once again sequencing: the rise of NIMBYism happened long before the rise of the conservation movement. As we have seen, suburban zoning spread across much of Europe before the First World War and then across North America in the interwar period, while conservation restrictions were extremely limited before the 1940s and only really became an important constraint on development in the 1960s and 70s. Many countries thus see gaps of forty or even seventy years between the two movements. Why didn’t NIMBYs invent conservationism earlier? Why, indeed, did they bother to invent it in the 1960s, long after they had already succeeded in protecting their affluent suburbs from development using other arguments?

The pretextual theory also struggles to explain the priorities of conservationism. As their name suggests, NIMBYs care chiefly about their own backyards – that is, typically, middle-class suburbs. Conservationism certainly does sometimes protect such places, but it is not restricted to them. It also protects working-class housing, commercial downtowns, public buildings, isolated country houses, and rural churches. In fact, it has often had far more effect on these buildings than it has on suburban areas, partly because suburbs were already protected by zoning, and partly because postwar governments wanted to clear ‘slums’, not middle-class neighborhoods. In other words, the conservation movement has the priorities of a NITBY movement, not a NIMBY one.

The difference between conservationist and NIMBY priorities is starkly illustrated by the divergent trajectories of city center districts. City centers with less historic build stock have frequently seen massive densification since 1950, because they have neither beautiful buildings for NITBYs to protect nor many local residents to object on NIMBY grounds. Thus many American, Canadian and Australian cities have seen forests of skyscrapers rising in their downtowns, while their vast suburbs, full of homeowning NIMBYs, remain petrified at low densities. Urbanists write about an ‘urban transect’, with densities gradually rising towards the center. These cities have developed a distinctive ‘L transect’, sheer at the core but flat everywhere else. This is the urban form that arises where local NIMBYism is a powerful force while NITBY conservation has less relevance.

By contrast, European city centers have been more perfectly frozen than perhaps any other kind of neighborhood: the building stock of central Paris, Rome, or Madrid has hardly changed at all since 1960. When European municipalities want to develop a skyscraper district, they generally have to find a low-end suburban site for it, like Paris’s La Défense or Madrid’s AZCA. If current plans for tall buildings around the Périphérique ring road go ahead, Paris may end up with a gentle U transect, with its highest densities displaced to the periphery. The obvious reason for this is that European city centers are where historic buildings are concentrated. They have no special significance for most NIMBYs – although they have often now gentrified, many centers were poor or depopulated in the 1960s – but they are the natural focus of NITBYs’ efforts.

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Where European cities have densified their centers since 1945, it is generally downstream of heavy bomb damage, as in Frankfurt and London. One famous study found that the Blitz ultimately made London’s economy 10 percent larger by enabling higher densities on former bomb sites. If London’s development restrictions were solely driven by NIMBYism, this would be inexplicable: sites where density had been randomly lowered to zero in 1941–1945 would if anything be expected to have lower density today, since the NIMBYs would have been resisting densification from a lower baseline. The reason that bomb damage enabled higher subsequent densities is that development is often blocked by NITBY protection of heritage architecture, not NIMBY opposition to density.

The fight against uglification

The true explanation of the spread of conservation is before our eyes: the rise of perceived ugliness. Redevelopment in the postwar era did not become more common or more destructive of heritage. But it did become, in the view of most people, uglier. This may have made people (even) more hostile to redevelopment near them. But its politically decisive effect was to make people more hostile to many kinds of redevelopment that did not affect them personally.

Most people are not principled opponents of redevelopment as such. Even today, developments on former industrial or logistics sites are often widely popular, like NOMA in Washington DC or Coal Drops Yard in London. But many people are principled opponents of redevelopment when it seems to uglify places. Very many people dislike the idea of their city or their country becoming uglier, even when they do not live near the development in question. They lend low-level, passive support to conservationist campaigns – support which aggregates into a powerful force in a democratic society.

How did people come to expect that new buildings would be uglier than what came before? As we have seen, this view was not standard historically. There are two main causes. First, in the middle of the twentieth century, traditional architectural styles were superseded by modernism, characterized by lack of ornament, repetitive facade patterns, and the use of exposed steel and concrete. This style emerged in the 1920s and became dominant for everything except suburban housing in the 1950s. As noted above, this style is broadly unpopular with the public. Replacement of prewar buildings in traditional styles with postwar buildings in modernist ones will thus, to most people, constitute uglification. This is the main reason that redevelopment switched from being aesthetically neutral to being uglifying.

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Second, at around the same time, mass car ownership became dominant. Unlike modernist architecture, cars are basically popular. But it is nonetheless obvious that, although individuals benefit from cars, spaces are degraded by heavy vehicle traffic. This is irrelevant to how people feel about some kinds of redevelopment, but it is worth mentioning because of how it affects views of street cuttings. A nineteenth-century boulevard was an airy, tree-lined space along which horse-drawn carriages flowed, roughly at walking speed. On the whole, people seem to have preferred them to narrow side streets, as contemporary property maps illustrate. By contrast, nobody prefers living near a modern highway, to the extent that the authorities often build sight and sound barriers around them.

The anti-ugliness theory of conservationism lines up strikingly with the timing of events. Developers had been demolishing vast quantities of historic stock for thousands of years with barely a whisper of conservationist resistance; then, within ten or fifteen years of the ascendancy of an architectural style that the public disliked, an immense movement to halt the replacement of old buildings appeared almost from nowhere.

This theory also explains the priorities of the conservation movement. On the one hand, as noted above, conservationists have successfully protected a much wider range of pre-1914 buildings than NIMBYs have, including in city centers and other places where NIMBYs are scarce or absent. On the other hand, conservationists have been far less effective in defending postwar modernist heritage, being either indifferent to it themselves or unable to mobilize wider public support. There do exist conservation groups defending modernist architecture, like the Twentieth Century Society in Britain, and some high-profile modernist buildings have received conservation protection. But the numbers are tiny relative to prewar architecture. In England, 300 postwar buildings had been listed as of 2003, apparently growing to about 500 in 2015, out of some 375,000 listed buildings in total. The American National Register has a blanket ‘fifty year rule’, almost never including anything built within the last half century.

It also seems to me that the anti-ugliness theory is a plausible account of the emotional character of the conservation movement. It is true that many conservationists are not explicitly anti-modernist, and that today the orthodox high-status view is to support conservationism for old architecture and modernism for new ones. I suspect, however, that conservationists were appalled by uglification, but sought to avoid direct confrontation with high-status modernism by sublimating their appreciation of beauty into appreciation of heritage. Conservationists could thus promote traditional architecture without attracting charges of pastiche-mongering. In other words, many conservationists secretly love old buildings because they are beautiful, while pretending to love them because they are old.

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Ugliness and the housing shortage

How much impact does conservation have on the housing shortage? The answer is complicated. Even in the European countries with the oldest build stock, only a fifth of housing dates from before 1919, while in the United States just 6 percent does. This suggests that rules protecting old buildings would do little to prevent the construction of new ones. But because historic buildings are concentrated in city centers, and because conservation systems tend to restrict what can be done in the environs of old buildings as well as within their curtilages, their effect is much greater than the raw statistics suggest. In fact, in most European cities, centers are effectively solid phalanxes of conservation designations, with new development largely displaced to inferior sites on the urban periphery.

The impact of conservation in the United States is smaller, but still considerable. Manhattan, central Boston, and San Francisco are not under blanket conservation designations like Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, or Rome. But large areas still fall under conservation protections, often exactly the areas where YIMBYs would most like to enable development. This means that conservation, and hence ugliness, still acts as a significant constraint on development, albeit a less important one than the general rise of suburban zoning.

Cogent arguments may be given for the redevelopment of historic neighborhoods. Densifying central areas of cities creates new housing where it is most needed, and where it contributes most to economic growth. It enables people to walk and cycle to work, or to rely on public transport. New buildings could be safer, better insulated, and more environmentally sustainable than their predecessors.

For most Westerners today, however, the prospect of destroying their cities’ historic neighborhoods remains a horrible one. People feel implicitly that we possess a finite stock of beautiful buildings, and that they are more or less irreplaceable. When one is destroyed, we lose forever a part of our inheritance, and condemn our children to live in a permanently uglier world.

So long as people feel this, they will never tolerate the large-scale destruction of historic building stock, no matter what ingenious arguments YIMBYs make for it. Their dread of ugliness will hang over our cities like a curse, freezing them in the last moment of their beauty. If that curse can be broken, it will not be by the arguments of economists and transport planners, but by confidence that change is not disfigurement, and that it will yield cities we can love.

Samuel Hughes is an editor at Works in Progress.

Artwork by Daniel Cox.

Some of America’s most famous land was reclaimed from the sea. The Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and the Reflecting Pool all sit on earth reclaimed from Potomac River tidal flats in the early twentieth century. Treasure Island was built in San Francisco Bay for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Chicago’s Northerly Island was filled in from Lake Michigan to complete Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan of the city.

In total, around eight percent of the land in America’s major coastal cities was underwater in the 1890s and has since been reclaimed. This includes the land under several major airports, like Newark, Logan, and SFO, as well as neighborhoods like the Financial District in San Francisco, the Back Bay in Boston, and Camden in Philadelphia. Some cities, like Boston and Charleston, have doubled in size by reclaiming land.

Today, reclamation should be more common than ever. Land values in some cities are thirty times what they were in 1950, and high-tide flooding is four to eight times as frequent. Reclamation could extend and protect our coastal cities as it has for centuries. But rather than reclaim more land, we have virtually ceased to reclaim any at all. Since the completion of Battery Park City in 1976, there has not been a single major urban land reclamation project in the United States and only a handful of port expansions.

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Two explanations are commonly proposed for this: first, that the easy spots have already been reclaimed, and second, that improved transportation has made reclamation unnecessary since we can expand cities further inland instead. But neither of these matches the evidence. Other countries still reclaim land at enormous scale, under conditions at least as challenging as those in the United States. The transportation story was once plausible, but not any more. Transportation has stopped improving, and downtown land values have risen so much that reclamation costs would be dwarfed by the value of the land created.

The timing points to a third explanation. Reclamation stopped abruptly in the 1970s when a wave of environmental regulations made it enormously expensive to reshape the landscape. And it halted at the same time in every other country that passed similar laws.

If the legal barriers to reclamation were lifted, we could build hundreds of thousands of new homes near the centers of our most valuable cities. We could build new airports to refresh ailing transportation infrastructure, and we could protect low-lying coastal areas from sea level rise. The disappearance of land reclamation is a choice that we have the power to undo.

Have we run out of good spots?

A common explanation is that we simply ran out of good places to reclaim. According to this view, there used to be plenty of shallow, semi-dry plots available, but they’ve mostly been used up.

There are indeed a finite number of shallow bays near major cities, and since land is often raised in one area by dredging the bottom of the surrounding waters, land reclamation can eat into its own expansion opportunities. But even so, many countries have been adding land for centuries without running out of good options. China has the longest reclamation history of any nation, stretching back to the Tai Lake Basin in the fifth century BC. Low-lying wetlands along the Yangtze river were made suitable for building by using dams and drains. If the US hit the limit of suitable areas for land reclamation within two centuries, China would surely have long since run out, having begun the practice over two thousand years ago.

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But China still leads the world in land reclamation, with close to 80 percent of all land reclaimed in the twenty-first century. Since 2000, Chinese cities of over one million people have reclaimed a land area equivalent to 39 Manhattans, with even more reclamation occurring outside city limits.

American history argues against this theory too: reclamation wasn’t confined to a few choice spots in the most valuable cities. It was common along both coasts, even in smaller cities like Charleston, Wilmington, and Portland.

Hundreds of square miles of water near major American cities are shallow enough to reclaim easily. When Boston’s Back Bay was filled in the late-nineteenth century, it had an average depth of 20 feet. Two thirds of the San Francisco Bay is shallower than this. The South Bay, adjoining Silicon Valley, is less than six feet deep. Outside the main navigation channels, most of New York harbor is less than ten feet deep. Almost all of the water between Miami and Miami Beach, and along the shelf extending south to Key West, is also less than ten feet deep. All of these could be candidates for reclamation.

Nor is depth a hard limit if land values are high enough. Monaco’s recent Mareterra project expanded the country’s land area by three percent by dredging down to 164 feet.

Soil and rock conditions also matter, but much of the American coastline has better conditions than sites where reclamation has already succeeded. Singapore’s Jurong Island is a massive industrial zone created on land reclaimed between 1995 and 2009. The water was more than 50 feet deep and atop another 50 feet of soft marine clay, which settles more than other materials under pressure. To reclaim the land, these layers had to be threaded with long plastic tubes to allow drainage and loaded with a large, heavy quantity of extra soil.

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It is possible that the United States could eventually exhaust its opportunities for land reclamation. But given how much further other countries have gone and how much suitable coastline remains, that point is likely a long way off.

Has transportation made land reclamation unnecessary?

Another explanation is that land reclamation was replaced by transportation. When walking was the main mode of travel, cities faced tight spatial constraints. Boston began as a tiny peninsula of about two square miles. The city quickly outgrew its isthmus, but land to the south was too far for commuters to walk from. If Bostonians wanted to build close to the city center, they had to expand into the sea.

Other cities faced the same problem even where land was more abundant. In 1890, while Manhattan’s population was similar to today’s, there were still farmhouses beside Central Park, only six and a half miles north of Wall Street. The need to build within walking distance of the city center made northern Manhattan effectively unusable, justifying extensions to the southern tip. Even with plenty of dry land available, the city kept filling in riverbeds and marshland around the island. In all, over a quarter of Manhattan’s land was reclaimed before 1979.

Over time, however, land reclamation became less useful. Better transportation unlocked lots of greenfield land that was cheaper to develop than dredging up new land from the water, while the elevator unlocked brownfield land from the sky.

This abundance of new land within the commuting zone of cities was a cheaper substitute for reclaimed land. Boston’s Back Bay reclamation in the 1860s cost about $400,000 per acre in 2025 dollars. Although the state of Massachusetts ended up selling the land for a healthy profit, by the 1910s there were cheaper ways to unlock land within reach of the city center. If each of the 332 stations of New York’s 1913 subway extension connected a half-mile radius to the downtown, this form of land reclamation cost only $65,000 per acre in 2025 dollars, five to ten times less than land reclamation from the sea.

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But this alternative source of land has proven difficult to extend indefinitely. First, while there may be land that we can access by expanding our cities outwards into virgin countryside, doing so is politically tricky in most countries, not least the United States. Adding more New York suburbs in New Jersey and Connecticut would mean a modern Robert Moses building more expressways through Manhattan.

Second, with enough population and economic growth, even the vast swaths of land accessible by modern transportation can eventually be filled. The edge of New York’s metropolitan area is already 40 miles from Midtown Manhattan at many points, over an hour’s commute. After rapid improvements in the twentieth century, transportation technology has stagnated. Average commute times have increased by a quarter since 1980, partly because cars haven’t grown much faster and partly because highway construction costs at least four times as much per mile as it did in 1960.

Finally, reclamation adds space near city centers, where land is far more valuable than at the suburban fringe. Cities are valuable because they concentrate economic activity, making it easier to find jobs, customers, and suppliers, and because they generate knowledge spillovers making everyone more productive. Better transportation increases their value by putting more workers, suppliers, and customers within reach. Crime and pollution pushed people out of city centers in America after World War II. But since 1990, this trend has reversed, and the value of land in city centers has grown quickly despite continuing suburban expansion.

Today, downtown land values are high enough to justify reclamation costs even in places where suburban land is plentiful. In 1955, the California Division of Water Resources estimated that reclaiming 23,000 acres of land on the west side of the San Francisco Bay would cost about $330,000 per acre in 2025 dollars. Today, the cost of an acre of single-family-zoned land in San Francisco County averages $24 million, more than 70 times the estimated reclamation cost. Even the cheapest county in the Bay Area exceeds $330,000 per acre.

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Despite the space opened up by cars, trains, and buses, America’s biggest cities face a massive land shortage. Even as the transportation explanation has weakened, reclamation hasn’t returned. Boston’s Back Bay reclamation was profitable when land sold for the equivalent of $40 per square foot. Land in major cities today sells for ten to a hundred times that, and dredging capacity has grown nearly tenfold since 1950. Yet urban reclamation has disappeared even in the most land-constrained cities in the country.

How reclamation went extinct

Neither explanation is convincing, especially where urban land values would plainly justify reclamation. But there is another problem: the explanations cannot easily account for the timing of land reclamation’s disappearance. A technological or geographic explanation would predict a slow and patchy decline, as different regions responded to different pressures at different speeds. But this is not what happened. In the 1970s, reclamation stopped virtually simultaneously everywhere in the country.

Of the 37 cities for which we can find data, every one reclaimed land more slowly after 1970, with many, such as Seattle and Chicago, slowing to zero. A few, including San Diego, Washington, and New York, do show some growth in land area after 1970. But most of this reflects changes in measurement or the completion of projects already underway.

The abruptness of the change shows up clearly in data on the amount of wetland that is lost per year. Most wetland loss is inland and agricultural, not the coastal urban reclamation we’re advocating. Still, the aggregate trend makes it clear that land reclamation ended suddenly around the 1970s. The annual rate of wetland loss in the 1960s was eight times higher than in the 1990s, and twenty times higher than in the 2010s.

In the 1970s, the United States passed a wave of new environmental laws, with perhaps the most far-reaching effects on land use in the country’s history: The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (known as NEPA), the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, and others. These laws hit the whole country at once, enormously raising the cost of reshaping the landscape, and are the real explanation for the end of American land reclamation.

Still in force, these laws largely regulate the federal government and not private development. But the moment a private project touches federal land, funding, or permits, it must comply with all of them. For land reclamation, NEPA is the most onerous.

NEPA requires covered projects to prepare a detailed report on the environmental impact of the proposed action and its alternatives. While NEPA itself sets no standards for how detailed these reports must be, decades of litigation have turned them into thousand-page behemoths that take years to produce. The environmental assessment for New York City’s congestion pricing plan, for example, is 900 pages long with 3,000 pages of appendices, despite the project requiring zero major construction. When potential harms are identified, agencies must undertake mitigation: buying and restoring 3,000 acres of panther habitat, say, or donating $16 million to conservation banks. In some cases, the project is simply blocked.

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Land reclamation must always go through the NEPA procedure because the Clean Water Act requires a federal permit for any discharge of dredged material into waterways or wetlands, including the entire coast. Because land reclamation projects do have significant environmental effects, every project must either complete a full environmental impact statement or produce an environmental assessment with costly mitigation measures before receiving a permit. Environmental impact statements filed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that oversees the permits for land reclamation, take an average of six years to complete, and the mitigation measures often run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Craney Island extension in Norfolk, Virginia is a useful illustration of how these laws complicate land reclamation. Craney Island is a four-square-mile rectangle of dirt and sand surrounded by dikes at the mouth of the Elizabeth river, built solely to store material dredged from Chesapeake Bay navigation channels. In 1997, Congress approved a study of the possibility of expanding the island to the east, extending the lifespan of the disposal area and adding a container shipping terminal to the Norfolk port.

By historical standards, this would have been an easy project: the original 2,500-acre Craney Island was built in just two years between 1956 and 1958. But because the extension involved discharging dredged material into US waters, it needed a Clean Water Act permit. The Army Corps’s environmental impact statement took nine years and ran to 1,400 pages.

Virginia’s environmental quality department then issued permits in 2010, three years after the environmental impact statement was published. After a decade of delays and budget uncertainty, the Corps changed its discharge plans in 2023, which required yet another supplemental environmental assessment. Twenty-eight years after the feasibility study began, almost nothing has been built. The project is expected to finish ‘on schedule’ in 2065.

Craney Island is not an isolated case. Land reclamation ground to a halt across the country after the major environmental laws passed in the 1970s. Very few US reclamation projects started later in the twentieth century, and no notable urban reclamation projects have taken place in the twenty-first.

Evidence for environmental law’s role in the end of American land reclamation can also be found in other countries. It declined abruptly in the 1970s and 1980s across the West. What western nations shared was the rise of powerful environmental movements hostile to reshaping the landscape.

Germany reclaimed over 80,000 acres from the marshy Wadden Sea before 1990. Tens of thousands more were planned, but fierce environmental opposition ended the practice in the late 1980s, turning the Wadden Sea into a national park and making wetlands protected areas. In the 1960s, France used reclamation to develop its Mediterranean coast into a world-class tourist destination, but environmental protection laws in the 1980s banned all construction within 100 meters of the shore.

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In the early twentieth century, Canada reclaimed tens of thousands of acres of floodplain in British Columbia and the Maritimes, along with hundreds of acres of urban land in cities like Toronto, but large projects like these have stopped or greatly slowed due to environmental rules. In nineteenth-century Australia, hundreds of acres were reclaimed in Sydney Harbor, including the land under the Sydney Opera House, but twentieth-century environmental rules have prevented future expansion.

Even the Dutch, history’s most celebrated reclaimers, largely ceased the practice after the passing of their own environmental laws. From about 1917 to 1970, the Dutch undertook the largest reclamation project in history: the Zuiderzee Works, which expanded the Netherlands by five percent. The fastest phase, the 1927 Wieringermeer Polder, dammed and drained 50,000 acres in just three years. The 1957 Eastern Flevoland Polder then reclaimed nearly three times the area in less than eight years.

But only four of the five planned polders were filled. The fifth, the Markermeer, which was dammed and ready to drain in 1975, was never completed. It would have provided the closest land to Amsterdam, where house prices have risen 120 percent since 2010. In 1969, the Netherlands created a new approval process for large spatial planning projects similar to the NEPA. This process required extensive public consultation and referendums which, while not as explicitly environmental as NEPA, were still dominated by environmental concerns. While the debate dragged on, the 1979 European Birds Directive added another layer of environmental protection. Environmental groups campaigned to halt reclamation permanently and have the unfilled lake designated a Special Protection Area.

In response, the government eventually abandoned its land reclamation plan. In 1992, the Markerwaard was listed as a protection area, preventing any development on some of Europe’s most valuable water. (Some reclamation has resumed since 2014, but not for people: a €300-million, decades-long project is building swampy archipelagos in the lake as bird habitat).

Even the rare successes are instructive. The one major Dutch reclamation of the twenty-first century, an expansion of the port of Rotterdam called Maasvlakte 2, took eighteen years to complete, including an eleven-year planning and environmental compliance period before construction began. Its environmental review alone ran to some six thousand pages.

Reclamation has continued only in countries where environmental regulation is less onerous, like China, Singapore, and Japan. China has reclaimed over 5,000 square kilometers in the first two decades of this century, including a new city of 500,000 outside of Shanghai, and Singapore has expanded its territory by over a quarter since 1975.

Japan does have high environmental standards and a NEPA-style law requiring environmental impact reports. But Japan’s system has two advantages: clear numeric thresholds for when reports are required and courts that make it harder to overturn agency decisions. Japanese infrastructure projects don’t need the defense against legal challenges that make Western projects take decades. The result is abundant housing and infrastructure, including multiple airports, port facilities, and residential areas built on reclaimed land.

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Land reclamation has always faced obstacles, and the story of its historical fortunes is not simple. But the weight of the evidence points in a clear direction. In America, as across the West, land isn’t reclaimed today because of barriers of geography or technology, but because 1970s environmental regulations made it prohibitively expensive and slow.

The wrong solution for an old problem

Reclamation would be feasible and profitable in the West today if some environmental laws were changed. But those laws were passed to solve real problems. So is it worth bringing land reclamation back?

The postwar state had incredible power to act unilaterally and grade its own work. Robert Moses could demolish entire neighborhoods for expressways without accountability; urban renewal programs replaced them with awful housing blocks; the Cuyahoga River caught fire from wanton industrial pollution; the interstate highway system demolished half a million homes to make way for highways through urban areas; and indeed land reclamation was sometimes responsible for the loss of valuable wetlands. These excesses understandably created fear of unchecked development.

Environmental laws provided necessary curbs, but since the 1970s, the costs of compliance have grown as NEPA reports expanded from ten pages to thousands and spurred half a century of expensive litigation.

Simultaneously, the value of foregone construction has never been higher. Real housing prices are at least five times higher today than in 1970 in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and LA, and three times higher across the country as a whole. Land reclamation may be the most striking casualty of 1970s environmental law. Land reclamation makes housing cheaper, cities more productive, and transportation networks more efficient. It also addresses twenty-first-century environmental challenges: city dwellers produce far less carbon per person than suburbanites, and reclaimed land can make coastal cities more resilient to natural disasters.

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Despite the environmental costs, there are many places in the country where the benefits of land reclamation are too great to ignore, in particular in and around our biggest cities. In some cases, the environmental benefits of bringing more people into dense, efficient cities where they have far lower emissions per capita may outweigh the loss of aquatic habitat all on its own, leaving the direct benefits of more land as pure reward.

Land reclamation is not the solution to everything, but there’s no good reason we should be worse at land reclamation than we were 150 years ago. There is plenty of land that is easy to reclaim and plenty of areas where the value of land is far greater than the cost of acquiring it. The benefits of more land in our most productive cities are large enough to justify the effort of reforming the laws that currently prevent it. Let’s make more land!

Zigmund Forrest is an independent researcher. Maxwell Tabarrok is a graduate student at Harvard University.

Artwork by Filip Setmanuk.

Chernobyl was the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster. The reactor was built to a flawed design. In 1986, its operators disabled automated safety systems and removed control rods to perform a late-night test. The coolant water overheated, speeding up the reaction until it flash-boiled into steam and violently shattered all the nuclear fuel in a matter of seconds. The graphite in the reactor then caught fire.

Six hundred workers were present when this occurred. Of these, 134 received high doses of radiation, between 800 and 16,000 millisieverts, mostly within hours. Twenty-eight of these died in the first three months, and another 19 died before 2004, though not all from radiation-related causes. While first responders have shown a slight increase in rates of leukemia, there has been no increase in solid cancers.

When the reactor exploded, it released massive amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. This ash settled onto the grazing regions of Ukraine. Dairy cows ate it and secreted it into their milk. Every person who drank this milk ended up with some quantity of radioactive iodine concentrated in their thyroid gland. Since children have smaller thyroids, their effective doses were much larger. The hundreds of thousands of children exposed have been closely screened in the years since, and authorities have identified 6,000 thyroid cancers. Fifteen people have already died of these cancers, and 200 might in the long run. These thyroid cancers were completely avoidable because the iodine has a half-life of eight days. After the Windscale fire released radioactive fallout onto grazing land in 1957, Britain discarded contaminated milk for 44 days, thereby avoiding any harm.

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Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them. But even it has caused only hundreds of early deaths, despite the exposure of millions of people in the exclusion zone and nearby. Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory. Evacuations and relocations to avoid small additional background radiation levels may have caused more harm than they averted. The same is true of Fukushima and Three Mile Island, the other two large nuclear disasters, but to an even greater extent: neither saw any responders die of the direct effects of radiation, and neither shows any clear impact on cancer rates.

Two years before Chernobyl, an explosion at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released toxic methyl isocyanate gas that killed at least 2,000 people instantly, permanently disabled another 4,000, and caused 550,000 injuries in total. In 1975, the Banqiao Dam in China failed, flooding 12,000 square kilometers, drowning at least 25,000 people, and destroying perhaps five million houses.

Whereas Chernobyl is a household name, Bhopal and Banqiao are mostly familiar only to specialists. People have much greater familiarity with and concern about the risks created by nuclear power, and the world’s international radiation protection regime is based on the idea that any release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is intolerable. This has led to regulations that have increased the costs of nuclear electricity over time to the point where it is widely considered a slow, backward, and ineffective technology.

The idea that any release of radioactive material is an intolerable disaster rests on the claim that radiation is harmful even in small, spread-out doses. But this claim is not well supported. The studies that claim to show harms from slow, drawn-out ionizing radiation are unconvincing. By giving them undeserved credence, we may be foreclosing one of the world’s most powerful technologies.

Trouble in Taipei

Between 1982 and 1984, recycled steel contaminated with cobalt-60 was unknowingly used in the construction of more than 180 buildings in Taiwan, including schools, businesses, and approximately 2,000 apartments. Cobalt-60 emits deeply penetrating gamma radiation, which in high doses is fatal: in 2000, three people died from acute radiation poisoning when a Thai scrap merchant took apart a radiotherapy machine containing large amounts of it. Over two decades, more than 10,000 people occupied these buildings, receiving an average total radiation dose of 400 millisieverts, about seven times more than the average American would receive over the same period from background radiation. This makes the Taiwanese buildings a good test of the claim that chronic background radiation at low daily rates damages human health.

A series of academic papers reconstructed the doses that different affected inhabitants experienced, combining thousands of on-site readings with estimates of their time spent at home. CJ Tung and colleagues built a model in 1998 of 24 of the 1,327 apartments that had then been identified as irradiated, breaking them down into one meter by one meter squares, and using dosimeters to measure radiation in those squares, to get an idea of how residents might have been affected.

Doses varied substantially. Most units received trivially low doses, less than the radiation exposure from one full-body medical CT scan per year (ten millisieverts). A small fraction of units received nearly 1,000 millisieverts per year, equivalent to a hundred CT scans. Later studies that mapped out these doses in more detail found that some sections of rooms were exposed to over 8,000 millisieverts per year, equivalent to about two CT scans every day.

A 2004 preliminary report, followed by a 2006 study (Chen et al), was the first to attempt to measure the health effects in this group. There were no cases of radiation sickness nor any major chromosomal aberrations. Affected Taiwanese had biomarkers of cellular stress nearer the upper end of normal reference ranges, but none linked with observable health effects. Cancer rates were, unexpectedly, dramatically lower than in the population at large.

Chen interpreted this as evidence of the health benefits of radiation. This theory, known as hormesis, holds that low doses of stressors, including ionizing radiation, can improve health (in this case, reducing cancer risk) by triggering the body’s repair systems in much the same way that exercise improves fitness by stressing the cardiovascular system. While popular among a small community of researchers, it has not gained widespread acceptance due to limited and conflicting evidence in humans.

This interpretation of the Taiwan data is dubious because it wasn’t able to control for age. Those affected by the cobalt-60 radiation were far younger than the average Taiwanese. Since younger people are less commonly diagnosed with cancer, this is a very significant limitation. A US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) review, describing the Taiwanese apartment data alongside some similar cases, warned that ‘studies on these populations are ongoing and suffer from various shortcomings, including incomplete follow-up, dosimetric uncertainties, limited statistical power and confounding’.

Torture the data and it will confess

Later studies fixed most of these problems, linking good estimates of the doses individuals experienced with their health outcomes and adding the missing age data. Contrary to the previous report, the studies generally claimed to find that low doses of ionizing radiation can cause cancer. But drawing this conclusion from them requires an unreasonable manipulation of statistics.

A 2006 study (Hwang et al) in the International Journal of Radiation Biology, for example, found slightly elevated incidences of thyroid cancer in women and leukemia in men across a sample of 7,271 people. But overall cancer rates were still lower in this group than in the general Taiwanese population, even after controlling for age.

The way the researchers found these higher rates of cancer was to break cancer cases down into 77 subtypes, such as tongue cancer in men or kidney cancer in women, and see if any of these had higher rates than expected. This approach has two problems. The first is that when you divide cancer cases into 77 buckets, even small and random variations in one or two of the buckets can create the appearance of a relationship. Every statistically significant site-specific result showing higher cancer incidence relies on seven or fewer observed cases. Across 77 different statistical tests, we would expect to see statistically significant results in four cases purely due to random variation. The second problem is that the authors did not register their hypotheses in advance: we have no idea whether they sliced the data into hundreds of different tests before cherrypicking those that gave them statistically significant correlations.

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The biggest issue with drawing the inference that low-level radiation harms human health is that the exposed population actually have lower cancer rates than unexposed people. Just like in Chen et al, the number of total cancer cases observed is substantially lower than expected.

Don’t back down, double down

A 2017 study in the British Journal of Cancer (Hsieh et al) follows up on this result, with ten years more data on whether affected people got ill, again using more accurate dose-rate profiles, more closely associated with particular individuals. Like Hwang et al, they claim their findings show that ‘low-dose-rate radiation exposure increases risks of breast cancer and leukaemia’, but the data is similarly brittle.

Within their sample of around 6,000 exposed Taiwanese apartment dwellers and schoolchildren, female breast cancers were higher at higher levels of exposure: 100 millisieverts of exposure was linked to an 11 percent higher cancer risk. This result is statistically significant. The study finds a few other results that are narrowly significant, but only out of a table of dozens, just like the previous study.

But again, the studies fail to state which tests they planned to do beforehand or that they began the analysis with the hypothesis that leukemia (but excluding multiple myeloma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia) would go up after a delay of two years, whereas rectal, stomach, liver, and thyroid cancer would be unaffected – or that cancers overall would be no higher in the study group than among totally unaffected Taiwanese. If they’d entered their research with this hypothesis, it might make the results more credible. Instead, they appear to have stumbled across a handful of correlations by chance.

And once more, the authors don’t highlight that the irradiated group has significantly lower overall cancer rates than the general Taiwanese population.

While we can comb through the data and infer that the average age of the subjects in Hwang was 33. The samples are slightly different, so we can’t just add ten years to get an average age of 43 for Hsieh. The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation estimated that the average age of the Hsieh sample was about 45, seven years older than Taiwan’s population overall in 2012. By 2012, the irradiated apartment dwellers had experienced 247 cancers, across 97,106 person years. Yet the cancer rate for Taiwan as a whole between 2008 and 2012 was about 390 per 100,000 person years.

Overall, cancer rates seem to be almost 35 percent lower in the affected group. If being irradiated with hundreds of millisieverts per year appears to have no effect, or even reduces cancer rates compared with the general population, this strongly implies that the links these two papers identify between much smaller doses of radiation and particular kinds of cancer are random noise.

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Made aware of this, Hsieh responded (as did Hwang) that these gaps must be down to socioeconomic status. Is this true? The best argument provided is that these were residents of new buildings constructed during an economic boom, suggesting that the apartments were relatively expensive. Though no data on the actual socioeconomic status of their residents exists, we can make some educated guesses.

First, though new, some of the buildings were public housing intended for poorer residents or public employees. This makes it unlikely that their inhabitants were wealthier people projected to have better health outcomes than the rest of the population.

Second, even if it were true that the residents were richer than average, this still wouldn’t account for the decreased cancer rates. Existing data suggest that Taiwanese health differences by socioeconomic status do not close this gap: overall cancer incidence is ten percent lower among doctors than in the general population. The incidence of colorectal cancer, one of the most common cancers, is actually lower (by about 20 percent) at the bottom of the wage ladder in Taiwan, though it is higher among those with the lowest education. None of these variations approach the 35 percent lower rates of cancer seen in the irradiated apartment residents.

This is not to claim that Hsieh’s paper provides strong evidence for the health benefits of radiation, as some fans of nuclear power have suggested. Most likely, these results are evidence of nothing.

The perils of low-dose science

From 2011 onwards, scientists began to realize that significant numbers of famous, eye-catching findings were unreplicable, in what became known as the replication crisis. Starting in psychology – once-popular ideas like power posing or the brain-enhancing effects of classical music began to be debunked – before the same occurred across every discipline.

The Taiwan papers have the classic tell of such findings, using tricks to turn random noise into statistically significant results, a phenomenon known as p-hacking. One such trick is dicing a population up into as many different subgroups as possible, expanding a researcher’s likelihood of finding something by chance.

It is inherently difficult to find out if low doses of radiation affect health. Populations vary hugely in all sorts of health, lifestyle, and genetic factors. The anticipated cancer effects of radiation would be low, even for those who expect to find them. Researchers would need a huge sample size and very carefully designed analysis to have any hope of detecting a signal amid the noise. INWORKS, first published in 2015 and updated in 2023, is the most serious attempt. It looks at cumulative low-dose radiation among 300,000 nuclear workers in France, the US, and Britain, measured by badge dosimeters, and finds that each additional 100 millisieverts of lifetime ionizing radiation exposure is associated with five percent higher cancer mortality rates, adding about one percent to the lifetime risk of dying of cancer (compared to an average of about 34 percent).

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For comparison, 100 millisieverts is about ten full-body CT scans, whereas the median INWORKS worker experienced a four-millisievert dose. Eating 50 grams of processed meat per day is associated, after controls, with a lifetime colorectal cancer risk 18 percent higher, and smoking with a lung cancer risk 1,500 to 3,000 percent higher.

The INWORKS study is the best single piece of evidence for an effect of cumulative low-dose-rate radiation on health, but the size of the effect is small enough that it is far from a given. For one, the INWORKS study does not attempt to account for background doses, despite the fact that different people will have different levels of background exposure, depending on factors like where they live and how many medical scans they have. The average lifetime background dose in the UK is about 70 millisieverts, similar to that in the US and France, meaning that more than 90 percent of INWORKS subjects got most of their exposure from natural background radiation.

Another problem is that INWORKS’s significant result is driven by subjects between the 75th percentile, meaning lifetime exposure of roughly 20 millisieverts, and the 90th, at roughly 50 millisieverts. The relationship between exposure and cancer is not significant for doses between 0 and 20 millisieverts. Only when expanded to doses between 0 and 50 millisieverts does a significant effect appear, before weakening steadily as higher doses are added in, though not to the point of becoming insignificant.

This sensitivity makes the results fragile and is one reason why many look instead at studies with higher doses. The median INWORKS worker received a dose of four millisieverts, which according to INWORKS’s model, would correspond to increasing the lifetime risk of dying from cancer from the US average rate of 17.2 percent to 17.23 percent. An effect this small is hard to confirm even with 300,000 subjects, given so many unmeasured confounders.

Historically, many people have received doses of thousands or even tens of thousands of millisieverts, similar to those of the Taiwanese apartment dwellers. There are cases of Keralans exposed to sand containing thorium; Manhattan Project scientists who inhaled so much plutonium that they peed it out; early British radiologists who worked without any protection from the X-rays they worked with. These groups suffered long-term health effects only if they absorbed high dose rates.

One of the most horrific and notorious cases of radiation exposure was that of women employed to paint radioactive radium onto watches for glow-in-the-dark dials. Early dial painters were told to lick their paintbrushes for greater precision. Those that did ingested radium at extremely high internal doses and developed necrosis of the jaw and often-lethal bone cancers. But the thousands that did not lick their brushes, despite receiving doses that were often hundreds of times higher than normal, did not see any higher rate of cancer.

Though unlikely, it is possible that future studies will reveal a more substantial correlation. In the meantime, the lack of any strong signal in the Taiwan data is one of many good indicators that low-level radiation is not a cause for concern. Where radiation does harm people is when they are exposed to high, acute levels that even the worst nuclear disasters seldom release. When people are looking this hard, absence of evidence is, in fact, pretty good evidence of absence.

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

Ben Southwood is an editor at Works in Progress.

One of the most expensive projects in history is under construction in Abilene, Texas. This joint venture, Stargate, is the flagship of a bigger project by the same name led by OpenAI and Softbank, and is expected to cost well over $40 billion for a high-performance computing campus that will train new generations of AI models.

Stargate is just one major project in one of the biggest investment booms in history, driven by the belief that increasingly powerful AI models can deliver explosive economic growth. But it will require enormous amounts of electricity to work: Stargate is expected to draw 1.2 gigawatts, as much as 313,000 median American family homes, at peak load. A report by EpochAI and an energy research institute projected that total AI computing power would reach 100 gigawatts worldwide in 2030 if the 2025 growth rate stays steady. And data centers aren’t the only energy-hungry element of the AI revolution. The biggest battery manufacturing plants in the US draw energy at a rate of 115 megawatts, and the first phase of TSMC’s Arizona semiconductor plant will draw 200 megawatts.

The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity. But this doesn’t mean there is an energy shortage. Instead, the constraint is connecting the flood of new data centers and the plants to power them to the electric grid. Before any new piece of infrastructure can be connected, grid operators must study how it will change power flows around the grid and determine whether upgrades to the system are required. That process is significantly backlogged. Though the median power plant in 2005 waited less than 20 months for interconnection, this had jumped to 55 months by 2023.

The interconnection process wasn’t created for today’s world. Grids use an inflexible first-come, first-served queue that leaves some of the most valuable projects stuck behind less important ones. They also evaluate according to rigid conditions that don’t reward plants for being willing to cover their own power needs for short periods. To prepare for the AI age, grid processes need to change.

A power-hungry future

Estimates vary for how much power will be needed by the data centers and chip manufacturers of the future, but the heads of every major AI company agree that they will need more than they are currently able to get. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has said that ‘every data center in the future will be power-limited’. Mark Zuckerberg said Meta ‘would build … bigger [AI training] clusters … if we could get the energy to do it’. And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress that ‘the abundance of [AI] will be limited by the abundance of energy’.

Regardless of how the data center boom plays out, there is a long-term shift towards electrification across the economy. Electricity can be converted into work instantly, unlike fuels, and with little energy loss. Electricity creates motion directly, while fuels must first be combusted in an engine. This is why electric vehicles can cost half as much to fuel even though electricity is more expensive than gasoline. The simplicity of electric motors also means that electric vehicles have half the lifetime maintenance costs of gas-powered ones.

Electricity also transmits information. Transistors switch on or off depending on the voltage applied to their gates, which allows circuits to perform logical operations. Radios, screens, and computers cannot run on gasoline alone.

Between 1990 and 2024, the price of electric motors declined by 97.5 percent. Power electronics fell 99.5 percent in price, processors built into devices by nearly 99.9 percent, and batteries 98.8 percent. As prices have declined, performance has improved. For example, the amount of energy a battery can store per kilogram has increased five-fold over the same period.

These trends allowed the progression from the Walkman to the iPod and then the iPhone, as well as enabling battery-powered cars, delivery vans, and bicycles. At the same time, the increased computing power built into devices is giving autonomy to newly electrified cars and trucks, robotic vacuum cleaners and mowers, and drones. The commercialization of humanoid robots may also be on the horizon. The future will be largely defined by technologies that run on electricity.

The grid bottleneck

This growth in demand is already straining power grids. Operators are increasingly forced to use expensive local plants because of what grid operators call congestion: cheaper plants are on the other side of transmission bottlenecks and there aren’t enough cables to get the electricity through. In the United States, the additional costs incurred because of grid inefficiencies like congestion ran to $11.5 billion in 2023, an increase of 45 percent from the year before.

ERCOT, the grid that provides 90 percent of Texas’s electricity (including for the plant being built in Abilene), forecasts that it won’t have enough power to meet demand in summer 2028. PJM is the US’s largest grid, both by the amount of electricity it provides and the population in its coverage area, serving an area between Chicago, New Jersey and North Carolina. In 2025, PJM was not able to buy enough future generating capacity to meet projected demand. MISO, another large US grid operating between Louisiana and Minnesota, concluded in one study that ‘resource adequacy risks could grow… absent increased new capacity additions’. PJM’s CEO put it more plainly: ‘We need capacity – a lot of capacity.’

Discussions about expanding electricity supply to power the future often become debates about which source is most suitable: gas, nuclear, solar, or something else. But these are a distraction. Far more fundamental is ensuring power can be efficiently delivered where needed.

When different generation technologies coexist, they can average out to a grid that is cheaper, more reliable, and less polluting than any single type alone. The question isn’t which technology to use, but what balance. But this question isn’t best answered in the marketplace of ideas. Instead, it should be addressed in the marketplace for electricity.

The market for electricity

In the US and Europe, power grids are largely liberalized: provided they can get the necessary permits, independent developers build power plants, and the local utility is required to connect those plants to the grid. In the United States, 88 percent of large-scale power projects currently in development are privately organized and funded.

The power market is run by the grid operator’s economic dispatch software. Each power plant tells the operator its costs, and the operator commissions the cheapest plants, accounting for transmission constraints. As load increases during the day, the operator keeps commissioning the next cheapest plant. The price of power is set at the marginal cost of the next cheapest plant, and that’s the price every power plant is paid.

Market prices signal to power plant developers about levels of supply and demand. In the same way, prices balance different energy sources based on the strengths and weaknesses of each. For instance, as more solar panels are built, the value (and therefore price) of power during the middle of the day, when the sun is shining most, adjusts downward. From December 2020 to September 2025, maximum solar output in ERCOT increased from 4 to 29.8 gigawatts. And from 2020 to 2025, the value of power at 1pm relative to the highest-priced hour decreased from 92.9 percent to 38.7 percent. As one technology type becomes overbuilt, prices reflect that and developers react accordingly.

The evolving daily price shape in response to the abundance of solar energy was a signal that the grid needed storage capacity, and power plant developers responded. From 2020 to October 2025, ERCOT went from having almost no battery storage to a combined battery discharge of 8.6 gigawatts. The same process has played out in California and many European markets.

One might assume that the price of electricity for consumers is dictated by market forces, like those that regulate supply and demand across different power plants. But to a large extent, it is not. Grid infrastructure, like large power lines, is generally planned by the grid operator, and the cost is passed on to consumers at a price approved by state and federal regulators. In one typical utility territory within ERCOT, the portion of regulated costs on the average residential customer’s bill has grown from 28 percent in 2002 to 40 percent in 2025.

Regulators of all major grids have set caps on wholesale prices in response to public outrage at price volatility. As a result, the generators needed to keep the grid reliable are sometimes unprofitable. Under normal market circumstances, generators would stop running when it wasn’t profitable to do so. Instead, regulators put further policies in place to prevent this. Markets for capacity mean that generators are paid not for energy itself but for committing to be available if there is extra demand. Must-run agreements pay unprofitable generators to keep running if they keep the grid reliable. These are negotiated bilaterally between generators and the grid operator, outside of any wider competitive process.

Policy choices also shift the equilibrium. For example, America’s Inflation Reduction Act gives a $30 tax credit for every megawatt-hour produced by qualifying renewables. Power plants that opt in, typically wind, paradoxically often offer their power at negative prices, making money from the tax credit even when they literally pay consumers to use them. At times, a large enough share of the market offers electricity at a negative price that electricity overall (not just from one supplier) can have a negative price. A similar dynamic is playing out in some European countries.

Despite these interventions, which make them less efficient, markets still find an equilibrium. The interaction of supply and demand creates prices that power plant developers use as indicators for what the market does or doesn’t need more of. If prices are high, new power plants enter. That’s why arguing about the best power generation method is overrated. Well-designed energy markets answer this question automatically. The real bottleneck is connecting to the grid at all.

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Power struggles

xAI’s Memphis data center operated partially off-grid for months. When it first came online in 2024, it could reportedly draw only eight megawatts from the grid (enough to power a few thousand electric toasters). Rather than wait for its grid connection to be upgraded, xAI installed 422 megawatts of on-site gas turbines. Once transmission upgrades were completed, the project would shift to consuming grid power and the on-site generators would be used only for emergency backup.

Such off-grid generation is a temporary solution. Grid power is more reliable and, on average, cheaper. But thanks to the long queue of projects waiting for connection, 62 percent of data centers are considering off-grid solutions, either to get up and running faster or to improve reliability. Google is even exploring the possibility of a data center in space powered by solar panels. Grids connect to new generators and energy-hungry infrastructure only after studying how to do so using an engineering model that simulates power flows during peak load scenarios. If the new infrastructure would cause overloads on any parts of the system, then those elements need to be upgraded. The utility then needs to estimate the cost of those upgrades and build them.

The grid operators who run these studies are typically public bodies charging a small fee on electricity sales to fund their operations without seeking to make a profit. State utility commissions and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have determined that grid operators should run the interconnection queue as a first-come, first-served process that is essentially free.

That process is moving very slowly, creating a huge backlog of mostly phantom projects. Every US grid has more power plant capacity waiting to be connected than there are gigawatts of peak demand. The backlog also exists for the separate but similar queue of infrastructure not yet connected to the grid. Across ERCOT, there were 143.5 gigawatts of data centers seeking to connect as of October 2025. This compares to ERCOT’s highest ever total demand of 85.9 gigawatts in August 2024.

This system was designed for a different era. The last time electricity use grew five percent annually or faster was between the 1950s and 1970s, during the adoption of air conditioning, refrigerators, dishwashers, and washing machines. From 2005 to 2023, electricity use was almost completely flat. But as that lull in growth comes to an end, the grid will have to adapt.

Crossed wires

The main flaw of the interconnection process is that it uses a first-come, first-served queue. This means that high-priority requests can spend years stuck at the back of the line behind other less important ones.

Some requests are speculative, submitted by developers before they have ready customers. Some are duplicative, meaning a developer fishing for a good spot has requested to interconnect the same project in multiple locations. These are among the reasons that 72 percent of requests to connect submitted since 2000 were ultimately withdrawn. Other requests are high quality but small and low value. This creates a feedback loop: the harder it is for developers to estimate the cost to interconnect, and the longer they have to wait for an answer, the more speculative requests are made, further clogging the system.

Every major grid has a roughly similar process. The system impact study comes first. The operator models the grid during peak demand conditions and assesses the cost of any necessary upgrades. After reviewing those costs, the interconnection customer (the developers of the power plant or power-hungry infrastructure) decides whether to proceed. Almost 40 percent of withdrawals between 2020 and 2023 were at this stage. If the customer proceeds, the grid operator then determines how to physically connect the project to the grid. Again, it delivers a quote for these costs to the customer, who then decides if they want to proceed. If so, they sign an interconnection agreement, and the utility begins work on the upgrades.

There are some opportunities to automate these workflows, but each request takes time. The median delay from initial request to the interconnection agreement was 34.2 months for agreements signed in 2023.

Another major issue is restudies. Once a system impact study identifies required network upgrades, those upgrades are added to the grid model that’s used to study subsequent projects in the queue. If those upgrades are not built because the earlier project withdraws, any subsequent studies may need to be redone. In one extreme case, a restudy increased a 242-megawatt wind project’s network upgrade costs from $33.5 million to $99 million after the project was already operating.

The slowness of the interconnection queue adds to households’ energy costs. The clearest example of this is found in PJM, which has the slowest queue of the US grids. In 2025, PJM’s electricity suppliers paid $14.7 billion at auction to make sure they’d have enough power to supply their customers, a huge jump from $2.2 billion the year before. Meanwhile, many gigawatts of renewable power projects have been sitting in the queue for five years or more. If just 30 percent of those projects had been interconnected, the auction’s cost would have been 63 percent lower.

Grids have adopted many sensible reforms to the interconnection queue, such as requiring higher deposits to enter the queue and forcing developers to prove they have land to build on and to disclose if they’re making duplicative requests. The most significant reform has been transitioning to cluster studies, which study multiple projects in the same simulation. This reduces restudies because removing any one project has less impact on the overall solution. Clusters also allocate costs more fairly. This prevents a single project triggering a major transmission upgrade that renders it uneconomical. In cluster studies, the cost of these backbone upgrades are shared among all the projects that would benefit from them. While these were necessary reforms, the backlog has only grown as they fail to address the fundamental irrationality of the interconnection process itself: the inflexible first-come, first-served queue.

Tragedy of the commons

In the early 2000s, regulators wanted to level the playing field between new independent producers and incumbents. They worried that utilities might preference their own projects. As there was plenty of spare capacity at the time, the first-come, first-served system seemed both simple and fair.

But today, transmission capacity is a limited resource and independent power producers are thriving. This means there is much less concern around the power of traditional utilities. In response, many grids are proposing mechanisms to allow more valuable projects to jump the queue. MISO, PJM, and SPP, three large grids in the US, have proposed mechanisms to prioritize projects that are most viable or most necessary for the system’s reliability. But these mechanisms are band-aid solutions.

The flood of requests is a typical ‘tragedy of the commons’. Everyone is incentivized to spam the queue with requests. Auctions can fix this.

In the fishing industry, when tradable fishing quotas were introduced worldwide in the 1970s, what had been a mad dash for fish became an orderly and efficient process. Before the quotas, the whole season’s supply was caught in a few days of dangerous, non-stop fishing. Market share went to whoever bagged the fish fastest. Once quotas were introduced, fishers could time their catches with market demand instead of catching everything at the start of the season and then freezing it. And since more efficient fishermen made more money, they were willing to pay more, and quotas went to them rather than the fastest fishers, lowering prices for consumers.

Auctioning new grid capacity could bring similar benefits. The scramble for interconnection would be replaced with an orderly process in which the highest quality projects would get priority. Developers’ bids would reflect both the likelihood that the project will come online and the projected value of the project to the grid if so. Less viable and less valuable projects would be weeded out.

The simplest way to implement an auction would be to create small ‘fast-track clusters’ that receive expedited studies throughout the year. Projects in the regular annual cluster could bid to enter the fast track, and the highest bidders up to some preset number would be admitted. The fast-track proposals recently adopted by some grid operators follow this structure, except that admittance to the fast-track cluster is based on an administrative scoring mechanism, not developer bids. But administrative scoring mechanisms could never capture the subtleties that a developer’s bid would. For example, developers have private knowledge about a project’s chances to get permitted, like whether the site has trees with endangered bird nests or unhappy neighbors generating pushback.

Only connect

Another inefficiency of the current transmission system is that it’s built for peak load conditions that occur only a few hours per year. The rest of the time, much of the grid’s generation and transmission capacity is sitting idle. In 2024, 42 percent of ERCOT’s capacity went unused for half the time.

Building the network upgrades that allow for this very high peak capacity can take years. But new power plants must wait for that construction to be completed before they can join the grid, even though the equipment being constructed will rarely be necessary. A survey of power developers found that transmission construction was the top cause of project delays.

The solution is to let the power plant come online before the upgrades are constructed on the condition that it agrees to turn off during peaks. The power plant doesn’t contribute to the reliability of the system since it won’t be available when the system is under stress. But it will produce electricity the rest of the time, which will lower costs. This is known as energy-only service.

ERCOT has made this energy-only service, also known as non-firm transmission because it implies no guaranteed ability to export or import power, their default. They call it connect and manage. That’s a large part of why projects move through ERCOT’s queue faster than any other grid operator.

But despite being an option in all organized US grids, 87 percent of interconnection requests by capacity opt for the slower firm transmission service. That’s because non-firm service disqualifies power plants from the payments they could otherwise receive in exchange for being available at times of high demand. Other grids could adopt connect-and-manage if they eliminated this payment system and, like ERCOT, raised price caps to allow energy prices themselves to reflect scarcity value. Short of that, they could make non-firm service more popular by allowing generators to apply for firm service after being interconnected on a non-firm basis.

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Can’t we just use less energy?

These proposed reforms would allow fast interconnection of new power plants. But if AI is a race with national security implications, they won’t be fast enough.

The fastest way to increase capacity for new large loads would be to decrease demand from existing sources. Demand reduction is the option energy planners have always reached for in a pinch. The concept of energy conservation originated in the late 1960s as the US power grid faced resource constraints for the first time in its history. Energy conservation became a national imperative. For the first time, utilities began promoting things like turning off lights and using less air conditioning. Christmas lights were framed as being wasteful and unpatriotic, and in 1973 the National Christmas Tree had only a single light.

Yet while short-term crunches can be fought with conservation, they are difficult to sustain, and increased energy efficiency can simply lead people to using more energy for other purposes. What’s more, the vast majority of electricity users are completely indifferent to the real-time cost to produce electricity, because they’re on fixed rates for terms of months or years. The wholesale cost of a clothes dryer load, which could consume four kilowatt-hours, could range from negative $0.12 to $20, but the retail customer always pays $0.64 at the average US residential rate of $0.16 per kilowatt-hour. This creates irrational behavior, like someone starting a load of laundry while the grid teeters on the edge of a brownout. If customers faced prices more closely linked to real-time costs, they would adjust their energy use accordingly. Prices would be more stable and, on average, lower.

Already, we’ve seen that power costs change throughout the day because of the increasing availability of solar power. Some power suppliers offer time-of-use rates that charge a different rate at each hour of the day to reflect what it costs to provide. As these are adopted more widely, the highs and lows of demand will increasingly follow the same daily pattern as wind and solar availability. Few customers think about their bill enough for small price differences to influence their behavior, but their power-hungriest devices, like their thermostat or EV charger, could schedule themselves to automatically run when the cost is lower.

Daily reconfiguration could be helpful. More helpful would be reducing demand during the few hours per year with extremely high wholesale costs, when the grid is under greatest stress. Even without time-of-use rates, customers can give their utility provider control of their most power-hungry devices, and the utility can turn them down during grid emergencies in exchange for a reimbursement on their bills. The US had 30.5 gigawatts of this capacity, called demand response, in 2022. But the headroom this gives is unreliable because participants may override the utility’s control, turning their air conditioning back up if they are too hot, for instance.

That’s what makes batteries, installed at customers’ homes, the ultimate load-managing tool. Electronic devices continue to work as normal in periods of high demand, just switching from grid to battery power. And batteries offset the demand of the entire home, not just one or two devices. Combined with rooftop solar, they can significantly reduce a home’s reliance on the grid, making room for new large loads. Perhaps the greatest advantage of all is that these at-home power resources don’t have to go through the interconnection queue; the installation process takes weeks to months, not years.

But devices like this free up relatively little grid capacity compared to the huge amounts that will be needed to power the AI revolution. They’re also relatively expensive, as the cost of installation has to be repeated on every home individually. Matching the demand of a single two-gigawatt data center, which could be handled by a handful of utility-scale projects, would require installing solar and battery systems at nearly 175,000 households.

The data center trilemma

Most data centers have on-site generators as backup power for if the grid goes down because they need a stronger guarantee of reliability than the grid alone can provide. But this capacity could have another significant benefit.

Like generators, power-hungry infrastructure could come online on a connect-and-manage basis, interconnecting before all transmission upgrades are complete on the condition that it disconnects from the grid during peaks. Instead of turning off entirely, it would switch to their on-site backup power. And just like connect-and-manage lowers grid costs, flexible data centers would also lower costs for consumers by ensuring less capacity sits idle outside of peak usage.

Because grid peaks are brief and infrequent, data centers would have to disconnect for only a few hours per year. One study found that 76 gigawatts’ worth of new loads could be added (across an area covering most of the US) if these new loads were willing to disconnect during just 22 hours per year. And those 22 hours of disconnection aren’t consecutive. Each disconnection would last a few hours at most, meaning that data centers could rely on batteries rather than thermal generation. The National Renewal Energy Laboratory estimates that grid-scale, four-hour batteries can be built for $1,300 per kilowatt, as compared to around $2,500 for combined cycle gas turbines.

Disconnecting from the grid isn’t exactly ideal, but given the constraints, developers face a trilemma: data centers can be large, they can come online quickly, or they can receive firm grid service, but not all three. If large data centers want to come online quickly, they’ll have to be flexible.

The powerful shall inherit

The data center boom has exposed the weakness of Western grids. But these are not the only new source of demand for electricity that we can expect in the coming years. Industrial electrification, hydrogen production, water desalination, heat pumps and air conditioning to cope with climate change, electric vehicles, and perhaps even electric aircraft are all likely to increase demand.

The twenty-first century will belong to those who make the most of these developing technologies. Without sufficient power, this will be impossible. And the main constraint to supplying power-hungry infrastructure is not power generation – it is getting that power where it is needed.

This is a blessing: insufficient power would be a much harder problem to solve. Instead, the solutions are simple. The queue of infrastructure that needs to connect to the grid should become more flexible, allowing fast-track slots to be auctioned so that the most valuable and viable projects can start sooner. And payment systems should reward both producers and large-scale consumers that are willing to disconnect for a few hours per year when demand is highest. These simple fixes can give America a power grid fit for the future.

Chris Gillett is a market analyst in electric power. His views don’t represent his employer.

Industrial modernity was invented in the English midlands around the end of the eighteenth century, kicking off an unprecedented global rise in living standards that continues to this day. But what made this revolution possible was a lesser-known political revolution that took place in the previous century: a period known in English history as the Glorious Revolution.

Today, the Glorious Revolution is remembered for having introduced the system of constitutional monarchy, which subordinated the power of the monarch to Parliament. What is really interesting, though, is how Parliament used its new power: to untangle excessively strong and complex property rights, making it possible for the first time for sustained investments to take place in infrastructure and agriculture across England. And unlike in most other political revolutions, this happened almost entirely peacefully and with the consent of the people whose rights were being redrawn.

Fragmented political and property rights have again become one of the Western world’s biggest problems, leading to the ‘vetocracy’ that paralyzes many developed countries. Could we foment a Glorious Revolution of our own?

Multiple scleroses

Seventeenth-century Europe was economically stagnant. Despite intellectual advances like the creation of patent systems, the flourishing of mathematical schools, and the founding of learned societies like the German Leopoldina and France’s Académie des Sciences, the physical world saw only plodding progress.

Agriculture was practically the only game in town. Almost everyone lived in small rural settlements: fewer than ten percent of Europeans lived in towns of more than 5,000 people in 1500. By 1700 this had grown to just 12 percent; and by 1800, to 15 percent. In France, Europe’s most populous country, nearly 70 percent of the workforce worked in agriculture between 1695 and 1790. Germany was similar, and Scandinavia, Russia, Eastern Europe, Southern Italy and Spain were possibly more agrarian.

The default was for countries to continue for centuries with virtually no growth. Spanish output per capita was flat for half a millenium between 1300 and 1800. Other areas saw temporary bursts of growth, followed by stagnation or reversion: Swedish and Portuguese incomes were lower in 1800 than in 1550, and the Italian efflorescence during the Renaissance was followed by steady decline for centuries. Even the Dutch golden age of 1500 to 1680, which saw the Netherlands buck the European trend with a large majority of its population working in industry or commerce and living in towns, was followed by more than a century of relative stagnation.

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Property ownership was so fragmented that nobody investing in improvements could expect to make a return. Splintered ownership of farmland discouraged the adoption of new crops and rotations. Rigid inheritance rules made it prohibitively difficult to invest in improvements to land or infrastructure. Roads were bad because nobody took responsibility for them, hindering the transportation of manure for fertilizer and preventing the trade that would allow different areas to specialize in different crops. Agricultural yields were so low that nearly everybody had to work to produce food instead of in other industries like mining or manufacturing.

Many European states tried to solve these problems, and nearly all failed. The reason was usually the same: monarchs depended on the support of landowning aristocrats and clergy, and those landowners had no confidence that reforms would leave them better off.

In 1746, Spain’s King Fernando VI tried to replace his country’s complex tax system with a single income tax to fund public investment, but was blocked by nobles, the church, and municipal oligarchies. In 1776, French Minister of State Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot tried to liberalize the property system and replace the patchwork of taxes with a single land value tax, but the Parlement of Paris refused to register his reform edict. In 1781, Austrian Emperor Joseph II abolished formal serfdom, but ex-serfs remained effectively bound until 1848, since the crown enforced landlords’ prerogatives.

Only one country succeeded in modernizing its property rights in this period: England. The Glorious Revolution resolved the conflict between landowners and the Crown by handing the country to the landowners. One might expect this to have produced an oligarchy that jealously guarded its privileges. But the landowners, precisely because they were empowered, did something their continental counterparts could not. They dismantled the fossilized property arrangements that had blocked development elsewhere, and in doing so, set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

The Glorious Revolution

In 1685, James II ascended the English throne. Several previous kings had faced accusations of covert Catholicism, but James II made no secret of his faith. He appointed Catholics to a range of government posts and tried to assert control of local governments, so that he could appoint the officeholders who oversaw elections to pack Parliament with loyal stooges. All this fueled fears that James was imposing Catholic, absolutist rule. According to one contemporary, at least 20,000 opposition pamphlets were circulated across the country during James’s short reign.

In June 1688, seven aristocrats wrote to William of Orange, inviting him to invade England with their support. William was the Dutch Republic’s head of state, married to James’s eldest daughter, Mary and, crucially, a Protestant. In their letter, the seven wrote that ‘the people are … generally dissatisfied with the present conduct of the Government in relation to their religion, liberties, and properties (all which have been greatly invaded)’.

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William landed at Torbay on 5 November that year with 20,000 Dutch soldiers and English exiles. The English defending army defected or melted away without a fight, and James fled to France, effectively abdicating. William and Mary were crowned as joint monarchs in April 1689.

A new political settlement quickly emerged. Parliament passed a Bill of Rights, reestablishing its own legal supremacy; the Mutiny Act of 1689 forbade a standing army without parliamentary assent; and taxes were decreed to expire after a year, requiring the monarch to call Parliament for renewals. Later acts established regular elections.

Today, this cementing of Parliamentary supremacy is what the Glorious Revolution, as William’s invasion came to be known, is most remembered for. But a second consequence was even more important: dramatically increased legislative productivity.

In the lead up to the Glorious Revolution, James II and his predecessor, his older brother Charles II, had been trying to rule without Parliament, dismissing it before it could pass legislation or simply not calling it. Parliament met infrequently at the end of Charles II’s reign, especially after the Exclusion Crisis of 1679, in which it had sought to pass bills excluding the future James II, by then a known Catholic, from the line of succession. Following this, it did not meet again for nearly all of James II’s short reign.

Before 1688, bills frequently failed because the monarch cut sessions short. After it, Parliament became an extremely active legislature, passing thousands of acts. Before the Glorious Revolution, legislative sessions had been short and variable: the average number of working days per session was 61 between 1660–85 and 57 for 1660–89. While some sessions lasted over 400 days, most lasted fewer than 50. Afterwards, legislative sessions met annually, owing to the requirement to renew military funding and the right to court-martial deserters. They began in autumn or winter and continued for more than 100 days.

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From 1660 to 1689, about 25 acts passed per session. Between 1688 and 1724, the average increased to 50–75 acts per session, rising to over 100 and eventually 200 per session in the late eighteenth century. Access also broadened. Before the Revolution, only the largest landowners brought bills to Parliament. Afterwards, many more minor gentry with no obvious political connections applied. The vast majority of these bills sought to reform landholdings or property rights in some way, either consolidating them, removing legal restrictions on how the land could be used, or allowing developers to charge for access to new or improved infrastructure.

Fragmented ownership

Across early modern Europe, plots of land were small as a result of the traditional open-field system, in which tenant farmers held many small strips of land scattered across different fields, as well as inheritance laws that divided landholdings equally among descendants.

The problems with small fields grew as technology improved, creating the potential for new economies of scale. The horse plough was faster than a team of oxen, but on a farm of many small plots, the ploughman spent more time turning and moving between them, so the advantage was dwarfed by a horse’s greater food cost. Under Russia’s equivalent system, peasants wasted as much as half their time moving between land strips. English farmers faced similar inefficiencies.

Small farms and the open-field system also made it hard to adopt better crops. The medieval three-crop rotation left each field fallow every third year to restore nitrates to the soil. The Norfolk four-course rotation eliminated this dormant period by sowing clover and turnips in the off year, which served equally well to replenish nitrates. But this was almost impossible on shared fields. Turnips and clover were hard to protect from neighbors’ grazing animals, which would not stay within strip borders. And in a fragmented system, anyone who wanted to sow a new crop would have to duplicate the work already shared by those sowing other crops, meaning that switching over required near-universal agreement.

As well as small farms and the open-field system, a third problem was common land: an uncultivated area on which local landowners had the right to graze their animals. The free mingling of livestock made selective breeding difficult, since owners couldn’t control which mated with which. It also meant this land was often overgrazed, since everybody was incentivized to overuse it. Since it was owned collectively, it was difficult to agree to do anything else with it: it could be reorganized or improved only by sending a petition to Parliament showing unanimous support of local landowners. A single holdout could block any change.

Over the century following the Glorious Revolution, Parliament steadily grew more confident in reorganizing land rights, drawing on the legitimacy generated by being elected by, for, and of the landowning classes. It gradually eased the process for enclosing and consolidating landholdings, with petitions eventually needing support only from a supermajority of landowners rather than all of them. By the 1740s, it was passing enclosure laws with 90 percent support of the landowners affected; by the 1750s, 80 percent; and later in the century, 75 percent. The process was formalized in 1801, and the General Inclosure Act of 1845 set up a standing body to enclose remaining fields.

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Enclosure was sometimes acrimonious, since a minority of rightsholders had their property restructured against their will. Some rights to common land were ill-defined, and some people lost them without adequate compensation. On the whole, however, enclosure benefited most people: it made land more productive, and nearly everyone ended up with more valuable holdings than they had before.

Between 1600 and 1815, Parliament passed 3,682 enclosure acts, almost entirely after the Glorious Revolution. This became possible partly because of the government’s increased legitimacy – as government by, for, and of landowners – partly because of the government’s increased legislative productivity – since Parliament sat longer and more predictably – and partly because each reform made sure to have overwhelming local support.

Other countries took centuries longer to solve the fractured land problem. German land was not consolidated until after the Second World War, when millions of acres went through a process like England’s and wheat yields tripled. Taiwan, Korea, and Japan used similar supermajority schemes to consolidate their small fields around the same time as Germany. In early 1900s Russia, Pyotr Stolypin’s land reforms used supermajority petitions by peasant farmers to divide their landholdings, boosting productivity so much that the country became the world’s top grain exporter. The Punjab is the breadbasket of both India and Pakistan in part because both sides consolidated their fields into rational squares, unlike the rest of the subcontinent.

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Modern agriculture requires consolidated fields, and consolidated fields require someone with the power to reorganize landholdings on a large scale. But before 1800, only the English Parliament, armed with new authority after the Glorious Revolution, managed to carry out a successful program of enclosure.

The dead hand of entail

The Revolution also addressed a second problem: the large quantity of land locked up by strict inheritance laws. European aristocratic families were obsessed with preserving their estates in perpetuity, and horrified by the idea that spendthrift heirs might sell, mismanage, or dismember them. They also wanted to provide for family members outside the direct line without splitting the estate, which would eventually destroy the family.

The details varied, but in England this was achieved through a legal device called a strict settlement. These devices guaranteed payments to widows, younger sons, and daughters marrying out of the family, while preventing an heir from mortgaging, subdividing, or selling any of the estate without their own heir’s consent.

Settlements also included an entail, a long list of successors to whom the estate would be passed. These legal devices are well known in fiction: they disinherit the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice and Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey, and drive the plot of The Quincunx.

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Over the 1600s, settlements became increasingly restrictive and harder to break. Conveyancers invented a device that prevented current landholders from undoing the entail. On its own terms, this worked. Large estates tended to be held together. Heirs could not squander their money on gambling and prostitution, and were more likely to marry and have children: owners of entailed estates were nearly 15 percentage points less likely to be childless.

But settlements were inflexible. Landowners could be prevented from selling, mortgaging, or improving their estates without the consent of an heir – even if no heir had yet been born.

This inflexibility could reach absurd extremes. In 1697, Zenobia Hough petitioned the English Parliament for the rights to sell land. Zenobia had a willing buyer, but could not sell her houses, fields, and water mill near Manchester because the settlement gave her husband Daniel the right to manage the property. But Daniel had been missing for 14 years, and no one knew whether he was alive or dead.

An investigative commission in 1829 reported a similar case. A barrister, Hasler Capron, explained that his client had inherited land in 1762 at the age of eleven. The settlement did not include the right to harvest timber. So for 67 years, ‘not a stick [had] been cut’ and ‘all the old trees, with scarcely an exception, [had] become decayed and valueless’.

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This inflexibility left swaths of estates in a bind. An owner might want to mortgage one field to raise the funds to drain others, almost certainly creating a large return. Any conceivable heir would want this too. But if the heirs were underage or not yet born, no mortgage could proceed.

A modern reformer might expect the solution to be simple: abolish entails and grant landowners the freedoms we now take for granted, accepting that many estates would be squandered and tens of thousands of widows and unmarried daughters would lose the stipends promised them.

Parliament, now sitting far more often and able to consider many more proposals than it had before, did nearly the opposite. It heard petitions from both sides, following the longstanding principle of expropriation with compensation, and broke settlements only when the living owner was proposing improvements expected to benefit their heirs as well. Perhaps that is why undoing the property rights of landed elites in this way faced so little opposition, allowing Parliament to pass 3,233 estate acts between 1689 and 1830, each tackling a single estate. These acts clustered around London and the industrializing North West, where the returns from changing land use were highest.

The practical consequences were considerable. In 1695, William, Duke of Bedford wished to build a wet dock on land he owned at Rotherhithe in Surrey, now part of London. His son was dead, which under the old settlement would have prevented any change of use. He and other family members petitioned Parliament, which promptly passed an act vesting the Howland family’s property in trust to raise the necessary funds. The Great Wet Dock (later called the Greenland Dock in the eighteenth century because it was used by whaling ships coming from Greenland) was completed in 1700. It was leased to the South Sea Company in 1725. By 1756 Rotherhithe had three shipbuilding docks; by 1892, eleven, building ships for the East India Company among others.

Estate acts enabled many grand projects. They raised the capital to improve the Bridgewater Canal, often considered England’s first true canal because it did not follow an existing river. The same powers helped finance railways and turnpikes, allowing parts of estates to be sold or repurposed.

Estate acts also helped ‘adventurers’ convert hundreds of thousands of acres of marshy fenland in eastern England into prime farmland. The Grosvenor, Portman, and Bedford families used them to develop Mayfair, Belgravia, and Bloomsbury by selling 99-year leases to developers, long enough to allow them to recoup their costs while eventually falling back into landowner control. Without estate acts, they likely could not have granted leases longer than 21 years.

As with communal land, other European countries failed to solve this problem for decades or centuries. Perhaps a third of the Castile region was entailed by the late-eighteenth century; Spain abolished entails only in 1841. Italy repealed its equivalent in the 1865 Civil Code after unification, and Germany only with the 1919 Weimar Constitution. England’s approach – led by landowners, and taking care to make changes to property rights only when those affected benefited – seemed to lead to much faster reform.

It was possible to fix settlements without landowners’ consent. Napoleon’s Code Civil of 1804 restricted entails on the grounds that they constrained credit, reduced incentives to improve land, and pulled property out of markets. But the top-down approach caused a different problem across the territories where it was imposed: morcellement, the excessive subdivision that entails had been designed to prevent, and the very problem England’s approach avoided.

For whom the road tolls

The Revolution’s third achievement was infrastructure. The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. Even today, the transport costs of heavy, low-value goods like gravel and sand mean that they are usually produced locally rather than being manufactured at scale in one place and shipped around the country or the world.

This was far worse in early modern Europe, when canals were rare, many rivers were not yet navigable, railways did not exist, and, above all, roads were terrible. In sixteenth-century Spain, wheeled transport was virtually useless; it was faster to travel across open country than to use a road. In late Ancien Régime France, roads were routinely obstructed by quagmires.

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In 1700, English road speeds, which were similar to those on the continent, averaged 2.3 miles per hour in summer and 1.5 in winter. In 1705, the journey from London to Birmingham, a distance of about a hundred miles, took 65 hours. As the historian Cyril Hughes Hartmann put it in 1927, Britain’s roads had been better in Roman times.

The underlying problem was incentives. In the Holy Roman Empire, local governments could charge tolls on roads and rivers. But this led to overcharging without investment. Each stretch had a different authority, and each charged as much as possible while feeling little incentive to improve its own section, since no single section made much difference to the journey as a whole. Timber merchants on the Rhine between Andernach and Dordrecht complained that they had to pay around twenty separate tolls. France and Spain also had dense networks of internal customs gates, including around Paris.

England’s rulers forbade local governments from charging tolls. But this left them with no motivation or ability to improve roads. In both cases, splitting infrastructure into the wrong pieces gave operators the wrong incentives.

Parliament’s solution, after the Glorious Revolution, was the turnpike act. A group of landowners and merchants would form a non-profit corporation, adopt a road, improve it with paving, bridges, and embankments, and charge tolls to cover costs. (Though they could not make profits, better roads increased property income, often by as much as a fifth per acre.) These turnpike trusts usually took over existing roads, though they sometimes added shortcuts and bypasses on new alignments secured through compulsory purchase (eminent domain).

Turnpikes dramatically improved road quality. Muddy tracks were covered with McAdam surfacing (later macadam, and tarmac when combined with tar) or Telford paving. Smoother surfaces meant carriages could be lighter, faster, and easier to pull, needing fewer horses and less fodder.

By 1840, Britain had 20,000 miles of turnpikes, more than twice France’s density of paved road per square mile, and nearly ten times Spain’s. By 1760, average travel speeds in France were half Britain’s. By 1820, British speeds had quadrupled to eight miles per hour, dazzling foreign visitors. Karl Philipp Moritz, a German traveller in England in 1782, called the country’s roads ‘incomparable’, writing: ‘I am astonished how they have got them so firm and solid … A thousand charming spots, and beautiful landscapes, on which my eye would long have dwelt with rapture, were now rapidly passed with the speed of an arrow.’ César de Saussure, a Swiss visitor to England in the 1720s, wrote that the English high roads were ‘magnificent, being wide, smooth, and well kept’.

Road freight costs fell from around 1.2 shillings per ton-mile in 1700 to 0.7 (in 1700 prices) by 1800. Diary surveys confirm that travelers greatly preferred turnpike roads for the smoother, more comfortable journeys they afforded.

A similar model improved rivers and canals. In 1700, freight on navigable rivers like the Thames and Severn cost just 0.12 shillings per ton-mile, compared with 1.2 shillings by road. The problem was that many rivers were shallow and impassable. River improvement trusts dredged channels to open them up to freight traffic, covering their costs through tolls. The total navigable length of British rivers rose from 850 to 1,600 miles by 1750.

Canals were different: they were dug across virgin land and financed by for-profit companies. Four thousand miles of canal were built before 1840, connecting river networks across watersheds and linking industrial towns like Birmingham and Manchester, which lacked natural waterways. By 1850, England and Wales had more navigable waterways per square mile than France, Spain, and Germany.

Together, improvements in roads, rivers, and canals cut transport costs by 75 percent. This enabled a degree of market specialization unseen in the rest of Europe. Manure could now be shipped from where it was plentiful to where it was scarce, on its own raising English wheat yields by a fifth between 1700 and 1840. The Bridgewater canals made Manchester’s industry possible by cutting coal costs there by half.

Regions specialized. Cheshire became a specialist in cheese. Stoke made the nation’s pottery, Burton its beer, and Sheffield its steel. A national wheat market formed, with prices converging across the country. In the 1650s, entrepreneurs in inland Lancashire built a cottage industry, exporting cotton textiles to London and nearby villages. By 1750, and especially by 1800, industries could scale and agglomerate. By 1800, Britain had 95 percent of the world’s cotton spindles, and output had grown more than thirtyfold since the seventeenth century.

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Across the rest of Europe, internal barriers took far longer to dismantle. German river tolls were scrapped by the 1831 Convention of Mainz; other barriers fell with the Zollverein after 1834. Spanish internal customs disappeared with the Mon-Santillán reforms of 1843–45. England solved its tolling problem earlier and more thoroughly by bringing the immediate beneficiaries into government and letting them drive reform.

Gloriouser and gloriouser

One reason the Industrial Revolution happened in England and not France, the Netherlands, or Germany was that its land, infrastructure, and capital markets had already been transformed.

In 1650, it was difficult to raise capital for a factory, or to transport raw materials from mine to factory and finished goods to customers. There was not nearly enough food to sustain the workers to procure these materials at scale. If the steam engine, the gas lamp, and the spinning jenny had been conceived at this time, it would have been far harder for their inventors to manufacture and sell them.

The Glorious Revolution broke these constraints. Agricultural yields rose by roughly 45 percent, while the share of the workforce in agriculture fell from 50 percent in 1600 to 30 percent in 1800. This agricultural revolution, which came as much from efficient institutions as from new technologies, transformed England’s economy, generating surpluses that fed a growing industrial workforce.

A century after William of Orange landed at Torbay, the England of the late eighteenth century was ready for an incredible acceleration of innovation across every sector, from watches to navigation, that would make it the richest country in the world. Had England remained as institutionally sclerotic as the rest of Europe, the Industrial Revolution could not have been as transformative.

A new Glorious Revolution?

Early modern Europe’s property rights held back growth not because they were too weak but because they were too strong and too rigid. Even those who stood to benefit had no power to alter them. Elites across Europe blocked reforms that would have benefited their nations as a whole.

Similar forces are at work today. Incumbents have property and a stake in elaborate regulatory systems that exist, sometimes openly, sometimes quietly, to protect them and their rights. Zoning, historic preservation, judicial review, environmental regulation all serve, among other things, to protect the property values of existing homeowners in the area. European workers hold what amounts to a right to generous compensation in the case of dismissal, which in practice discourages the restructuring that drives innovation.

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As in premodern Europe, the costs of these tangled rights are high enough that many incumbents would actually gain from well-designed reform. In Palo Alto, every homeowner could be paid tens of millions of dollars to accept Manhattan-level density, and developers might still clear hundreds of billions in profit. Danish workers receive extremely generous state unemployment insurance, up to 90 percent of income for two years, in exchange for giving up labor protections, a tradeoff the state can afford thanks to higher growth.

The lesson from the Glorious Revolution is that reorganizing rights is much easier if reformers work with incumbents rather than attempt to override them. A legislature made up of landowners, which sought supermajority approval for change or took care to make sure nearly everyone benefited from major changes, turned out to be far better at radical reform than any absolutist monarch.

These methods still work. Take housing. Small minorities often oppose any change. But building a coalition for development is as possible today as it was for enclosure. Japan, Taiwan, and Korea each used supermajorities of landowners to replan roughly a third of their cities at higher densities with better infrastructure. A very similar scheme, Pinui Binui, delivers many of Israel’s new homes. In the UK, social housing tenants have approved dozens of proposals to demolish and upgrade their own social housing.

While many of today’s challenges are new, a surprising number have been with us for centuries. But so have their solutions.

Kara Dimitruk is Assistant Professor at Hamilton College and Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University.

Ben Southwood is an editor at Works in Progress.