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.

The Coyote Getter, invented in the 1930s, was a hunting device that spewed cyanide into the mouth of any coyote that bit its scented wool bait. Thirty years later, researchers revisited the device. But rather than revamping it to kill more efficiently, they wanted to replace the cyanide payload with something wholly different: a coyote vaccine.

Wild animal vaccines are remarkable for many reasons, but the most remarkable might be that they exist at all. Vaccines are usually tools civilization reserves to defend the humans and domesticated animals within its bounds. The wild, by contrast, is a place from which we extract resources or defend ourselves, or where we simply leave things untouched.

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But defense doesn’t have to be adversarial. Around 60 percent of infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin, meaning they are transmitted from animals to humans, and the majority of them originate from wildlife rather than livestock or pets. Ebola came from fruit bats; HIV from chimpanzees; SARS from horseshoe bats and civets; Lyme disease lurks in deer and mice. In theory, preventing disease at its source in wild populations could protect people better than simply reacting to spillovers when they occur.

Preventing human illness is not the only reason to vaccinate wild animals. Many recent programs have been motivated by conservation, such as efforts to protect bats from white-nose syndrome or koalas from chlamydia. There is also budding recognition that these programs are valuable on welfare grounds, sparing animals from pain and suffering.

Nevertheless, wild animal vaccination first emerged as a form of defense. In the mid-twentieth century, laws mandating the vaccination of dogs pushed down the number of rabies cases in the United States, from 74 reported human deaths across the country in 1921 to single digits per year by the 1960s. The remaining cases occurred overwhelmingly through contact with wildlife: bats, foxes, skunks, and raccoons. But worryingly, the prevalence of rabies in wild animals seemed to be growing, both in the United States and in Europe. To keep rabies contained, researchers had to figure out how to immunize these animals, too.

Sick as a dog

Rabies is a terrifying disease. It is transmitted to humans through bites or scratches from an infected animal, such as a dog, bat, or coyote. The virus travels silently through the peripheral nervous system, taking a month or two to creep up into the brain and spinal cord. Once it infects the central nervous system, an array of alarming symptoms emerge. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates is thought to have been describing rabies when he wrote of ‘persons in a frenzy [who] drink very little, are disturbed and frightened, tremble at the least noise, or are seized by convulsions’. And when these appear, death is virtually guaranteed within days.

Since rabies doesn’t spread between humans, infecting us only incidentally, it’s far more cost-effective to wipe out the disease reservoir in animals than to vaccinate humans. So developed countries have long implemented public health programs to control its spread from animals to humans: vaccinating pets and regulating their movement across borders, neutering or euthanizing strays, surveilling and investigating cases, and rapidly administering treatment after potential exposure. These early efforts worked. By the 1960s, the US had largely brought dog-mediated rabies under control, reducing the number of cases affecting humans almost twentyfold. In 2007, the canine variant of the rabies virus was officially declared eradicated from the United States, with the last recorded case occurring in 2004. Many European countries had achieved this milestone earlier. The United Kingdom had been free of canine rabies since 1922; France, 1960; and Italy, 1973. Human deaths from rabies are now almost unheard of in rich countries, though it continues to kill tens of thousands of people per year in the developing world.

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But as canine rabies subsided in the West, another problem arose: wildlife rabies. Between 1938 and 1958, the annual number of rabies cases reported in wild animals grew from 44 to 2,075. Part of the reason for this was increased detection, but there also seemed to be a genuine rise in the number of cases. Rabies was spreading in raccoons, skunks, and foxes across the Americas; in Europe, too, a growing number of rabies cases were identified in red foxes, beginning in Eastern Europe in the 1940s and expanding westward. Genetic analysis of rabies strains indicates that outbreaks on both sides of the Atlantic occurred independently of one another. In both cases, the virus is thought to have jumped from dogs into wildlife.

These infected animals endanger any person who comes into contact with them. Every year, around 100,000 Americans are injected with a precautionary course of post-exposure rabies treatment after wild animal bites or scratches. This treatment, first developed in the late-nineteenth century, is thankfully highly effective, but expensive. Post-exposure treatment also works only if administered before the onset of symptoms, and the prospect of needing it is terrifying. The better solution is to control the disease at its source, in the wild.

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By the 1960s, crude methods like culling and sterilizing rabies-carrying wild animal species had shown limited success, despite hundreds of thousands of foxes, coyotes and other animals being killed. These efforts may even have been counterproductive, as they increase contact between humans and animals, and could spread disease between animals in different areas. With elimination impracticable, prevention was the only solution. In 1962, early research into wildlife vaccination began, led by veterinarian and virologist George Baer at the CDC (at the time the Communicable Disease Center; now the Center for Disease Control).

Animal vaccines work in the same way as many human vaccines: killed or attenuated (weakened) pathogens trigger immune responses, teaching the immune system how to recognize a real infection. What’s different, and more difficult, is delivering those vaccines. Foxes don’t check themselves into clinics, and attempting to capture thousands of feral animals living over vast swaths of wilderness would be a logistical nightmare. Delivery methods would have to be designed differently.

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Throughout the 1960s, Baer and his colleagues attempted to solve the distribution problem with imaginative gadgets. The Coyote Getter, as mentioned, was modified to shoot out inactivated rabies vaccine instead of poison. But in field trials, the forceful device often injured animals’ mouths and was unreliable at producing immunity. Another early prototype was CDC veterinarian William Winkler’s Vac-Trap, a spring-loaded needle trap that injected a syringe full of vaccine when stepped on. However, it was expensive, inaccurate, and hazardous. Any animal, or unlucky hiker, could trigger the needle.

The breakthrough came when Baer’s group pivoted to oral vaccination. The rabies vaccine variant used in human post-exposure treatment, where the virus is fully inactivated, must be injected: otherwise, it would be destroyed by the digestive system. But in 1971, Baer’s team discovered that pipetting an attenuated rabies virus vaccine, where the virus has been rendered harmless without being killed, into the mouths of foxes produces immunity. The next step was to package the oral vaccine into something an animal would want to chew.

This concept – live, attenuated virus tucked into a tasty bait – was first field-trialed in Europe. Fox rabies had been advancing westwards across the continent since the 1940s, reaching Switzerland by March 1967. In response, Swiss veterinarian Franz Steck and colleagues built on Baer’s work and began testing a range of vaccine baits, from sausages to dog biscuits to eggs, in the mid-1970s.

Eggs were rejected, as foxes would often save them for later. Sausages and dog biscuits fared better, but the ultimate winner was chicken heads. On 17 October 1978, Steck’s team scattered over 4,000 vaccine-laden chicken heads along the eastern shore of Lake Geneva, creating a barrier against the advancing epizootic. The heads also contained tetracycline, an antibiotic that incorporates into bone and teeth and glows fluorescent yellow under ultraviolet light, allowing researchers to track which foxes had consumed the bait. Within a few years, fox rabies was cleared from the area.

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Following this success, Switzerland scaled up its efforts dramatically. Millions of vaccine baits were distributed nationwide over the next two decades, with individual chicken heads flung onto roadsides and airdropped over the Swiss Alps by helicopter. By 1999, fox-mediated rabies was eliminated from Switzerland entirely.

In the meantime, the US was hit by multiple rabies crises. A raccoon rabies variant had emerged near Virginia in 1977, and spread across the Eastern seaboard over the following decades. To the south, two large epizootics infecting coyotes and gray foxes had spread along the Texas–Mexico border, beginning in 1988. Hundreds of canine rabies cases popped up, and, given rabies’s near-certain fatality, thousands of people faced with potential exposure needed preventive treatment at a cost of around $3,500 per person. Alarmingly, the disease was spreading north towards San Antonio and other major cities. By 1994, the animal outbreaks had become severe enough that Texas Governor Ann Richards formally declared a state health emergency.

Several affected states launched oral rabies vaccination (ORV) programs in response, though with a less grisly bait than deployed in Switzerland. Rather than chicken heads, researchers employed fishmeal blocks covered in fish oil or vanilla. Despite their manufactured, brick-like appearance, these baits proved attractive to hungry animals.

The programs were remarkably successful. The raccoon ORV program halted the westward spread of raccoon rabies, creating a barrier at the Appalachian Mountains that has held for decades. In Texas, every dollar spent on the coyote ORV program saved an estimated $4 to $13 in human treatment – not to mention reducing the risk to human life. By 2008, the state had eliminated the dog-coyote rabies variant. By 2009, the gray fox variant followed. Today, the USDA National Rabies Management Program distributes eight to ten million vaccine baits annually across the US, placed next to dumpsters or in other places raccoons and foxes are likely to frequent, or dropped over large rural areas by plane. The rabies vaccine demonstrated that wild animals could be immunized at scale.

Shielding nature

As the conservation movement grew, the technology found a second application: preserving biodiversity. Wild species have always been threatened by disease, but human activity has exacerbated this. Habitat destruction and climate change have increased crowding in animal habitats and put stress on animals’ immune systems, amping up disease transmission. Humans and livestock also spread disease directly to wildlife, a phenomenon known as spillback.

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The scale of destruction can be enormous. Chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease that infects amphibians’ skin and often fatally disrupts their vital functions, has affected at least 501 amphibian species over the past fifty years, with 90 species going extinct and another 124 declining in population by over 90 percent. In 2015, 200,000 saiga antelopes – 60 percent of the global saiga antelope population – were killed in three weeks by an outbreak of hemorrhagic septicemia, a bacterial infection that triggers sudden internal bleeding. White-nose syndrome is caused by a fungus that invades bats’ skin and disrupts their hibernation, often leading to fatal starvation and dehydration. It has killed over six million North American bats since 2007, with three bat species declining by over 90 percent. Outbreaks like these illustrate how diseases of wildlife, amplified by human activity, can push species toward extinction faster than they can recover or adapt.

Wild animal vaccines are emerging as a promising tool to fight this devastation. In September 2025, Australia approved the world’s first chlamydia vaccine for koalas. While plenty painful and embarrassing for humans, chlamydia is a far more serious threat to koalas, with infections much more likely to cause infertility and often resulting in blindness and death. Disease outbreaks account for upwards of half of all deaths in koalas and are pushing some colonies towards extinction. Alarmed by the threat posed to Australia’s iconic marsupials, Peter Timms, a microbiologist and chlamydia expert at the University of the Sunshine Coast, has spent over a decade leading development of the vaccine.

Distribution, as always, poses a challenge. Since koalas exclusively eat eucalyptus leaves, bait vaccines, like those used for rabies, don’t work. It is feasible, though, to capture koalas. Simply surround a tree with cages, and sooner or later, they will climb down and wander into the harmless traps.

After completing the largest and longest ever study conducted on wild koalas, Timms’s team found that the vaccine reduced the likelihood of developing chlamydia. With vaccines now available for wildlife hospitals, veterinary clinics, and field use, there’s new hope for preventing koala populations from vanishing.

Vaccines for other diseases are still in the pipeline, including vaccines for bats threatened by white-nose syndrome, which wakes them up repeatedly during winter hibernation, draining their stored energy and water until they die from starvation or dehydration. The fungal disease has already killed millions of North American bats, but the stakes extend even beyond their extinction. Many of these bat species are insectivores; without their voracious consumption of agricultural pests and mosquitoes, crop yields could fall and insect-borne disease transmission could rise. For reasons like these, the USGS estimates that bats contribute billions of dollars to the US agricultural economy annually.

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But their insect-based diet also makes vaccine distribution complicated. Bats, like koalas, aren’t tempted by food baits. But they won’t leisurely wander into cages either. So researchers are experimenting with novel delivery methods instead, such as a vaccine gel or paste that could be applied onto roosting bats, which they would spread as they groom themselves and other colony members. Since September 2025, epidemiologists have been actively conducting field trials at a key site in Wyoming, racing to protect bat populations before the disease wipes them out.

Human kind

From airdropped chicken heads to anti-fungal bat gel, scientists have used ingenious methods to adapt human vaccines for animal use. Some of these efforts have already brought impressive successes, protecting humans and preserving animal species. Peculiarly, in all cases, animal welfare itself is considered incidental – a positive side effect. Even with conservation-driven programs, the concern is for populations, not individuals. A species can be considered safe while millions of its members suffer painful diseases and die, as long as the population remains stable.

There’s a growing group of researchers and activists who seek to go further. Disease isn’t bad solely because it threatens a species’s survival but because it causes suffering. Every koala or raccoon that contracts a fatal illness spends days or weeks vomiting, seizing, blind, feverish, or paralyzed. None can hope for treatment. Then, alone and in pain, they die.

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Wild animal vaccines could mitigate such suffering. Vaccines like the oral rabies bait show that it’s possible to effectively improve wild animal welfare, and there are other painful diseases we could prevent, too.

In 1936, the Coyote Getter was invented to kill coyotes with cyanide. Thirty years later, it was retrofitted to administer medicine. The same ingenuity that made us effective predators could also make us effective protectors. Perhaps wild animal vaccines hint at what we’ll ultimately choose to become.

Michelle Ma is chief of staff at a startup.

Illustration by Jenna Barton.

Correction: This article previously stated that a koala chlamydia vaccine decreased mortality by around 65 percent. The cited study was found to have data handling issues that rendered the mortality reduction no longer statistically significant.

In a corner of the prestigious Kits Point suburb in Vancouver, eleven great towers are beginning to rise from their foundations. This is Senakw (pronounced sen-AHK), a new development owned, managed and championed by the Squamish Nation, an indigenous group native to British Columbia. It will ultimately house 9,000 people, and represents seven percent of Vancouver’s entire projected housing output up to 2033.

Senakw has an unusual history. The land it is built on was home to the Squamish people until they were forced out in 1913. Almost a century later, a court case restored the land to the descendants of those who were expelled, along with almost 100 million Canadian dollars in compensation. Freed from the restrictive planning rules that hold back densification in the rest of Vancouver, the Squamish decided in 2019 to use the land to build apartment blocks that, as well as housing Squamish people, are expected to generate around C$10 billion in income, equivalent to more than two million per person.

This is a story of a dispossessed group that is making the most of a rare and remarkable set of circumstances to generate wealth through upzoning. But it is also a story with relevance all over the world. Senakw shows that when local residents stand to benefit from development, obstacles to housebuilding can be overcome, to the benefit of a much broader group of people.

The village that was lost

The Squamish are one of the Coast Salish peoples, the precolonial inhabitants of British Columbia. Today there are about 4,000 Squamish, and historically, the population inhabited a considerable territory, including the land on which the city of Vancouver was built.

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Wilson Williams, council chairperson of the Squamish Nation, explains that in the precolonial period, the False Creek inlet served as a seasonal gathering place: ‘Senakw was a place of abundance ... It was the mainstay for spring and summer for our people. It was a welcome place for our families during those warm seasons because of the abundance of food’. Salmon, oysters, and berries, key ingredients in Coast Salish cuisine, thrived there. By the 1860s, records suggest it had evolved into a permanent village, featuring traditional Squamish longhouses.

Between 1869 and 1877, eighty acres were allocated by the Canadian government as False Creek Indian Reserve No. 6, more commonly known as the Kitsilano Indian Reserve. Like all reserves, the land was owned by the federal government and held in trust for its indigenous residents, a legal arrangement that would prove crucial more than a century later.

European settlers quickly drove out the existing villagers. The city of Vancouver was incorporated in 1886 and expanded rapidly. Conflict between settlers and natives over space began to worsen. A 1911 amendment to the Indian Act enabled the forced removal of indigenous people from urban areas. Vancouver did not wait: in 1913, the residents of the Kitsilano Indian Reserve village were summoned to meet British Columbia officials under attorney general William John Bowser. They were told they either had to accept a small cash offer for the land or receive nothing. They had no federal representatives to support them, which was unlawful even at the time, and many did not even speak English. Believing they had no choice but to accept, the residents disinterred the remains of their ancestors. Most sailed north to relatives in Howe Sound, and the village was burned.

Contemporary newspaper articles imply that the motive for removal was not primarily financial. At the time, the land was not nearly as valuable as it is now: it sits on the opposite side of the False Creek inlet from the city, and the Burrard Street Bridge that links it today would not be constructed for another twenty years. Instead, newspapers focused on concerns about noise from traditional ceremonies, and alleged immorality and public disorder.

City officials originally intended to designate the land for either courthouses or a public park, but had no fixed plans. The land seizure itself was the primary goal.

After the Squamish residents were evicted, the site was neglected for decades. It ended up being occupied by squatters, who made a living fishing and pulling in logs that floated down the creek. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, newspapers complained of worsening disorder and mess, as well as the city’s repeated failed attempts to evict the squatters. Ironically, the removal of the original residents in the interest of public order had failed even on its own terms.

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Throughout the twentieth century, the land was parceled up and passed between various public bodies, including the harbor authority, as well as private companies like sawmills and breweries. From the 1940s, it was used by the Royal Canadian Airforce as a storage depot. In 1967, it was eventually turned into Vanier Park and became a museum complex.

The long fight back

The 1911 Indian Act amendment made it easier to expropriate land from indigenous people. Unfamiliar with legal processes and sometimes lacking a working command of the English language, they found the deck stacked against them. But even in 1913, the province’s actions in the Kitsilano Indian Reserve village were not lawful: the land was federally owned, and the province could not acquire it without federal consent. The Crown immediately began efforts to reclaim the land.

The Squamish people also began organizing. Between 1913 and 1923, sixteen local families amalgamated into the Squamish Nation band. But for the first few decades, they were legally prohibited from pursuing their claim to the land.

Wilson Williams’s great-grandfather, Andy Paull, was a young man when the village burned. Selected at a community meeting to learn English and represent the nation’s interests, Paull studied in a Catholic residential school in North Vancouver and was educated as a lawyer. Williams recalls his grandfather telling him that the seizure of the village was the catalyst for the nation’s focus on strengthening their legal capabilities. But indigenous people were legally prohibited from joining the bar unless they gave up their indigenous status, which Paull was unwilling to do. ‘He became an off-the-record lawyer’, Williams explains, helping not just the Squamish Nation but other indigenous people across Canada.

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The Indian Act heavily restricted the ability of indigenous people to seek legal redress over land. Throughout his career, Paull focused instead on advocacy, using his legal skills indirectly to push for the right to launch land claims, a right that was eventually won in 1973.

The eventual breakthrough for the Squamish came from an unexpected direction: academic research. In 1971, anthropologists Dorothy Kennedy and Randy Bouchard began what at first seemed an uncontroversial project: recording historical place names to preserve indigenous peoples’ languages and history. Working with Squamish chief Louie Miranda, they had no idea they were assembling evidence for a legal case that wouldn’t be heard for decades.

Chief Miranda, who had himself been a resident of the Kitsilano reserve, was the Squamish Keeper of the Names, responsible for memorizing ancestral names and history going back generations. Without him, there would have been little to work with.

Following Catholic missionary efforts from the 1840s, almost all Squamish people had converted to Catholicism by 1913. Accordingly, their births, deaths and marriages were usually recorded by the Church. However, Kennedy recalls that ‘the church was reluctant to hand over information’. They did eventually gain access, and not only did they accurately reflect Chief Miranda’s memory, the records also enabled them to ‘bring back hundreds and hundreds of names’, something of great cultural significance in Squamish tradition.

By cross-referencing Miranda’s extraordinary memory against Catholic church records, government surveys, and early anthropological notes, Kennedy and Bouchard could reconstruct not just genealogies but precise information on who lived where. ‘We transcribed all the Catholic records for the Squamish back to 1860’, Kennedy explains. Thanks to the connection between anglicized names in the church record and traditional Squamish names, ‘We could reconstruct where the houses were, who lived there, and their descendants... All of the success was thanks to Chief Miranda’. This painstaking work would prove invaluable in the court battles that began in late 1977, led by Chief Joe Mathias. It took several decades of legal dispute, but the case that turned the tide was decided in 2001: Mathias vs Canada. The case centered on the fiduciary duty of the federal government towards Indian Bands. Several other indigenous groups also made competing claims over the same land.

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One focus was proving that the 1869 residents, when the land was originally set aside as a reserve, were Squamish. The court accepted the anthropological evidence as overwhelming proof, largely because of Kennedy, Bouchard, and Miranda’s meticulous work decades earlier.

Most of the other claims were dismissed by the court, partly due to the statute of limitations expiring. But in order to close the decades of continued legal battles, the federal government came to an out-of-court settlement with the Squamish Nation: it paid C$92.5 million (USD $66.9m) in compensation, which, under the terms of the settlement, would be held in a trust fund for band members. The settlement also included something that received much less media attention at the time, but which has since proven far more significant: 11.7 acres of the original 80 acres of land.

In a ceremony in 2002, the Squamish Nation sailed 28 canoes to the beach in Kitsilano, a symbolic homecoming for the Squamish people. The site did not seem especially valuable: a thin patch of land, approximately half of which lies directly beneath the Burrard Street Bridge in an unusual tri-point shape. With the neighborhood zoned largely for single-family housing, observers did not initially notice its development potential.

The grand bargain

Vancouver is one of the most expensive housing markets in Canada. An average detached house there now costs over C$2 million (USD $1.5 million). Data scientist Jens von Bergmann and UBC associate professor Nathan Lauster estimate that the metro area has 130,000 to 200,000 suppressed households: people doubling up with family or roommates who would live independently if they could afford to. That backlog alone represents six to ten years of recent construction. In 1981, two thirds of 25- to 29-year-olds in Vancouver lived in their own households; by 2021, only a third did. Rental vacancy rates often hover below one percent; vacancy rates in more affordable housing markets, such as Austin, Texas, hover around ten.

This pressure comes in part from Vancouver’s success. Vancouver is Canada’s third-largest metropolitan economy. With its stunning backdrop of mountains and ocean and its mild winters, it repeatedly ranks among the world’s most liveable cities. Accordingly, the metro area adds over 40,000 new residents each year, each needing somewhere to live.

Despite this massive demand for housing, and its dense urban core, most of the city looks as it did decades ago. Vancouver pioneered single-family zoning in Canada: the municipality of Point Grey became the first in the country to adopt such rules in 1922. When Point Grey amalgamated with Vancouver in 1929, the principle spread citywide, although initially in a relatively permissive fashion. In the 1960s, the city briefly experimented with allowing apartment towers in residential areas, but a political backlash voted in a council in 1972 that was more resistant to development. From that point onwards, Vancouver systematically downzoned, restricting building heights and locking most of its land into low-density use. Today, 52 percent of Vancouver’s residential land supports just 15 percent of its homes.

Vancouver never managed to comprehensively reverse the downzoning of the early 1970s, despite the huge pressure on housing affordability since. But it did find a way to permit intensive development in narrow strips, typically along transport corridors, while leaving the suburban expanses largely untouched. The city is dependent on such developments: property taxes are low, so almost half of its C$3.5 billion capital budget comes from developer payments. Through a mixture of fixed development fees and Community Amenity Contributions, which are negotiated during spot rezoning on a case-by-case basis, planners extract funding for parks, childcare centers, and affordable housing units in exchange for permission to build. They aim to capture 75–80 percent of the land value uplift. Because each negotiation process can be lengthy, the city prefers to allocate a small number of highly valuable permits, creating an incentive structure that favors concentrated towers, rather than gentle density across the city.

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The downside is that the negotiation process is slow, expensive, and unpredictable. Von Bergmann notes that planners ‘typically get it wrong – they either charge too much or too little’. Getting it right requires predicting market conditions years in advance. Charge too much and the project is rendered unviable and dies, potentially taking the developer and many jobs down with it. Charge too little and the city misses out on valuable capital spending opportunities. Frances Bula, a journalist who has covered Vancouver planning for decades, describes the practical reality: ‘Big developers just cough up when planners demand.’ Smaller builders, including homeowners wishing to add small extensions to their own houses, lack the resources to play the game.

This system is what is known as Vancouver’s grand bargain, and what leads to the largely untouched suburbs occasionally punctuated with tall, thin towers. The grand bargain generates some income for public spending, while minimizing property taxes and development across most of the city. But the price is paid through worsened housing affordability and the economic costs of suppressed construction.

The mandate to build

After the land at Kits Point was returned to the Squamish Nation, they initially made plans to develop it at low density: two residential towers and some mid-rise offices, barely distinguishable in scale from the commercial buildings that already exist nearby. However, these plans stalled after the 2008 financial crisis, and it took some time for the Nation to return to its development ambitions.

In 2018, the Nation established a development arm, Nch’ḵay Development Corporation, bringing in much-needed expertise in construction. Moving quickly, in April 2019, they formally requested the Minister to order a referendum on the designation of the site, which Squamish people were eligible to vote in. In two votes, they approved the land designation for a mixed-use development, passing with 87 percent approval, and business terms with the development partner Westbank, one of Canada’s largest developers, passing with 81 percent approval. The Nation agreed to a 50-50 partnership with Westbank, though Westbank later sold its shares to OPTrust, which manages one of Canada’s largest pension funds. Despite a low turnout of 27 percent, the votes were considered to give a decisive mandate to the development plans.

But why did designating the land for development require a referendum? The site at Kits Point was returned to the Squamish Nation as reserve land. The Indian Act requires that reserve land be ‘designated’ by the federal government before it can be leased, a process that is considered ‘tedious, expensive and time consuming… with no guarantee of the outcome’, and which makes development difficult. Senakw’s swift progression is a testament to both political will and the Squamish Nation’s effective navigation of the system.

While reserve land can be leased with federal permission, it cannot be alienated from the band, meaning freehold ownership cannot be transferred in any way. This means it cannot be parceled up and sold off. It also means that the land cannot be borrowed against, because securing a loan on land is only possible if the land’s ownership can be alienated in the case of default. Traditional development finance uses loans as residential mortgages. Apartments cannot be sold as condominiums (where each unit is privately owned, like a house, and each owner also has a share of the overall building), but must instead use leasehold, where residents purchase a right to live in a property for a set period of time rather than owning their home outright.

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These restrictions might have made the project impossible without support from the federal government, which agreed to a C$1.4 billion loan through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the largest in the corporation’s history. To work within leasehold constraints, the residential units were earmarked for 100 percent rental.

Yet reserve land also offered a crucial advantage: because it is reserve land, it is exempt from zoning rules which apply to the rest of Vancouver. The Squamish Nation made the decision to ‘maximize economic benefits for the Squamish community’, which, in Vancouver’s housing-starved market, meant maximizing density: 6,000 rental homes plus commercial space. It also meant opting not to impose many of the costly mandates that cities typically require. They maintained the same safety and building standards that other Vancouver developments adhere to, but stripped away height limits, inclusionary zoning, zero-emissions requirements, parking minimums, design panels, and the years of public consultation that other projects must stick to.

Although Senakw is not subject to the normal city zoning rules, it nonetheless required standard public amenities like sewerage connection and transport access, including installing roads through public land. The City of Vancouver could have blocked or severely delayed the project simply by refusing these services, and might have been tempted to, given that the development sidesteps the city’s own planning rules.

Yet the city proved amenable. Kennedy Stewart, Vancouver’s mayor from 2018 to 2022, strongly supported the development and oversaw the signing of a services agreement in 2022. The Squamish Nation agreed to fund the sewerage upgrades, as well as the installation of cycle paths and seawall repairs to reduce flood risk to the neighborhood, paying roughly what they would have for site infrastructure under the standard planning process. They were not, however, required to pay the far larger sums that Vancouver normally extracts from developers to fund other municipal priorities.

Mayor Stewart emphasized to me that Canada’s intensifying political discourse around ‘reconciliation’ was critical. Many dismissed this discourse as performative symbolism, but at Senakw it had practical consequences: ‘Promises about reconciliation forced governments’ hands when it came to enabling indigenous-led developments’. The Squamish Nation’s referendums gave the project a democratic legitimacy that Vancouver’s usual stakeholder consultations rarely achieve. A city government that had spent years resisting modest density increases facilitated a far more ambitious project when backed by a clear community mandate and a compelling moral case.

The financial rewards to the Squamish Nation are substantial. A minority of the homes are earmarked as below market rate housing that will be let out to members of the Squamish Nation. The rest will be let out at market rates. With their 50 percent stake expected to generate up to C$10 billion in rental income over the entire lifespan of the buildings, and around 4,000 members, the project could be worth around C$2.5 million per person. How it will be distributed or spent is as yet undecided.

Beyond Senakw

On just one site, Senakw will provide a year’s worth of housing normally built in the city of Vancouver. It functions as a sort of policy laboratory, showing that cities like Vancouver can build many more homes if the decision-makers allow it.

Senakw also offers two lessons for those of us in other cities who want to get more homes built. The first is about incentives. When the Squamish Nation’s members voted on development, they were voting on their own land, and for the economic development of their own community. They chose to maximize density and limit the costly requirements that cities like Vancouver typically impose on new developments because they would bear the costs of these requirements directly. Yet in terms of quality and safety, Senakw is just as good or better than other new developments built just across the river. But residents voting on their own projects make very different assessments of the value of some of these mandates and vote accordingly. Similar dynamics have appeared in other resident-led ballots such as estate regeneration programs in England, and Israel’s Pinui Binui program.

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The second lesson concerns democratic legitimacy. It is partly a myth that Senakw slipped through a loophole in normal land-use restrictions. The City of Vancouver could have obstructed Senakw by refusing infrastructure connections and services. The federal government could have obstructed it by refusing the land designation or not offering the financing agreement. That both chose not to do so reflects the power of a clear democratic mandate. Governments that spend years resisting modest density increases may nonetheless facilitate ambitious projects when backed by direct community approval and a compelling moral case.

It’s an open question how replicable Senakw’s model is in the rest of Canada. Most reserve land in Canada is not urban; the Indian Act ensured that most such sites were seized long ago. However, ongoing legal battles make the future unpredictable. Indigenous groups may apply to the federal government to convert land they own to reserve status, and at the moment the federal government is amenable to doing so.

Nations may also build on land they own outside of reserves using standard zoning processes. Not far away from Senakw sit the Jericho Lands, a 90-acre site being developed in a joint partnership of the federal government and the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. This site is owned on a freehold basis. The overall development plan has been approved through the standard city planning process, although it will require further approvals of rezonings on individual parcels. It is expected to take 25–30 years to deliver around 13,000 new homes, an annual rate much slower than Senakw.

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Whatever lessons cities do or do not draw from Senakw, for the Squamish Nation, the significance extends beyond housing policy. For Wilson Williams, it represents something important: ‘We’re no longer out of sight and out of mind in our own village.’ More than a century after his ancestors were forced to sail away from the burning ruins of their homes, a new generation of Squamish people will return to live where their ancestors once fished for salmon in the abundance of False Creek.

Anya Martin is policy lead at YIMBY Alliance.

Artwork by Nina Bunjevac.

The author would like to thank for their generously given time and expertise: Squamish Nation, Abundant Housing Vancouver, Revery Architecture, Jens von Bergmann, Randy Bouchard, Frances Bula, Dorothy Kennedy, Nathan Lauster, Vanna Orecchio, Kennedy Stewart, Sam Sullivan and Lynn Zanatta.

Cities are often centers of agglomeration, places where people gather to collaborate with one another. But this is not the only reason they exist. Sometimes, cities are chiefly centers of consumption, where elites gather to devour resources extracted from the rest of the country. And occasionally, they are something like prisons, where troublesome social groups are concentrated so that the authorities can keep an eye on them. Many premodern cities, like Versailles, Naples, or Imperial Rome, were a little like this. But perhaps the greatest example was Tokugawa Edo.

Between 1600 and 1868, Japan was dominated by the Tokugawa family. The Tokugawas had prevailed over their rivals after a series of civil wars, establishing a sort of dictatorship known as the Shogunate. They developed a remarkable social system, crafted to preserve their power, and with it, the peace and social stability of Japan. At the apex of this system was the city of Edo (today’s Tokyo), at times the largest city in the world, and one of the strangest urban structures in history.

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The Tokugawa social system

In early modern Europe, most people were tenant farmers, who paid rent to landowners. The state sometimes taxed landowners, sometimes tenants, and sometimes both through consumption taxes. In peacetime, however, the early modern state did not do very much, so taxes generally ran at just a few percent of national income.

The picture in Japan was profoundly different. The peasantry was directly taxed by the government, at rates varying from 15 to 70 percent of the harvest, with 40 percent as a rough norm. The authorities distributed most of their tax receipts to the samurai, a hereditary, quasi-noble class making up about six percent of the population. In both cases, the agricultural surplus ended up in the hands of a leisure class, but the Japanese system was structured very differently, with the surplus reaching the leisure class only through the funnel of public taxation.

Measured by agricultural output, about 15 percent of Japan fell under the direct control of the Shogunate. These were areas that had always belonged to the Tokugawa, or that had been conquered by them during the civil wars. About a tenth of samurai were Tokugawa retainers, who received their stipends directly from the Shogunate.

In about three quarters of Japan, the tax authorities were a different group, the daimyo. The daimyo had originally been the territorial nobility, and in the pre-Tokugawa era, the breakdown of central authority had left them as the effective rulers of their domains. After 1600 the surviving daimyo submitted to the Tokugawa and were rewarded with a role somewhat akin to that of regional governors. There were about 260 daimyo, and about nine tenths of samurai were their retainers.

Urban design as a panopticon for the nobility

The city of Edo played a crucial role in this system. The daimyo were required to maintain mansions in Edo, in which their families were obliged to live permanently. Any act of disloyalty by a daimyo would thus place his family in the gravest peril. Most women of the daimyo class passed their lives as effective hostages of the state, never visiting the domains that their husbands, fathers, and sons governed. The daimyo themselves were also required to spend alternate years or half-years in Edo, bringing with them great crowds of samurai retainers. Edo thus had a dual nature: on the one hand, it was the apex of Japanese society, in which the country’s agricultural surplus was consumed; on the other, it was a kind of prison, in which Japan’s potentially dangerous elites were contained and monitored.

This gave Edo a peculiar demographic and economic character. For one thing, it was enormous. Japanese rice agriculture was extremely productive by premodern standards and generated a huge surplus for the capital’s benefit. Edo’s population seems to have been over a million by 1700, which would make it the largest city in the world at the time: London reached a population of a million only around 1800, while New York did not reach it until 1880.

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It was also extremely top-heavy socially. Unlike the knights of the European feudal system, Tokugawa-era samurai were usually required to live in cities. The Shogun’s own samurai were permanently concentrated in Edo, while each daimyo brought hundreds or thousands of his samurai with him during his years of residence in the capital. This meant that almost half of Edo’s population at any given time were samurai.

The samurai were theoretically a warrior class, but since Tokugawa Japan was at peace, there was little real soldiering to do. Most non-military work was seen as degrading, with the exception of gentlemanly occupations like civil administration and tutoring in calligraphy. Most samurai thus lived as pensioners of the state, deriving the bulk of their income from hereditary government stipends assigned to their families at the start of the Tokugawa era.

Stipends were generous for high-ranking samurai but very modest for the majority: in 1876 the Japanese state calculated that only 5.1 percent of samurai had stipends worth more than 100 yen, equivalent to a little over $4,000 today. The result was that most samurai lived in dignified but extreme poverty. It is a testament to the primacy of status among human ends that, although some samurai surreptitiously took on side jobs to supplement their tiny incomes, very few abjured their rank to take up more gainful occupations openly. Interclass marriages were forbidden, and there was theoretically no process for ennoblement, though some wealthy commoners worked around this by arranging to be adopted into impecunious samurai families.

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The High City

Edo was zoned according to social class, probably the largest-scale use of zoning before modern times. Samurai neighborhoods made up a large minority of the total surface area, concentrated in western areas that came to be known as the High City. Higher-ranking samurai had substantial homes, but most lived in extremely austere conditions: the median family lived in a tiny, two-room rowhouse with no garden and communal latrines.

The samurai shared the High City with the daimyo. Each daimyo was expected to maintain several estates in Edo, including a more compact estate near the Shogun’s castle and a more spacious garden estate further out. These were made up of single-storey buildings connected by covered walkways, set amid exquisitely landscaped gardens. Each estate was surrounded by a perimeter wall broken by just one or two richly ornamented gates. The great expense of all this was, from the Shogunate’s perspective, part of its appeal: the more resources daimyo expended on maintaining mansions and circulating between them, the less remained for fomenting trouble.

These samurai and daimyo neighborhoods made up a substantial majority of Edo’s surface area. In some ways, they foreshadowed affluent American suburbs, though they would have felt quite different at street level. Physically, the closest modern parallel might be elite neighborhoods in countries like South Africa or Brazil, where fear of crime has driven the wealthy behind high walls and electric fences.

In fact, however, Edo seems to have been an unusually safe city, a fact that often struck early Western visitors. Most people had no locks on their front doors. The English writer Isabella Bird wrote that a solitary foreign woman could travel in Japan in ‘perfect safety’ and that she had never encountered ‘a single instance of incivility’, though at home she would often have been ‘exposed to rudeness, insult, and extortion, if not to actual danger’. The walls and gates of the High City may thus tell us more about elite culture and status display than they do about any distinctive security needs.

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The Low City

Much of the rest of Edo’s surface area was taken up with religious complexes and institutional buildings belonging to the Shogunate. The commoners were crowded into the remainder, mostly in riverside areas known as the Low City. Though most commoners were very poor, some were richer than most samurai, and even richer than minor daimyo. Some of the greatest artistic legacies of Tokugawa Japan, like ukiyo-e prints and the kabuki theater, arose from the patronage of this class. However wealthy they might become, however, commoners’ status was axiomatically lower than that of the samurai.

Edo’s commoners worked mostly in providing goods and services to the city’s elite. The city as a whole produced little, consuming resources from the rest of Japan and providing little in return save the arguable gift of government. No international trade took place in Edo: the government was intensely wary of destabilizing foreign influences, and by the late-eighteenth century it allowed only two Dutch and ten Chinese ships to visit Japan each year, all through the carefully controlled port at Nagasaki. (For comparison, about fifteen thousand ships arrived in British harbors from foreign ports annually in the same period.) In this as in other respects, the Shogunate’s political needs had a decidedly fitful relationship to the country’s economic growth: although the political stability that the regime provided certainly did foster prosperity, the steps it took to ensure that stability often stifled it.

The physical form of the Low City was even more remarkable than that of the daimyo neighborhoods. Commoner Edo was divided into some 1,500-2,000 fenced and gated blocks called chō. These were then subdivided into roji, alleys lined with small houses, often also gated. The Low City was thus divided up by many thousands of internal checkpoints, all of which closed at night. Edo was not under threat of attack in the Tokugawa period and the city as a whole was not fortified. The purpose of this immense labyrinth of walls and gates was to control and monitor the movement of the population.

Wealthy merchants lived in substantial houses called machiya, featuring a series of small garden courtyards around which living spaces were ingeniously laid out. In plan, machiya recall the domus house type of the urban middle and upper classes in the Roman Empire. Many machiya must have been rather agreeable houses, and some Japanese people still live in modernized machiya today. Most commoners, however, lived in nagaya, tiny terraced houses frequently built back-to-back. A standard specification for nagaya was 2.7 meters wide and 3.6 meters deep, yielding a total floorspace of only 13.2 square meters.

An enormous number of people were crammed into commoner neighborhoods. The most crowded had 58,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, about twice the population density of Manhattan today. Remarkably enough, however, their dwellings were largely single-storey. This seems to have been required by regulation, in turn motivated by fire risk or by dislike of commoner buildings towering over the mansions of the nobility. Japanese builders were perfectly capable of erecting taller structures, so the fact that these intensely crowded neighborhoods forewent the floorspace that additional storeys could have provided is not least among the paradoxes that Tokugawa Edo presents to history.

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* * * *

In a way, the Tokugawa system was a success. Japan experienced near-total peace between 1600 and the late nineteenth century, a remarkable achievement for a premodern society and a dramatic contrast to Europe or China, where tens of millions of people died in wars. The Tokugawa succeeded in bribing, blackmailing, and intimidating Japan’s armed elites into a quarter of a millennium of passivity, enabling steady economic growth and a remarkable artistic flowering. One might thus argue that Edo’s apparent parasitism was an illusion. Edo was indeed a gilded prison, but prisons can be useful things.

Still, it would have been nice if Japan had not needed a vast prison capital in the first place. Tokugawa Edo stands as a monument to the power of rent-seekers, producing little and demanding immense resources as a condition of civil peace. It shows how the physical form of cities may be reshaped by these demands, as governments apportion space and limit movement in line with their political needs. These forces yielded a city with tight restrictions on built density and land use, an acute housing shortage, and a huge share of privileged state stipendiaries. Edo is a particularly striking example of these phenomena. But it is far from alone.

Samuel Hughes is an editor at Works in Progress. Follow him on Twitter.

Thanks to Fabian Drixler for generous help.

In the twentieth century, Christian and Jewish religious architecture was reshaped by modernism. Most new churches and synagogues today are built in modern styles; almost no new Gothic cathedrals have been built since the nineteenth century. Hindu architecture did not undergo the same process. Temple architecture is governed by ancient canons known as the Shilpa Shastras, which define the classical style of Hindu temple architecture. In the twentieth century, many Hindu communities continued to aspire to this style, while sometimes using modern materials for reasons of cost. As these communities have become more prosperous, they have tended to adhere to the these Shastras even more closely: modern affluence has enabled a more faithful embodiment of architectural tradition rather than a departure from it. Today, these monumental projects form the world’s foremost living tradition of masonry architecture, united to vast global supply chains and great feats of logistics and engineering.

To understand the Hindu temple, one must invert the modern conception of a public building. A temple is not an auditorium designed primarily for the convenience of a human audience: it is a residence of God, who is manifested on Earth through a consecrated image (mūrti) accommodated in the temple. Within Hindu theology, the sacred image is not a statue, but God’s living presence, which the architecture of the temple is designed to revere. Its scale, masonry, and ornamentation collectively aim at creating a residence befitting the majesty of God, while generating the peace and tranquility associated with the divine.

Temple architecture normally follows rules set out in the Shastras, architectural treatises composed between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. The Shastras function both as artistic guidelines and rigorous algorithms. The measurements of the temple’s components, from the height of the plinth to the curve of the shikara (the tower or spire), are calculated to correspond to the geometries of certain constellations.

The Shastras also rigorously govern construction methods. The basic structure of most large modern buildings is a steel or reinforced concrete frame: if stone is present at all, it is merely a surface cladding. In Hindu temples, by contrast, the structure is still formed of massive load-bearing stones. While steel is sometimes introduced in foundations and structural cores to meet modern seismic standards, the governing structural logic remains resolutely premodern. Stability is achieved through the compressive strength of stone and through complex interlocking jointing systems, including mortise-and-tenon-like connections.

This approach prioritizes longevity over speed. Steel frames are strong, but they often succumb to corrosion over time. This is one reason why many office buildings have a design working life of 50 years, after which they are sometimes replaced. Load-bearing masonry is slow to build, but it is extraordinarily durable. Temples built today could stand for thousands of years, vanishing only when their stones are worn away by the wind and the rain.

Perhaps the most striking innovation in recent temple architecture is the labor model. The construction of a modern temple can be a complex hybrid of high-tech manufacturing, hereditary craftsmanship, and devotional volunteerism. Stone is sourced from quarries around the world, especially Tuscany, Bulgaria and Rajasthan. It is shipped to workshops in India, where intricate carving is executed by professionals. These artisans often come from lineages of stone carvers who have preserved these skills for centuries.

The carved stones are then shipped to the construction site, a massive logistical puzzle involving tens of thousands of numbered pieces. Their assembly operates on a unique collaborative model: the more technical work is generally executed by professionals, but other tasks are performed by a host of volunteers. The construction process itself is often viewed as a form of worship: tools are sanctified and prayers mark critical stages, ensuring the sacred character of the temple is maintained throughout its creation. This integration of hereditary skill with devotional energy creates a site that can feel less like a construction zone and more like a festival.

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Here are seven examples of this living tradition. They are particularly impressive buildings, but they are not fundamentally exceptional: smaller and simpler temples in the same style are being built today in thousands of towns and villages across India.

1. Shri Swaminarayan Akshardham

Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

Construction: 1979–1992

The BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham in Gandhinagar is a pivotal building in modern Hindu architecture. Constructed over a period of 13 years, it is built from 6,000 tons of pink sandstone from Rajasthan, chosen for its durability and aesthetic warmth. Standing 108 feet tall, 240 feet long, and 131 feet wide, the structure is a complex assembly of 97 intricately carved pillars, 17 domes, 220 stone beams, and 256 statues representing the breadth of the Hindu spiritual pantheon.

The interior layout is designed to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge. The upper floor gallery houses a comprehensive series of paintings illustrating the biography of Bhagwan Swaminarayan, a visual text that makes his life and philosophy accessible. The lower floor serves as a repository for historical relics – personal objects used by Swaminarayan and preserved by his followers.

2. BAPS Hindu Mandir

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Construction: 2019–2024

The BAPS Hindu Mandir in Abu Dhabi is the first traditional Hindu stone temple in the Middle East (‘mandir’ means ‘temple’ in Hindi). Built on land gifted by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the temple was constructed using pink sandstone from Rajasthan for the exterior and Italian marble for the interiors. The temple features seven towering shikharas (spires), housing seven revered deities from across India, as well as representing the seven emirates of the UAE. Upon entering, visitors encounter streams representing the holy rivers Ganga and Yamuna, while a beam of light symbolizes the mythological Saraswati River.

Construction in the desert environment presented specific engineering challenges. The temple is the first traditional Hindu temple to undergo complete digital modeling and seismic simulation to ensure resilience against local geological conditions. The foundation utilizes a concrete pour reinforced with fly ash to reduce its carbon footprint.

Inside, 402 uniquely carved marble pillars support the structure, which includes a ‘Dome of Harmony’ depicting the five elements of nature and a central ‘Dome of Peace’. A notable feature is the stone-carving symbolism. While Hindu narratives adorn the exterior, to reinforce the message of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (‘the world is one family’), the carvings also depict moral stories from Arabian, Mayan, Greek, and other ancient civilizations.

3. BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir

London, United Kingdom

Construction: 1992–1995

Popularly known in Britain as the ‘Neasden Temple’, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir was the first traditional Hindu stone temple in Europe. Constructed in less than three years, the temple required five thousand tonnes of Italian Carrara marble and Bulgarian limestone. The limestone was specifically selected for its density and durability to withstand London’s damp climate and urban pollution. The stone was shipped to India for carving, after which over 26,300 pieces were shipped to London. The specific architectural layout corresponds to the Revati Nakshatra, a lunar constellation in Hindu astrology, ensuring the design aligns with precise spatial and auspicious parameters.

The foundation itself marked a complex engineering event. At the time, it was one of the largest single concrete pours in the UK, creating a massive raft capable of supporting the immense load of the stone superstructure. The project was financed entirely by the local community through grassroots efforts, including sponsored walks and aluminum can recycling campaigns. Over 3,000 local volunteers worked on the construction itself. Beyond its function as a place of worship, the complex regularly hosts school visits and features exhibitions on Hinduism and community outreach programs. Visitors have included royalty and prime ministers.

4. Swaminarayan Akshardham

New Delhi, India

Construction: 2000–2005

Dedicated to Bhagwan Swaminarayan, BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham is a significant example of contemporary traditional stonework. Rising 141 feet, spanning 356 feet in length and 316 feet in width, the temple was completed in five years through a collaboration of 11,000 artisans and 8,000 volunteers. More than 300 million volunteer hours went into making the complex. The temple was originally envisioned by Yogiji Maharaj (1892–1971) as a temple on the banks of the sacred River Yamuna, and completed under the leadership of his successor, Pramukh Swami Maharaj (1921–2016).

The structure rests upon the Gajendra Peeth, a three thousand ton plinth featuring 148 sculpted elephants. These depict storied elephants from various texts and pay homage to the foundational support of the animal kingdom.

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Above them rises the temple’s intricately carved outer wall, the largest such wall built in India in eight centuries. It depicts animals like lions and elephants, followed by floral motifs, culminating in a layer adorned with various sculptures of deities and sages. The temple itself incorporates 20,000 statues across its 234 pillars and nine ornate domes. The pillars and ceilings depict various incidents and virtues from the life of Bhagwan Swaminarayan. The complex extends beyond the sanctuary to include educational facilities, featuring exhibitions, a cultural boat ride, and a multimedia water show depicting events from the Upanishads, some of the central Hindu religious texts.

5. Pramukh Swami Maharaj Smruti Mandir

Sarangpur, Gujarat, India

Construction: 2018–2023

The Pramukh Swami Maharaj Smruti Mandir represents a specific category of Hindu temple architecture known as a Smruti Mandir, or memorial shrine. Located in Sarangpur, this temple marks the cremation site of Pramukh Swami Maharaj (1921–2016), a significant figure in modern Hinduism who oversaw the construction of more than 1,200 temples, including the Akshardham complexes. Within Hindu traditions, sites associated with the final rites of enlightened spiritual leaders and virtuous figures are sacred spaces.

The temple is constructed entirely from pristine white Makrana marble, the celebrated Rajasthan stone used in the Taj Mahal. It features a single central dome and detailed carvings that illustrate the narrative of the guru’s life and global travels. The temple functions as a canopy over the specific site of the funeral rites. The original cremation spot has been preserved in its raw state within a transparent casing alongside the ashes, allowing visitors to view the ground directly. The current spiritual head, Mahant Swami Maharaj, inaugurated the temple with the stated objectives of fostering peace, faith, and the fulfillment of personal wishes.

6. BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir

Chino Hills, California, United States

Construction: 2004–2012

The BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Chino Hills presents a specific engineering application: reconciling the rigidity of traditional stone architecture with the safety requirements of a high-risk seismic zone. Located in the San Bernardino region, an area known for frequent tectonic activity, this structure is the first traditional Hindu temple designed with a base-isolation system. The exterior features pink sandstone from Rajasthan; the interior uses white Italian marble from Carrara.

To protect this brittle stone assembly from ground motion, the structure rests on a system of 40 base isolators – consisting of steel plates stacked with a viscous liquid – which mechanically separate the upper temple from its foundation. This mechanism is designed to allow the heavy edifice to shift laterally during an earthquake, effectively enabling it to ‘float’ independently of the ground. Engineers and architects refer to this configuration as the ‘floating mandir’.

The project required navigating complex regulatory and height restrictions. Temple representatives engaged with local officials and residents to explain the cultural and religious significance of the traditional spires to secure approval. Beyond the temple itself, the complex includes a cultural center, which houses a museum dedicated to the history and details of Hindu architecture. The site operates largely on solar energy, merging traditional aesthetics with modern ecological standards.

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7. Birla Mandir

Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Construction: 1970–1996

The Birla Mandir in Kolkata was sponsored by the industrialist Birla family, whose name it bears. The construction took 26 years. While the temple is consecrated to the Hindu deities Lord Krishna and his consort Radha, the complex also houses shrines for other major deities including Shiva, Durga, and Shakti.

Constructed from white marble and cream-colored sandstone, the edifice reflects a synthesis of regional aesthetics. It draws primary inspiration from the Lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar while incorporating elements of Rajasthani architecture and modern styling. The design principles are rooted in the Brihat Samhita, an ancient Sanskrit text that outlines precise standards for temple architecture and iconography. Standing 160 feet tall on a raised platform – a classical feature intended to separate the sacred space from the street – the structure is a defining landmark of the Kolkata cityscape.

The temple’s interior and exterior are notable for their didactic ornamentation. Intricate carvings depict pictorial narratives from Hindu philosophy and scenes from scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita. The project sustained a hired workforce of artisans from the city of Muzaffarpur in Bihar for over two decades, playing a crucial role in preserving traditional masonry skills.

Tilak Parekh is a researcher of religion and anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

The phones we carry around in our pockets have two million times more memory and are thousands of times faster than the room-sized computers that guided the Apollo mission to the Moon. This incredible shrinking act has been driven by our ability to make transistors smaller and smaller.

Each transistor is a microscopic switch that can alternate between a one and a zero, the basic language of all computing. Billions are packed onto tiny silicon chips called semiconductors. The more transistors that fit onto a chip, the more logic and memory circuits it holds, and the more it can do.

Advanced semiconductors are, arguably, the most important technology in the world. Over the last five years, they have even emerged as a geopolitical flashpoint between the US and China. But for all this rivalry, any country or company that hopes to manufacture semiconductors is dependent on a single firm: ASML. Dubbed ‘a relatively obscure Dutch company’ by the BBC in 2020, ASML makes the only machines in the world capable of stenciling the transistors onto chips with the precision necessary to fit billions on a 30-centimeter wafer.

These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength.

While ASML is now the sole supplier of these machines, and will be for some time to come, it started out as a laggard in the chipmaking industry. Overtaking its competition required many things rarely associated with European companies: close collaboration with the American government, selling large stakes to foreign competitors, and a huge gamble on an unproven technology.

Let there be light

The key to ASML’s success is a technology called photolithography (sometimes just called lithography). The technique involves transferring a pattern onto a semiconductor wafer by exposing it to light. In the 1950s, the first chipmakers had tried to draw these patterns by hand, but anything that physically touches the wafer scratches it, dirties it, or warps the pattern. Scientists working independently for Bell Labs and the US military realized that they could use light to print identical patterns without making physical contact with the wafer.

To make chips, engineers start with a thin wafer of semiconductor material, usually silicon. This wafer is coated with a chemical called photoresist, which reacts when exposed to light. In photolithography, light is projected through a detailed pattern onto the photoresist-coated wafer, softening the exposed areas. The wafer is washed to remove any softened areas, revealing the silicon underneath. It is then moved to an etching machine that blasts it with charged chlorine or bromine gas, carving the desired pattern into the exposed silicon. These features are later filled with metal, such as tungsten and copper, to connect the transistor to power. These etched layers then combine into an intricate network of transistors.

Over time, the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem has developed increasingly sophisticated etching using ever smaller wavelengths of light. Smaller wavelengths diffract less, allowing the light to travel in straighter lines and print sharper, tinier details without blurring. These allow for more precise pattern projections that, in turn, allow smaller and more densely packed transistors.

Early lithography relied on mercury vapor lamps that were similar to streetlights, while more modern machines rely on lasers created using argon and fluorine gases. By 2010, such lasers made it possible to create a 22-nanometer feature through multiple exposures using a 193-nanometer wavelength.

The most advanced version of this technology, extreme ultraviolet lithography, is used to make the very smallest chips. The smallest in 2025 were marketed as three nanometers, roughly 25,000 times thinner than a human hair.

To make them, a droplet of liquid tin is released into a chamber and hit with a single pulse of light, which melts and flattens it. As the droplet continues to fall, a second, more powerful pulse vaporizes the tin, creating an extremely hot plasma that emits light at the narrow wavelengths needed for extreme ultraviolet lithography. The light beam is then concentrated by reflecting it across a series of slightly concave mirrors so flawless that, if scaled to the size of Germany, their imperfections would be measured in millimeters. Engineers need to use mirrors, rather than the glass lenses used in standard lithography, as almost all solid materials absorb light at such short wavelengths.

The light eventually hits the mask, which contains the pattern to be printed on the chip. As the pattern on the mask is usually several times larger than what is wanted on the chip, the light is then reflected by a second system of mirrors.

After the light reflects from the mask, it carries the pattern as a bundle of rays spreading out from each point. The next mirrors tip these rays inward so that, instead of spreading widely, they reunite over a shorter distance. When the rays from each point come together sooner, the picture they form is physically smaller. By repeating this with several carefully shaped mirrors, engineers shrink the pattern by a fixed amount while keeping it in focus. After being shrunk four times, it hits the wafer.

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The great shrinking act

Longer wavelengths act like a blunt chisel, suitable for rough shaping, but they struggle to capture finer details. The longer light waves are larger relative to the tiny features on the reticle that they must reflect from. When a wave meets something smaller than itself, it naturally spreads and bends around its edges instead of casting a sharp shadow. To create the same details, the blunt chisel needs to go over the same spot a number of times (creating blurrier edges). Lithography had to take wavelengths all the way to the extreme ultraviolet range to achieve the high resolution patterning needed for cutting-edge process nodes.

Wavelengths as low as 13.5 nanometers can achieve more precise patterns in a single exposure. In fact, extreme ultraviolet lithography can combine three or four photolithography patterning cycles into a single one on a seven-nanometer node. Without EUV, producing five-nanometer nodes might require as many as one hundred different steps.

Extreme ultraviolet lithography was able to produce more accurate patterns on wafers than older techniques even if they were used multiple times.

Today, ASML dominates the overall market for lithography and has an effective monopoly in extreme ultraviolet lithography. Its EUV machines sell for more than $120 million. With a market capitalization of over $400 billion, ASML is one of Europe’s most valuable companies. But it wasn’t always like this.

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Origins

ASML started off life within Philips, the Dutch consumer electronics giant. During the 1970s, Philips had roughly 20 percent of the global electronics market and was a major chipmaker. In this era, lithography machines used wavelengths of over 400 nanometers to pattern 1,000-nanometer features. The industry struggled to shrink features without losing accuracy or letting dust and flaws creep in. Philips began to work on its own prototype, drawing on its expertise in optics and precision mechanics. By the early 1980s, the project was running into trouble. The company was looking to cut costs and engineers estimated that they would need over $280 million in today’s money to finish the machine’s development and production.

In 1984, Philips spun out Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography (which later dropped the full name in favor of its acronym) as a joint venture with ASM International, a Dutch conglomerate that sold equipment to the semiconductor industry. The business originally struggled. It had no market share and no brand recognition. Its first product, the PAS 2000, was a commercial failure. The machine used oil pressure, like that in power steering, to move the table that held the wafer during exposure, rather than electric motors. This made it smooth and precise, but it was prone to leaking. At the first conference ASML attended, one industry executive told them: ‘The race has already been run. There’s no room for you here.’ ASML switched back to electric motors.

The company took an unusual approach from the outset. While Japanese giants Nikon and Canon were vertically integrated, ASML outsourced key components like optics and motors so that it could focus on assembling and optimizing the final machine. Given this outsourcing, it made sense for ASML to embrace a modular design with clearly defined subsystems. This approach was mocked in European manufacturing circles. German engineers warned ASML’s leadership that they were ‘asking for trouble’ and would ‘lose all control’ if they didn’t make critical components themselves. But ASML had no choice: it lacked the capital, expertise, and time to build these subsystems from scratch.

By 1988, ASML was on the verge of collapse. ASM International had already pulled out, and Philips considered shutting it down. It was saved by a single Philips board member, Gerd Lorenz, who was particularly worried about Europe’s growing dependence on Asia for strategic technology. Lorenz argued that Europe needed a stake in chip manufacturing. This was enough to convince Philips to give ASML more time, but didn’t fix its fundamental problem: it was still an inferior supplier with no competitive edge.

ASML used the time it was given to develop the PAS 5500, released in 1991 and the company’s first commercial breakout. While Nikon’s contemporary photolithography system was more precise, ASML’s modular design meant that machines could be fixed quickly on site. This reduced downtime and, by making it easy to replace parts when they broke, it was possible to extend the machine’s life. This was a key factor that led John Kelly, IBM’s director of semiconductor R&D, to push IBM to order the PAS 5500 over the Japanese machines. ASML had gone global.

The first breakthroughs

ASML’s success depended on two projects in the late 1990s and 2000s that gave it a huge advantage in research and development. The first was a public-private partnership, started in 1997, called the Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Company. The Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Company began life as a rescue mission. Before 1997, basic semiconductor research was carried out in a small handful of research labs, all dependent on government grants.

The original program for EUV research was a ‘virtual national lab’ that combined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Each covered a different component: Livermore focused on mirrors and optics, Sandia on the light source and systems engineering, and Berkeley on advanced equipment for testing. But in 1996, Department of Energy budget cuts had placed the virtual national lab program on the chopping block.

Intel, then the undisputed world leader in microprocessors, was keen to preserve the work and spearheaded the creation of the Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Company, the largest public-private partnership of its kind in the history of the US Department of Energy. During its six-year life, the company invested over $270 million into extreme ultraviolet lithography development, funded by the sale of shares to member companies, giving them a right of first refusal to purchase the photolithography tools being produced.

The company initially restricted membership to American firms. ASML, along with its main Japanese rivals, Canon and Nikon, was initially barred from membership.

The only established semiconductor equipment manufacturer to join the partnership from the beginning was Silicon Valley Group, which had a market share of just 5 percent to ASML’s 20 percent. Fearing the danger of being reliant on such a small manufacturer, the rest of the companies involved concluded that it would be better to open up to foreign firms, rather than risk ceding the entire market.

ASML was allowed to participate so long as it committed to establish a research center in the US and source 55 percent of components for the systems sold in the US from American suppliers. In practice, this commitment was never enforced. Its Japanese competitors were never allowed to join, due to widespread fear in the US of Japanese competition.

The program built up a vast base of intellectual property and process knowledge. These types of public-private partnerships typically grant the participating companies a non-exclusive license to use the intellectual property generated, but in this case the companies in partnership got complete ownership.

In 2001, ASML acquired Silicon Valley Group after it ran into cash flow difficulties, making ASML the sole surviving equipment manufacturer in the partnership. When the consortium produced the first full-scale extreme ultraviolet lithography prototype – the Engineering Test Stand – ASML stood alone at the vanguard of lithography. This was the first demonstration that 13.5-nanometer light could print dense features on a chip.

By the time the Engineering Test Stand was built, the program had already proved that it was possible to generate extreme ultraviolet light reliably, which let engineers start building mirrors and lenses that could be used in real production tools. To solve outstanding questions, such as how to boost the throughput of their machines or increase the power of their light sources in production settings, ASML needed to test its machines in environments close to the real world. But no chipmakers were willing to shoulder a project so large and risky at such an early stage.

The second project essential to ASML’s success was the Belgium-based Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC), a research organization that collects machines from different companies and allows researchers to test them in semi-real environments while protecting the companies’ intellectual property.

As potential customers began to consider different options for next generation lithography technologies, ASML used IMEC to promote its extreme ultraviolet lithography prototype. Topping ASML’s target list was TSMC, which today is the world’s largest semiconductor foundry. Founded in 1987, TSMC’s history had been intertwined with ASML’s since its birth: Philips, ASML’s former parent, owned a 27.5 percent stake in it. Seeing ASML’s machinery exhibited at IMEC was what led TSMC to partner with ASML in EUV development.

By contrast, Canon and Nikon were tight-lipped about their research and made little effort to cooperate with outside companies. While this theoretically allowed them to maintain greater control over their work, and capture more of the value chain, it also made them solely responsible for simultaneously solving a bewildering array of fundamental physics problems, while assuming all the financial risk of doing so.

Since almost all of the parts in ASML’s machines are made by other companies, it has become master of a sprawling supply chain of over five thousand companies. It has diversified its suppliers over the years in a very deliberate way: 80 percent of its spending goes to companies across Europe and the Middle East (notably not the US, despite prior agreements), which reduces the risk of potential export restrictions, tariffs, and other geopolitical risks that may face critical suppliers based in the US or Asia. It also aims for its suppliers to make no more than 25 percent of their revenue from ASML, to force them not to become overreliant on the volatile semiconductor market.

While most of its components come from a large number of small suppliers, ASML has formed deep bonds with its biggest suppliers. It acquired a 24.9 percent stake in optics manufacturer Zeiss. Peter Leibinger, vice chairman of laser manufacturer Trumpf, has said that ASML and Trumpf are a ‘virtually merged company’.

Winning the war

Extreme ultraviolet lithography would not become a successful commercial technology until 2018, over 20 years after the creation of the Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Company and 34 years after IMEC was founded. In the meantime, it was consuming more and more resources. By 2015, ASML was spending more than $1 billion a year on R&D, more than double its 2010 total. According to some estimates, by 2014, the industry had collectively invested over $20 billion in extreme ultraviolet lithography, with no guarantee of any return.

ASML was able to continue pouring money into this black hole partly because it had already beaten its competitors. By 2010, it had two thirds of the overall lithography market and was the dominant supplier for the rapidly growing smartphone market, with deep ties to Intel, Samsung, and TSMC. It had secured this position by winning the decisive technical battle of the 2000s.

At the start of the millennium, the entire semiconductor industry hit a physical wall. Circuits had been getting steadily smaller for decades by simply switching to shorter wavelengths, but the standard 193-nanometer light (roughly one five-hundredth of the thickness of a human hair) was too blunt to draw smaller circuits.

Nikon tried to solve this by developing a new light source with a smaller wavelength of 157 nanometers. But this shorter wavelength light was absorbed and distorted by standard glass, forcing Nikon to build lenses out of calcium fluoride, a rare, brittle crystal that was expensive to polish and prone to cracking under heat. The industry poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this ‘dry’ lithography path, only to find the manufacturing challenges insurmountable.

ASML’s partnerships helped it avoid this dead end. TSMC researcher Burn Lin had advised them to switch to a technology called immersion lithography. ASML continued to use 193-nanometer light but placed a layer of water between the lens and the silicon wafer. Just as a straw appears bent and magnified when placed in a glass of water, the water in the machine bent the light waves, sharpening the focus and allowing smaller circuits to be printed without needing new lenses.

ASML compounded this advantage by introducing a revolutionary machine architecture called TWINSCAN. In older machines, the light source would sit idle while the machine stopped to measure the surface of the silicon wafer to ensure it was flat. ASML replaced this with a dual-stage system: a massive machine with two tables would measure one wafer in the background while another was being printed simultaneously. This eliminated the dead time in the manufacturing process, allowing chipmakers to produce significantly more chips per hour. By the time Nikon abandoned its 157-nanometer project in 2005, ASML had become the industry standard, with 53.2 percent of the market.

ASML’s machines were so much better than the competition that it could charge nearly twice as much for them: $55 million versus $30 million for the comparable Nikon device.

But even this was not enough. While ASML was beginning to ship prototype EUV machines to IMEC from 2006 onwards, they were so slow and prone to breaking down that they were commercially useless. In 2012, ASML, still reeling from the global financial crisis, was struggling to continue financing its EUV efforts.

In a drastic move – part desperate attempt to keep the company’s research efforts afloat and part strategic bet to win the EUV market once and for all – the ASML leadership launched a co-investment program that sold 23 percent of the company to its three largest customers: Intel, TSMC and Samsung.

The funding also allowed ASML to complete a $2.5 billion acquisition of one of its suppliers, Cymer, which produces lithography light sources. The acquisition allowed ASML to invest in Cymer’s R&D efforts to perfect its soft X-ray light source, which involved hitting fast-moving droplets of tin with such force that they lost electrons, but precisely enough that this did not shed so much debris that it coated the mirrors. They accomplished this by moving from a single pulse to two separate laser pulses: the pre-pulse would shape the droplet and the main pulse would generate the plasma. This improved efficiency and stability.

ASML’s close partnership with TSMC proved especially critical. In 2014, TSMC launched its first chip for Apple, which was now its largest customer and was putting pressure on the chipmaker to produce higher performance chips than its existing machinery was capable of. It had become urgent for ASML to complete a commercial EUV machine.

The two companies worked so closely together that Anthony Yen, the Division Director at TSMC responsible for overseeing EUV development, described them as ‘one team’. ASML and TSMC engineers on the ground worked tirelessly, troubleshooting and iterating until they had reached the necessary throughput: 500 wafers a day for a month.

During this period, the joint team redesigned both the tin-droplet generator and the way the laser hit each droplet. The new setup produced droplets that were about half the original size while still yielding the same ultraviolet energy. Smaller droplets throw off far less debris when vaporized, which slows the rate at which tin builds up on the collector mirror. Because the mirror degrades more slowly, it needs fewer replacements, keeping the machine up and running for longer stretches.

The partnership was a win for ASML, as it was able to work through some of its key engineering and commercialization challenges. It also helped TSMC become an early adopter of the most cutting-edge technology. By 2019, TSMC was ramping up mass production of its seven-nanometer process and the first phones with EUV chips were being sold by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, competitor firms like Nikon, which had never believed as strongly in extreme ultraviolet lithography, effectively gave up. In its 2013 annual report, Nikon noted that its own EUV progress had not proceeded as planned, and it was not mentioned in an annual report again. With ASML pulling ahead on R&D and locking up key customer demand, and with competitors struggling to justify their own R&D spending in the wake of the financial crisis, ASML became the last company standing in the race to commercialize the technology.

The importance of tacit knowledge

Early on, ASML cultivated a culture that was more risk tolerant than other players in the industry. It promoted high-potential talent early and had a track record of retaining key employees for decades. Much of this is a product of its challenging early years. ASML needed the talent of its younger generation to save the company, so it was more willing to promote and empower them quickly.

For example, Martin Van Den Brink joined ASML in 1984. Within 18 months, aged 29, he became one of two people promoted to lead the development of one of the company’s early flagship projects. He carried on working at ASML for his entire career, serving as president and chief technical officer until his retirement in 2024. This practice was far less common among ASML’s Japanese rivals, who were more hierarchical and tended to reward seniority over performance.

Retaining the best workers is especially crucial in an area like photolithography, where a huge amount of tacit knowledge is used to assemble its machines. An ASML engineer once told He Rongming, the founder of Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, one of China’s top ASML competitors, that the company wouldn’t be able to replicate ASML’s products even if it had the blueprints. He suggested that ASML’s products reflected ‘decades, if not centuries’ of knowledge and experience. ASML’s Chinese competitors have systematically attempted to hire former ASML engineers, and there is at least one documented case of a former ASML employee unlawfully handing over proprietary information. But none of this appears to have narrowed the gap.

A European giant

ASML is a rare example of a European tech giant. Its success was the result of transatlantic cooperation, not continental parochialism. Had the company not joined a program funded by US chipmakers, Canon and Nikon would likely still dominate a less advanced lithography industry.

Cooperation with other companies was just as important. While vertical integration gave Nikon and Canon total control, it capped their innovation at the limits of their internal resources. In a system exceeding one hundred thousand components, that ceiling proved fatal. ASML’s modular approach allowed it to import cutting-edge physics by acquiring Cymer and investing in Zeiss, while distributing the risk to customers like Intel and TSMC. This strategy created a collective engine that outspent and outpaced every rival attempting to shoulder the burden alone.

This took a great deal of courage. ASML sank billions of dollars into the development and commercialization of EUV technology, with no guarantee that it would ever work. As late as the 2010s, many semiconductor experts doubted that the technology could be successfully commercialized. Now it is the most important technology in the world.

But ASML, and by extension the continent, cannot stand still. As ASML enjoys its place as an indispensable pillar in one of the world’s most important industries, others are working to create a new paradigm in chip technology. Moore’s Law probably doesn’t end here, and in a matter of years, five nanometers won’t be small enough.

Neil Hacker runs partnerships at Isometric. Follow him on Twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The first wave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trouble ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The original sin of British nuclear?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tipping point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Overreach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The chill

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

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

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

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

The premature death of UK nuclear?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Nationalization with Thatcherite characteristics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unlearning nuclear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The twilight of the technocrats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why fertility falls with age

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

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

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

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

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

Running out of eggs

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

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

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

Egg quality

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

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

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

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

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

The egg freezing and IVF journey

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

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

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

How many eggs can you expect per cycle?

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

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

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

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The practicalities of egg freezing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should you freeze your eggs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Japan’s railway companies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Railway-led urbanism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pricing driving

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

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

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

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

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

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

Privatization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regulation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The recipe for successful railways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A spice merchant’s solution

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

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

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

George Washington goes to war

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

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

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

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

Solving the sticky problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From ice to vapor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Premium instant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every crop we consume came from a wild ancestor. Through breeding, people selected for bigger grains, juicier fruit, more branches, or shorter stems – gradually turning wild plants into improved yet recognizable versions of their originals. The rare exception is Brassica oleracea, wild cabbage: the origin of cabbage, bok choy, collard greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and much else.

Wild cabbage is unassuming: some untidy leaves and a few thick, coarse stems on the browner side of purple that poke out from the soil. Nothing about it looks appetizing.

Nevertheless, many cultures have recognized something special in this plant. By selecting plants with denser layers of leaves, ancient people created modern cabbage and kale. Others bred for the inflorescence, a dense bundle of small flowers that forms the head of cauliflower and broccoli. By favoring large, edible buds, thirteenth-century farmers living around modern day Belgium created Brussels sprouts. Under different selection pressures, Brassica oleracea has become German kohlrabi, or Chinese gai lan, or East African collard greens.

This level of morphological diversity is unusual. Modern tomatoes, for example, vary in size, shape, and color, but are all recognizably tomatoes. Since the 1920s, scientists have worked to understand how Brassica oleracea was domesticated and to deepen our knowledge of evolution and artificial selection.

By combining modern genetics, genomics, and molecular biology with linguistic, historical, and sociological sources, researchers are now beginning to develop conclusive answers.

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Cabbage architecture

Domesticating a plant means prioritizing certain structures over others. Wheat shoots are completely inedible, so farmers have bred plants to focus on their grain. Modern wheat typically grows to around waist height; a few hundred years ago it was closer to head height. These shorter, modern wheat ears also produce more and larger grains than ancient species.

Whereas other plants have a single most useful element, such as the grains of wheat or the fruit of tomatoes, wild cabbage has many. Although people didn’t know about it until the twentieth century, Brassicas are high in fiber and micronutrients like calcium, iron, and vitamin A.

Genetic sequencing has shown that kale is the modern Brassica oleracea crop most closely related to wild cabbage. Early farmers likely started by selecting plants with the largest or most palatable leaves and replanting their seeds. By around 400 BC, after hundreds of generations of selection, the plants became more extremified. This resulted in modern kale, composed almost entirely of leaf, but with little in the way of shoots, buds, or inflorescences. Later, farmers focused instead on buds or stalks. By the time written records appeared, we had already inherited most of the main categories of brassica cultivated by our ancestors.

A plant’s above-ground architecture develops from a group of cells called the shoot apical meristem. These stem cells generate every part of the plant’s structure above the soil. Whether they become shoots, leaves, or inflorescences is determined by the meristem’s stage of life. In the earlier vegetative stage, the stem cells produce leaves, while in the later reproductive stage, they grow into inflorescences. This is why no one has bred a plant that has the leaves of a cabbage and the head of a broccoli.

When ancient humans selected for certain architectures, they were really altering the movement between these stages, selecting for longer in the vegetative or reproductive stages.

Cabbage genomics

In the last few years, genomics has offered an explanation for Brassica oleracea’s unusual adaptability. Ancient wild cabbages underwent a process called polyploidy. Humans are diploid, meaning that we usually have two copies of each of our 23 chromosomes. Many cabbage varieties are triploid or even more complex.

The more polyploid a species, the greater its capacity for gradual evolution. For haploid species like ants, which have a single chromosome set, mutations routinely result in certain death. Diploid species, like humans, can tolerate more genetic experimentation. A single mutation in both copies of HBB causes sickle cell anemia, but the same mutation in a single copy of the gene can confer greater resistance to malaria. Triploid plants, with multiple backups of every gene, take this even further. Harmful mutations are masked by healthy copies, reducing risk while allowing much richer genetic diversity than would otherwise be possible.

Polyploidy sets the stage for our Brassica oleracea varieties, but someone had to push wild populations to create more leaves, buds, or inflorescences to create the crops we know today.

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Cabbage archeology

Archeological evidence of Brassica oleracea domestication goes back thousands of years. Fossilized samples of wild and early domesticated varieties can be found across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Domesticated Brassica oleracea reached China around the seventh century, and by the eighth it had been bred into an early form of gai lan, or Chinese white kale.

But like genomics, traditional archeological methods don’t tell us where Brassica oleracea originates. Our earliest samples of cabbage seeds date to around the sixth century BC, but no clear evidence supports their cultivation prior to the fourth. No pottery with biological residue suggests the cooking of cabbage, nor do contemporary illustrations depict anything resembling them. Fossilized seeds are difficult to classify: samples are just as likely to be turnip or canola as they are to be Brassica oleracea.

As a result, researchers have turned to linguistic methods. Unlike ancient Egyptian, Celtic, or Fertile Crescent cultures, Latin and Greek sources include frequent references to ‘caulis’ or ‘krombe’ respectively, which likely refer to early forms of domesticated kales and cabbages. Ancient Greek texts are particularly rich: they include recipes, myths about cabbages growing from the sweat of Zeus, commonly used idioms such as ‘μὰ τὴν κράμβην’ (roughly translating to ‘by the cabbages!’), and a wide variety of synonyms.

Literary analysis also supports the theory that the first domesticated varieties initially focused on the leaves, as Ancient Greek distinguishes between distinct wild, curly-leaved, and smooth-leaved varieties.

Assuming that Greeks in the Hellenistic period had cabbages, ecologists modeled the potential range of Brassica oleracea based on the predicted climate of ancient Italy and Greece between the fourth and second centuries BC. This narrowed down the likely range to the coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea.

So wild cabbages were probably first domesticated into leafy vegetables in ancient Greece, before being spread to around the Mediterranean, then northern Europe and Asia (probably by the Romans). Their genetic makeup made them highly adaptable, allowing new varieties and new feral populations to emerge wherever they were introduced.

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What’s next for cabbages

Cabbage’s adaptability, which once allowed it to produce such a wide variety of useful crops, will make it equally valuable in the future. Many of the varietal differences may have first arisen as the plant adapted to new climates. Brussels sprouts not only look distinct from broccoli but thrive in cooler climates, such as those in Belgium rather than the Mediterranean.

Wild populations must survive on their own, without irrigation, fertilizer, or pesticides. These varieties are naturally more resilient to climate change and to pests. By studying the differences between these feral cabbages and their cultivated relatives, we might identify ways to improve today’s plants. Most of broccoli’s genetic diversity resides in landraces, uncommon varieties found in a localized area and not grown as part of industrialized global agriculture. These varieties could hold countless useful alleles that could be bred back into modern crops.

The evolution of cabbages reflects our own history: how human culture has reshaped a wild coastal plant into a family of vegetables that now feed billions. As climate, culture, and technology change, so will the cabbages we grow. And like the farmers of the past, we’ll keep sculpting them one generation at a time.

Alex Wakeman is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leeds. You can follow him on Twitter here.

From the beginning, it was clear – in this case the beginning was 2nd December 1942, the day the first man-made nuclear reactor was nudged to criticality in a squash court beneath the west stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field and, incidentally, the first day of wartime gasoline rationing – that the fissioning atom radiated heat energy and that such energy might, in the fullness of time, be applied to make electricity for power. Fifteen years would pass before nuclear electricity was generated in any quantity in the United States. That is rapid development or surprising delay, depending upon one’s perspective, but the fact is that, despite its imposing technical lead in nuclear matters, the United States did not arrive first at the production of commercial nuclear power. Great Britain did. On a smaller scale, even the Soviet Union preceded us. The reasons are intriguing. How the United States contrived to get back into the nuclear power business is instructive. ‘There are overtones in this development’, wrote the physicist and statesman J Robert Oppenheimer in 1957, ‘that have been absent in power developments in other respects not wholly beyond comparison, such as the diesel engine and the gas turbine: overtones of pride and terror, of mystery and hope’. There are still such overtones today.

Atoms in war and peace

Enrico Fermi’s first ‘atomic pile’, literally a flattened spherical pile of graphite blocks plugged with cylinders of purified natural uranium, radiated heat equivalent to some two hundred watts of electricity, no more. The dark, dirty mechanism, its emergency quenching system three young men crouched on top of the last layer of graphite, up under the ceiling, balancing buckets of cadmium solution, was designed to prove that a reactor would work, and it barely did – so barely that it required no cooling system and no shielding. It was simplicity itself. The graphite served as a sort of physical catalyst; the uranium did the work.

Uranium purified from ore consists of two isotopes – variant physical forms – in the proportions in which they are found today in nature: U 235, bomb material, an unstable substance continually undergoing radioactive decay, to the extent of seven parts per thousand; and U 238, stable ‘ordinary’ uranium, the preponderant balance. U 235 atoms spontaneously eject neutrons from their nuclei as they decay; collisions with atoms of a suitable moderator can slow some of those neutrons sufficiently to allow other uranium atoms to capture them and, in so doing, to fission; in fissioning – splitting – some of the matter of the uranium is converted into energy in the awesome proportions of Einstein’s famous formula. The fissioning of one uranium atom, minuscule though it is, produces enough energy to make a grain of sand visibly jump.

It happens that the average number of neutrons emitted by a decaying atom of U 235 is slightly more than one. This happenstance suggested, to Fermi and his colleagues, that in a sufficiently ‘massive’ assembly of natural uranium and moderator, each decaying atom might fission at least one other atom, and some decaying atoms might fission two. The result then might be a chain reaction of fission events that would be self-sustaining and controllable. A control mechanism – rods of some neutron-absorbing material – might be pulled out of the pile to allow the chain reaction to begin and to continue and be pushed into the pile to slow or stop it. In Chicago, in 1942, Fermi proved such speculations correct.

The goal of Fermi’s reactor work was not to produce energy. It was, immediately, to prove the chain reaction, and subsequently to devise a machine that could make bomb material. U 235 is excellent bomb material, but it is extremely difficult to separate from U 238 because the two isotopes are chemically identical. Theory indicated that a reactor could be used to transmute ordinary U 238 into an entirely new, man-made element that would also serve for bombs: plutonium. And plutonium, chemically different, might be efficiently separated chemically from its parent, uranium.

Theory proved, again, correct. Fermi’s modest Stagg Field pile was the immediate forerunner of the truly massive uranium-graphite reactors built at Hanford, Washington, in the midst of the Second World War, for the production of plutonium. The Hanford reactors radiated so much heat that they were cooled by diverting a considerable portion of the Columbia River through them, raising the river’s temperature by measurable degrees downstream. But they were no more designed for power production than was Fermi’s first pile. They wasted copious quantities of heat, but their temperature was inefficiently low. In power production, the greater the temperature differential, the greater the efficiency.

The peaceful atom got short shrift in wartime. Every effort of the secret Manhattan Project was bent to making bombs. Yet some took notice. In 1944, anticipating the end of the war, General Leslie R Groves of the US Corps of Engineers, the man who commanded the bomb building, convened a committee of experts chaired by Dean RC Tolman of the California Institute of Technology to assess the atom’s postwar prospects. The Tolman Committee thought atomic energy would lend itself to three areas of development: power, weapons, and scientific tools. It recommended to the War Department that the United States pursue atomic power ‘for the propulsion of naval vessels’. It was pessimistic about the prospects of commercial power. ‘The development of fission piles solely for the production of power for ordinary commercial use’, it found, ‘does not appear economically sound nor advisable from the point of view of preserving national resources’.

There matters stood until some years after the war – necessarily, given the times. The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki came off the bottom of the bin. More were at least weeks away from fabrication and delivery. The Japanese understandably chose not to call our bluff. Immediately after the war, then, and into at least the early 1950s, almost the entire US production of uranium and plutonium was dedicated to weapons. In 1953 US atomic energy facilities busy making weaponry consumed no less than 2.5 percent of the total national electricity supply. Some of the urgency, not to say the hysteria, of those years around 1950, when the Soviet Union was testing atomic bombs and we were scrambling to build a thermonuclear weapon of any, even of inefficient, design, resulted from our sense of not having stockpiled enough. The ‘national resources’ that the Tolman Committee sought to preserve were the bomb materials that a mere power reactor would burn. The balance of terror was hardly understood and had not yet been struck.

Evidence on this point is scarce but not lacking. Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1950 to 1953, wrote suggestively in his 1953 book Report on the Atom, ‘As a result of this cold war [with the Soviet Union] and this armaments race, the American atomic energy program has been largely a weapons program carried on in secrecy and with the utmost urgency’. Comparable statements might be adduced. Most convincing is an event that led directly to the notorious 1954 Oppenheimer security investigation: that is, the 1949 recommendation by the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, of which Oppenheimer was then chairman, that the United States not proceed with H-bomb development, a recommendation President Harry S Truman pointedly ignored. The General Advisory Committee, made up of eminent scientists, wasn’t pacifist and hadn’t gone daft. It simply understood that the inefficient H-bomb design then at hand would use up too much precious bomb material for its trigger – bomb material still in relatively short supply, bomb material that the committee believed could be put to better use diversifying the nation’s existing atomic arsenal.

As we were short of fissile materials in the years immediately after the Second World War, so were we short of facilities and personnel. Civilians at Chicago, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge, confined to their posts during the war, swarmed back to wherever they had come from, and it was all the lame-duck Manhattan Engineering District could do to hold its atomic energy operations together. Scientists especially left the quasi-military organization they had served at Los Alamos. Some of their pent-up resentment at its restrictions, and perhaps also some of their guilt, was channeled into the battle royal waging in Washington in the winter of 1945–46 over the issue of civilian versus military control of the atom.

The result of that battle was the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. That remarkable act made atomic energy in all its manifestations an absolute monopoly of the US government. All discoveries concerning atomic energy were to be considered ‘born’ secret – counted secret until formally declassified – and the penalty for divulging atomic secrets was life imprisonment or death. All fissile materials became the property of the US government, as beached whales once became the property of kings. No one might build or operate a reactor except under government contract, nor might such devices be privately owned. Authority over atomic energy was vested in a commission of civilians, the Atomic Energy Commission, responsible to the President – ‘the most totalitarian governmental commission in the history of the country’, one historian has called it. Proponents of the bill that became the Atomic Energy Act had argued that atomic energy was too important to be left in the hands of the military. It apparently was also too important to be conveyed into the hands of the public.

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A thing to send home

Some modest efforts toward designing a power reactor had begun at Oak Ridge in 1944. Dr Farrington Daniels of the University of Wisconsin conceived of a high-temperature reactor assembled from natural uranium and graphite and cooled by either helium or liquid bismuth. Planning for a pilot model continued immediately after the war. The Daniels pile was never built, but it figured indirectly in the subsequent development of nuclear power. The Navy dispatched a hot-headed, forty-five-year-old career officer to Oak Ridge to study it, and Captain Hyman George Rickover took up the reactor trade.

Technically more important was a curious research reactor built at Los Alamos in the winter of 1943–44. It consisted of uranium densely in solution with less than four gallons of ordinary water; the resulting soup was contained in a stainless-steel sphere some 12 inches in diameter. The uranium used in this homogenous reactor had been ‘enriched’ by differential separation of its isotopes from .07 to 15 percent U 235 (and in a later experiment, to 88 percent). The enriched uranium was far more efficient for chain reaction than natural uranium – making the reactor far more compact – and enriched uranium would be thereafter the material of choice for US reactors of every kind. Canada began building reactors of natural uranium and heavy water, Great Britain of natural uranium and graphite; the United States ultimately chose enriched uranium and light – ordinary – water, and in this way also, power initially would compete with weapons for the existing uranium supply.

If bombs had clear priority to supplies, it was also true that no one was much interested in nuclear power in the first years after the war except the Air Force and the Navy. Nuclear power for aircraft (which fortunately never flew) or for naval vessels might be valuable at almost any price, but nuclear power for the commercial production of electricity simply wasn’t economical. No one knew yet precisely what such electricity might cost, but anyone in the power industry could see that it was likely to cost more than the four to eight mills per kilowatt hour (a mill is a tenth of a cent) that was typical of nonnuclear electricity in the Eastern United States.

Yet power enthusiasts in Congress grew restless. Cheap electricity from the atom (as they imagined it) was something they could send home. The Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, slowly becoming aware of its unusually broad mandate not only to propose legislation but also to monitor and control, met in extended hearings on the state of the atomic energy program in 1948 and wasn’t happy with what it found. ‘The Joint Committee believes’, it complained, ‘that reactor development should proceed with all possible speed, and disappointment therefore follows from the reflection that, in two and a half years [since the creation of the AEC], the Commission has not broken ground on a single new-type high-power reactor’.

The AEC took heed. Early in 1949 it established a Division of Reactor Development. It began carving out a National Reactor Testing Station from the barrens of Idaho. It authorized an experimental breeder reactor – a reactor that would breed more plutonium than it would burn uranium – to be built there, along with a materials-testing reactor to study the effects of radiation on the materials from which reactors might be built, a necessary step to large-scale power production. Most significantly, and out of character with these other experimental projects, it directed Westinghouse in Pittsburgh to begin work on a seagoing power reactor for submarines. The instigator of the Submarine Thermal Reactor project was Hyman Rickover, of course, operating out of his own hip pocket from a special-assistant position within the Navy’s cavernous Bureau of Ships. Busy making bombs, the AEC had wanted no immediate part of building nuclear submarines. Nine months of Rickover’s carefully orchestrated prodding moved the commission to relent.

If any single person has contributed more than any other to the uneasy nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that passes for nuclear truce, that person is the American engineer and naval officer Hyman Rickover, because Rickover was largely responsible for the submarines that constitute our most invulnerable picket line of nuclear deterrence. Such is commonly known. Less commonly known is this: Rickover was also largely responsible for the founding technology of US commercial nuclear power. He personally directed the building of the first nuclear submarines; he personally directed the building of the first large-scale civilian power reactor.

Rickover was born in Russia in 1900. His father was a tailor who emigrated with his family to the United States, to Chicago, in 1906. Young Rickover worked his way through high school as a Western Union messenger. A congressman arranged his appointment to Annapolis, from which he graduated in 1922. He served on a destroyer, then on a battleship. He took a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Columbia. He attended submarine school at the old age of twenty-nine and served on submarines. In 1937 he was awarded a coveted ‘Engineering Duty Only’ billet within the Navy, a position that corresponds to appointment to the Army’s Corps of Engineers.

As an EDO, Rickover advanced rapidly in responsibility. In 1939 he was assigned to head a small technical branch within the Bureau of Ships, the Electrical Section, which was responsible for improving the design of the Navy’s shipboard electrical equipment. He consolidated, simplified, strengthened, and renewed. Out of channels, he put into production a $12 million electrical mine-sweeping system that the Navy only later discovered it needed. He supervised the development of sonar. More conventionally talented engineers who worked with him said that he often gave the wrong reasons for doing what he did but that his technical instincts were almost infallible. He reorganized the Navy’s main supply depot in wartime, reducing the turnaround time for parts orders from months to days. At the end of the war he oversaw the mothballing of the Pacific fleet. And then, after the war, when the invitation to participate in the development of the Daniels pile came from Oak Ridge, he convinced his superiors to send him, and he went. He learned quickly. He was single-minded. He saw that the Daniels pile would be too large to fit into the hull of a submarine and lost interest in it forthwith. He went back to Washington in the summer of 1947 and set to work prodding the Navy and the AEC.

Westinghouse initially was awarded $830,000 to begin designing the reactor system for a nuclear submarine. The immediate question that faced the designers was what kind of reactor they should build. One of Rickover’s assistants, Lieutenant Commander Louis H Roddis, proposed a system he had first read about a year earlier in a report by physicist Alvin M Weinberg. Weinberg, writes a Rickover biographer, ‘had based his report in part on experiments and in part on conversations with Enrico Fermi’. By 1949, AEC scientists had studied a number of different reactor configurations: cores of natural uranium, enriched uranium, plutonium, in metallic form, in oxide form, in solution; moderators of graphite, heavy water, light water, paraffin; unmoderated reactors; coolant systems using water, air, helium, carbon dioxide, liquid sodium, and oil.

The reactor Roddis proposed would consist of plates of highly enriched uranium moderated by light water – the same materials (the uranium in different form) as those used in the Los Alamos homogenous reactor of 1944. The water would serve not only as a moderator but also as a coolant and a heat-transfer medium. It would circulate among the plates of enriched uranium and then through a heat exchanger. A separate water system, also circulating through the heat exchanger, would serve to make steam. The reactor water would be pressurized. Under pressure, it could be heated to efficient, high temperatures – 500 degrees Fahrenheit or more – without boiling away. Control rods would dampen the reaction. The complete mechanism would be compact enough to fit into the hull of a new submarine much larger than the diesel submarines of the war. The reactor would require no oxygen to operate; and with an oxygen generator for the crew, the submarine would be able to cruise the oceans of the world for months, completely submerged and without refueling.

The pressurized water reactor worked, as we know. In August, 1951, the Navy awarded a contract to the Electric Boat Company of Groton, Connecticut, for construction of a nuclear-powered submarine. On 14th June 1952, Harry Truman began the laying of the keel, noting that ‘widespread use of atomic power is still years away’ and remarking on the ‘paradox that most of our progress toward the peaceful application of atomic energy has come under the pressure of military necessity’. On 21st January 1954, Mamie Eisenhower launched the nuclear-powered Nautilus with a bottle of champagne. Rickover, now an admiral after a nasty battle with the conservative admirals of the Navy’s selection boards, was already busy elsewhere. The first, demonstration-scale civilian nuclear power station was abuilding. ‘The Navy’s project is the basis of the country’s infant atomic industry’, said a congressman fighting the Navy for Rickover’s promotion. ‘When civilian power comes, it will be a by-product of the Navy’s work’.

The events and decisions that led to the commissioning of America’s first large-scale civilian power reactor were complicated. A chronology clarifies:

June 1950: Charles Thomas, president of Monsanto, writes the AEC: ‘It is proposed that American industry design, construct and operate one or more atomic power plants with its own capital’. Similar proposals follow from other firms – utilities and would-be reactor manufacturers – during the year.

January 1951: The AEC issues a general invitation to industry to conduct design studies.

April 1952: Following the recommendation of its Industrial Advisory Group, the AEC invites industry to a second round of studies. 30 companies ultimately participate at their own expense. During the same month, the AEC authorizes Westinghouse, Rickover’s prime reactor contractor, to begin designing a new, larger pressurized water reactor (PWR) for the nuclear propulsion of aircraft carriers.

Late 1952: The AEC, under its chairman, Gordon Dean, begins a review of its nuclear power policies. It inserts proposals into the last, lame-duck Truman administration budget for an enriched-uranium, graphite, and sodium power reactor, for a land-based prototype of the Westinghouse aircraft carrier PWR, and for a nuclear-powered aircraft.

20th January 1953: Dwight D Eisenhower is inaugurated the 34th President of the United States.

Early 1953: Eisenhower’s budget men cut the AEC’s Navy, Air Force, and civilian reactor proposals from their new, leaner Republican budget.

Early 1953: Stung, the AEC and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy double-team the House Appropriations Committee to restore some sort of nuclear power project. Congress allows the AEC to spend up to $7 million of previously appropriated funds on what it takes to be the nation’s best immediate shot: a land-based version of Westinghouse’s aircraft carrier PWR. Rickover takes the helm.

June–July 1953: the JCAE conducts a series of hearings into ‘atomic energy for peacetime power’. The AEC’s policy statement is ready. It proposes ‘that now is the time to announce a positive policy designed to recognize the development of economic nuclear power as a national objective . . . to promote and encourage free competition and private investment . . . It would be a major setback to the position of this country in the world to allow its present leadership in nuclear power development to pass out of its hands’. Public versus private power is debated at length during the hearings – by now, US taxpayers have invested some $12 billion in atomic energy for peace and war – conservatives insisting on private ownership, liberals looking to protect the public investment. ‘Though the profits will be drained off’, The New Republic worries in an editorial contemporary with the hearings, ‘the taxpayers will continue to pay the costs and bear the risks’.

22nd October 1953: The Atomic Energy Commission announces that an AEC-owned demonstration power plant of 60,000 kilowatts will be built at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, jointly by Westinghouse Electric Corporation and Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Light Company under the direction of Rickover’s Naval Reactor Group, the latter wearing its reversible AEC hat.

Westinghouse’s participation in the PWR demonstration project is self-evident; the participation of a medium-sized private utility, Duquesne Light, needs explanation .Duquesne’s surprising reason for bidding emphasizes the very different national attitude toward nuclear power at that time and parallels arguments that were forthcoming again in the 1980s as the nation reconsidered expanding the use of coal.

Philip A Fleger was chairman of Duquesne’s board of directors in 1953. Now retired, he remembers the Shippingport project well. The basic reason Duquesne went nuclear, he says, was pollution control.

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The fear of the atom disappeared from the minds of the people

Pittsburgh, once the ‘Smoky City’, had begun urban redevelopment in the late 1940s, instituting strict smoke control. By the time the AEC solicited bids from private industry for the PWR project, sulfur oxide controls were also in the offing in the Pittsburgh area, well ahead of the rest of the nation. Duquesne was petitioning to build a coal-fired power plant on the Allegheny River, and citizens of the area were resisting. ‘We encountered a great deal of harassment and delay from objectors’, Fleger told me recently. ‘It began to look as if we wouldn’t be able to complete the plant in time to meet the power demands we were facing’.

The Atomic Energy Commission’s PWR project came along and it looked like a godsend: no expensive precipitators for smoke control, no expensive scrubbers for sulfur oxide control, 60,000 kilowatts of peak-load power, and a leg up on nuclear power technology. Nuclear power was conceived then, as it is being touted again today, as power without pollution. It pollutes, of course, but the pollution takes the form of radioactive waste, which, unless there is an accident, does not escape into the air.

The economics of the PWR project also looked promising. ‘Very early on’, Fleger remembers, ‘we set up some lectures on atomic energy. When the AEC invited bids, we were very much interested and quite well aware of the possibilities. The AEC specified that the bidder should indicate what it was prepared to do in, one, providing a site, two, providing the conventional portion of the plant, and three, making some financial contribution to the building of the nuclear portion of the plant. I remember this so well: we saw that this would probably offer the only opportunity an electric utility company would have to bid on a nuclear power plant on a closed-end basis. I realized that at this stage of the art it would be very difficult for any company to foresee the ultimate cost of the project. But here we could negotiate a contract and know there’d be a ceiling on cost’.

Duquesne already owned 271 acres of flatland beside the Ohio River at the village of Shippingport, 38 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, near the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. The company bought 237 acres more, creating a relatively isolated site of three quarters of a square mile. It proposed to build the necessary structures for a nuclear power plant, to install a 100,000-kilowatt turbogenerator to produce electricity from reactor-heated steam, and to put up the equivalent in manpower and services of $5 million toward the reactor’s cost. The $5 million, says Stanley Schaffer, Duquesne’s president in the 1980s and the person responsible in the mid-1950s for the Shippingport reactor test program, ‘was more or less equivalent to the cost of the boiler plant we would have had to buy if the power system had been conventional instead of nuclear’.

The AEC liked Duquesne’s bid. It liked Duquesne’s location in the same city as the Westinghouse facility where the reactor would be designed and built. It received ten bids. Duquesne’s was by far the best, and the AEC accepted it.

While Rickover, Westinghouse, and Duquesne began work on their demonstration project, the nation wrestled with its atomic power policies. Two lines of issue developed independently in the mid-1950s; quickly enough, as issues do, they frayed together into a common plait. One was public versus private power. The other was the metaphysical yet strategically important question of the United States’s standing before the nations of the world.

We had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world was still horrified. Since then we had confined our atomic energy program, so far as most of the world could see, to cranking out thousands upon thousands of atomic bombs. The British, in the meantime, were well along toward a working power reactor fueled with natural uranium, the sort of machine that other, nonnuclear nations might buy or hope to build. The Soviets also had announced a power-reactor program. We looked, or feared we looked, like capitalist warmongers to foreign eyes.

Further, we wanted to shore up Western Europe, which already was beginning to feel the energy pinch, against any encroachments from the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. ‘A substantial American effort on behalf of nuclear power development in Western Europe makes sense’, wrote a contemporary scholar of international affairs, Klaus Knorr, ‘for this region is badly in need of more energy and of depending as little as possible on Arabian oil’. Yes, even then.

At the same time, American industry had learned enough about nuclear power to understand that, while it wouldn’t immediately be economical in the United States, it was probably already competitive with non-nuclear power in Western Europe and Japan. There was a lucrative foreign market opening; firms like Westinghouse and General Electric were eager to compete, but they were forbidden to do so by the terms of the 1946 Atomic Energy Act.

Dwight Eisenhower proposed to regain the high ground. His administration meant to stop public power, nuclear and non-nuclear, in its tracks, and turn the matter of power generation over to business. More personally, Eisenhower the military man wanted to be known as a peacemaker. Responding to an invitation from United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, he left an important summit conference in Bermuda to address the United Nations General Assembly on 8th December 1953; his speech that day came to be known as ‘Atoms for Peace’.

Eisenhower being Eisenhower, ‘something of an artist in iron’ as he once coyly translated his German name, he first told the General Assembly just how awesome was America’s nuclear supremacy, concluding meaningfully that ‘atomic weapons have virtually achieved conventional status within our armed services’. He spoke with gloom of ‘two atomic colossi . . . doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world’. And then, white rabbits from a white hat, he proposed ‘to hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds of people’ by participating in the creation of an International Atomic Energy Agency to which all nuclear nations would contribute stocks of ‘normal uranium and fissionable materials’. That would be, he thought, a kind of disarmament without the necessity of on-site inspection. ‘A special purpose’ of such an agency, he said, ‘would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world’.

Atoms for Peace caused a stir – any proposal to slow the breakneck arms race did in those days – but nothing very specific came of it. Henry DeWolf Smyth, the American scientist and AEC commissioner, would note in Foreign Affairs in 1956 that ‘in the nearly three years that have elapsed since [Eisenhower’s] speech, its principles have been reaffirmed but it can hardly be said to have been put into effect’. Atoms for Peace did, however, encourage Congress, industry, and the press to consider nuclear power, and notably private nuclear power, as peaceful, patriotic, and benevolent.

Finally, and briefly, the private power industry understood that if it didn’t get its marching orders soon, government outfits like TVA would occupy the field. It pushed Congress that much harder.

Out of the Joint Committee hearings of summer 1953; out of the Eisenhower administration’s conviction that private enterprise could do the job, whatever the job might be, better than public authority; out of Eisenhower’s vision of nuclear swords melted into a pool of plowshares; out of yet more hearings, closed and open, in 1954, Congress forged a new Atomic Energy Act. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 allowed private industry to own and operate reactors (but not yet own fissile materials – that liberalization came later). It loosened the stranglehold of AEC security. To collect liberal support, it prohibited the AEC from subsidizing any private projects for purposes more commercial than research and development. Through various legal and technical arrangements, it encouraged private marketing activities abroad. A General Electric executive summarized the new act simply: by its provisions, he wrote, ‘The Government monopoly created by the 1946 Act was substantially broken’.

Waving a magic wand – a neutron source – over a transmitter in Denver, Colorado, where he was recovering from a heart attack, President Eisenhower activated an automatic bulldozer in Shippingport to turn the first dirt for the new power plant on Labor Day, 6th September 1954. Excavation and building began in earnest the following spring. Work progressed smoothly. ‘We are able to do our work with few letters and no fuss’, Rickover told the Joint Committee. ‘There has never been a single letter written between the Commission and the Duquesne Light Company since the contract was signed with them. It has never been necessary’. Rickover would arrive at the site from Washington in the evening or late on a Friday afternoon, to keep his managers worrying nights and weekends. ‘There was a motto down here’, Duquesne president Stanley Schaffer remembers, ‘that some of us who were the doers learned to hate – the Admiral’s motto, ‘“Full Power in Fifty-Seven”.’ Not everyone loved the admiral, but he got the job done.

It was no small task. The pressure vessel that would hold the reactor’s hot, radioactive core, 33 feet long and nine feet in diameter, half a foot thick, required two and a half years to fabricate. Westinghouse, Duquesne, the Navy, the AEC, and all their several contractors had to coordinate their efforts on and off the site. Uranium oxide would be used as a fuel in the PWR for the first time and had to be fabricated – it is essentially a ceramic – and clad. Zirconium would serve as cladding. Rickover’s group had stimulated a new industry to bring that exotic metal’s production up to the new nuclear industry’s demands. A byproduct of zirconium production was the excellent neutron absorber hafnium, and hafnium would serve for Shippingport’s control rods. Then there was the midget welder.

‘In building an atomic plant you spend a lot of time just looking for weak and leaky joints’, the Westinghouse project manager for Shippingport told a Saturday Evening Post writer. ‘One day an X-ray revealed a defect inside a bend of fifteen-inch pipe. It was a hard place to get at. We considered dismantling the pipe, but that would have been costly as the devil in time and money. Then we learned of a firm in Georgia that hires out midget welders for just such jobs. They sent us one who was just thirty-nine inches tall, and he crawled into the pipe and made a good solid repair’. The plant needed solidity. Water would be pumped through the reactor core at 45,000 gallons per minute, water pressurized to 2,000 pounds per square inch. The core was a hybrid: 115 pounds of bomb-grade U 235 metal as ‘seed’ in plates at the center, ($1,000,500 worth of U 235 at $8,700 per pound) and 12 tons of natural uranium oxide in rods blanketed around.

Rickover sounded testy toward the end, early in 1957, before the Joint Committee came out to Pittsburgh to take a look. ‘I think we have babied a lot of people in this country too long with the glamour of atomic energy’, he told the Congressmen, ‘and I think as soon as possible we have got to get down to do it like any other business’. Someone made the mistake of asking him about the new, larger power reactors then being designed. They were supposed to be more efficient. Rickover sneered. ‘Any plant you haven’t built yet is always more efficient than the one you have built. This is obvious. They are all efficient when you haven’t done anything on them . . . in the talking stage. Then they are all efficient. They are all cheap. They are all easy to build, and none have any problems’.

He was candid about Shippingport’s problems. Costs had increased by at least 50 percent. People, he said, had the idea that reactors were ‘much further advanced than they are’. Their designers and builders lacked much of the necessary ‘basic technology’. The ‘reactor game’ hung ‘on a much more slender thread than most people are aware. There are a lot of things that can go wrong and it requires eternal vigilance. All we have to have is one good accident in the United States and it might set the whole game back for a generation’.

Shortly Shippingport was completed, in good time by any standard less rigorous than Rickover’s. ‘A little over two and a half years’, recalls Stanley Schaffer, ‘by comparison with today, which may be twelve to fourteen years from the time of a plant’s inception. I think it moved very expeditiously’.

The reactors of futures past

On 2nd December 1957, 15 years to the day after Fermi first operated his Stagg Field pile, Shippingport went ‘cold’ critical, meaning its operators ran the reactor for testing but not for power production. They cut in power on 18th December at 12.39am. By 3.00am the plant was producing more electricity than the 8,000 kilowatts it consumed. By seven in the morning it was generating 12,100 kilowatts. It would generate 20,000 kilowatts by that night and 60,000 within a few days. Budgeted at $47.7 million, it cost $84 million. Another $36 million went to reactor research and development. Shippingport electricity came to 55–60 mills per kilowatt-hour, although the AEC sold it to Duquesne at 8 mills, a figure that stood in for the equivalent charge Duquesne would have paid for conventional fuel. Democrats in Congress, reported The New York Times, ‘have been urging a government program for building atomic plants’, and so the AEC’s announcement of Shippingport’s coming on line emphasized its service to domestic power, missing a chance to score a ‘psychological triumph’ to offset ‘the Soviet satellite achievement’. Sputnik had achieved earth orbit 5th October 1957, two months before. Shippingport was ‘the world’s first full-scale atomic electric plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses’, the AEC announced. The qualified superlative exempted Great Britain’s 70,000-kilowatt power reactors at Calder Hall in Cumberland, England, the first in the world of any consequence, which made not only domestic electricity but also plutonium for British bombs.

The Shippingport reactor, custom-built without regard to cost, worked efficiently and well. It was in operation until 1989, having been converted in 1977 to an experimental light-water system that breeds yet another fissile isotope of uranium, U 233, from the common element thorium. It was never economical, nor was its pressurized-water design necessarily the best model for the US reactor industry to follow in scaling up to the behemoth 1,000-megawatt power reactors of today. ‘Most experts would say that [pressurized light-water reactors] are not the reactors of the future’, Henry Smythe remarked in Foreign Affairs in 1956, but they have been.

The private power industry signed on reluctantly after Shippingport, shocked by its demonstration of cost overruns. Through 1959 the AEC had spent $585 million to push nuclear power; industry, by contrast, had spent $82 million. The national demand fell short of the AEC’s early estimate of 900 Shippingports nationwide by the late 1960s, but nuclear power in 1981, under continued indirect government subsidy, accounted for some 12.8 percent of electrical capacity nationwide, and we consider it anew as an alternative to oil and a supplement to coal.

Atomic energy was debated from the beginning; it continues to be debated, and the debate has grown bitter. We have not yet made any lasting peace with its powers. We have not yet found a way to live with it or without it. Robert Oppenheimer, habitually an ironist, once called atomic energy ‘a somewhat tarnished symbol’. It is in truth a sort of Moby Dick among us, drawing hope and terror to its vast blankness like wounding harpoons.

Richard Rhodes is an author.

This article originally appeared in American Heritage in June 1981.

These reformers had faith that what their countries had achieved was far from the limit of what was possible. They aimed for abundance. Many actively believed in the system they were part of, and none sought to overthrow it. Instead, they aimed to write reports and build coalitions; to win the argument in seminars and side rooms, and then in the corridors of power. They often had the impression that they had done just that, only to watch as the system reverted to its original form. Perhaps what they mistook for agreement was actually a surface-level nod from those who had no intention, or no capacity, to carry reform through. Maybe the system absorbed their language but not their logic. Maybe the system was irredeemable and needed to be swept away. Or did the system know things the reformers didn’t?

Some of these questions are still open to interpretation. However, two clear conclusions emerge. People in communist countries, perhaps even more so than people in capitalist ones, really did not like inflation. Reforms that raised prices or lengthened queues had to be delivering very tangible benefits, very quickly, or else they risked instability. Second, successful reforms needed a broad coalition of winners, including the top leadership and a very large percentage of the population. Few reformers were able to deliver that.

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Freedom isn’t free

‘We shouldn’t put on colored glasses, and provoke people or find fault with them for allegedly supporting capitalist methods’, Kim Jong Un, December 2011, on tolerating advocates for economic reform.

‘Those who dispute the Party line and its policies should not have their leaves trimmed, but be ripped out at their roots’, Kim Jong Un, September 2012, referring to those who wanted to take economic reform further than he did.

Even discussing economic reform can pose dangers for authoritarian leaders. For their underlings, working out where the line between acceptable comradely debate and counter-revolutionary sabotage lies can be a matter of life and death. When Kim Jong Un assumed power in 2011, his top priority was improving living standards. He understood that achieving this required giving at least a small circle of policymakers more space to think and speak freely. This quickly caused problems. Younger cadres began comparing North Korea unfavorably with China, well aware of how much richer China was and which economic policies had led to this gap. For the Pyongyang elite, and for Kim himself, this was threatening. Though Kim continued to pursue limited reforms for several years, he quickly made clear where the boundaries lay.

This dilemma was not unique to North Korea. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Soviet leaders also encouraged economists to explore new methods, such as linear programming and input-output analysis. To shield their relative freedom, they were sent to the new scientific city of Akademgorodok in Siberia, far from Moscow. Distance allowed some experimentation, while reassuring the authorities that dangerous ideas were isolated thousands of miles from power.

Across communist states, economic liberalization has always implied a reduction of political control. When the market, not the state, provides food and housing, loyalty to the regime weakens. Protests on the scale of those in Tiananmen Square in 1989 would have been unimaginable without China’s ‘Reform and Opening’. It is impossible to understand the collapse of the Soviet political system without understanding the prior collapse of the Soviet economy. Communist leaders who embark on a path of reform increase their chances of leading a country that is economically strong. They also increase their chance of being shot in the head.

The price is wrong

‘You have no idea what the wrong price can do’, Premier of the Soviet Union Alexei Kosygin, in Red Plenty

Marx gave little guidance on how Communists should wield power. He imagined the Communist government would be easy to manage. Revolution would occur in advanced countries already brimming with abundance, not in Russia, China, or North Korea, societies of illiterate peasants that had barely begun the hard graft of industrialization. Yet he was clear about one thing: the labor theory of value. Market prices, he wrote, were a mirage concealing the true value of goods, which was derived from the amount of labor put into them. Communist planners, in theory, were to build prices on this foundation.

In practice, no price in the communist world was set this way. Prices were compromises between politics, economics, and inertia. The result was distortions everywhere: goods overproduced or scarce, resources misallocated, needs unmet. Yet Marx’s teachings armed reform’s opponents with a ready argument: prices that could adjust rapidly were ideological surrender.

Price stability also became part of communist identity and legitimacy. In China, hyperinflation had doomed the Nationalists. In Russia, World War I, the civil war, and a brief experiment with a post-money economy had collapsed the ruble until the Bolsheviks restored price stability with a gold-backed currency. From 1947 to 1948, Stalin went further. He announced the end of rationing, a currency reform, and price cuts. Further price cuts were launched every spring until 1954. These were partly underpinned by genuine productivity gains but were also a much propagandized ideological commitment that equated price cuts with progress. Citizens came to see stable and even falling prices as a right.

Reformers understood the problems and floated alternatives. Some designed elaborate new price systems, supposedly superior to the command economy and the market; others suggested computer systems that could replace the price system; others called for simple adjustments where supply and demand were furthest apart; a few even dared propose full marketization. Almost all failed.

The danger was not theoretical. In 1988, China’s leadership planned a sweeping liberalization of consumer prices, leaving only rice and bread prices under state control. Their slower reforms up to that point had created a ‘dual-track system’, which generated resentment as insiders enriched themselves by arbitraging between state and market prices. The proposed reform triggered panic buying, empty shelves, spiraling inflation, and is sometimes cited as a long-term cause of the Tiananmen Protests. The government retreated, reaffirming price controls and cutting investment to restore stability. Four years passed before they touched the live wire of price reform again.

The Soviet Union had learned the same lesson earlier. In 1962, aware that meat and dairy prices no longer covered costs, planners pushed for price increases. The Politburo agreed. Wages were trimmed at the same time. Protests erupted. In Novocherkassk, when a factory director told hungry workers to ‘eat cabbage’, demonstrations nearly swelled into insurrection. Khrushchev sent in troops. Dozens were killed. Academic economists would continue drawing up models of price reform until the USSR’s collapse. Many were always confused about why their ideas were never acted upon. Many likely didn’t hear of the Novocherkassk Massacre until after their country was gone.

Stable prices, it turned out, were a cornerstone of communist legitimacy. To touch them was to endanger the whole system.

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All of the right policies, but not necessarily in the right order

A factory manager is interviewing for a new accountant. He asks only one question: ‘What is two plus two?’ Candidate after candidate gives the wrong answer. Finally, the right man walks in. ‘What answer do you need?”’ asks the applicant. Old Soviet Joke

Alexei Kosygin was a technocrat determined to leave his mark. Tired of Khrushchev’s chaos and reckless schemes, he joined the bloodless coup that brought the old boss down and emerged as Premier of the Soviet Union. His message was clear: reforms were necessary if the economy was to regain initiative, efficiency, and profitability.

But after the trauma of Novocherkassk in 1962, Kosygin avoided touching prices. Instead, he latched onto the ideas of economist Evsei Liberman. Liberman promised a simple fix: stop judging enterprises by crude output targets and start rewarding them for profitability. Profits would be the yardstick, and managers would receive bonuses for hitting targets. By 1965, this ‘Liberman reform’ became official policy.

It didn’t work. With prices set administratively and customers guaranteed, profits reflected politics, not economics. Factory managers gamed the system. They invented ‘new’ products, almost identical to old ones, so that they could raise prices. They lobbied planners to let them charge more. Output shifted toward whatever goods produced the highest paper profits, unrelated to what people wanted. On paper, enterprises looked healthier than ever; in reality, productivity had not budged.

Worse, these distortions rippled through supply chains. An upstream plant chasing fake profits at fake prices might abandon the goods its downstream customers needed. Whole factories could be left idle. Some argue that bureaucratic ‘vested interests’ stopped these reforms from succeeding. However, the economist Kontorovich argues resistance from central ministries and Gosplan wasn’t just self interest. They recognized the reforms would destroy the whole system of central planning, with nothing to replace it. Their resistance prevented the reform from producing an outright economic crisis.

Kosygin correctly recognized a genuine problem: Soviet enterprise managers lacked both the incentives and the autonomy needed to improve performance. The logical place to begin was price reform, since only with more realistic prices could profitability reflect efficiency rather than distortions. But price reform was off the table.

That left enterprise reform as the available lever. Yet here Kosygin faced an impossible dilemma. If the reforms were too cautious, they would deliver no visible results and quickly lose momentum. If they were too bold, they risked undermining the fragile balance of the command economy. Kosygin chose to gamble on bold enterprise reform without first addressing prices. The result was that his program was both too disruptive to be absorbed smoothly and too incomplete to generate real improvements. It ended up achieving neither transformation nor stability, and quickly ran aground.

He was never purged, and his reforms were never officially rolled back. They were just undermined one ministerial directive at a time. His failure strengthened his colleague Brezhnev’s hand and discredited reform itself. It would be another 18 years before serious attempts were made again.

Ignorance isn’t always bliss

‘Analyses of “Gorbachev’s economists” never mention the words “charlatan” or “ignoramus”’, Vladimir Kontorovich.

‘You don’t know what you’re doing’, British sports chant.

Economic reformers thought they knew best, but often didn’t. Reforming an economy requires a lot of knowledge. In 1985, to better understand the market reforms they were contemplating, Chinese policymakers invited dozens of Western economists to give lectures on a five-day river cruise. North Korean academics have quietly written explanations for trade officials on how banks function in capitalist societies, hinting these institutions might one day be useful at home. Soviet officials in the late 1980s traveled back and forth to Europe and America almost constantly. The learning curve is steep.

Worse still, it is not clear that reformers fully understood their own systems. Planned economies can be almost as complex as market ones, but with far fewer people trained or incentivized to grasp them. In capitalist economies, there are entire professions, from academics to traders, devoted to understanding how markets work. In communist economies, expertise was confined to a small circle of planners. Secrecy made things worse: it may be that no one fully understood how the whole system fit together. When Gorbachev, still a Politburo member in 1983, asked to see the state budget, he was simply told ‘no’.

This ignorance had consequences. When he took power two years later, Gorbachev accidentally destroyed a system he may not have even known existed and certainly didn’t understand: Beznal. In the Soviet Union, enterprises kept two accounts. Nal (paper cash) was used by households for consumer purchases and by enterprises for paying wages. Beznal (noncash rubles) was used for transactions between enterprises, buying supplies, selling goods, and settling debts. Crucially, enterprises had strict limits on the amount of Nal they could hold. Excess cash had to be deposited in banks, converted into Beznal, and thus quarantined from the consumer economy.

This firewall mattered. It kept excess money trapped in enterprise accounts, preventing it from competing with citizens’ wages for scarce consumer goods. Enterprises could not convert Beznal back into Nal without explicit authorization. In effect, the system stored inflation out of sight.

Gorbachev tore down the wall by accident. His new law on private cooperatives allowed them to convert freely between Beznal and Nal. Enterprises quickly realized they could make fake Beznal transactions with cooperatives, which would convert the funds into cash and hand most of it back, keeping a cut for themselves. Suddenly, vast amounts of hidden money entered the everyday economy.

Cash-rich state enterprises spent freely on wages, while goods remained scarce. In sectors without price controls, inflation ran rampant. In those with controls, shortages and queues grew longer. Later changes to banking rules made things even worse, as new banks failed to enforce the Nal and Beznal distinction at all.

It is still unclear whether Gorbachev and his closest advisers understood the system they had demolished. But their blunder shows how reformers, blinded by secrecy and complexity, could unleash forces they neither anticipated nor controlled.

Is communism really so bad?

‘Comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society’, Chinese Communist Party slogan.

The Soviet Union was not a poor country. While far behind Western Europe and North America, it was firmly middle-income, with living standards far above most of the world. And it paired those living standards with genuine excellence in nuclear and space technology, an enormous army that kept up with the United States until the very end of the Cold War, and an elite with world-class education. That prosperity created a problem: reform carried real risks. Elites had much to lose, and even ordinary citizens feared the disruption of hard-won stability. In today’s North Korea, though much poorer, a privileged elite in Pyongyang thrives under the system, and reform would not only strip them of status but could threaten their lives.

Communist reform was easier where planning was never consolidated. China in the 1970s and Vietnam in the 1980s both launched reforms when their systems were weak, not entrenched. Vietnam’s ‘Đổi Mới’ reforms began in 1986, after decades of war and a single failed nationwide five-year plan. Most Vietnamese lived on less than a dollar a day. In China, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution had devastated both planning and the party elite. By 1976, many leaders had survived exile and persecution, and they knew firsthand how poor rural China was. Stable planned communism had existed for at most 10 of the 27 years of the Communist era when Reform and Opening began.

Where planning worked well enough, as in the USSR, it created vested interests that blocked reform. Where it failed to take root, as in China and Vietnam, there was little to lose and much to gain.

Where is that abundance you promised?

Every communist reformer promised abundance. Yet again and again, their reforms faltered, not because they lacked ideas, but because they underestimated the scale of the task. Prices became untouchable symbols of legitimacy; the wrong sequence of reforms shattered fragile balances; leaders tinkered with systems they barely understood; elites and ordinary people who had something to lose quietly strangled change. The result was not abundance but frustration, fear, and eventually collapse.

For political movements today, the warning is not that we live under a command economy, but that winning the argument, as we are in many countries, is never enough. Systems push back. Interests entrench. Complexity hides consequences from those who think they know best. Good ideas, launched in the wrong order, can backfire.

That is why the stories of communist reform matter. If we want to reach the frontier of abundance, we must do more than draft clever reports or whisper in the ear of the powerful. We must understand the order of reform, the risks of backlash, and the realities of the systems we hope to change. We must deliver quick wins to build momentum and develop a coalition that gains at least the acquiescence of the most powerful and the masses. And perhaps most importantly, we need to make sure that prices don’t go up.

Michael Hill is a policy researcher at Britain Remade. You can follow him on Twitter.

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In the 1930s in the Upper Nile region of what is now South Sudan, anthropologist EE Evans-Pritchard met a Nuer woman sitting by a thatched hut with her children. In the distance, the father of her children tended the cattle. They looked like an ordinary family. But this man was not her husband. The Nuer woman was married to a ghost, and her children were officially the children of this ghost.

Among the Nuer, if a man died without leaving any heirs his kinsmen would find him a wife, in order for his name to live on. They worried that otherwise his ghost would grow restless, haunting and bringing sickness upon them. ‘A ghost likes to think of people asking, “whose son is that?” and being told in reply that it is the son of so-and-so’, the Nuer say. ‘Thus, his name continues on the lips of men’.

Evans-Pritchard, who lived with the Nuer for a number of years, observed that ghost marriages were nearly as common as those between the living. Warfare and disease often claimed young men before they became fathers; childhood mortality sometimes carried off any sons they did have. In such cases, a brother, son, or nephew might marry in their name – ‘kindling the fire of the dead’. As in any marriage, cattle were paid as bridewealth to the bride’s family. The difference was that children born of the union would legally belong to the ghost, carry his name, inherit any cattle he had had while living, and, when grown, assume the ritual privileges appropriate to their ghost father.

This arrangement could lead to a curious cycle. Because the man marrying on behalf of the ghost gained a wife and children in all but name, the family’s cattle would be used next to secure marriages for his younger brothers. In some cases, the living husband died before ever contracting a legal marriage for himself. And so, in turn, his kinsmen found him a wife after death. Ghost marriage begat ghost marriage.

The variety of marriage customs

The Nuer example presents just one of a wide variety of marriage customs. For much of history, this complexity was invisible to Westerners. Northwestern Europeans assumed that their way of doing things, lifelong monogamous marriage sanctified by religion and nuclear families with male breadwinners, was the natural order. But by the twentieth century, anthropologists were returning with reports of foreign customs which challenged this notion.

Margaret Mead’s 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa depicted a society that regarded ‘lovemaking as the pastime par excellence’ and where young women aimed to ‘defer marriage through as many years of casual love-making as possible’. At the same time Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1929 The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia described trial marriage among the Trobriand Islanders, where young lovers would live together for a few years in the bukumatula – the bachelors’ and unmarried girls’ house. If this relationship went well, it would lead to marriage, but it could also easily be dissolved. In other words, it resembled modern dating.

George Murdock and Douglas R White went on to formalize this scholarship with the publication of the Ethnographic Atlas in 1967, a compilation of over 1,200 cultures. Two years later, they refined the project into the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, selecting 186 societies thought to be culturally independent and geographically dispersed. Of these societies, 31 were monogamous, 153 were polygynous, where a man had multiple wives, and 2 were polyandrous, where a woman had multiple husbands.

One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans. Sometimes marriage is sanctified by religion or the state; other times, it is simply what happens when two people begin living together. For some it is chosen, while for others it is coerced. Some societies prize monogamy, others polygamy, yet neither is a clear predictor of fidelity. In some cultures, both sexes can divorce and remarry freely; in others, only men have that right.

Compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, human marriage is even more aberrant. We are among a minority of animals where individuals pair up over long periods of time. Birds pair bond like us, but only nine percent of mammalian species do. For most animals, relationships last only as long as the duration of copulation.

Interfering relatives

But we are yet more peculiar. We are the only animal where third parties – parents, siblings, and extended family – routinely interfere in marital decisions, often going to great lengths to shape, delay, or prevent unions. Some societies arrange marriages at birth or very young ages. Many require long negotiations through family-approved channels. Others segregate boys and girls to restrict contact.

Well known is the segregation of women, such as the South Asian practice of purdah (literally ‘curtain’ or ‘veil’), a system that ranges from modest dress to near-complete seclusion. Lesser known is the segregation of men. Among the Enga of Papua New Guinea, boys as young as six were sent to live in men’s houses, eventually joining bachelor cults that taught them discipline and allowed marriage only after they had proven themselves. Only virgins could take part in the final initiation ritual, which involved lying open-eyed beneath a waterfall to cleanse themselves of the pollution caused by having seen a woman’s genitals. Nearby, teasing girls would sing: ‘I urinated further up this creek. Where did you purify your eyes?’

Whether through teasing, teaching or coercion, it is clear that marriage is rarely a private matter. It holds deep significance for the wider family and community. Time and time again it serves the same basic purpose: managing resources and building alliances. So why do strategies vary so widely?

For evolutionary anthropologists, the answer lies with Charles Darwin. People seek to maximize the number of descendants they leave behind. The best way to do this changes with the environment. And often, the best thing for me may not be the best thing for you. This creates the conditions for the conflicts that occur between the sexes, within families, and between competing groups.

Marriage for hunter gatherers

For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Today, a few such groups still exist, although these final echoes of a life we lived for millennia will soon disappear as well.

The BaYaka, who live deep in the Congolese rainforest, are one of these. Anthropologist Haneul Jang, who has worked with the BaYaka for over a decade, describes how marriages happen: an enamored adolescent couple will simply walk off into the forest and a few days later, they return and build a hut. There is no ceremony, no exchanging of vows, just a mutual understanding that they are now together. ‘There is something very romantic about it’, she says.

The young man may then do ‘bride service’, where he will live with his girlfriend’s family for a year, hunting and collecting honey with his father-in-law. At some point the relationship may dissolve. This can even happen while the couple still have small children. It will end much like it began, with one individual wandering off into the forest and building a hut with someone else.

This fluidity isn’t unique to the BaYaka but a product of hunter-gatherer societies. Groups are highly mobile, society is egalitarian – any meat from hunts is quickly shared – and there is an almost total absence of material wealth. Fathers look after their children, but they are not necessarily a primary carer. A review of over 45 studies, mostly looking at populations without medical fertility control, found that fathers have a surprisingly small effect on child survival. Other helpers, predominantly grandmothers and siblings, provide more substantial support for the mother.

While Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas classifies most hunter-gatherers as polygynous, this is not accurate. In practice, most men are unable to support more than one wife because there is no stored wealth. Divorce and remarriage happen frequently because helpful extended families give women certainty that they won’t be left raising children alone. The lack of inheritance prevents conflict developing over having children with multiple partners, and the residential mobility means one can literally just walk away from relationships one no longer wants to be in. Consequently, women will frequently have children with two or even three men during their lifetime.

How farming promotes inequality

When farming arrived 12,000 years ago it transformed almost everything, including marriage. Defending livestock and crops became a priority, mobility decreased, and for the first time in history, wealth could be accumulated, leading to the emergence of inequality.

In the arid regions of northern Kenya, several pastoral groups still roam with herds of cattle or camels. In 1948, one Turkana man named Imana had 13 children by four wives, all of whom he was married to concurrently. His herd of over a hundred cows made it possible to support multiple households. By contrast, his neighbor, with only ten cows, had to come to terms with a single wife and far fewer children.

It’s easy to see how the arrival of wealth reshaped marriage: more cows, more wives. But less obvious is that this shift may also have been shaped by female choice. Individual men always stand to benefit, in Darwinian terms, from gaining extra wives, since they have no reproductive upper limit. Women, however, do. They have a choice: be the second or third wife of a rich pastoralist or be the first wife of a poor one. It can pay to be the former.

Taken to its extremes, some men may be so powerful and rich that they can accumulate tens, if not hundreds, of wives. The Azande recount tales of one legendary monarch, Gbudwe, who once spotted an attractive girl as he was walking through his province. Wanting her to be his wife, he stopped to inquire who she was and was told that she was one of his own wives.

Of course, given the benefits to men, not all polygyny is freely chosen. Among the Dogon of Mali child mortality is higher in polygynous households, suggesting women may be coerced into these marriages. But elsewhere, such as in Northern Tanzania, the children of polygynous fathers tend to be wealthier and better nourished.

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When some men have many wives, women become a limited resource for which men must compete. Daughters become economically valuable to parents, who can demand a bride price, ranging from a couple of cows to a small fortune. To raise the funds, some men must call upon extended family networks and make the payments over several years. Among the Chagga of Tanzania during the colonial period, efforts were made to standardize bride wealth payments: 62 pots of beer, 4 slaughtered goats, 3 live goats, 15 gourds of milk, and half a cow. And that was just the pre-wedding deposit. After the wedding came a cascade of further obligations: heifers and goats to the father of the bride, and still more livestock and beer for her mother, uncles, grandmother, and brothers. To avoid disputes between sons, fathers would sometimes allocate each a sister, whose bridewealth could be used to finance his marriage.

The second consequence of polygyny is that wealth flows overwhelmingly to sons. Sons can use inherited wealth to acquire more wives and therefore many more descendants. Daughters can only carry so many children. So, across Africa, whenever cows were adopted so was polygyny and societies ended up passing property down the male line, as patrilineal families started to outnumber matrilineal ones.

In these marriage systems, divorce and remarriage become less frequent, as parents have to return the bride price, and when children inherit, fathers have a vested interest in ensuring they are his. These societies invent ways to limit the freedom of women. The Dogon of Mali, for example, have menstrual huts where women must seclude themselves during their menses. This advertisement of her cycle helps men to protect themselves from being cuckolded. He, along with the rest of the community, will know when she is fertile and so if she falls pregnant without him visiting her he knows the baby isn’t his. This system appears to work. Among the Dogon three religions coexist: Christianity, Islam, and the indigenous Dogon faith, which requires use of the menstrual hut. Genetic data from fathers and sons of the Dogon of Mali found that nonpaternity (a child not being genetically the offspring of their father), though uncommon, was slightly lower when mothers used the hut than when they did not, and that there were higher rates among Christians, whose women are not obliged to signal menstruation. Among Muslims, nonpaternity was no higher than among adherents of the Dogon religion since women must still declare menstruation and refrain from prayer, an equivalent signal of fertile periods.

These controls apply to both married and unmarried women. Unmarried Dogon girls must also use the menstrual huts, reducing the chance of unwittingly marrying an already pregnant woman, while socializing girls into institutions of control from a young age.

Parents can also command a higher bride price for daughters seen as compliant and chaste. Some scholars have suggested that female genital cutting, widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa, functions as a signal of virginity, allowing parents to secure better marriage terms. The evidence is mixed: cut girls do not consistently receive higher bride prices. But they are less likely than uncut peers to report more than one lifetime sexual partner, suggesting the practice does control their sexual freedom.

The usual pattern is that pastoralists are inegalitarian, inequality drives polygyny, and polygyny drives male control of women. But there are exceptions. Known for their distinctive hair coated in a paste of fat and red ochre, the Himba of Namibia are pastoralists among whom polygyny is common. Yet they are relaxed about infidelity, and many women have boyfriends outside of wedlock. In one sample the child was not biologically the husband’s in 49 percent of cases. There is no cuckoldry, and the Himba know exactly whose children are whose. But her husband helps raise them and pays for their marriages. He doesn’t seem to mind, knowing that the same behavior is the rule in the households where he has fathered children. Men expect their wives to see their boyfriends when they are away but not to flaunt it in front of them. ‘It’s when he stays for tea in the morning, that is when it really upsets me’, described one Himba man.

What makes the Himba so different? For one, the bride price is considerably smaller than in other pastoralist groups: typically only one or two cows and some goats. Second, most inheritance passes matrilineally, from a man to his sister’s sons. That blood line is guaranteed: he knows he and his sister share a mother and that her child is truly hers. These two features – a modest investment in non-biological children and the assurance of relatedness through the female line – help men to accept high levels of nonpaternity within their marriages.

Nor is polygyny confined to Africa. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, Quranic law sought to cap men at four wives, a limit that suggests the practice was widespread, at least for elites who could afford it. Today, the same logic plays out under different currencies. In Papua New Guinea men with a bik nem, literally a ‘big name’, once used pigs and shells to secure multiple wives. But with the rise of mineral extraction, wealth has shifted. Today it is the dak glas kar men (men with dark glasses and cars) who attract multiple women. As with the pastoralists, sometimes it pays to be the second wife of a rich man than the first of a poor one.

Monogamy and primogeniture

So how does one explain the parts of the world, like Europe and large parts of Asia, that are unequal yet predominantly monogamous? The spread of monogamy is often credited to Christianity, but restrictions on polygyny long predate it. The code of Hammurabi (1750 BC) let Babylonian men take a second wife only in rare cases, such as when the first wife was infertile. In ancient Greece and Rome, monogamous marriage was the only legally recognized union.

But even though Roman men were expected to have one wife, they often kept mistresses and fathered many children by their slaves. Similarly, Confucian family law recognized one principal wife for lineage and ritual, but allowed for concubines. Together, these exceptions to the monogamous rule may help explain why anthropological evidence finds that monogamous and polygynous societies have similar variations in male reproductive success.

The fact that many ‘monogamous’ cultures allow for elite men to have concubines and mistresses highlights the difference between a ‘mating system’ and a ‘marriage system’. Marriage might be more about managing resources than who you have sex with. Monogamous systems, therefore, may have evolved to limit the transfer of resources, rather than as a form of monogamous mating.

In this explanation, men forgo their right to multiple wives when the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and dividing their wealth among many heirs would reduce its total value. You see this clearly with farming, where dividing land into smaller plots reduces its productivity compared to keeping it as a single estate, a problem that doesn’t occur when dividing a herd of animals. This issue becomes especially acute once there is no new fertile land to expand into – a situation that occurred across Europe in the Middle Ages. This might explain the rise of unigeniture, where only one son inherits.

Under such an all eggs in one basket strategy, a man needed to be sure this son was his. So women traded their faithfulness in exchange for an agreement that only their children were legitimate heirs. Virginity was prized, and divorce could become almost impossible. Across the world, where paternal investment is higher, so too is sexual jealousy.

While women’s sexuality was strictly controlled, men were not faithful, and many would father children out of wedlock. But legislative and institutional systems were built up to exclude these bastard children. Unlike polygyny, where women were the limited resource, under inegalitarian monogamy rich men were. Daughters went from being an asset to a cost as parents had to endow them with large dowries to compete for the few inheriting men.

Nevertheless, many of these societies ended up with partible inheritance while still remaining monogamous. After the French Revolution, the government imposed the equal partition of assets among children. Unable to choose just one heir and faced with the over-division of assets, families limited the number of children they had, possibly helping explain why France was the first European country to exhibit declining fertility rates. The same trend has been found in Sub-Saharan Africa. Individuals from ethnic groups where inheritance is shared between all children have lower fertility rates than those from ethnic groups where a single heir is chosen.

Norms are sticky and can become separated from the underlying factor that caused them to originally evolve. Similarly, once evolved, the behavior can take on new functions. Limiting inheritance to the children of one woman is beneficial to that woman, and she has a vested interest in maintaining monogamy beyond a world of large agricultural estates. On the other hand, disinherited children are disadvantaged under such a system and might undermine it as they become more numerous.

The end of marriage systems

In contemporary Western settings, things seem to have changed once again. Many people are monogamous and have children with a single partner, much like our agricultural forbearers. But others divorce and remarry, similar to hunter-gatherers. Young couples often live together before deciding whether to commit, like the trial marriages of the Samoans. True polygamy is usually illegal, yet some rich divorced or widowed men can attract young second wives, who can bear them a new set of children. Ethical non-monogamists are a growing and vocal minority. To an outsider, it may seem like we have no marriage system at all.

Traditional controls over marriage have weakened. Couples now choose for themselves, usually for love. The disappearance of bridewealth, dowries, and kin-arranged unions has reduced family involvement. While this might feel like a long steady transition for the West, it’s unfolding rapidly in many parts of the world today.

As states expand schooling, boys and girls mix freely. Mobile phones let them talk privately. Rural-to-urban migration brings people from different ethnic groups together, and when they marry, neither tradition quite applies. Removing the involvement of third parties makes marriages easier to enter and leave. One woman from the El Molo, a small fishing community on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya put it bluntly: ‘in my time, your husband could beat you badly and you would stay. Today, the smallest thing, and they divorce’.

Ironically, Christian missionaries may have had similar effects. In Melanesia they tried to ban bachelor cults and introduced mixed churches. They preached chastity, while also inadvertently undermining the indigenous systems that had once regulated informal relationships.

Less obvious is how changes to wealth and inheritance might also make marriage more fluid. In contemporary Western societies, unigeniture is either considered wrong or is illegal; we no longer differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate offspring; and children inherit from both parents. Women no longer need to ‘trade’ their fidelity for economic security, and men may well be less territorial (cuckoldry rates range between one and three percent in the West). With women fully integrated into the workforce and earning similar salaries to their husbands, there is little keeping them in relationships they do not enjoy. And fathers who wish to divorce assume that the mothers of their children will be fine raising children alone with the support of their family, the state, and their salaries.

There has always been a tension between the stability of marriage and the freedom of individuals. This is an important reason why divorce rates drop as soon as couples have children and part of why they remain lower among higher socioeconomic groups. In a social milieu where buying a home requires two incomes and raising children has become increasingly expensive, requiring support and education well into their twenties, a complementarity of roles emerges. If you have little chance of buying a home and fewer payoffs to investing in the education of your children, then it is easier to walk away.

The tradeoffs between one or many partners, a single or multiple heirs, control or freedom, have shaped marriage for as long as humans have existed. These tugs of war explain the vast variety of relationships we see around the world. Marriage is not fixed but a tool to build connections, secure wealth, and ultimately to pass on genes. If marriage has a nature, it is to be reshaped to fit the world around it. In a world where many of the familiar constraints have disappeared, perhaps all that is keeping us together is love.

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Olympia Campbell is a research fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics. You can follow her on Twitter.

There are many partial explanations: high energy prices, expensive housing, excessive proceduralism, high taxes, extractive interest groups, and politicians with a penchant for degrowth. But all of these problems are true of California as well, which is nonetheless home to Waymo and birthed Tesla before it moved its headquarters to Texas in 2021. Explanations often blame Europe’s lack of research spending, but governments spend more on research in Europe than in America. And just seven companies globally – Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Samsung, and Huawei – spend more on research each year than Volkswagen.

What really sets Europe apart from states like California is different. Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers, a difference arising entirely from different regulatory approaches. As a result, it virtually never happens: Americans are ten times more likely to be fired than Germans in any given year. In this respect, the European economy differs greatly from the American one. By American standards, a European business has to be exceptionally confident that it will want an employee for a long time before hiring them.

This may sound like a great virtue of European life, and in a way it is. But it has costs. If it is expensive to fire people, then companies may pay them less in order to balance out employment costs, or they may not employ people at all. To understand the innovation gap, however, there is a third effect that is even more important. If it is expensive to lay people off, employers avoid creating jobs that they might subsequently discontinue. Innovation involves experimentation and risk, so jobs in innovative areas of the economy are more likely to be discontinued than jobs elsewhere. High severance costs create a fundamental incentive for European businesses to avoid innovative areas and concentrate on safe, unchanging ones. In the long run, this is a recipe for decline.

Europeans are attached to their secure jobs, and understandably so. But they may be able to get most of the benefits of the American model without adopting it wholesale. Some smaller European economies have adopted ‘flexicurity’ models that protect their citizens from economic insecurity without disincentivizing innovation. Building a European Tesla requires institutional reform, but it does not require giving up what Europeans value most about their regulatory settlement.

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Failure costs

All businesses make mistakes. Dismantling these failures often means shedding physical assets: writing down investments and breaking factory leases. But for many companies, most of the cost of failure comes from making employees redundant. These payments are large even in countries with laissez-faire labor rules like the US: when Google restructured in 2023, it spent $2.1 billion laying off 12,000 workers, about $175,000 per person. Its second largest expense, breaking office leases, was $1.8 billion.

But however costly firing is in the US, it is much more expensive in Europe. US labor market legislation is liberal by global standards. American states tend to recognize a mix of three exceptions to employment at will: the public policy exception, which prevents workers from being fired for fulfilling duties such as appearing on a jury; the implied contract exception, which prevents firings if there is an implicit agreement that abrogates that right; and the good faith exception, which prevents firing an employee to avoid incurring a new obligation, such as stock that is about to vest. Beyond that, and the constraints of anti-discrimination rules, the American employer can usually release an employee immediately, for no cause at all.

Some American employers offer more generous redundancy packages, like Google in the example above. But this happens because American businesses want the concessions that they extract in exchange, such as non-disclosure and arbitration agreements, as well as appearing more attractive to potential hires. Neither the Department of Labor nor most state governments actually require it.

The opposite is true in most European countries. Severance payments are often mandated by law and are much larger than in the US. In Germany, a worker who is fairly dismissed due to business needs is entitled by law to 15 days of pay for every year they have spent with the employer.

Getting as far as making these severance payments can be a challenge for German employers. Under the Protection Against Dismissal Act, the Kündigungsschutzgesetz, redundancies over ten employees must pass a social selection test (Sozialauswahl). Employers cannot choose who leaves: they must rank employees by age, years of service, family maintenance obligations, and degree of disability, and then prioritize dismissing those with the weakest social claim to the job. If someone is dismissed for operational reasons but the company posts a similar job elsewhere, the dismissal is usually invalid.

Disabled employees can be dismissed only with the approval of the Integration Office (Integrationsamt), a public body. The office will weigh the employer’s reasons, whether they have taken sufficient steps to integrate the employee, and whether they could be redeployed elsewhere in the organization. Workers who also become caregivers cannot be dismissed at all for up to two full years after they tell their bosses they fulfill that role.

As a company becomes larger and tries to let more workers go at once these difficulties increase. In many European countries, companies with more than a certain number of workers – 50 in the Netherlands, 5 in Germany – are obliged to create a works council, which represents employees and, in some countries, must give its approval to decisions the employer wants to make regarding its employees, including layoffs or pay rises or cuts.

Works councils have stopped some of Europe’s largest companies from making changes. In 2024, Volkswagen’s works council blocked the company’s plan to cut costs by closing three factories in Germany. After the company union organized ‘warning strikes’, Volkswagen agreed to keep its factories open and halt compulsory redundancies until 2030.

Companies that are allowed to fire someone and can afford to pay the severance costs have to wait and pay additional fees. Collective dismissal procedures in Germany start after 30 departures within a month; once triggered they require further negotiations with the works council, a waiting period, and the creation of a ‘social plan’ with more compensation for departing workers. When Opel shut down its Bochum factory in Germany, it reached a deal with the works council to spend €552 million on severance for the 3,300 affected employees. This included individual payments of up to €250,000 and a €60 million plan to help workers find new jobs.

French law requires any restructuring involving more than ten employees in a month, even if they work in different parts of the company, to be approved by a special regulator and reviewed by the works council in two meetings over multiple months. It is only allowed after a ‘good faith’ attempt to protect the jobs of the workers involved (by attempting to give them jobs elsewhere in the company, keep them on part-time, or induce other companies to hire them). To prove that financial conditions justify the layoffs, French companies often impose hiring freezes across the company when employees in one division are let go.

If a court determines that a company that has laid off employees was not in a financial state to merit laying off workers, that court has the power to reclassify the dismissals as unfair and impose even higher severance as a fine. Continental, a tire company, tried to shrink its French workforce during the financial crisis. A court decided that there was a ‘lack of economic justification for the dismissals in light of the overall situation and results of the global Continental group’. The company was obliged to pay up to three years of salary to the 680 employees involved.

These rules – severance, negotiating periods, works councils, buyouts, and waiting periods – collectively impose high costs on a European company that tries to let workers go. The costs of restructuring are so high that companies will often try and bribe their workers to leave. In 2023, Amazon offered French employees a year’s salary to leave voluntarily so they didn’t have to fire them and go through a legal restructuring. In 2024, German chemical manufacturer Bayer offered long-tenured workers 52.5 months of pay, or over four years’ worth, in exchange for quitting.

According to a rough estimate by Olivier Coste and Yann Coatanlem, a corporate restructuring in Germany and France costs companies the equivalent of 31 and 38 months of salary per employee laid off, putting all of the above costs together. In Italy, this is 52 months. In Spain, it is 62 months. In the United States, the cost per employee is just 7 months.

It is widely understood that Europe’s restrictive labor laws involve tradeoffs in exchange for the additional security they give to workers. The standard story is that these rules lead to lower wages, when employers can negotiate wages directly with individual workers, or lower employment levels, when companies have to bargain with workers en masse and cannot just price the cost of firing them into wages. But Europe’s stagnation, especially in the north, has ceased to be primarily a problem of unemployment. In the Euro area, about 71 out of every 100 people of working age have a job. This is nearly the same as in the United States, where about 72 out of 100 working-age people are employed.

Rather than reduce hiring in response to more expensive firing, companies in Europe have shifted activity away from areas where layoffs are likely. European workers are for sure, solid work only. This works well in periods of little innovation, or when innovation is gradual. The continent, however, is poorly equipped for moments of great experimentation.

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Risky business

Building self-driving cars has involved lots of failures. Apple spent $10 billion on its self-driving car project, before scrapping it and never transported a single paying customer. General Motors acquired Cruise, an autonomous taxi company, for $1 billion in 2016, only to close it down in 2024. It had sold just $102 million worth of rides in 2023, making a loss of $3.4 billion that year.

But failures like these are unavoidable in pursuit of innovations that succeed. Waymo is estimated to serve a fifth of the San Francisco ride hailing market, and, as of April 2025, carries a quarter of a million passengers each week in five cities. Uber and Lyft, which had halted their self-driving cars in 2020 and 2021 after years of losses, have partnered with Wayve and Baidu to offer autonomous alternatives to Waymo and the Tesla cybercab.

For both American and European companies, the upsides of success from bets like these are similar. But the downsides from failed bets are much greater for Europeans. On top of the lost investment, many European companies also face significant severance costs, negotiations with worker representatives, requirements to redeploy unneeded workers internally, and the need for permission from regulators to approve layoffs.

In 2018, Audi launched the Q8 E-Tron, a fully electric SUV. As bets go, the E-Tron wasn’t even that bold: Porsche, Jaguar, BMW, and Volkswagen would all announce major electric models that year.

Unfortunately, the E-Tron saw weak sales, and it was cancelled in 2024. The factory where it was built, Audi Brussels, was to be closed. But instead of just writing off the plant, as an American company would have done, Audi had to set up a huge scheme to pay departing workers. After months of negotiations, Audi agreed to spend €610 million on severance, or over €200,000 per employee. These payments to employees more than doubled the costs of closing the car factory, costing more than writing off all its assets.

A luxury electric SUV may still turn out to be a good idea, and Audi may still be the company that will make the best one. But Audi executives have learned their lesson. A future E-Tron, they have indicated, will be built at a plant in Mexico.

Failure costs lead some European companies to try and avoid having to innovate altogether. For years, the German car industry refused to see that the writing was on the wall for traditional cars powered by an internal combustion engine. In 2013, Martin Winterkorn, then CEO of Volkswagen, dismissed the idea that electric cars could be suitable for long-distance travel. Instead of seeing this as a temporary limitation that would one day be solved by better batteries or more charging infrastructure, the company simply ignored electric vehicles for the next five years.

After years of delay, Volkswagen did decide to pivot. In October 2018, its new CEO Herbert Diess predicted that by 2020 the company would produce electric vehicles that ‘can do everything like Tesla and are half the price’. The vehicle to meet this ambition was the ID.3, so named as it would mark a symbolic ‘third era’ for the brand, after the Beetle and the Golf. Volkswagen threw $50 billion at its electric car line-up, making them some of the most costly cars in history, Unfortunately, it failed again.

In part, this was the product of complacency. Volkswagen’s leadership, made up of traditional automotive executives, saw software as an inferior artform to traditional manufacturing. They committed to highly ambitious public timelines and to developing all software in-house. The company’s in-house software team was short-staffed and struggled to meet demand. As one insider put it at the time: ‘It’s an absolute disaster’. In the months leading up to the launch, the team was finding up to 300 new bugs a day.

It was also the product of a company that has been unable to allocate and reallocate workers effectively for decades. Since 1994, Volkswagen has guaranteed German factory jobs at the company – the result of a negotiation with the union where, rather than firing people, the company cut costs by switching to a four-day workweek, an arrangement which was in force until 2006. The result has been that, for the past three decades, being hired has effectively resulted in a lifetime appointment.

In June 2024, Volkswagen admitted defeat and set up a joint venture with American electric vehicle startup Rivian. In exchange for an investment of up to $5 billion, Volkswagen received immediate access to Rivian’s software for use in its own cars. In essence, Volkswagen has had to license core technology from a small American rival because it has found innovating so hard.

Herbert Diess, the CEO brought in to lead the transition to electric vehicles, would not be there to see it. His clashes with the works council over factory closures and his frequent warnings that Volkswagen was falling behind Tesla caused him to run afoul of the Porsche and Piech families that own a majority of the company. He was fired in July 2022.

Europe’s recent history is littered with examples of great companies that failed to adopt the next innovation. Nokia built its first smartphone in 1996, developed a prototype of a phone with a touch screen and internet connection around the turn of the millennium, and would eventually release early touch screen devices. However, it never developed the software needed to make it successful.

It is not surprising that Nokia was unwilling to incur more risks, given the costs it faced when it did restructure. In just one year, 2012, Nokia spent €1.8 billion to reorganize its phone and telecommunications business, a sum which consisted ‘primarily of employee termination benefits’. While it is not possible to infer how much they spent that year per employee, when the company closed a mobile phone plant in Germany, in 2008 it spent €200 million to fire just 2,000 employees.

Innovation requires huge, uncertain bets. European companies can and do invent, as Nokia once showed, but they rarely take repeated risks the way American superstars do.

This explanation fits other problems in Europe as well. The problem with European venture capital is often thought to be insufficient supply of capital. But if the downside of failure is high, returns are also lower, making it unsurprising that less is invested. An estimate by Coste and Coatanlem shows that the median internal rate of return, a measure of profitability, between 1998 and 2022, of venture capital firms in Europe was around five points lower than in the US, evidence that fits the view that Europe’s investors are spending less due to a lack of opportunity, not capital.

Keeping small business small

Great innovation often comes from new companies, not old ones changing course. Tesla leads the way on electric vehicles, not Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler. National politicians in European countries are aware of the downsides of their labor laws, and usually exempt small companies and startups from them. In particular, the rules governing collective redundancy often only apply to companies above a certain size and making a large enough number of redundancies.

But the purpose of a startup is to grow. When a company does succeed it is governed by the rules covering large companies, hurting its ability to grow beyond a few hundred employees. It also damages acquisitions, as any acquiring company is governed by employment rules, and is similarly deterred from taking bets that involve hiring.

As a result, acquisitions are rarer in Europe. Between 2012 and 2016, 79 percent of all startup acquisitions tracked by Crunchbase took place in the US. Of those that did take place in Europe, 44 percent were acquired by American companies. European companies made just seven percent of acquisitions of American startups.

Many companies with potential choose to leave. Companies like Grammarly and Hugging Face were once headquartered in Europe. Bird, a messaging company, was until recently one of the Netherlands’ most successful start-ups. In 2024, employees complained that it had long breached the legal threshold for establishing a works council: 50 employees. To avoid complying, its billionaire founder moved the company to New York, Singapore, and Dubai. According to one estimate, 11 percent of US tech startups have a European co-founder: it is just not the case that Europeans are not entrepreneurial enough. Europe’s problem is that they choose to be entrepreneurial somewhere other than Europe.

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When the rubber leaves the road

With government seats on the board, a jobs guarantee, a works council, the Sozialausgleich, and the Sozialplan, Volkswagen seems like it should have never succeeded. But the European model works well for incremental innovation, which dominated manufacturing in the decades after the Second World War.

For over a century, making better cars has in large part been a question of making existing designs more efficient. A 1975 Volkswagen Polo (the first) and a 2025 Volkswagen Polo (the latest) both share the same basic powertrain, a piston-driven combustion engine, but the latter accelerates twice as fast and is a third more fuel efficient.

Europe’s newest internal combustion engines are engineering miracles. Volkswagen squeezes roughly the same horsepower from their latest one liter engine as Packard could get from an engine five times its size 90 years ago. The average fuel used per kilometer by new combustion cars sold in Europe has decreased by a third since the turn of the twenty-first century.

Even weaker manufacturers like Renault have long left their American competition behind when it comes to efficient petrol and diesel engines. And, remarkably, these improvements have happened almost every single year, as European automakers brought out cars that were slightly better than the previous generation.

Europe’s labor laws are supposed to help find those efficiencies. Companies can make deeper investments in workers because the costs are amortized over long tenures. All German manufacturing workers train twice: once as an apprentice at a school, and then again at a specific company, a system known as duale Ausbildung. The average age of an employee at Volkswagen is 45, and only 0.1 percent of German employees will be fired in a given month, compared to 1 percent in the United States. Rules that can seem strange to foreigners make more sense from this perspective.

Europe’s companies have immense, specialized knowledge. The problems happen when radical innovation is needed, as in the shift from gasoline to electric vehicles. The great makers of electric cars have either been new entrants, like Tesla and BYD, or old ones who have had their insides stripped, like MG. Even where a European carmaker has been central to the rollout of a major new technology, as with Jaguar making Waymo’s taxi fleet, it underscores Europe’s weakness: the vehicles were manufactured at a plant in Austria, but then shipped to Arizona to be outfitted with Waymo’s autonomous driving technology. Now that prior expertise is not as useful, and succeeding at cars means taking big bets on new ways of doing things, the rigidity of Europe’s labor laws has led its car companies to run out of road.

The best of both

If Europe wants a Tesla, or whatever the Tesla of the next decade will turn out to be, it will need a new approach to hiring and firing. Many Europeans fear that this cannot be reconciled with Europe’s ‘social model’: the desire to give workers certainty and protect them from the vagaries of the business cycle.

But there are examples of European countries having it both ways. In Austria, workers have a portable savings account, the Abfertigung Neu, that pays their severance and is funded through employer contributions, which reduces the costs of restructuring to an employer. Switzerland maintains (relatively weak) works councils and a generous public safety net, but has no mandatory severance. Denmark uses a flexicurity model where employers can almost fire at will, but workers can draw on generous unemployment insurance which covers up to 90 percent of their previous income for two years. In exchange for reduced job security, the Danish government spends two percent of GDP on subsidies and other incentives for retraining and rehiring the unemployed.

While it may be difficult to imagine a France or an Italy giving up their labor market protections, the point of all of these models is to protect workers’ incomes against the capriciousness of capitalism. Most European countries do this by forcing companies to hold on to their workers except in extreme circumstances; in Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland, the government bears that cost. Europeans are unlikely to embrace the American model, but they might accept the Danish one.

Europe’s most flexible economies are its most innovative. Denmark and Switzerland have given the continent Novo Nordisk, Roche, Nestlé, and Novartis. The small and few countries that have adopted a flexible model are Europe’s innovation heavyweights. (Meanwhile, the countries with the strictest employment protection, like the Spaniards and the Italians, are some of the worst, by this measure.)

If more European states do decide to change their labor markets, the exact policies they adopt may not be Danish-style flexicurity, but it will need to use some of its principles. Since innovation is primarily a function of elite talent rather than the median worker, even limited reform could deliver many of the same benefits. Perhaps only workers above a certain income threshold could face Danish labor rules. Even allowing all workers above the 90th percentile of income to opt out of employment legislation would make German services very competitive with the American market, since German workers at the 90th percentile in 2022 earned about $80,000 per year in today’s money before tax. (The equivalent in the US was about $147,000.)

Europe had Teslas once

Until the nineteenth century, many continental labor markets were still governed by the feudal system. As everyone knows, feudal serfs could not leave the service of their lords at will. But it is often forgotten that this went both ways: serfs came with the land, and although feudal landowners had many powers over them, they generally did not have the right to turn them out. Employer and employee were stuck with each other, even if both would be much better off terminating the arrangement. As Enlightenment reformers such as French Minister of State Anne‑Robert‑Jacques Turgot and Habsburg Emperor Joseph II pointed out, this arrangement was inefficient. Workers were hindered from moving to more productive employers, regions or sectors, while landowners were hindered from agricultural restructuring or innovation that conflicted with tenants’ rights.

It would be only a little fanciful to describe Europe’s current system as ‘one-way feudalism’. Employees have the right to leave their employers, just as they do in all free societies. But employers have only a tightly circumscribed right to leave their employees. As we have seen, the costs of doing so are so high that European employers have to a large extent stopped doing so.

Europe’s current system may seem like a deep feature of its culture, inherited from the feudalism of its past. But, for more than a century between the end of Enlightenment and the Second World War, European companies innovated furiously, like American ones do today. In the 1880s, the French company De Dion-Bouton became convinced that the future of transport lay in automobile vehicles. It invested heavily in steam-powered automobiles. ‘Steam cars’ could theoretically go up to 35 miles per hour, but they took about 30 minutes to start and needed a full time stoker to keep going. In 1894, De Dion-Bouton gave up and discontinued its steam car experiment.

But the story didn’t end there. De Dion-Bouton made a second attempt, using experimental petrol engine technology instead. This time, it worked. De Dion-Bouton’s production grew exponentially, and by the early 1900s it was the world’s largest automaker, employing far more people in petrol car production than it ever had for its steam line, and germinating one of the key inventions of the twentieth century. Europe does not have Teslas today. But it has had them in the past, and, without giving up what Europeans value about their economic model, it could have them again.

Pieter Garicano is an editor at Works in Progress.

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The Turritopsis dohrnii is a small, bell-shaped jellyfish found in temperate and tropical waters. It has stinging tentacles and is completely transparent, allowing you to see its pulsating internal organs. It’s a predator and hunts in the open ocean, feeding on small crustaceans and plankton.

This deep-water, alien-seeming creature has a unique ability to regenerate itself. In cases of extreme stress, like starvation, sudden temperature changes, or even being cut with a pair of scissors, the adult jellyfish can, in a matter of days, transform back into an infant-like polyp stage. The polyp is hardy, and many of its cells are undifferentiated – like in a human embryo – so it can regenerate damaged parts easily and ‘bud’ into several clones.

This process can theoretically happen on an infinite loop, meaning that if the jellyfish managed to escape disease and predation, it could live forever. In a lab, these jellyfish have been kept alive for two years, respawning 11 times. For comparison, the Turritopsis dohrnii’s cousins, the Clytia hemisphaerica or the Obelia geniculata, live as full-grown jellyfish for only a few weeks.

Lobsters are, by all appearances, just insects that live in the ocean. They have segmented bodies, ten legs, and compound eyes. With simple insect-like brains (comprising only 100,000 neurons, to a mouse’s 10 million and a human’s 86 billion), many scientists believe they don’t even feel pain.

Unlike most other insects, they can regenerate lost limbs. This is the result of a group of cells called blastemal cells. Like the cells in a jellyfish’s undifferentiated polyp state, blastemal cells can regenerate into any kind of cell in a lobster’s body, including muscle, bone and nerve cells.

What is remarkable about lobsters is their longevity. They have been known to live for over a hundred years. In most animals, cells, DNA, and tissue accumulate damage over time, which eventually leads to death. Lobsters, on the other hand, repair themselves continually. As a result, their organs, cells, and even DNA stay young.

Lobsters do eventually die. They grow throughout their lives and, as a result, need to regularly molt their shells and regrow them. This process is so energy-intensive that when lobsters get very old, and therefore very large, this molting exhausts and starves them to death. The oldest lobster ever found, dubbed George, was about 140 years old and weighed almost ten kilograms. George was kept on display in a restaurant in New York until PETA campaigned to get him released into the wild, where he almost certainly starved to death. Theoretically, someone could keep a lobster alive indefinitely by feeding it calorie-dense foods when it molts. No one has tried this (yet).

The ocean quahog clam is another long-lived sea creature. Quahog life is the opposite of ‘live fast, die young’. It has a very slow metabolism. Hardly moving, it eats by filtering small particles of food from the water and can survive in a variety of harsh conditions, like very cold water, low oxygen levels, and heavy pollution. It has such a rudimentary nervous system that some vegans will eat it, saying it has no capacity to suffer and is, essentially, more like a plant than an animal.

For the same reason that trees have rings, clams grow ridges in their shells. They grow faster in summer when it’s warm and slower in the winter, producing a new ridge every year. We have found a clam with 507 ridges. Carbon dating verified its age, making it one of the longest-lived animals on Earth.

Clams aren’t the only sea creatures with ultra-slow metabolisms and centuries of life. The Greenland shark is a massive beast. It is about 20 feet long and can weigh up to two tons. Like the quahog, it is a ‘live slow, die old’ kind of animal.

It hunts in the North Atlantic and is a stealthy, opportunistic predator. It remains completely still until an unobservant seal or whale swims past, striking when the perfect moment presents itself.

Such a strategy requires patience but its exceptionally slow metabolism means it needs little food, able to grow large while eating as seldom as once a year. It expends hardly any calories heating itself and can live in such cold waters because high concentrations of urea and trimethylamine oxide stop its blood from freezing. The oldest known Greenland shark is about 400 years old.

On land, the oldest known animal was an Aldabra tortoise named Adwaita. Adwaita was the pet of British general Robert Clive of the East India Company. Clive died in 1774 and, after a few years living on his estate, Adwaita was brought to a zoo in Calcutta, where he lived until 2006. His shell has been carbon dated, showing that he was about 250 when he died. Aldabra tortoises can weigh up to 250 kilograms. They move very little and, like many other long-lived creatures, have slow metabolisms, enabling them to go long periods without eating.

Centuries-long lifespans are found in some mammals, too. Bowhead whales dwarf the Greenland shark, at about 70 tons. They too are cold ocean-dwelling predators with a slow metabolism. We did not know they were so longevous until 2007 when, off the coast of Alaska, hunters discovered the whale they had just killed already had a Victorian-era harpoon embedded in its neck, meaning it must have been at least 120 years old. We now think they can live for over two hundred years.

Bowhead whales superficially resemble Greenland sharks more than they resemble people. But as fellow mammals, they are closer relatives of ours than they are of any cartilaginous fish. They breathe air. They gestate and nurse their young. They are social animals and live in complex communities. They use vocalizations to communicate with one another and have large brains relative to their body size – usually indicative of some degree of intelligence.

Their physical similarities to Greenland sharks suggest they are the product of convergent evolution: cold oceans are, apparently, a good place to be a slow, long-lived, multi-ton predator and thus, evolution has answered with several iterations of such a creature.

Naked mole rats are exceptional for mammals in many ways. They live in bee-like colonies with a queen and workers, do not regulate their own temperature, have very slow metabolisms (no surprise), and are immune to some forms of pain, including acidic burns and capsaicin. Like lobsters, they repair their DNA constantly, and they don’t seem to get cancer.

The Gompertz law is a mathematical equation that describes aging. For every mammal, once out of childhood, the odds of dying rise exponentially with age. For example, as an adult human, our odds of dying double every eight years. Among mammals, naked mole rats may be the sole exception. Their odds of dying don’t seem to increase at all. In the wild, they usually live for about 17 years, much longer than a typical rodent of their size, but the oldest known is in captivity: Joe is thriving and pushing 40 with no sign of slowing down.

Homo sapiens are primates characterized by our hairlessness, bipedality, and intelligence. Like naked mole rats, we live in colonies with specialized hierarchical roles. Like Greenland sharks, we are slow and opportunistic predators. And like lobsters, we can regrow lost appendages (albeit only the very tips of our fingers and only as young children). We are strangely long-lived for mammals, both overall and, in particular, for our size. We have long childhoods and, unusually, we live for decades after our reproductive windows have closed. What’s the secret to human longevity?

Humans: evolved to live

There are several measures by which humans are strangely long-lived: size, heart rate, and reproductive window. In general, the more intelligent the species, the longer its lifespan. But like all things in evolution, longevity has tradeoffs, and many of the super-long-lived creatures make big sacrifices to achieve their lifespans. Even if we worked out how to harness their gifts, it might not be worth it.

The average lifespan of a species, across all kingdoms of organisms, tends to increase as it gets bigger.

If humans had the lifespan of a random animal their size, we would live between 20 and 50 years. For example, tigers are larger than typical humans, weighing between 100 and 300 kilograms, but in the wild, a tiger will usually live only 10 to 15 years. Even in captivity, which is more like the state humans currently live in, tigers survive just 25 years.

We don’t just have long lives for our size, we also have long lives for our heart rates. Most mammals get about one billion heartbeats in their lifetime. Small animals have fast heart rates and short lives, and larger animals have slow hearts and long existences. Humans are a major outlier here, too: we get more than two billion heartbeats.

What is particularly unusual about humans, as well as a small handful of other strangely long-lived animals, is that we continue to live long after we are no longer able to reproduce. Women go through the menopause at around 50 and stick around for decades more, an adaptation that is possibly the product of our complex social structures and needy children. Elderly humans, chimps, and elephants can help take care of children and store up and pass on useful knowledge to their family and tribe. Tigers, who usually die while still fecund, are of little use to their cubs after a few years: a tiger grandmother with four grandcubs does a disservice to her genes by staying around and competing for resources.

In addition to a long post-reproductive life, humans and other primates have an exceptionally long period of childhood, where we grow and develop while still not having reached sexual maturity. Big brains take a long time to develop and can be taught a lot of information. As a result, the number of neurons is a better predictor of lifespan than metabolic rate and body mass.

But while brain size predicts in broad strokes why some animals live longer than others, it doesn’t explain why any of the super-duper long-lived creatures have their powers, except for maybe bowhead whales. Naked mole rats are interchangeable parts of a machine. Lobsters don’t have problem-solving skills or a long-term memory. Jellyfish don’t even have brains. Clams don’t do anything at all!

This is only a partial explanation. It explains the evolutionary conditions that created longer lifespans, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what in our biology gives us these longer lifespans, or what we could do to live longer.

Physiologically, humans have some of the adaptations that super-long-lived creatures have. Our brains use a lot of energy, but instead of having a correspondingly high metabolism, humans are very energy efficient elsewhere. We have small muscles and are, for mammals, basically hairless, which means we can cool ourselves very efficiently by sweating.

We have some of the cancer-fighting adaptations that other large, long-lived animals have, too. We might naively assume that a large, long-lived animal, due to having more cells that are copied more times, would develop more cancers. Instead, smaller animals, like mice and rats, are much more vulnerable to cancer than humans, elephants, and whales.

This problem is called Peto’s paradox. One theory is that larger animals develop ‘hyper tumors’. Once a cell has turned cancerous, it has defected against the whole organism. Each of its cells is more prone to becoming cancerous again, so the cancerous tissue is overwhelmed and killed by hyper tumors. In a mouse, a two-gram tumor – ten percent of its mass – would kill it, likely before it developed a cancer-fighting hyper tumor. In a human, a two-gram tumor – 0.002 percent – would have a negligible effect unless it were in a crucial organ. In a bowhead whale, a two-gram tumor would be just 0.000002 percent of its mass.

Another explanation points the finger at large animals’ slow metabolisms. The respiration that takes place in the mitochondria is a big part of our metabolism and, as a byproduct, makes reactive oxygen species that cause cell damage. (This is why ‘antioxidants’ might be good for us. And it is also a reason proposed for why low levels of radiation are unlikely to be harmful: we are doing ourselves DNA damage already, and healing constantly.) A slower metabolism means both fewer cell divisions and less cell damage per cell. But while humans are resistant to cancer for our size, taller humans get more cancer, which suggests that we have a cancer-fighting adaptation that does not just scale with size.

In humans, about half of cancers have a mutated p53, and the gene plays a crucial role in preventing cancer formation. Elephants have 20 copies of this gene. They also exhibit hyper-apoptosis, which means that cells are killed after modest DNA damage before they can become malignant. This is associated with the LIF6 gene, some variation of which is also possessed by naked mole rats and bowhead whales.

In nature, these benefits come with a cost. In order to extend their lives, the longest-lived species have evolved to sacrifice many things we value greatly. Cancer suppression involves dedicating a lot of scarce energy towards DNA repair and immune defenses, away from reproduction, growth, and fighting. This makes sense for unpredatable animals like elephants that hyper-invest in a small number of offspring but not for a creature that wants to grow and reproduce quickly, use sharp bursts of energy, or develop ornamental appendages.

Humans are nothing like Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish. We don’t know if these jellyfish retain their memories when they revert to their polyp stage. We’re not sure they even have memories. Many of us would not see the ability to spawn baby clones as a legitimate alternative to a longer lifespan.

Living like a Greenland shark, a clam, or a tortoise doesn’t seem like a good alternative to a human life. If we found ways to stop burning energy and live in extreme cold as they do, we might survive much longer, but it wouldn’t really be living.

But while we may not want to copy their lifestyles, the existence of animals that live so much longer than us makes it worth asking whether there is an underlying secret of aging we can unlock. If nature couldn’t give us longer lifespans, perhaps science could make them.

Humans: upgraded to live?

As life goes on, people become more likely to die, whether through infectious disease, cancer, failure of key organs, a stroke, or a heart attack. That suggests there are two potential ways to increase longevity: tackling the proximate causes of death, like cancer and dementia, as medicine typically does; or finding and tackling some underlying reason that these causes come along more over time. This second approach would mean breaking the link between our ‘chronological clock’ – how long we’ve been alive, and our ‘biological clock’ – the state of our body and brain.

So far, we have been incredibly successful in increasing life expectancy through a ‘whack-a-mole’ method of curing differing ailments. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that making sure a child is properly fed increases their life expectancy, after they have survived to old age, by a further 0.39 years, taking beta blockers after a heart attack by 2.48 years, and cleaning air from high to low pollution by 0.4 years.

But this approach gets harder and harder as we whack the easiest to catch moles. It took 25 years to raise life expectancy from 60 to 70, and then more than 50 years to raise it to 80. As death rates fall, the pool of survivors shifts toward people who are naturally healthier, leaving fewer frail individuals to save. Despite having better technology than ever, further gains have become progressively smaller.

For now, most treatments do not seem to return us to enjoying the life we used to lead. Surviving something like cancer or heart disease usually means living with chronic pain and discomfort, one step closer to future danger.

Is it possible, instead, to slow the biological clock? We know that long-lived animals have different strategies. They have specific adaptations, like cancer-fighting genes, that we may want to emulate. But they also share traits that are generally helpful: lobsters and naked mole rats have very good DNA repair, and basically, every creature with an ultra-long lifespan also has a slow metabolism.

DNA damage and repair

One option is to learn from the lobster. Telomeres, repetitive strings of extra DNA on the end of the main strand, are one of the first things we learn about if we are interested in aging. When a cell divides, it replicates most of its DNA. But it does not copy the very ends, so the telomeres become shorter with each division. When the telomeres become critically short, the small chunk of DNA deleted starts to include important information, leading to cellular death, senescence, or cancer. The rate of telomere attrition is highly predictive of a species’s lifespan, and within species that we have tracked, like mice, individuals with longer telomeres live longer and develop less cancer.

There is a naturally occurring enzyme, telomerase, that can repair telomeres by adding the repetitive sequence back onto the end of DNA. It is abundant in the ageless lobster but, in most animals, is active in just a limited number of cells, like gametes, stem cells, and some parts of the immune system. But it could, theoretically, be switched on in other cells with gene editing injections or other therapies.

Unfortunately, when telomerase was switched on in the skin cells of mice, it didn’t simply give them better skin. Instead they had both better healing and more skin cancers. Similarly, switching telomerase on across an entire mouse gave it more cancers everywhere that the telomerase was expressed. But in mice that have been engineered to be more cancer-resistant, more telomerase led to longer lives and to other signs of youthfulness like thicker skin and better performance on motor tests.

Metabolism: live slow, die old

If we are unable to generate more useful telomerase and stop telomere shortening, like the lobster, or to improve our DNA repair mechanisms, like in naked mole rats and elephants, then we might consider upgrading our metabolisms. There is clearly some relationship between metabolism and life span. The most popular explanation links aging to the production of reactive oxygen species during normal metabolism. Known as the free radical theory of aging, these chemicals, the inevitable byproducts of the chemical processes that are your metabolism, are highly volatile and damage cells and DNA when they come into contact with them.

The body normally has natural processes that repair this destruction, but over time, the rate of damage increases, and these repair processes get overwhelmed, making people age. Animals like birds and bats that have fast metabolisms and long-ish lifespans have adaptations that lead them to produce fewer reactive oxygen species, especially near their DNA. But many other long-lived species show signs of abundant damage from reactive oxygen species, even while young.

In simple organisms like worms, flies, and yeasts, single-gene mutations that affect the metabolism can dramatically extend lifespan. For example, the worm C. elegans has a receptor that is active when food is plentiful but that can be genetically reprogrammed, orienting the animal towards maintenance and metabolic thrift and away from growth and reproduction. This genetic edit doubles C. elegans lifespan. Dwarf mice with similar mutations live about 50 percent longer than their littermates. We have even found some rare genes that appear to work in similar ways when studying centenarians, especially among Ashkenazi Jews and Italians.

One of the pathways through which these rare genes for longevity change the metabolism is mTOR, which stands for the ‘mechanistic target of rapamycin’. When nutrients are abundant, mTOR promotes cell growth and, when they are scarce, mTOR activity switches cells into maintenance mode. Chronically high mTOR, usually caused by overfeeding, can accelerate aging, and inhibiting the mTOR pathway has been shown to extend lifespan in every organism tested. Fortunately, we do not have to be a gene-edited screwworm or an Italian supercentenarian to benefit from this pathway: some drugs, like rapamycin, likely inhibit mTOR. At high doses, rapamycin is used as an immunosuppressant to stop people from rejecting transplants, but at lower doses, it can prolong lifespan without severe side effects. When mice are treated with rapamycin from their youth, it can extend lifespan by about a quarter. When used in 600-day-old mice, which are at a comparable stage in their lives as a 60-year-old human, it can extend their lifespan by about a tenth.

There are other signs that changing our metabolisms is key to extending our lifespans. There are several drugs on the market that have been shown to promote longevity in mice, all of which were originally developed to treat diabetes: acarbose, SGLT2 inhibitors, metformin, and now GLP-1 agonists (like Ozempic). Diabetes is a chronic health condition that affects how the body turns food into energy, characterized by elevated levels of sugar in the blood due to problems with insulin production or action. Most of these drugs seem to work by decreasing blood sugar and promoting weight loss.

There may be lower-tech diabetes treatments with benefits, too. Intermittent fasting and caloric restriction often increase lifespans in lab experiments on mice, even if it isn’t clear whether intermittent fasting is good because it helps insulin regulation or inflammation, or because it is just a good way to stop obesity.

While aging chronologically may imbue us with wisdom and other benefits, beyond a certain point, getting biologically older has little to recommend it. Neuroplasticity and the ability to learn new languages peak in early childhood. Young people recover faster from injuries. IQ, recall, and speed of processing peak in adolescence. Metabolism peaks at 20. Bone density typically peaks between 25 and 30. Muscle mass typically peaks at age 30 and decreases at about 5 percent per decade following.

Human life would be very different if we, like naked mole rats, could break out of Gompertz’s law, if we could stay as healthy as the average 25-year-old until a car or a pandemic like the Spanish flu killed us. Most people die of things caused or exacerbated by age, like heart disease, cancer, infections and dementia, meaning that, especially in the rich world, we could expect to live for hundreds of years. Extremely cautious people could probably live for millennia.

Perhaps if we wait for a few million years, we will fill an ecological niche where our descendants become still and cold-blooded, enjoying centuries-long youths. The alternative will be to pharmaceutically construct what nature didn’t give us: injections that lend us a lobster’s ability to repair and regrow, gene therapies that give us an elephant’s resistance to cancer, drugs that give us a Greenland shark’s metabolism, or – better still – give us a bird’s ability to cure ourselves of metabolic damage. Ideally, we would be able to live tortoise years on dog diets, shark lifespans in tiger climes.

Evolution has tradeoffs. Obviously, none of us would trade places with a clam or a lobster. But we’re no longer constrained to traits that can be coded into DNA and enable a hunter-gatherer to reproduce. In the long run, this means we can change anything we want about ourselves. For now, mortality should be the priority.

Aria Schrecker is an editor at Works in Progress. Follow her on Twitter.

Raw population growth understates the speed of expansion. The number of people per home fell, and, in Britain and America, the size of the average home roughly doubled. At the same time, those homes fit on a smaller share of land, with huge swaths given over to boulevards, parks and railways. The expansion in surface area was thus often several times greater than the expansion in raw population. Meanwhile, real house prices remained flat, while incomes doubled or tripled, generating a huge improvement in housing affordability. Far more people were enjoying far larger homes for a far smaller share of their income.

As well as becoming bigger, nineteenth-century cities became better. Their streets were wider, straighter, and better structured as a network. By the end of the century, they had vast systems of public transport. Incredibly, the average speed of public transport in 1914 was about the same as it is today, while its coverage was often far greater. Nineteenth-century urbanism had many of the features that urban designers fight for now, like mixed use, perimeter blocks, and gentle density. And, at least to our eyes, nineteenth-century cities are beautiful. Neighborhoods dating from before 1914 tend to command a price premium today, and tourists travel thousands of miles to walk their streets.

Western cities today grow much more slowly. Between 2010 and 2020, New York’s, London’s and Paris’s metropolitan areas grew by an average of 0.6 percent per year, while even the fastest-growing cities, like Houston and Dallas, grew by around two percent per year. If sustained for a century, New York, London and Paris would grow 1.8 times, and the Texan outliers sevenfold.

This sluggish growth rate has generated intense housing shortages. Tackling them may require learning from the city planners of the nineteenth century. The whirlwind pace of nineteenth-century expansion was underpinned by a distinctive approach to urban government, including a fundamental right to build when it was profitable to do so, tolerance and even mandating of infrastructure monopolies, and willingness to charge fees at profit-making levels to fund urban infrastructure, whether sewerage, water, buses, trams, metros, gas, or electricity.

We can imagine what, say, New York City might look like if this system had endured. The serried towers of the Financial District might extend the length of Manhattan; surrounding it might be an endless Brooklyn of five-storey brownstone row houses, stretching all the way from the Hamptons to New Brunswick, serviced by 50 metro lines. New York might still be the world’s largest city, a genuine competitor to the 65 million living in the Pearl River Delta. Perhaps the great cities of the West may yet return to this trajectory. But if they wish to, they would do well to revisit how they managed it once before, not so very long ago.

Streets and drains

Urban planning involves controlling development over a geographical area to ensure that the area works as a whole. Street networks are perhaps the most obvious example of how this can be useful. If streets do not join together or go to places where people want to go, they are useless. If they are too narrow or too winding, their usefulness is severely compromised. Almost the entire value of a given unit of road depends on its being connected to other units of road.

Disastrously unplanned street systems often develop in areas with weak governance, with landowners creating masses of access roads that fail to join up into a coherent network. In early nineteenth-century Sheffield, nearby coal reserves led to rapid urban expansion without a proper municipal government to manage it. In the southern parts of the city, ownership was sufficiently unified that the landowners were incentivized to lay out a fairly coherent street grid by themselves, but in the north, a congested mass of narrow lanes, bizarrely shaped blocks and gloomy cul-de-sacs emerged, with extremely poor overall circulation.

Where they existed, municipal governments generally recognized the need for an integrated street network and acted vigorously to guarantee it. The clearest cases of this were the great extension plans, in which the authorities literally drew a map dictating where future streets would go as the city expanded. Nearly all major American and Canadian cities did this, using simple but effective grid plans which created convenient square blocks and highly interconnected street networks. The canonical early example is the Commissioners’ Plan for New York in 1811, which designated a future street network covering the whole of Manhattan at a time when only the southern tip was built up. All major American cities, except Boston and Washington DC, emulated it.

Europeans generally regarded American gridiron plans as comically ugly. Charles Dickens visited Philadelphia in 1842 and described its street grid as ‘distractingly regular’, remarking that ‘after walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street’. Only a handful of major European extension plans worked this way, the most famous being the Plan Cerdà for Barcelona’s Eixample neighborhood. Its grid was unpopular with local people, who preferred an alternative scheme closer to normal European practice, and the grid had to be forced on the city by the government in Madrid.

Most European extension plans started from a framework of axial boulevards, straight, tree-lined streets terminating on squares, monuments, or public buildings. Boulevards were designed to enable easy wayfinding and swift movement of carriages and public transport. Between the boulevards, side streets were usually plotted on a modified grid, a looser version of the system used in the United States. Berlin, Madrid, Rome and Milan were all governed by extension plans of this kind, as was Washington DC, uniquely for an American city. The most famous city planner of the time, Josef Stübben, drew up extension plans of this kind for nearly 100 cities as far afield as Bilbao and Poznań.

The regime for enforcing extension plans varied, but there was a dominant model, variants of which were used in Germany, Italy and Spain. As soon as the extension plan was set, development on the designated street alignments was banned. Development on the remaining land in the plan area was conditioned on the landowners’ grading the alignments, partly covering the costs of surfacing them, and then ceding them to the authorities. Because development was extremely profitable for landowners, this mechanism incentivized them to implement the city’s extension plan themselves.

Governments used compulsory purchase only occasionally, generally for major arterial roads or for dealing with holdouts. In Berlin, for example, compulsory purchase was used in the development of a handful of key boulevards like the Frankfurter Allee, Leipziger Straße, Potsdamer Straße and Schönhauser Allee, but everything else was left to landowners to lay out in their own time. This helped to minimize controversy. American cities initially used a more aggressive system of compulsory purchase, but over time they tended to adopt the continental approach too.

In Britain, France and Portugal, the authorities generally did not produce extension plans for entire cities. Smaller cities often lacked comprehensive extension plans even in Germany and Spain, and there were also cases where development spilled out beyond the area governed by an extension plan into unplanned territory beyond it, like Gràcia in Barcelona.

The lack of an extension plan definitely had an effect on the character of cities and neighborhoods. Overall road share tends to be lower: for example, central New York has 36 percent road share against 30 percent in London and 29 percent in Paris. The contrast is particularly striking in the case of arterial roads. Most of London’s arteries today are basically rural lanes from the Middle Ages, so they tend to have only two lanes for traffic. This means dedicated lanes for buses, trams or bicycles are rare. In a planned city like Madrid, Budapest, Milan or Berlin, the arterial boulevards are much wider, and dedicated lanes are standard.

However, the contrast between the planned and organic models should not be overstated. British and French authorities did not have overall network plans, but they did plan streets on an ad hoc basis. The famous Haussmann boulevards in Paris are examples of this: the authorities compulsorily purchased swaths of land and laid out arterial roads on them. These planned streets never made up more than a small share of the urban road network, but the overall system of circulation partly depended on them. The British authorities often gave private companies powers to compulsorily purchase designated alignments, lay out roads, and then toll travellers to make back the cost (so called ‘turnpike roads’). In London, Euston Road, Brixton Road, Harrow Road, Finchley Road and Old Kent Road are among the many examples.

Controversially, these planned roads often cut through existing urban fabric. Medieval and early modern cities had not been built to deal with a large flow of wheeled vehicles, which meant they frequently became traffic chokepoints. Municipal authorities responded by compulsorily purchasing and demolishing urban buildings to widen roads or to open up entirely new ones. The Parisian examples of this like the Rue de Rivoli and the Boulevard de Sebastopol are the most famous, but most major European cities have examples, like the Gran Via in Madrid, Victoria Street in London and the Via Nazionale in Rome. Cuttings involved a brutal loss of ancient fabric and displacement of existing residents, but they were extremely successful in improving circulation.

All countries, including Britain and France, heavily regulated the streets that they did not plan themselves. Generous minimum widths were widely enforced. In London, all roads had to be at least 12 meters in width. This is wide enough that cars can be parked on both sides of the road today while still leaving enough space for cars to pass each other between them. Elsewhere, the minimum street was wider still. Berlin’s streets were at least 22 meters (72 feet); New York’s cross streets were 60 feet (18 meters) and its avenues were 100 feet (30 meters). This generosity is somewhat astonishing given that very few people in the nineteenth century owned private carriages, and that those who did always stored them off-street.

Public regulations also controlled the kind of networks that developers could lay out in countries or areas without a formal extension plan. One example of this is restrictions on cul-de-sacs. For a developer with a small parcel of land, cul-de-sacs are often the value-maximizing street type, because they exclude disruptive through-traffic while still giving residents road access. For the city as a whole, however, cul-de-sacs are troublesome: if everyone excludes through-traffic, nobody can get anywhere.

Many nineteenth-century authorities therefore tightly restricted them: in London, for example, cul-de-sacs longer than 60 feet were banned outright, and shorter cul-de-sacs were allowed only if they were wider than they were long (so really courtyards or closes rather than true dead-end streets). Regulations of this general kind were ubiquitous in nineteenth-century cities, such that street networks are normally more a function of public regulation than market forces, even when they were not strictly planned by the state.

Overall, then, the level of public planning of street networks varied from high to absolute. There is abundant evidence for the economic value of these interventions. A generous road endowment is extremely useful: a World Bank study found that congestion in Cairo alone costs Egypt around 4 percent of its GDP, while a United Nations study estimated that congestion costs EU and American economies just 1.4 and 0.7 percent respectively. UN-Habitat recommends that cities preserve at least 30 percent of surface area for roads, very much in line with nineteenth-century norms. The structure of these roads also has demonstrable effect, with several careful studies finding that gridded networks generate higher property values than unplanned ones.

Only one other kind of infrastructure was publicly planned and funded to the same extent as streets: drains. Up to about 1850, sewage was generally stored in brick-lined cesspits and then removed by specialized businesses known as ‘gong farmers’, who sold it for use as agricultural fertilizer. Greywater (water used for washing and cooking) was usually poured into open channels in the street, down which it flowed into rivers. Gong farming cannot have been the most pleasant occupation, but it was often quite profitable, and the farmers who made use of its products formed a notable lobby group against the development of sewerage. When Düsseldorf excavated a sewerage system, the gong lobby prevailed upon the authorities to forbid its use for human waste, and for about twenty years Düsseldorf’s expensive new system was used only for greywater.

Popular historians like to tell horror stories about the old system, but in smaller cities it seems to have worked well enough, and consumer demand for sewerage connections was surprisingly low. It survived well into the postwar era in the cities of Japan, as well as, curiously, in the Australian city of Brisbane. A version of it is still widely used today in rural areas, though most cesspits were gradually replaced by septic tanks. In the eyes of contemporaries, the great problem with the system was its openness to abuse: some people illegally dumped sewage into rivers and canals, and others failed to maintain cesspits properly, leading to the contamination of urban groundwater and ultimately to the rising incidence of cholera, typhoid and dysentery. The increasing abundance of running water and the hardscaping of ever wider urban areas also led to increasing flood risk.

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, municipalities embarked on immense projects to develop modern sewerage systems. Paris’s system was laid in the 1850s and 60s as part of Haussmann’s interventions. In London, the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette reclaimed a stretch of land 30 meters deep from the Thames. On top of this land he ran a street (the Victoria Embankment), and within it he ran a huge sewerage pipe, which intercepted the various polluted drains and streams of London before they reached the river and whisked their contents away to the east. New York developed its drains in a more piecemeal fashion between the 1860s and the 1890s. These projects were triumphantly successful in reducing disease, and were viewed with great pride.

The main benefits of drains were public goods like clean groundwater, less flooding, and fewer epidemics. No individual consumer was willing to pay for these by themselves, and as a result private enterprise only ever played a limited role in the emergence of drainage systems: developers of new housing were often required to lay drains and pay for a connection to the municipal system, but the core trunks of the system were always publicly developed and funded through municipal taxation. Drains seem to sit with navies, law courts and diplomats as one of those services where a prominent state role is most clearly inevitable.

Trains, trams, buses, water, gas and electricity

We have seen that nineteenth-century streets and drains were delivered through public planning that was at least as activist as that which is practiced today. These made up only a modest share of the period’s infrastructure investments, however. A citydweller in 1800 was still living with infrastructure that was basically medieval in character. By 1914, middle-class people (certainly) and working-class people (increasingly) enjoyed vast systems of buses, trams, trains, gas, running water and electricity.

In the case of public transport, in fact, provision in 1914 was often better than it is now. The United States had some 975 electric tram networks with a total length of about 45,000 miles, longer than all the rest of the world’s tramlines put together. Although the maximum speed of these trams was slower than that of modern vehicles, the absence of congestion on the roads meant they operated at remarkably similar speeds. In New York City in 1914, the average speed of a tram was 8 miles per hour, while today the average for New York local buses is 7.8 miles per hour.

These systems were the product of public intervention, but a very different kind of intervention to that which was used for streets and drains. Transport and utility infrastructure has two features that mean it often requires special regulatory treatment. First, many kinds of infrastructure have huge positive spillover effects. If I take a solitary trip on a railway to visit a woodland, then the trip is valuable only for me, and the railway company is in the same position as any other consumer-facing business to capture that value through a fare. If I take a trip to visit my grandmother, my trip is valuable for both of us, but the railway has no way of capturing the value it has for her because it cannot charge her for my journey.

This is why transport infrastructure has such large positive spillover effects: we do not just travel for its own sake, we travel to others – family, clients, businesses, friends – for whom our presence is valuable. Transport providers can usually capture only the value of travel to travelers, not to those they visit. This is why the free market often supplies less transport infrastructure than is socially optimal.

The other regulatory challenge for transport infrastructure arises from a market failure called Hotelling’s Law, named after the economist Harold Hotelling. Imagine a beach on which holidaymakers are evenly distributed. Social value would be maximized by placing the two ice cream vans at points A and C, minimizing the distances that holidaymakers have to walk to them. But in a free market, both ice cream vans have an incentive to edge towards B. The left van will not lose any customers to the left of A by moving rightwards, since it is still closer to them than the right van: it only gains by advancing rightwards and capturing market share from the right van. The right van is subject to equivalent incentives, and so, absent external intervention, both will end up next to each other in the middle of the beach.

When new kinds of transport infrastructure were invented in the nineteenth century, they tended to be initially unregulated, and Hotelling effects arose swiftly. A classic example is the railways of Kent, developed from the 1840s by two companies, South Eastern Railway (SER) and London, Chatham and Kent Railway (LCKR). The two companies served many of the same suburbs and towns, and some towns ended up with two rival railway stations, giving access to distinct but largely duplicative networks. Vast quantities of capital were thus basically wasted. The two debt-ridden companies eventually merged in 1899, but because of the political difficulties of replanning railway alignments retroactively, southeast London and Kent have a strange and inefficient railway network down to the present day. A few towns, like Canterbury, even preserve multiple railway stations.

In some cases, duplicative lines had even worse effects. The tendency of bus companies to converge on the same routes led to serious congestion, actually lowering throughput. Bus companies also developed a bad habit of ‘racing’: because the first bus to arrive at a stop got all the waiting passengers, buses were incentivized to hurtle past each other in pursuit of fares. In the London neighborhood of Islington, the local vestry council became so fed up that they offered a cash bounty for any information leading to the capture of a dangerous bus driver. In Paris, horse-drawn bus competition was perceived as a crisis by the 1850s, leading to drastic reforms discussed below.

In the twentieth century, many countries nationalized urban infrastructure and funded it through general taxation. In principle, this could solve both the problems we have identified here: the government could subsidize a higher level of public transport than the market would provide, and it could plan the network so that services were efficiently differentiated. Needless to say, it has also brought its own problems: public subsidies are not always forthcoming, and public management not always efficient. In any case, no country in the nineteenth century adopted it wholesale for any services except roads, parks, and drainage. People were used to extremely low taxes, and the tax burden required to cover the cost of municipal infrastructure was still inconceivable.

Without public funding, nineteenth-century governments were obliged to find an alternative way of preventing these market failures. Governments converged on a similar solution: the creation of monopolies. In some cases, governments simply allowed monopolies to develop. This approach was particularly common in Britain. For example, by the late nineteenth century, a large majority of London’s buses were run by a single company, the (originally French) London General Omnibus Company, while almost all the gas of North London was delivered by a company called the Gas Light and Coke Co. Many kinds of infrastructure are natural monopolies, so the authorities needed only to passively acquiesce in order for a dominant firm to emerge in each market through outcompeting or merging with its rivals.

In most countries, however, the authorities were not content to wait for monopolists to emerge naturally. The process was slow and often involved chaotic bankruptcies, which left an endowment of inefficient duplicative infrastructure like the Kentish railways that could only be rationalized at great cost. Many municipalities thus began to legally restrict each infrastructure market to a single operator.

The formal monopoly system came in three main variants. Under the first variant, known as franchising, the service was completely privately owned, though with municipal regulation of prices and routes (in the case of buses and trams). This was the dominant system in the United States, where it was used for buses, trams, gas, and electricity. For example, virtually all trams in Philadelphia were consolidated under the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company, while the Boston Elevated Rail Company owned the whole rail system in Boston (not just elevated lines, despite the name). Franchises were usually time-limited: when they ended, municipalities usually renegotiated and renewed them, but they could also buy up the infrastructure or even (theoretically) require that the franchise company tear it up.

Under the second variant, known as a concession, the underlying physical infrastructure belonged to the municipality, but concessionaires were given the right to operate it and collect receipts for a fixed period, again subject to regulations from the municipality. At the end of the concession period the municipality could either renew the concession or grant it to a different concessionaire who offered a better deal. This process was smoother than it was with franchises, since the actual tracks or pipes could simply be handed over to the competitor without having to be bought up.

The concessionaire model was highly developed in France, where it was used for all municipal infrastructure except drainage. Two companies, the Compagnie générale des eaux and the Société lyonnaise des eaux et de l’éclairage, came to dominate the entire sector nationally, operating most of the infrastructure of urban France, and competing to win concessions from municipal governments (both companies still exist, now called Veolia and Suez). The French system was widely emulated, especially in Spain and Italy, and by 1900 the great French concessionaires were already multinational powerhouses, operating municipal infrastructure around the world.

Under the third variant of the monopoly system, the whole service was owned and run by the municipality. This approach was pioneered in the German Empire, where most cities municipalized their infrastructure in the late nineteenth century, replacing earlier franchises or concessions. For example, Frankfurt’s gas system was originally established by an English company but municipalized in the 1860s, while its trams were originally private concessions until they were municipalized in the 1890s. All these services were then unified under companies called Stadtwerke. The Stadtwerk model was seen as very successful, and other countries emulated it, including Britain and Austria-Hungary. This process was slow, however: when British utilities were finally nationalized in the 1940s, about half were still in private hands.

These three approaches may sound completely different. But they had some crucial similarities. In all of them, competitors were excluded, services were municipally regulated, and municipal services were normally funded through user fees. With marginal exceptions, the franchise companies and concessionaires received no public money, covering running costs and depreciation through user fees and ideally turning a profit for shareholders to boot. The Metropolitan Street Railway Company, which ran Manhattan’s trams, paid a seven percent dividend in the first decade of the twentieth century, while the Brooklyn Manhattan Transport Corporation, which ran Brooklyn and Queens’s trams, turned a profit of up to $5 million annually, fantastically large by the standards of the time.

More strikingly still, infrastructure companies usually aimed to turn a profit even when they were municipally owned. Many Stadtwerke in Germany and municipal works in Britain were highly profitable, paying for improvements in other public services or cuts to local tax rates. The lucrativeness of municipal works was often explicitly cited as a reason for establishing them. Municipal works were thus run surprisingly similarly to franchises and concessions, essentially as profit-making monopolies whose shareholders were local taxpayers. Nineteenth-century municipalities were almost never bailed out by national governments if they went bankrupt, meaning that they had incentives to avoid profligacy and risk that were similar to those of a private company.

All versions of the monopoly system solved the Hotelling problem: since a single organization controlled the entire network, it was incentivized to space out its services efficiently, rather than cannibalizing customers from its own existing services when it added a new one. They partly corrected for spillover effects. Protection from competition meant that infrastructure operators could charge higher fares, which meant that more lines were viable. Most municipal governments supported infrastructure fervently, so although they capped prices when they allowed monopolies or granted franchises and concessions, they were generally careful to cap them high enough that they did not disincentivize the investment.

The downside of this system, of course, was that higher fares depressed ridership. The overall effect was that cities got more infrastructure, but used it less intensively. This effect was, however, only temporary: when the franchises or concessions came up for renewal, and after the debts from installation (‘undertaking debt’) had been paid off, the municipality could lower fare caps so that fares merely covered operating costs. The standard pattern was thus that new infrastructure was expensive for users for ten or twenty years while the monopolist paid off undertaking debt, before becoming more widely affordable.

For example, in 1899 the authorities determined that Boston’s gas companies had paid off their undertaking debt sufficiently that their maximum prices were lowered to $1.30 per 1,000 feet. Cleveland’s tram franchise had a more sophisticated mechanism written into it so that fares automatically fell when undertaking debt was paid off. Glasgow finished paying off undertaking debt from its trams in the 1910s and steadily cut fares thereafter. Similar examples are found all over the world.

Needless to say, infrastructure companies lobbied to keep prices high as long as possible, and their methods were not always models of transparency. In the United States, nineteenth-century local government was prone to corruption, and infrastructure companies sometimes bribed local politicians to secure more generous franchises.

The most famous practitioner of this was Charles Yerkes, who developed Chicago’s enormous tram system in the 1880s and 90s, despite having previously been jailed twice for larceny and blackmail. Yerkes gave Chicago the greatest tram system in the world, but he did not do so in an idealistic spirit, once remarking that ‘my chief aim in life has been self-satisfaction’. In 1897, a heavily bribed Illinois legislature granted him an exceptionally generous franchise renewal, and the Chicago authorities were about to do the same. The outraged Chicagoans rioted outside City Hall, and the alarmed councillors changed their minds at the last moment. Yerkes indignantly sold off his Chicago assets and moved to London instead, where he founded the Bakerloo, Piccadilly, and Northern Lines. Perhaps rather appropriately, an impact crater on the Moon was later named after this remarkable man.

In fixing sustainable prices, nineteenth-century regulators had one huge advantage over their successors today, which was that there was no inflation. Governments find it extremely difficult to uprate price controls in line with inflation, partly because doing so involves incurring renewed political pain year after year, and partly because imperfect public understanding of economics means that people interpret nominal price increases as real ones. This creates a widespread tendency for controlled prices to rise at below the rate of inflation, resulting in real terms price cuts. Egyptian bread and English university fees are famous examples of this.

Nineteenth-century governments did not face this problem. Provided municipalities set a reasonable price when the concession or franchise was granted, it would remain moderately profitable indefinitely, and might even become more profitable with productivity improvements. All this changed in 1914 when inflation recommenced, rapidly driving down the real value of user fees. By the 1920s, most public transport companies were on the edge of ruin. Utilities were so obviously essential that most governments ultimately grasped the nettle of increasing prices in line with inflation, but most public transport systems remained in financial crisis throughout the interwar period, and were in a position of profound weakness just when competition from cars became intense.

By the 1960s, public transport had collapsed, except where systems were established to subsidize it. The reason why trams survived in Germany while vanishing in Britain, France, and North America was that German trams were run by unified Stadtwerke, which were able to subsidize them from still-profitable utilities services.

The regulated monopoly system had its problems, and the politics of inflation may make it irrecoverable today. But its appeal is apparent given the number of valuable contemporary infrastructure projects that fail to happen because the government is unwilling to subsidize them. For example, there is a strong case for through running some of London’s old suburban railways in a scheme called ‘Crossrail 2’. Despite being widely supported for decades, funding has never been made available, partly because the British government does not like to be seen as favoring London. If fares were decontrolled on Crossrail 2, it is possible that London’s transport operator could fund it from projected fare income. But it is politically delicate to charge £12 for travel on one London railway when all the others cost £2.90.

There are occasional modern examples of transport infrastructure funded in the nineteenth-century manner. In postwar France, the concessionaire system was extended to motorways, which are built and operated by concessionaires and funded entirely by tolls. Austrian motorways are publicly owned but funded by borrowing against future toll income, like Stadtwerk infrastructure before 1914. The Channel Tunnel, a rail tunnel between Britain and France, was similarly delivered by a concessionaire at no cost to the British or French publics, with its cost covered by borrowing against future fare income.

These exceptions may have been possible because they felt so unlike existing transport infrastructure that standard political norms were not applied to them. But it is interesting to consider what other opportunities there might be for more such self-funding infrastructure projects, even under trickier modern conditions.

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Buildings

Nineteenth-century governments were not really laissez-faire in their approach to infrastructure, but they were closer to being so with individual buildings. In general, the right of landowners to build on their land was seen as axiomatic. There were limited exceptions. Public authorities reserved the right to ban development on the alignments of future roads. They sometimes banned development around fortresses or city walls to preserve a field of fire for the defenders. For example, Paris was fortified until the 1920s, and development was theoretically banned in a 250-meter-deep area around the walls (in practice the area, known as ‘the Zone’, rapidly filled with slums, only sporadically demolished by the authorities). But only overriding reasons of public good could justify revoking the right to build that citizens enjoyed. In German-speaking Europe, Baufreiheit (‘freedom of building’) was regarded as an important principle of political liberalism; in the English-speaking countries, it was simply taken for granted.

The authorities had somewhat more to say on what people could build. All cities had building regulations, which covered structural soundness and fire safety. In Europe, these rules were fairly strict, usually banning timber from the facade and requiring unbroken masonry party walls between plots. It is because of these rules that a small majority of the fabric of German cities survived the Second World War, while the timber cities of Japan were completely annihilated by firebombing. Similar rules also applied in some American cities, resulting in the development of famous house types like the New York ‘brownstone’. Where fire-proofing rules were laxer, catastrophic fires remained a real risk, as Chicago found to its cost in 1871 and San Francisco in 1906.

In some cases, building regulations included height limits, which were thought to help in fighting fires, preserving light and air for the public realm, and enhancing the cityscape. The maximum height usually varied based on factors like street width, but the usual effect of the regulations was that Paris capped heights at about eight storeys, Berlin at about five, Vienna at about six, and Rome at about six. These limits were usually rigorously enforced and were often the binding constraint on urban density in central areas. In Berlin, for example, virtually every plot was built up to the five-storey limit. Crucially, however, the height limits did not vary from neighborhood to neighborhood: the same limit applied across an entire jurisdiction. Since almost no municipalities were prepared to ban mid-rise in central areas, this meant that mid-rise had to be permitted everywhere, meaning in turn that suburban densification and relatively dense greenfield development were always possible. This began to change only in the 1890s with the emergence of differential area zoning in Germany.

Height limits were much less important in English-speaking countries. Most American cities had none at all, leading to skyscraper downtowns after the invention of steel frames and electric elevators in the 1880s. British municipalities imposed height limits only at the end of the nineteenth century in response to the invention of skyscrapers, usually capping heights at about ten storeys. This blocked some interesting Gothic skyscrapers, but as British cities were almost entirely developed at below ten storeys anyway, the limits were generally not a binding constraint.

Municipalities also regulated plot coverage, though these rules tended to be minimal. Berlin courtyards had to be 5.3 by 5.3 meters, this size being determined by the turning circle of contemporary fire engines. In London, all buildings had to be under a 63.5 degree light plane from the back of the plot, effectively generating a shallow rear setback. Most British municipalities also introduced bylaws governing the layout of working class housing, generally requiring that they have a backyard rather than being built flush with the rear plot boundary. These rules were thought to prevent disease, which was believed to be transmitted through bad air called miasma. Although the miasma theory was scientifically discredited by 1880, it seems to have had a long half-life in the culture of town planning.

Among the most notorious high densities were in the tenements of Manhattan. Until 1867, New York had no coverage restrictions at all. This sometimes resulted in city blocks being completely covered with buildings, the inner rooms of which wholly lacked natural light. In 1867 the city introduced a rule that every room have a window, which builders gamed by introducing dummy windows between rooms while continuing to cover whole city blocks. From 1879, the authorities required that all habitable rooms have a window onto the outside. Builders satisfied this by introducing comically narrow slits between buildings, resulting in the infamous dumbbell plan. Many of these unappealing buildings survive in Lower Manhattan, where, by a curious irony, they now have some of the highest floorspace values on earth. More stringent rules were introduced only in 1901.

Even the most determined friend of urban density today is likely to quail a little before these designs. As contemporary observers pointed out, however, banning them did not necessarily help their residents: in fact, prohibiting the cheapest forms of housing often meant that those who lived in them ended up with nothing at all. Nineteenth-century municipalities were sensitive to this argument, and their building regulations tended to lag behind improvements in market housing generated by rising incomes, except inasmuch as structural soundness and fire risk were concerned.

Today, most cities zone their neighborhoods by use class, finely specifying the activities that can take place there. This happened to a modest extent even in the nineteenth century, with local governments excluding noxious uses from densely populated areas. Slaughterhouses were widely regarded as repulsive neighbors, and it was common for local governments to require them to move to uninhabited areas, along with brick kilns and tanneries.

In general, however, the authorities were extremely liberal about how buildings were used. American permissiveness could reach extremes that even the most radical zoning reformists would probably balk at today. In California, it was not unknown for one’s neighbors to sell their plot to oil prospectors, who would then begin drilling in the next door garden. If they got lucky, a huge plume of oil would burst from the earth, and the whole neighborhood would degenerate into a smoldering hellscape.

This is rather a special case. But flexibility of use certainly led to change in nineteenth-century cities that use zoning would prevent today. The most striking example of this is the development of central business districts. The development of radial public transit meant that central areas became extremely valuable for commercial and retail uses: the area where the transport lines converged was accessible to the population of a huge area, meaning businesses sited there could draw on larger pools of potential employees or consumers than ever before. Floorspace thus became more valuable in commercial and retail uses than residential ones, leading to the displacement of most residents from urban cores. The City of London, the medieval core of the city, lost three quarters of its residential population between 1850 and 1900. Manhattan’s population peaked in 1910.

This may inspire memories of postwar urban decline, when soaring crime, congestion and deindustrialization led to the collapse of many Anglophone city centers. But the similarity is only superficial. The value and density of floorspace in nineteenth-century centers was rising, not falling. Pedestrians flowed into them every morning; dense and affluent residential neighborhoods clustered around them, like the Upper East Side and the West End. Residential populations declined because mass transit made urban cores even more attractive for something else, not because they had become unattractive places.

This permissiveness created restless cities, in which rapid unwelcome change in a neighborhood’s physical and social character was a constant threat. Nineteenth-century people were anxious about this, and sought ways of mitigating it. Many middle-class people were willing to pay a premium to live in privately covenanted areas, whose developers had imposed rules that would theoretically fix the neighborhood’s character in perpetuity, prohibiting densification, change of use, subletting and subdivision. These restrictions were not very effective. But they suggest that nineteenth-century governments were offering a level of development management below what would have been economically value-maximizing: the addition of restrictions sometimes made neighborhoods more valuable, not less.

On the other hand, the permissiveness of development controls enabled a huge increase in the housing stock. Economic theory predicts that if the supply of housing is unrestricted, the price of housing will not exceed the price of agricultural land plus the cost of building housing on it for any length of time: whenever house prices do rise above the price of agricultural land plus build costs, agricultural landowners will be incentivized to build housing until its price falls back to this point again. Increases in housing demand will thus translate smoothly into increases in housing stock, not increases in price.

The empirical evidence from the nineteenth century confirms this hypothesis. Despite the enormous increase in demand for urban housing caused by demographic and economic growth, real house prices remained roughly flat throughout the period. This is despite the average home becoming considerably larger and better built in the course of the century. In 1800, the median Briton or American was living in a home with two rooms shared with five other people. This began improving around 1850, and by 1914, they were living in a home with four or five rooms and a back yard, shared with three or four other people. Continental housing was worse but also rapidly improving. Anglo-American homes in 1914 were also far more likely to have a garden, and, as we have seen, homes in all countries were far more likely to be connected to running water and gas.

The upshot of this is that the price per square meter of floorspace, let alone per ‘unit of quality’, actually fell. This is because the factors of production got cheaper: agricultural land values remained constant or fell gently due to competition from Ukraine and the New World, while build costs fell due to technological improvements in manufacturing, like the factory production of bricks, joinery, and ornament.

At the same time, incomes rose rapidly, especially after 1850, meaning that housing became dramatically more affordable overall. In Britain, for example, the average house price fell from about twelve times average earnings in 1850 to about four times in 1914. The same trend is evident across the West. Of course, incomes were still very low in 1914, and many Europeans (and to a lesser extent Americans) still lived in terrible housing poverty. But the number was rapidly shrinking. For the first time in history, hundreds of millions of people had escaped from squalor, even as they had escaped from hunger.

In the postwar period, house prices began rising in Europe, Canada and Australia. By far the most important driver of this, generally explaining 80 percent of the total increase, were restrictions on building imposed by public authorities. For many decades, the United States was basically an exception to this trend due to its continued permissiveness towards outward suburban expansion. But since 1990, it too has joined the general upwards trend, especially in major cities.

This rise is so steep that affordability has declined in many major cities, despite rising incomes. In Britain, the average house price started rising again around 1990 and reached nine times average earnings in 2020, the same as it was in 1876. Britain is distinctively bad, but deteriorating affordability is also apparent in Canada, Australia, France, parts of the United States, and many other developed countries. This is strong evidence that, though the optimal level of development control is probably higher than that which prevailed in the nineteenth century, it is far lower than that which has strangulated the housing supply of many cities in the twentieth.

I have argued here that many of the merits of nineteenth-century cities are attributable to their regulatory systems. Some readers may wonder if this is also true of their beauty, the feature that sets them apart so sharply from growing cities around the world today. To the extent that beauty is constituted by good transport, street networks, and so on, a positive answer follows from what has already been said. But to the extent that we are concerned with the visual beauty of their buildings, the answer, perhaps surprisingly, is no.

Nineteenth-century building codes did govern many features that are relevant to a building’s beauty, such as alignment and height. They frequently banned wood from facades as an anti-fire measure, and required various refinements like parapets, raised party walls, and setback windows for the same reason. But it is just not true that they regulated buildings tightly enough to ensure they were beautiful. Nineteenth-century codes almost never required ornament, beautiful materials, or good proportions. It would have been perfectly possible to build an ugly building that complied with them.

A number of myths have arisen in this connection that it is worth exorcizing explicitly. It is often said that the architectural style of Paris was tightly controlled by the government official Baron Haussmann. This is basically untrue. Parisian building codes were silent on architectural style: the authorities did choose a style for the small minority of streets that they compulsorily purchased and redeveloped, but acting in their capacity as a landowner, not as a regulator. Similarly, it is sometimes thought that the four ‘rates’ of London houses corresponded to four state-mandated designs. This too is a misunderstanding. London’s building rules did indeed distinguish four rates of house based on size and sales value, to which different construction standards were applied. However, these standards had nothing at all to say about facade pattern or ornament. Like all codes of the period, they aimed merely at structural integrity and fire safety.

The conclusion is unavoidable that developers invested in beauty not because of regulatory pressures but because of market ones. To put that differently, nineteenth-century people got beautiful buildings because they wanted them – enough that they were prepared to pay for them, despite their relative poverty. The physical character of a city is a flawed guide to the spirit of its inhabitants: there are any number of material constraints and collective action problems that mediate between the two. But we do learn something about the men and women of the nineteenth century from their cathedral-like railway stations, their palatial office blocks, and their carefully ornamented homes.

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The twilight of liberal urbanism

The nineteenth-century system did not completely vanish in 1914. Indeed, it has not completely vanished today. France still runs its utilities on the same concessionaire system it used in 1900, and indeed the same two companies still win most of the concessions. German cities still have successful Stadtwerke, although the public transport services they provide are now heavily subsidized. So far as outward expansion is concerned, many American cities remain basically as permissive today as they were in the nineteenth century.

Nonetheless, the system entered a period of crisis and transformation after 1914. The old self-funding transport systems were decimated by the combination of price controls and inflation, and either collapsed or survived on public subsidies. Densification and change of use were gradually banned by the rise of zoning systems. The outward expansion of cities was increasingly restricted by public spatial policy, with national governments deciding which cities would expand and where they would do so. In many continental countries, private homebuilding was decimated for decades by rent controls.

Traditional accounts of nineteenth-century urban development, both by admirers and detractors, tend to present it as laissez-faire. In this story, nineteenth-century cities were the organic product of private enterprise, while twentieth-century cities arose from a hybrid of private enterprise and public planning. This is incomplete and misleading. As we have seen, streets and drains were mostly publicly provided, and in some countries trams, buses, gas, water, and electricity were too. Building regulation was ubiquitous and generally strictly enforced. Infrastructure might be privately owned, but the state shaped the private sector to ensure integrated planning across cities.

The really important differences might be subtler. If we were to specify one unifying virtue of nineteenth-century urban governance, it would not be laissez-faire, but rather the alignment of private interests and public good. Monopolism was a way of creating bodies for whom the best way to maximize profit was to build infrastructure that also maximized value for the city as a whole. Municipal ownership did not change this, because cities raised their own revenues locally and bore full responsibility for their spending decisions. The right to build was generally restricted only where doing so was necessary to prevent exceptionally negative side-effects. The key features of the system turn out to be more elusive principles like ‘users pay’, ‘suppliers profit’, and ‘spendthrift public bodies go bankrupt’.

In the years since 1914, technological and economic progress has continued and accelerated. For all their problems, most Western economies have grown faster since 1945 than they did between 1850 and 1914. The technology underlying construction, transport and utilities has vastly improved. Despite this, urban growth rates have collapsed, housing affordability has deteriorated, urban design has frayed, and urban mobility has stagnated. In some ways, Western societies have become worse at solving the collective action problems of urban life. Nineteenth-century cities were materially poor and technologically primitive, but their institutions were often flexible, vigorous, and creative. We still have something to learn from them.

Samuel Hughes is an editor at Works in Progress. Follow him on Twitter.

In 1796, when Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine, against the smallpox virus, no one knew what viruses were, let alone connected them to diseases.

Many believed Jenner’s vaccine worked because it depleted the body of the specific nutrients the disease needed to thrive. In reality, his concept worked because of the good fortune that cowpox infections provided cross protection against smallpox. It would take almost a century to work out how to develop vaccines against other diseases.

Stocks of Jenner’s vaccine would die out repeatedly, and needed to be rederived from scratch many times. Keeping a vaccine alive in the nineteenth century was grueling, requiring arm to arm chains of transmission just to preserve the material.

The process improved slowly. In the 1840s, doctors invented a method to grow the smallpox vaccine virus more safely and reliably on the skin of calves. The 1890s saw a method to keep it from spoiling quickly by mixing it with glycerin, and in the 1940s, scientists learned how to freeze-dry it to survive heat and long journeys. In the 1960s, the bifurcated needle, with a forked tip that could hold a tiny drop of vaccine, made it possible to use only a quarter of the usual dose and helped scale up vaccination. Technological innovations like these made it possible to eradicate smallpox worldwide.

Jenner’s discovery in the eighteenth century transformed the world. But it also reflected the primitive knowledge and technology of the time. It would take another 90 years for scientists to formulate germ theory. Another half century would pass before Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll invented the electron microscope, allowing scientists to see the virus that caused smallpox for the first time.

Two hundred years ago, vaccines were serendipitous; today, they are designed. We can now visualize the structure of pathogens at an atomic level. We can purify and design ingredients, boost our immune response with adjuvants, deliver vaccines in safer packages, and manufacture them in billions of doses. We can track pathogens’ evolution in real time and adapt vaccines to new strains.

It has never been easier to develop new vaccines. We are living through a golden age of vaccine development. The future holds even greater breakthroughs, but only if we continue to invest in them.

Pasteur and the culture of vaccinology

The smallpox vaccine was serendipitous. It just happened to be the case that a related virus, cowpox, could protect against smallpox and that cowpox was mild enough to be used safely.

Ninety years after Jenner, Louis Pasteur worked out how to replicate his success for other diseases. Pasteur was already famous for his fermentation techniques and developing the process now called pasteurization.

In the 1870s, he began to study infections in farm animals, starting with chicken cholera. He grew the bacteria in the lab and kept them alive via ‘serial passage’, transferring them to fresh broth every few days, and injecting them into chickens to study the disease. Fresh cultures were lethal: nearly all the chickens died within days.

During the summer of 1879, while Pasteur was away, his assistant Émile Roux continued the work. Roux tried reculturing flasks that had stood for weeks, but the broth had soured, and the bacteria grew poorly. He then injected it into chickens and noted that some survived. Perhaps the bacteria had become too weak to cause disease? But surprisingly, when he injected the same chickens with a fresh, deadly strain, some survived; it had somehow protected them. When Pasteur returned, they continued experimenting, gradually learning that acidity and prolonged exposure to air could weaken the microbe and protect the chickens. With this, they developed the world’s second vaccine.

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Then they developed another, against animal anthrax, this time inactivating the bacteria with chemicals, before turning to one of the deadliest diseases: rabies. Almost everyone who developed symptoms from a rabid animal’s bite died within weeks, but its microbial cause was unclear. The rabies virus, like other viruses, was too small to be seen under microscopes of the time. But Pasteur and Roux reliably found that brain tissue from a rabid animal could cause rabies in another animal.

After hundreds of experiments, they finally developed a vaccine. Roux extracted brain tissue from a rabid dog and injected it into the brains of rabbits after drilling a small hole into their skulls. He then passaged the material from rabbit to rabbit this way, eventually going through 90 rabbits in a row. Finally, he dried the tissues in closed flasks to weaken the pathogen and injected the material into dogs, gradually exposing them to higher and higher doses, helping them build up protection.

As the animal experiments seemed successful, Pasteur and Roux moved to treat people who had been bitten by rabid animals, helping their bodies build up antibodies before the disease could fully take hold. In 1885, they treated two young boys bitten by rabid dogs and saw their first indications that the procedure worked. One of the deadliest diseases had become preventable. Rabies would eventually be eliminated in many countries with vaccines built on their idea.

Their methods could be used to develop vaccines systematically. One way was to force a pathogen into a different environment until it lost its virulence (‘attenuation’); another was to use heat or chemicals to inactivate the pathogen (‘inactivation’). Both prevented pathogens from causing disease in humans while preserving their structure, so the immune system could recognize a similar pathogen in the event of future exposure.

But protecting large populations was still a distant prospect. Pasteur developed vaccines by culturing microbes in whole animals, which was inefficient and carried contamination risks. It was essential to find a way to cultivate cells – not entire tissues or animals – in a lab.

Robert Koch, a bacteriologist and Pasteur’s rival, would make a major advance. While Pasteur fermented microbes in liquid broth, Koch wanted to cultivate bacteria on solid media to see them under the microscope. His solution was to solidify nutrient broth in a dish with gelatin and cover it with a bell jar. The gelatin was later replaced by agar (a jelly-like material derived from seaweed) and the bell jar was replaced with an additional lidded dish in an invention by his assistant Julius Petri, creating what is now known as the ‘Petri dish’. Paired with Pasteur’s methods, tools like these helped support a wave of research and the development of new bacterial vaccines.

But scientists still couldn’t cultivate animal cells. They clumped together on a plate, ran out of nutrients, and quickly died. And as viruses are obligate parasites, requiring living cells to replicate, they couldnʼt be cultivated this way at all.

The next step forward came from neuroscientist Ross Harrison in 1907, who developed the hanging drop method. He took a piece of spinal cord from a frog embryo and put it in a drop of its plasma, placed it on a thin glass coverslip, inverted it over a concave slide, and sealed it with wax – creating a drop that hung suspended and stayed moist and rounded while the plasma provided nutrients and structure. The nerve fibers stayed alive, growing for weeks.

By the 1920s, scientists were isolating cells from tissue, watching them migrate across glass surfaces and, once they had used up the nutrients on a plate, cutting the growing regions and transferring them onto a new plate, creating longer lineages of cells. Such methods helped develop vaccines against diseases like polio as scientists figured out how to propagate poliovirus in cells outside the nervous system.

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Additional technologies made the process safer: antibiotics reduced bacterial contamination, and autoclaves sterilized instruments with high-pressure steam. Later, cryopreservation helped freeze cells for long term storage, and animal broths were replaced with simpler preparations like Harry Eagle’s medium, which contained only glucose, amino acids, salts, and vitamins.

Researchers also developed machinery to grow cells. For cells that typically grew suspended in liquid, there were stirred-tank bioreactors, which bubble in oxygen and stir the solution to distribute nutrients. For those that still required a surface, there were microcarriers, with tiny beads suspended in liquid, and the roller bottle system, where glass bottles rotate slowly to increase cells’ surface area while keeping them evenly bathed.

Vaccinology had become a systematic science, based ultimately on the foundations laid by Pasteur. By the mid-twentieth century, scientists were producing vaccines against typhoid fever, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, influenza, polio, yellow fever, and other diseases.

The microscope revolution

What was remarkable about Pasteur’s approach was that he developed some vaccines without ever observing the pathogens, through empirical testing alone.

It wasn’t strictly necessary to see pathogens to develop vaccines for them, but observation made others possible. Take tuberculosis, whose symptoms are easy to confuse with other diseases. The bacteria that cause it were eventually identified through microscopy. Without such careful examination, it would have been difficult to cultivate the right bacteria and remove other contaminating microbes from a vaccine preparation.

Fortunately, microscopes had been undergoing a revolution of their own. Over two hundred years, their resolution would improve more than ten thousandfold, allowing scientists to examine not only cells, but bacteria, then viruses, their protein structure, and, eventually, the individual atoms that comprised them.

In 1800, the French anatomist Xavier Bichat had classified the body into groups of similar cells, like muscle or connective tissue, using only a hand lens. Bichat distrusted nineteenth century compound microscopes, probably for good reason. Many apparent discoveries of the time were actually caused by optical problems like spherical aberration, where the edges of a curved lens bent light differently than the center and made images blurry, or chromatic aberration, where different wavelengths were bent differently and created colored fringes around objects. What looked like a cellular feature might simply be a distorted lens.

Various innovations were needed to make microscopes more precise. One step came in 1830 from the wine merchant JJ Lister, who studied lens making as a hobby. By varying the distance between lenses, he worked out how to develop achromatic and aplanatic lenses, which reduced color and spherical aberrations, respectively.

Improvements continued, along with new techniques to view more biological material for longer and with greater detail. Scientists developed better fixatives to stabilize cells and prevent them from decaying, staining dyes that bind to molecules to reveal structures like the cell nucleus, and sectioning equipment, which cut tissue into thin slices to allow light through.

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As the nineteenth century progressed, scientists began to see cells’ organelles and observe cell division. They increasingly recognized cells as the units that all living organisms are made of. And with improvements in culture methods, they observed microorganisms – bacteria, fungi, and parasites – infecting cells and causing disease.

Most famous was the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, discovered by Robert Koch in 1882, at a time when tuberculosis was killing thousands each year in growing cities like Berlin. Before Koch, researchers had managed to reproduce tuberculosis in rabbits by injecting them with phlegm from infected patients, but struggled to identify its microbial cause. Although they didn’t know it, the bacteria’s waxy cell walls, rich in mycolic acids, repelled water-based dyes, making the bacteria difficult to stain.

Visualizing them would take ingenuity. Taking lung tissue from an autopsy, Koch applied standard dyes and then added ammonia, making the solution more alkaline. It made it possible for the dyes to attach to the bacteria, and as the dyes latched on, they revealed, at last, the pathogen responsible for one of humanity’s greatest killers.

His discovery was part of a surge of research in microbiology in the late nineteenth century, now known as the Golden Age of microbiology. One by one, long standing mysteries of diseases – tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, anthrax, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, meningococcal and pneumococcal disease – were being resolved.

No viruses had yet been observed: they were still invisible under the microscope, being much smaller than bacteria. Unfortunately, by the end of the nineteenth century, improvements in microscopy were reaching a hard limit.

The physicist and businessman Ernst Abbe had formulated an equation that would explain why. He found that a microscope’s optical resolution depended on the wavelength of light and the numerical aperture of the lens (a measure of its ability to gather light). Light microscopes couldn’t focus at high magnification because, no matter how clear the lenses were, they couldn’t distinguish details closer than about half the wavelength of visible light, roughly two hundred nanometers. When two points were closer together, light waves directed at them would interfere, blurring them into a single spot.

It would take until the 1930s for physicists Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll to invent the electron microscope, replacing light with electrons, which have a smaller wavelength, and extend this limit. Their invention required various advances: discovering the electron, inventing magnetic lenses, and improving vacuum technology.

Electron microscopy combined them all. Electrons can’t be bent by glass the way light can, so electron microscopes instead use magnetic lenses: coils of wire carrying current that bend and focus the electron beam. To keep the electrons from scattering off, the instrument operates in a vacuum. The pieces work in stages: a source produces the electron beam; a condenser aperture shapes it; magnetic lenses focus it progressively onto a specimen; and more lenses project and magnify the image onto a detector.

The first electron microscopes were fragile prototypes. Improving the vacuum seal, brightening the beam, sharpening the lenses, and using better cameras led to an enormous payoff: magnification thousands of times greater than light microscopy.

Electron microscopy gave microbiologists their first direct look at viruses, finally revealing their geometry. But the electron beam could collapse biological material like proteins and membranes, leaving mere outlines and shadows. It would take until the 1980s for scientists to see the precise internal structure of viruses, with the invention of cryo-electron microscopy. Here, a thin film of the sample would be plunged into a very cold liquid so fast that water solidified without forming ice crystals. This glass-like water, called vitreous ice, locked molecules in place in their native structure.

With time, scientists developed better detectors and computational methods to combine overlaps from thousands of images to reconstruct the 3D structure of microbes down to their individual atoms.

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Take respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. In the last decade, visualizing the atomic structure of its proteins helped finally develop safe and effective vaccines, decades after previous efforts failed. The critical site was a protein on its surface, the fusion protein, which helps the virus enter cells. The protein changes shape after it enters cells, by which point it’s too late: even if our immune system could recognize it, it wouldn’t matter. But its pre-fusion shape, before it enters, is a powerful target. After scientists could see its structure with crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, they used genetic engineering to mutate the protein and lock it in its pre-fusion shape for a vaccine.

Precision vaccines

The RSV vaccine was also part of a major shift in vaccine technology: it was not the whole virus but an individual protein. Until the mid-twentieth century, the vast majority of vaccines had been made from whole pathogens. Making precise vaccines, containing only a few key ingredients, would improve their safety and widen their breadth.

This approach gradually replaced the Pasteurian method of culturing and weakening a microbe. The first step came in 1890, only a few years after Pasteur’s breakthrough, when the doctors Emil von Behring and Kitasato Shibasaburo discovered ‘serum therapy’. By passively transferring the serum of an infected person or animal to someone else, they could prevent or treat the latterʼs infection.

Their serum therapy tamed diphtheria, whose victims, typically young children, could die of suffocation within days. The bacteria release a toxin that kills throat cells, causing our body to respond by laying a tough, clot-like membrane that can inadvertently seal the airway and choke us. Unfortunately, serum therapy gave only fleeting protection: whatever was in the serum didn’t teach the immune system to recognize and remember the pathogen later on.

Over three decades later, researchers developed an active, longer-lasting vaccine against diphtheria by inactivating the bacteriaʼs toxins using formalin, while maintaining their ability to stimulate an immune response. Diphtheria cases fell dramatically. It was the first example of what we now call a ‘subunit vaccine’, containing only a particular part – in this case the inactivated toxin – of the bacterium.

Though serum therapy was being replaced by vaccines, it had also given scientists a key insight: serum carried protective factors that could defend someone against pathogens they had encountered before. Those protective factors included antibodies, which attach to particular parts of the pathogen, called ‘antigens’.

Researchers developed a growing set of tools to detect and quantify antibodies. What they found was remarkable: antibodies weren’t just vaguely anti-foreign, they were highly specific. Tiny differences in the molecular structure of an antigen could lead to entirely different immune responses, as the doctor Karl Landsteiner discovered when he worked out the chemical basis of blood groups. But how could the body possibly generate so much diversity and specificity?

One theory, the ‘instructional’ model, was proposed by Linus Pauling. He suggested that the microbe acted as a template, molding the shape of the nascent antibody to fit it. This seemed to explain the high specificity of the interactions at first. But with more data, the model broke down. Just a single unit of an antigen could generate millions or even billions of antibodies that were exact copies of one another, not what you’d expect if they all required contact. And some were present even before exposure to an antigen, like the natural antibodies people have against other blood groups.

Gradually, the field shifted toward another model, proposed by Niels Jerne, which suggested that antigens weren’t reshaping antibodies: they were being recognized by a pre-existing antibody repertoire. This was refined into ‘clonal selection theory’ by Macfarlane Burnet in 1957: each white blood cell expresses a unique antibody, and when it finds a matching antigen, clones of that white blood cell multiply and release thousands of antibodies per second. The massive diversity of white blood cells, researchers later found out, isn’t encoded from birth – the DNA of developing white blood cells is actively cut, shuffled, and stitched back together during our lifetimes into tens of millions of unique antibody-producing cells, generated continuously after birth, waiting for the right antigen to come along.

This extreme specificity meant the immune system didn’t need the entire pathogen to trigger a response, but only a part of it, the right antigen, to recognize it in the future. It laid the groundwork for an entirely different approach to developing vaccines or improving existing ones.

One example was the vaccine against pertussis, or whooping cough, a disease that leaves infants and young children violently gasping for breath. Pertussis vaccines were developed back in 1914, and their rollout massively reduced the spread of the disease. But they also contained the whole bacterial cell and could cause rare side effects. The Bordetella pertussis bacterium has thousands of antigens, and injecting vaccines containing the whole bacterium meant injecting unnecessary material. Rising concern about the safety of the vaccine led to lawsuits in the United States and, in Japan, the government suspended it. As vaccination rates dropped, pertussis cases and deaths rose, spurring an international research effort to develop a better vaccine: one that contained only the antigens necessary for protection.

Yuji and Hiroko Sato, a husband and wife team working at the National Institute of Health in Japan, found two such antigens: pertussis toxin and filamentous hemagglutinin. They purified and detoxified them with formalin. The resulting vaccine became part of the diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine, which was introduced in Japan in 1981 and later adopted globally.

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More and more vaccines have been developed with this approach, as scientists have sifted through pathogens to find only key antigens that are needed for a subunit vaccine. As they’ve replaced older vaccines, the number of antigens that children receive in childhood vaccines has fallen sharply. Children receive more vaccines today, but fewer and more targeted antigens than they did back in 1900, when only the smallpox vaccine was widely available.

Subunit vaccines have many advantages. Without the entire pathogen, there are fewer contaminants, fewer unnecessary antigens, and fewer side effects. They can also easily contain antigens from multiple pathogens, protecting people from all of them at once. But stripping vaccines down to a few components can also come at a cost: the acellular pertussis vaccine, for example, was safer but also less effective, with immune protection waning after a few years.

Over the twentieth century, immunologists discovered new ways to restore the potency that subunit vaccines had lost. They found ‘adjuvants’, such as aluminium salts and oil-based emulsions, that could dramatically strengthen the immune response. They also learned that the way a vaccine’s antigens are presented, the structure, formulation, and delivery, could shape immunity. Step by step, scientists learned to recreate the strength of whole-pathogen vaccines with the safety of their purified descendants.

The genomic revolution

A new era began when scientists stopped merely cultivating viruses and began decoding them. Over the last 50 years, genome sequencing has grown faster and cheaper, and genetic engineering has become ever more precise: the blueprints of pathogens have become both readable and editable, making it possible to rapidly redesign vaccines to match an evolving world of microbes.

In the 1970s, it took weeks or months to laboriously decode the sequence of a single gene. Even in the 1980s, after automated sequencers were introduced, it took days per gene. But by the 2010s, propelled by the Human Genome Project, scientists could read entire genomes in the same amount of time with new sequencers, at a tiny fraction of the cost. Since then, some sequencing devices have been made so compact they can be plugged into a computer like a USB stick.

Scientists can now compare thousands of strains to one another and analyze how changes in a virus’s genetic code weaken it. They found, for example, that only a handful of mutations were needed to attenuate the poliovirus into a vaccine that doesn’t invade nerve cells or cause paralysis. By experimenting and tweaking it further, scientists developed a new, more stable oral polio vaccine.

Sequencing can also help identify better genes to use as vaccine targets. Genes that are conserved across multiple strains of a virus can help make a vaccine that protects against them all; genes encoding proteins on a virus’s surface make for better immune recognition. This approach of finding antigens through genetics, known as reverse vaccinology, produced the first effective meningitis B vaccine in 2013. Finally, sequencing has enabled scientists to track evolving viruses like influenza and Covid-19 in real time in order to update their vaccines.

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Alongside these advances, scientists learned to transfer and edit genes between organisms, turning cells into tools of manufacture. In the 1970s, biologists Paul Berg, Stanley Cohen, and Herbert Boyer developed methods to combine DNA from different organisms. This method, called recombinant DNA technology, involved cutting DNA with restriction enzymes and pasting it into vectors, transforming bacteria, yeast, or insect cells into miniature factories that can produce proteins like insulin in bulk.

This solved another problem that subunit vaccines had. In the past, developing them required purifying proteins from viruses grown in eggs or tissues, which was laborious, gave low yields and could contain contaminants. Recombinant DNA technology replaced this process. It helped Maurice Hilleman, who made over 40 vaccines in his lifetime, develop the first recombinant hepatitis B vaccine. It contained only one key surface protein from the virus and was far easier to manufacture than previous versions of the vaccine.

It also helped develop the first human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which contains copies of a protein from the outer shell of the virus. When expressed in yeast or insect cells, these proteins spontaneously assemble into hollow ‘virus-like particles’ that resemble the real virus but contain nothing inside. The immune system responds as though they are genuine viral invaders, giving it the ability to respond swiftly if it encounters the real virus later on.

Recombinant DNA technology can also combine targets from multiple microbes. The HPV vaccine Gardasil-9, for example, protects against nine virus strains by including a key antigen from the surface of each one. In doing so, it protects people from a wide range of HPV infections that can cause cancers of the cervix, vagina, vulva, penis, anus, head and neck.

Not all proteins self-assemble and many arenʼt easy to manufacture this way. Viruses typically use our own cells’ machinery to make their proteins, which assemble in specific ways for the virus to multiply. But viral proteins can end up processed incorrectly when grown in recombinant bacteria or yeast, since they have different machinery. To make recombinant vaccine proteins, scientists often spend years experimenting and optimizing the protein’s shape and structure to develop a vaccine, with each protein requiring its own long optimization process.

A better idea is to bypass microbial factories entirely and make cells in our own body produce the proteins for a vaccine. In the 1990s, scientists tried making DNA vaccines for this purpose, with circular plasmid DNA to deliver the instructions into muscle so it could make vaccine proteins. The idea was promising in animals but inefficient in humans: DNA struggles to enter cells and an even smaller fraction would reach the nucleus for this idea to work.

A more direct route is to use mRNA, which can be translated straight away by our protein-making machinery outside the cellʼs nucleus. mRNA is also transient, producing a protein we can recognize before disappearing itself. But it also triggers strong immune reactions, is chemically fragile before it enters cells, easily destroyed by enzymes. Step by step, these obstacles were overcome: first, in 2005, when the scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman developed a method to tweak it and make it less visible to the immune system, and then in 2014, when Weissman and other researchers developed ‘lipid nanoparticle’ systems to carry, protect, and deliver the mRNA safely into cells.

The result was a rapid, adaptable platform that could be redesigned almost as quickly as new threats emerged: because it bypasses microbial factories entirely, each new vaccine can be formulated and updated within weeks.

In the 230 years since Jenner’s discovery, vaccine technology has changed inconceivably, and many diseases that plagued humanity are mostly forgotten.

It has become far easier and faster to develop new vaccines. Microbes that were once invisible to us can now be observed at an atomic level. Vaccines were once cultured in animals, then tissues, then cells, and now their individual proteins can be built in microbial factories. They can be engineered to be safer and more precise than ever before.

Biology has had golden ages in the past, as scientists rapidly discovered new microbes, antibiotics, and drugs: microbiology’s golden age developed in the late nineteenth century, while antibiotic development had a golden age in the mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile, vaccine development has actually sped up; in the last five years alone, scientists have developed the first effective vaccines against four additional diseases. If we invest in them, the future holds many more. The golden age of vaccine development lies ahead of us.

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Saloni Dattani is an editor at Works in Progress, writes the newsletter Scientific Discovery, and hosts the podcast Hard Drugs.