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.

But a subtle shift in perspective was already taking place, heralding the ‘culture of growth’ that would blossom in the coming century. In intellectual circles, Europeans had begun to view their era not as a pale imitation of classical greatness but as a promising new world, blessed with discoveries and inventions the ancients never imagined. For all their brilliance, after all, Aristotle and Cicero knew nothing of the Americas – continents with as many and varied peoples, landscapes, flora, and fauna as Europe, Asia, or Africa. Nor did they enjoy the navigational tools that had made such discoveries possible.

In the late 1500s, in other words, Europeans started to imagine progress. ‘The first history to be written in terms of progress is [Giorgio] Vasari’s history of Renaissance art, The Lives of the Artists (1550)’, observes historian of science David Wootton. ‘It was quickly followed by Francesco Barozzi’s 1560 translation of Proclus’s commentary on the first book of Euclid, which presented the history of mathematics in terms of a series of inventions or discoveries’.

This was the environment in which two Florentines conceived Nova Reperta, whose Latin title is usually translated ‘new discoveries’. One of the earliest works promoting the new attitude – and definitely the most charming – the book is a collection of 19 engravings, each celebrating a discovery or process that was relatively new to Europeans. First published in 1588, Nova Reperta made the argument for progress by showing rather than telling.

Its creators were the Flemish-born painter Johannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet), a former Vasari apprentice who worked for the Medicis, and his friend and patron Luigi Alamanni, a literary intellectual from a prominent Florentine family. As a sideline to his prestigious commissions for paintings and tapestry cartoons, Stradanus often designed print series on popular subjects such as hunting scenes, horses, and the Passion of Christ. Drawing on Alamanni’s expertise and substantial library, for Nova Reperta Stradanus created meticulously detailed reminders of how the contemporary world differed from antiquity.

The title page serves as a graphic introduction. At the top left, a strategically draped nude woman points to a map of the Americas. On the top right, an old man exits the page, his back to a compass. Each carries an ouroboros, eternity symbolized by a snake eating its tail. She is the future, he the past. ‘The present lies between them’, writes historian Samir Boumediene, ‘the place of contemporary discovery’. Dividing the vertical halves of the page are a printing press and a cannon, flanked by other inventions and discoveries distinguishing modern life, including a clock and a chemical still. Some of these ‘new’ inventions, such as the stirrup, were centuries-old, imported from other cultures, or both. But none were inherited from antiquity.

The book opens with an allegorical scene of Amerigo Vespucci awakening America, who is wearing a feathered cap and little else, from her hammock.1 The picture includes exotic animals, including an anteater and a sloth, along with a remarkably nonchalant background tableau of a nude woman roasting a human leg on a spit, with another lined up to go. Nearby, a mother and baby look out to sea. The New World is at once strange and familiarly human.

Most of the other illustrations depict busy European workshops: making cannons and gunpowder; setting type and printing books; smithing iron and filing gears for clocks; pressing and refining olive oil; repairing and polishing armor. The invention of oil paint is represented by a painter’s bustling studio. In one scene, people bring mules laden with grain sacks to a water mill; in the next, they journey toward windmills.

Stradanus portrays a world of sociable work and material plenty. His people look well nourished, and everyone wears shoes, except the boy pumping bellows for the distillation fire, who could just be hot. (In a typically whimsical detail, the big toe of a boy lugging a basket of armor peeks out of his left shoe.)

These images represent what is sometimes called Smithian growth, in which wealth arises from expanded markets, the division of labor, and, implicitly, the synergy of new ideas. In Stradanus’s work, argues Boumediene, ‘rather than a new technique being immediately imposed as a discovery, its true effects are revealed over time’, as when the magnetic compass enables bolder navigation of the seas. ‘Its true power can only be measured when its action is combined with others’.

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In a sweeter version of Adam Smith’s pin factory, Stradanus shows how one group of workers cuts sugar cane, another slices and loads it into baskets, and, building on another new discovery, a third brings the baskets to a water mill for grinding. From there, the crushed cane goes to a press, turned by two men, which drains liquid into a well in the floor. Still more workers transfer the liquid into big pots continually heated on stoves. Another man pours the thus-refined syrup into molds that, in the final step, are emptied to produce bullet-shaped pyramids of solid sugar.

Specialization also appears in the book’s final, self-referential illustration, where an engraving goes from an initial design to printed pages hung on the wall. ‘By a new art the sculptor carves figures on beaten sheets and reproduces them on a press’, explains the Latin caption. Engraving divides the key stages among specialized designers, engravers (the ‘sculptor’), and a publisher.

For Nova Reperta, these roles were taken by Stradanus, Jan Collaert, and Phillips Galle, a leading Antwerp print publisher and Collaert’s father-in-law.

Less realistic but more inviting than those in the famous Encyclopédie of the eighteenth century, Nova Reperta’s images aren’t meant as how-to guides. They’re entertainment, filled with extraneous details. Birds perch in the eaves of the water mill while chickens peck stray grains. Fashionably slashed silks on a man consulting the cannon makers highlight his well-turned calves and buttocks. The boy cranking the engraving press looks bored; the one pounding ingredients for distillation seems to be eavesdropping. A sleeping dog curls at the feet of the scholar calculating in the magnetic compass image. Nova Reperta doesn’t tell you how to construct a clock from scratch. It lets you enjoy searching out the picture’s many gears and scrutinizing the looks of concentration on the diverse faces.

An afternoon spent with my nose literally in the 1600 edition at the Huntington Library gave me the same sense of immersion as a novel or film. The whiff of leather binding and the soft, strong feel of the rag-heavy paper – so unlike the crisp, fragile stuff of later books – enhanced the feeling of leaving the present behind.

So, alas, did the book’s joy.

After my encounter with the original Nova Reperta, I visited the UCLA library’s special collections to see a 1999 volume with the same title. A limited edition art book, it features black-and-white photographs, sometimes overlaid with blocks of color. Downbeat, semi-poetic meditations on the bleakness of turn-of-the-century life complement the photos. We start on a rural highway lined with telephone poles. Wind turbines, modest by today’s standards, sprout from the surrounding pastures. ‘POWER seduces the land, staking the human presence across the expanse with all the deference of claiming its inevitable own’, reads the text. Late twentieth-century art book collectors will naturally read the human presence as undesirable and foreign to the land.

Instead of buzzing work spaces, the latter-day Nova Reperta highlights the impersonal infrastructure of bridges, railways, and ports, along with the flashing signs of Times Square and displays of military hardware. An open-plan office with exposed brick walls appears abandoned, with only computers and piles of paper files to suggest its normal occupants. This new world is nearly empty of human beings. Gone are Stradanus’s expressive faces.

‘Unlike Stradanus’s original’, explain authors Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman in the introduction, ‘our response barely shows the details of bodies, people, or processes, but rather, the outward manifestation in the more familiar forms of landscape conspicuous for the invisibility of labor and relations of production’. The only hints of happiness are in the faces of a family leaving McDonald’s, who seem to represent consumerist delusion.

Just as the original Nova Reperta captured an intellectual moment, so does the 1999 version. The authors explain, drawing a midcentury comparison:

In his 1953 introduction to the Burndy Library reprint of Nova Reperta, Bern Dibner wrote, ‘The boon of the physical sciences stands unquestioned’. His sensibility was closer to that of Stradanus, nearly four hundred years earlier, than it is to ours. Half a century later, it is as difficult to share Dibner’s unqualified endorsement as it is to feel a sympathy with his opening statement, ‘Today we are impatient with Science for not yet having done the things we expect from it’. However, invoking the term ‘science’ as a monolith whose contributions are unqualifiedly positive can no longer pass without question. Our distance from Dibner and Stradanus is marked by a poignant awareness of their lack of attention to the price of the global expansion of consumer culture combined with unregulated exploitation of the environment.

In response, their version inverts the supposed error, substituting relentless negativity for gratitude and wonder. A generation after its publication, the twentieth-century Nova Reperta seems eye-rollingly clichéd. Stradanus, meanwhile, still offers fresh delights.

Virginia Postrel is a commissioning editor at Works in Progress and the author of The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World and The Future and Its Enemies.

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‘A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.’ VS Naipaul’s first rule for good writing is a popular one. From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter.

This has been a standard modern academic account of English prose, from Edwin H Lewis’s 1894 book The History of the English Paragraph to recent dataset analyses. Arjun Panickssery recently argued that English sentences got shorter over time and that ‘shorter sentences reflect better writing’.

The Elizabethans and Victorians wrote long tangled sentences that resembled the briars growing underneath Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Today we write like Hemingway. Short. Sharp. Readable. Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete.

I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modeled more closely on spoken English.

What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.

What is a sentence?

We often talk as though a sentence is just the words and characters between two full stops (periods). But when grammarians refer to a ‘sentence’ they mean something with a certain structure of ‘syntax’. By this way of thinking, a sentence is an independent clause, also known as a main clause. A main clause has a subject and a predicate. The subject is the thing performing the action. The predicate is the verb (the action) and the object (the thing receiving the action).

Instead of:

Man dog walk. Boy biscuit eat. Girl throw ball.

We write:

The man walked the dog. The boy ate the biscuit. The girl threw the ball.

The first three sentences are clearly incorrect, and we would not expect to read them in normal English. So, a sentence is not just words with a full stop. A sentence is a syntactical structure, most commonly that of subject-verb-object. The man (subject) walked (verb) the dog (object). This is the nucleus, onto which many other modifying slots can be added.

Sentences can be simple (one main clause), compound (two or more main clauses linked with a conjunction), complex (a main clause with dependent clauses, i.e. clauses that cannot stand alone), or complex-compound (one or more dependent clauses and two or more main clauses).

These complex sentences below have both a main clause and a dependent clause. The commas aren’t optional: changing them for full stops would make it impossible to know what was being said.

The man walked the dog, who lingered.

Before running inside to her irritated mother, the girl threw the ball.

Hiding behind the door, the boy ate the biscuit.

Complexity is added by the number of ideas we progress through, and the way we progress through them, not the lengths of sentences.

Before running inside to her irritated mother, the girl threw the ball.

The girl threw the ball. Then she went inside. Her mother sounded irritated.

Is the second so much easier to read? Perhaps a little, but if so, not much. Here’s the opening paragraph of the first article in the New York Times on 3 May 2025.

Dr. Alan Garber, president of Harvard, disagrees with President Trump about many things. He is fighting Mr. Trump as the federal government tries to strip Harvard of billions of dollars in research funding and its nonprofit tax status.

This could be rewritten to make the sentences shorter.

Dr. Alan Garber is Harvard’s President. He is resisting President Trump. The federal government wants to remove Harvard’s research funding and its nonprofit tax status. That would be a loss of billions of dollars.

The second example here works fine, but the final sentence would actually be clearer if it were a sub-clause in the previous sentence, not a stand alone one. Just because a sentence gets shorter, doesn’t mean it gets better, simpler, or easier to read.

The example I gave above (Before running inside to her irritated mother…) is a left-branching sentence. All the information at the start is subordinate to the main clause. Once the nucleus of the main clause is established (the girl threw the ball), the sentence can be expanded in different directions (the subclause ‘before running inside…’ could also go after the main clause), modifiers can be dropped in (the girl threw the red ball), and so on. Some people think these are difficult sentences. You have to remember all that non-essential stuff before the piece gets to ‘the point’. But the New York Times goes on to use just such a sentence that works perfectly well.

In one of the rare interviews he has given since Harvard began its battle with the federal government, Dr. Garber said this week that Harvard has a campus culture problem that needs urgent fixing.

What you put in the sentence matters just as much as how complex the sentence structure is. For example, one study found that while sentence length has decreased in scientific papers, noun phrases have become far more complicated. Even simple sentences are hard to read when they are full of compounded jargon. You can restrict yourself to ten or twelve words, but still use unnecessary, distracting ones.

Compare Milton Friedman,

There is wide agreement about the major goals of economic policy: high employment, stable prices, and rapid growth. There is less agreement that these goals are mutually compatible or, among those who regard them as incompatible, about the terms at which they can and should be substituted for one another.

To James Joyce,

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

To Barbara Vinken,

The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter.

These examples show: first, punctuation can dramatically affect measured length without affecting complexity; second, even given this, shorter sentences are not always simpler or easier to read; and third, that the range of variation in the complexity of a sentence of a given length is so large that length is probably a bad measure of complexity. To understand what makes modern prose simple and readable, we need to look elsewhere.

Shorter sentences or just different punctation?

We use full stops (periods) to break up (whole, independent) clauses now, instead of colons and semicolons. The distance between full stops is often shorter. But the complexity of thought patterns across a paragraph is often not. (According to one dataset, semicolon usage has declined from one every 90 words in 1781 to one in every 390 words today.)

Here’s an illustration. In the past, my last few sentences might have been punctuated something like this.

We use full stops (periods) to break up clauses now, instead of colons and semicolons; the distance between full stops is often shorter; but the complexity of thought patterns across a paragraph is not: according to one dataset, semicolon usage has reduced from one every 90 words in 1781 to one in every 390 words today.

This set of thoughts isn’t much more difficult to read when punctuated as one long sentence. If you count the number of words between the capital letter and the full stop, you will come up with the ingredients for a theory that sentences got shorter, perhaps under the selection pressure of modern technology and expanded readership. But once you see that the punctuation makes relatively little difference to the overall complexity of these clauses, you might account for the progress of prose differently.

Shorter and shorter

This fact about punctuation means that most data on sentence length should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Every study is vulnerable to this point, from the standard account (Edwin Lewis) to recent empirical work. For example, one study looked at 1,157 texts on Project Gutenberg between 1820-1940; average sentence length went from the mid thirties to the high teens. This study is just one of a swathe finding similar results.

These histograms show that these averages hide some variation: while there are many shorter sentences, there are also many long ones.

Examples of prose, past and present, illustrate that short prose isn’t always modern, that long sentences aren’t always difficult to read, and that short sentences aren’t always easy.

Compare the sentences from the New York Times above to this from Bagehot’s English Constitution.

‘On all great subjects,’ says Mr. Mill, ‘much remains to be said,’ and of none is this more true than of the English Constitution. The literature which has accumulated upon it is huge. But an observer who looks at the living reality will wonder at the contrast to the paper description. He will see in the life much which is not in the books; and he will not find in the rough practice many refinements of the literary theory.

These are nice, simple sentences that break the supposed pattern of ‘Victorian equals complicated’, ‘modern equals simple.’ Even Samuel Johnson, master of the long sentence, frequently writes short, as here, from Idler 103.

Value is more frequently raised by scarcity than by use. That which lay neglected when it was common, rises in estimation as its quantity becomes less. We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.

Here is the opening paragraph of Onyx Storm, the 2025 fantasy romance novel that has sold tens of millions of copies.

Where in Malek’s name is he going? I hurry through the tunnels beneath the quadrant, trying to follow, but night is the ultimate shadow and Xaden blends seamlessly into the darkness. If it wasn’t for our dragons’ bond leading me in his general direction and the sporadic disappearance of mage lights, I’d never think that he’s masked somewhere ahead of me.

Two of those sentences are 24 and 30 words long.

The 30-word sentence has a subordinate clause at the start (If it wasn’t for our dragons’ bond…) which is twice as long as the main clause (I’d never think …). (This is left-branching.) This length is, in the opening of an incredibly popular modern book, the exact opposite of what we might expect if we thought length was the key driver of popular readability. It’s simple not because it is short, but because the language is plain and the narrative demands little of us. ‘Malek’, ‘masked’, and ‘mage lights’ may be unfamiliar, but hurrying through tunnels, night as a shadow, blending into darkness, these are tropes, clichés, easy to read. The sentences are longer than average, maybe twice as long or more, but they are full of easy matter.

Simplicity is about more than sentence length.

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The story of English syntax

In his History of the English Language, GL Brook describes the differences between Old English (the language of the Saxons and Beowulf) and Modern English (which we use and which has been in use for some four hundred years). He said that Old English was like a natural succession of images, where Modern English is more logical, always making the relationship between ideas clear.

Prose has evolved from being more impressionistic to being more logical. Shakespeare wrote ‘This was the most unkindest cut of all.’ This sounds like a mistake to us: modern English wouldn’t tolerate that sort of tautology in the name of emphasis. Another difference is that Old English was heavily inflected – for instance, verbs had many more different endings depending on tense and person – whereas Modern English relies more on word order. Write like Yoda, we cannot.

The importance of logical order to modern English is summed in Jonathan Swift’s maxim: ‘proper words in proper places make the true definition of style’.

Or, as Adam Smith put it: ‘Our words must be put in such order that the meaning of the sentence shall be quite plain and not depend on the accuracy of the printer in placing the points, or of readers in laying the emphasis on any certain word.’

Consider the famous reminder of native English speakers’ strong sense of intuitive word order: we all know that you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, but that any change of the order there makes the writer sound crazy. Rules like this, especially the introduction of the sentence, are the first key reason that writing is easier to read today. If something doesn’t start a sentence, then we know to compartmentalize until the sentence gets going.

Whether a sentence is long or short, simple or complicated, it has to be logical. That is why the examples above show that sometimes longer sentences are really quite simple for us to read. Syntax demands comprehension. (JS Mill went so far as to say, in his Aberdeen lecture about education, that grammar is ‘the most elementary part of logic. It is the beginning of the analysis of the thinking process.’)

From periods to sentences

In the earliest English writing, prose relied on rhetorical periods instead of more complex syntactic structures. Rhetorical periods are discrete units of meaning that form the building blocks of sentences, and begin, develop, and return to closure within a single breath. This stands in opposition to the nested, syntactical diction Aristotle described as ‘strung together’ where it goes on and on. Periodic writing is organized into segments, usually by rhythm.

Aristotle preferred periodic diction, which he believed was easier to understand and remember. In the sort of periodic diction Aristotle was writing about, periods contained clauses (cola). Typically these clauses were balanced: they contained ideas and images that either paralleled each other or contrasted with each other. (To show you what that means, I just did it: ‘ideas/images’, ‘parallel/contrast’.)

To see what I mean, look at this example from Coverdale’s Psalm 100 from the 1530s.

O go your way in to his gates with thanks giving, and in to his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and speak good of his name.

For the Lord is gracious, his mercy is everlasting: and his truth endureth from generation to generation.

The full stops mark the verse as the period (each made of two cola, separated by colons). These are not sentences as we know them, like the examples earlier in this piece, which are organized around a nucleus; they are sentences made up of lots of balanced periods. (His gates and his courts, be thankful and speak, gracious and mercy.)

Caedmon’s Hymn is similar. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn’t often relate subordinate clauses to main clauses, preferring to string main clauses together (When…then…and…). It is a language of periods, but not of a recognisable modern syntax.

In early English, these periods were not separated by punctuation, but more often by rhythm. Pauses were rhetorical, not grammatical. Often clauses were of the same length; words, sounds, and cadences corresponded. It was not all organized around the nucleus of the main verb: instead groups of breath and groups of sense were similar. So although it was like Aristotle’s second idea of diction, since it was organized into subsections, it was not as tightly organized as modern English sentences, where the ordering of ideas relative to the main verb creates a hierarchy of interpretation.

Modern English emerges with bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Now look at this from the King James Version of the Bible, from seventy years later, 1611.

Then Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel,

if we this day be examined of the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole;

be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole.

In this prose, pauses continue to be used for breath, as in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles and Coverdale’s Psalms, but are also used to mark the end of a conceptual idea: of a subject-verb-object sentence. Modern syntax has emerged. In The Establishment of Modern English Prose, Ian Robinson argues that syntactic sentences became predominant in the early modern period.

William Tyndale was essential to the way prose developed. His Bible translations, from a similar time to Coverdale in 1526 for the New Testament and 1530 for the Pentateuch (and almost a century before King James’s edition), adapting the successions of phrases used in medieval prose ‘to make a versatile style, capable of rising to high moments, but pithy not churchy’, as Ian Robinson says. It is hard to believe this is five hundred years old.

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the deep, and the spirit of god moved upon the water. Then God said: let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good: and divided the light from the darkness, and called the light day, and the darkness night: and so of the evening and morning was made the first day.

Remember what I said earlier. English prose isn’t necessarily much shorter today than it used to be. This is so simple! So plain! So short! So old!

Look at this sentence. The earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the deep, and the spirit of god moved upon the water. Remember the example from the beginning, of the man and the boy and the girl. We can do the same thing here.

The earth was void and empty. Darkness was upon the deep. The spirit of god moved upon the water. The earth was void and empty; darkness was upon the deep; the spirit of god moved upon the water.

Nothing much changes in either way of punctuating. It is just as simple. Each clause is just as short. What matters is that Tyndale is syntactical: his sentences are logical, not long strings of clauses, but each ordered around clear discrete sections.

Then came Thomas Cranmer, who in the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 brought Latin-style logical syntax over to English. Here is the Gloria.

Glory be to God on high. And in earth peace, good will towards men. We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory, O Lord God Heavenly King, God the father almighty.

Alliterative, rhythmic, and plain. So simple. And again, so short! We would separate those comma-separated clauses with full stops or semicolons (grammar pedants would complain about spliced commas when they see stuff like this, which is to greatly to everyone’s loss), but they are simple and short however you punctuate them.

In the Collects from the same prayer book, Cranmer starts writing complex sentences.

Lord, we beseech thee, assoil [excuse] thy people from their offences; that through thy bountiful goodness we may be delivered from the bands of all those sins, which by our frailty we have committed: Grant this, &c.

He had to write complex sentences to be able to translate the Latin faithfully. Cranmer punctuates logically, not for breaths or periods, but for the sense of the whole. This is the emergence of the fully syntactic sentence.

His sentences are clauses structured around finite verbs (i.e., a conjugated verb in a tense, not an infinitive: ‘we beseech’, not ‘to beseech’). In the example above, ‘we beseech thee’ is the main clause and ‘Lord assoil thy people’ is part of the object (the object complement). The rest are subordinate clauses. Notice that this is right branching, the subordinate material coming after the main verb. It’s the same sort of structure we might still find in the New York Times today.

The essential point is that Cranmer, following Tyndale, has developed an English syntax.1 He almost never now writes a sentence without a finite verb. The subject-verb-object pattern I showed at the start of this essay is being formed.2 This matters because English people heard this language day in, day out, at Holy Communion, Matins, and Evensong. These were the sentences that shaped our culture.

Sentences of finite verbs

In the eighteenth century the rhythmic periodic style was married to the logical, syntactic style. Samuel Johnson and Joseph Addison, co-founder of The Spectator, use the balanced clauses of the periodic style and the logical structures of the syntactical style. Johnson famously complained in the 1770s about a book that was written in the late 1600s. Everything was badly written then, he says, and today any barrow boy could turn a better sentence.

Here is Addison combining the new methods into some very fine English prose.

In the mean time, when I consider how much I have seen, read, and heard, I begin to blame my own Taciturnity; and since I have neither Time nor Inclination to communicate the Fulness of my Heart in Speech, I am resolved to do it in Writing; and to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die.

Compare Addison to this sentence which I grabbed at random from Astral Codex Ten.

When people do list a specific example, it’s almost always a claim that, if you’re unhappy with any result of a system, the system must have been designed by evil people who were deliberately trying to hurt you, and so you should become really paranoid and hate everyone involved.

Or this, from a recent edition of The Villager.

Being able to go through your life without ever looking back at a you from a previous time and thinking ‘Ah, you poor unsuspecting overoptimistic idiot, you really have no fucking idea what is coming, do you?’ is not a privilege my particular personality type allows for, but I think there might have been a part of me that once assumed such moments would dry up in my 40s. Not so.

Or this from From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy.

I’ve been disappointed in him other times – perfection isn’t the point of being a person, of course, but we were taught that infallibility is the point of being a pope, and because he was so good on certain issues, there was always this misguided hope within me that he’d completely reform the church on matters of gender and sexuality. But he gave me hope, which is something I don’t have much of – or at least, a new confirmation: the confirmation, specifically, that I was born into a tradition that values human life, animal life, and the earth, despite so many obvious signs to the contrary.

So many long, complex sentences! We so often write more like Addison than the ‘short prose’ people fixate on. What is similar is the logical structure of each sentence, especially the finite verbs.

As for short sentences, here is Fordyce, from Sermon VII, in 1776.

Young minds ought to be encouraged. In every young mind there is something good. An agreeable appearance is certainly engaging. Truth will never deny it: courtesy will readily own it.

Here he is again in Sermon VIII.

The human mind was made for action. In virtuous action consists its highest enjoyment. It will not, it cannot continue long unemployed, especially during the sprightly season of youth.

Turn of phrase aside, these are short modern sentences, locked away in a dusty old book you have most likely heard of (do you remember where?) but never read. (I am not recommending that you do read it; entertaining though Fordyce can be, the time for moral improvement via books of sermons is surely past.)3

So it was that we came to have the English sentence, capable of simplicity, complexity, balance, and above all, versatility. We can be short or long, simple or complex: what makes English readable is logical syntax.

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The emergence of the plain style

Coupled with syntax was the refinement of the plain style, which became dominant between 1650–1750, the period in English history described by Matthew Arnold as ‘the passage…to prose and reason’.

The plain style means what it says. No fuss. No metaphor. No figurative language. Just simple, direct, factual prose. The opposite of the plain style is the rhetorical or ornamental style. We use the plain style everywhere, all day long. It is what you mostly find in newspapers and on the internet. The opposite, known as the ornate, rhetorical, or florid style, is just that. It is ornate because it is complex not simple; rhetorical because it uses the tropes and tricks of oratory; florid because it prefers flourishes of expression to simpleness of style.

Here are two descriptions of rain: one in the plain style, one in the ornate. (Hemingway, then Dickens).

It stormed all that day. The wind drove down the rain and everywhere there was standing water and mud. The plaster of broken houses was gray and wet.

It was a murky confusion—here and there blotted with a colour like the colour of the smoke from damp fuel—of flying clouds, tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much increased, and the sky was more overcast, and blew hard.

You need only glance at a novel by James Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov or Thomas Pynchon to see that the rhetorical style never left literary fiction, even though many literary fiction writers use straightforward simple language. Look at the opening of Ulysses.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains.

Even Joyce’s shortest sentences require a lot of our attention because they are not plain. In an essay of 2003 defending the use of the florid style in modern English, David Bentley Hart quoted Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a fine example of rhetorical writing.

The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours.

This tradition of writing goes back through writers like RL Stevenson, Thomas Browne, to the King James Bible, and so many of the great poets.

The plain style has also existed for a long time. The Tyndale passage above, from 1530, repeats the word ‘light’ five times. In most modern prose, that would often be subject to ‘elegant variation’ or ‘enrichment’ or some other abuse of style. And it would be much worse.

Tyndale is building on the thousand year tradition that came before him, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but he created what Robinson calls ‘the natural style of the English Bible.’ We do not have only a Latinate, ornate Bible, but often a plain one.

Beginning with Francis Bacon, who urged scientists to write plainly so they could be understood, there was a determined effort in English to produce a prose free from tropes, similes, and so on, but which simply said what it said. How else could an organization like the Royal Society function?

Seventeenth century writers like John Wilkins and eighteenth century philosophers like Adam Smith extolled the virtues of plain prose. The most well-known version of this idea today is probably George Orwell’s statement that ‘good prose is like a window pane’. Writers like John Locke required a plain style for their idea. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes forbids ‘obscure, confused, and ambiguous Expressions, also all metaphoricall Speeches tending to the stirring up of Passion.’

The plain style is predominant today, though we still use the high style in many places.

In his Presidential Address to the English Association in 1984, the former editor of the London Times, William Rees-Mogg, said that for every column you print in the rhetorical style you must print fifty in the plain style. He was quick to add that, as the editor of Bernard Levin for ten years, being anti the rhetorical style would have been ungrateful. Here is an example of Levin’s rhetorical style, from 1 April 1971.

There is another gap in my musical life, though this one, the biggest of all, I think of rather as a huge and daunting mountain, a musical Everest. Peering up at the summit I see dimly through the mist that surrounds it the outlines of Bach. The St. Matthew Passion, the B Minor Mass, the gigantic vista of the chorales — there they all are, up in the clouds, beckoning and threatening at the same time.

I have started out on that climb countless times, only to turn back in uncomprehending despair. One day I must take my pack on my back, and my beautiful carved Alpenstock (which I bought in the shadow of Neuschwanstein, maddest of all the mad castles built by mad Ludwig of Bavaria) in my hand, and go up that mountain to plant my flag at the top or die in the attempt.

Levin was perhaps the best English journalist of his generation, and this florid style – extended metaphors, lots of reliance on words like daunting, peering – makes a lively contrast to the ordinary prose of his day.

Rees-Mogg said the plain style was humble, clinical, direct, detailed, little ornamented, moderate, pragmatic, and truthful. The plain style has no Everest, no mist, no vista, no beckoning and threatening, no maddest of all mad castles.

The plain style is loved on the internet, especially by people involved in tech, progress, blogs, and rationalism of various forms. And no wonder. As Rees-Mogg said, it has traditionally been the prose of sceptical philosophers, ‘of those who wish to trim the fat off ideology’. It is the prose of economics. (According to Rees-Mogg, David Hume and Adam Smith wrote the best plain prose.) Paul Graham writes: ‘I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.’

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Talking or writing?

You might have read this essay and largely agreed with me but still been left with the feeling that something is different about modern prose as compared to the writing of the 1700s, not just the fact that we use less obscure vocabulary or the substituting full stops for colons and semicolons. Something else is still different. I think that something is that we increasingly write like we speak.

A huge amount of what we write and say doesn’t actually form syntactical sentences. Sports commentary, weather forecasts, a good deal of radio and podcasting, tax forms, programs, glossaries, menus, contents pages, dictionary definitions. All rely on more fragmentary language. You do not always find well-formed syntactical sentences in these places. Even a writer like Matthew Yglesias, who typically uses writerly syntactical sentences, will include things like this in his Substack: ‘Mamdani… I just don’t know.’ Pure speechified writing. Kyla Scanlon does it too: ‘Succinctly… everything feels like crypto now?’ Scanlon fans (of whom I am one) will know that her videos have the same tone as her Substack. Scott Alexander is good at using speech-like English:

No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast.

Even a literary writer will do this. The novelist Brandon Taylor writes a Substack where he often sounds speechified, as in this example: ‘As to the charge of Substack’s un-programmatic writing. Be so serious. Be so for real, right now.’ It is not just the tone and phrasing, look at the punctuation too. This is not something that has only just started happening. We have been writing like we talk for a century or more.

In Modern Prose Style (1934, updated in 1963), Bonamy Dobrée contrasts a passage of Thomas Browne (seventeenth century) and William James (nineteenth century). You know each of them, immediately, as products of their time. The difference from us, he says, is in their rhythm. See these two extracts, first Browne, then James.

…embryon Truths, and Verities yet in their Chaos…

..old-fashioned absolute sense of the term…

Read them aloud. They have a strikingly similar rhythm. It is dactylic. DUM—dee—dee, DUM—dee—dee. Bold marks the stressed syllables.

Em-bry-on Truths-, and Ver-it-ies yet in their Cha-os

old-fash-ioned ab-sol-ute sense of the term.

Modern writing has much less emphasis on rhythm. Phrases are longer and more flexible. What Dobrée saw in 1934 was a return to speech-like writing. He has some funny examples of newspapers writing in a writerly style which sounds absurd. This is from the Times in 1934: ‘as soon as it was announced, on the morrow of Parliament’s rising’. And this from the Daily Worker: ‘No sound comes from out those walls.’ You would be mocked if you talked like that, he said. Newspapers still sometimes sound like this. But mostly we avoid writing in this obviously written manner. Modern prose, no doubt under the influence of the radio, telephone, telegraph, and later television, was becoming like talk, hence the still ubiquitous advice (beloved of the short-sentence people) to write like you speak.

You even find this in classic literature. Look at the opening of Bleak House.

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.

Or this, from D.H. Lawrence.

Awful years—’16, ’17, ’18, ’19—the years when the damage was done. The years when the world lost its real manhood. Not for lack of courage to face death. Plenty of superb courage to face death. But no courage in any man to face his own isolated soul, and abide by its decision. Easier to sacrifice oneself. So much easier!

This is all good prose. And it would support the shortness thesis. But, there are not many actual syntactical sentences here. Those fragments from Dickens and Lawrence, all that podcast talk, that is what modern prose is often like.

Helen de Witt gave a perfect example of this point recently, when she mentioned that she had, as a graduate heading to Oxford, read Samuel Johnson, thinking that was how English people wrote. After arriving she was instead advised to read CS Lewis to improve her prose style. Johnson has a writerly style. Lewis always sounds like he is talking to you. No-one could think that Addison or Carlyle’s books (even his lectures) were just dictation, caught by someone overhearing them, but you might believe that about CS Lewis, whose work often reads like a transcript of a radio broadcast. The extract I gave from Bernard Levin earlier is another good instance: Levin always sounds like he is talking to you, albeit in his rhetorical style.

We are speechifying our prose just as earlier generations created a very literary plain style. To write like we speak means to write with fewer syntactic sentences and in more speech-like patterns.

When we are still syntactic, which is often, we are as plain and simple as Tyndale. Reading a publication like Works in Progress means reading a sort of English prose that was refined and perfected by Bible translators and philosophers and essayists. Reading the internet often feels like reading something in the plain style but which is not very much like writing.

If sentences are getting shorter now (and as I say, I suspect a lot of it is just punctuation differences) that is not what makes modern prose easy to read. Those achievements are part of a much longer history. Prose made its progress a long time ago. The miracle of modern English is not shortness or simplicity, per se, but that it allows us to do almost anything: syntax can swell to great length or be concise and taut; it has room for ornate vocabulary and simple language; it is a structure that allows us to build many forms of expression. It gives us Shakespeare and Locke, Milton and Darwin. It is the language of poets but also of economists and YouTube commentators.

Henry Oliver is a writer and research fellow at the Mercatus Center. Follow him on Twitter.

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South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Its population is (optimistically) projected to shrink by over two thirds over the next 100 years. If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.

This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.

South Korea is often held up as an example of the failure of public policy to reverse high fertility rates. This is seriously misleading. Contrary to popular myth, South Korean pro-parent subsidies have not been very large, and relative to their modest size, they have been fairly successful.

The story of South Korean fertility rates is thus doubly significant. On the one hand, it illustrates just how potent anti-parenting factors can become, creating a profoundly hostile environment in which to raise children and discouraging a whole society from doing so. On the other, it may offer a scintilla of hope that focused and generous policy can address these problems, shaping a way back from the brink of catastrophe.

Career-motherhood conflict

In every developed country, women struggle to reconcile their careers with a satisfying family life and their preferred number of children. This tradeoff is exceptionally severe in South Korea.

Despite its very high level of female education, South Korea has the largest gender employment gap in the OECD. There is almost no employment gap between men (73.3 percent) and unmarried women without children (72.8 percent). The gap is driven by the fact that large numbers of women stop working when they have kids: only 56.2 percent of mothers work, the fourth lowest in the OECD.

In South Korea, mothers’ employment falls by 49 percent relative to fathers, over ten years – 62 percent init­ially, then rising as their child ages. In the US it falls by a quarter and in Sweden by only 9 percent.1

South Koreans work more hours – 1,865 hours a year – in comparison with 1,736 hours in the US and 1,431 in Sweden. This makes it hard to balance work and motherhood, or work and anything else.

There is intense pressure from employers for women not to have children: in surveys, 27 percent of female office workers report being coerced into signing illegal contracts promising to resign if they fall pregnant or marry.

South Korean work culture is notoriously sexist. After their long work days, colleagues are expected to go out drinking together. Alice Evans, a social scientist, spoke to a young South Korean woman who went to a karaoke bar with her colleagues and found they hired a sexy woman to serve them drinks. Her boss, noting her discomfort, chided her: ‘You shouldn’t be surprised by this, at your age.’

In response to these taxing hours, and with bosses unwilling to make accommodations to mothers, over 62 percent of women quit their jobs around the birth of their first child. (Some go back soon afterwards, which is why the total fall in employment is slightly less than this, at 49 percent.)

By the time a child turns ten, their mother will have seen her earnings fall by an average of 66 percent, considerably higher than the earnings penalty in countries including the US (31 percent), UK (44 percent), and Sweden (32 percent).

Put together, all this means that having children is extremely expensive for South Korean women in terms of their careers and earnings.

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Resource-intensive parenting

Perhaps due to high infant mortality rates in the past, Koreans treat a child’s first birthday as a very significant milestone. A Doljanchi is a party and ceremony when the child is dressed in an ornate traditional outfit and presented with a series of objects – a pen, a thread, money, a sword – and what they choose is meant to show what the future has in store for them: academic success, longevity, wealth, or martial prowess respectively. Parents will often try to coax their child to choose something specific but, being only one, the child is usually uncooperative.

Traditionally, this party would have been done at home. Now, they have become more lavish. They are typically hosted like weddings: in hotel ball­rooms with long guest lists, party favors, and multicourse meals.

As with weddings, the costs of the ceremony vary from family to family. But a typical Korean family can expect to spend a month’s wages on the Doljanchi.

Today, South Korea is the world’s most expensive place to raise a child, costing an average of $275,000 from birth to age 18, which is 7.8 times the country’s GDP per capita compared to the US’s 4.1. And that is without accounting for the mother’s forgone income.

Fueled by intense competition for university places, cram schools and private tuition are popular in many low-fertility East Asian countries. Uptake is also high in Taiwan and Singapore, and 38 percent of Chinese children used the country’s shadow education system before the government clamped down.

But South Korea is even worse. Almost 80 percent of children attend a hagwon, a type of private cram school operating in the evenings and on weekends. In 2023, South Koreans poured a total of $19 billion into the shadow education system. Families with teenagers in the top fifth of the income distribution spend 18 percent ($869) of their monthly income on tutoring. Families in the bottom fifth of earners spend an average of $350 a month on tutoring, as much as they spend on food.

On top of the expense, these are grueling for the children themselves, and they start very young. Nearly half of children under six receive some form of private tuition. As a Korean TikToker explains, even if you have the money, you can’t necessarily get your teenager into the most elite hagwons. They have to have attended the right hagwons when they were younger to have a shot at getting in later.

These high school hagwons have grueling schedules. During term time, students typically have days that run from 7am to 2am, starting with morning study sessions before school and finishing with homework in the library. During school holidays, lots of students go to boarding hagwons where the days are tightly scheduled from 6am to midnight and include tests late in the evening.

Parents don’t feel like they can just leave their children to fend for themselves in the public education system. Because most students, upon starting high school, have already learned the entire mathematics curriculum, teachers expect students to be able to keep up with a rapid pace. There’s even pejorative slang for the kids who are left behind– supoja – meaning someone who has given up on mathematics.

The intense schedule and the lack of sleep is why places like Daechi, a neighborhood renowned for its hagwons, have screaming pods for frustrated teenagers to let off some steam.

Since the 1980s, the South Korean government has regarded shadow education as a ‘social evil’ that widens inequality. The government even temporarily banned private tuition, but tutors simply went underground and charged high ‘risk premiums’. The ban was removed in 2000, but the government is still trying to reduce demand by curfewing operating hours, providing after-school teaching of its own, and regulating the shadow education industry. In Seoul today, all hagwons must close by 10pm. But some operators have responded by simply switching off the lights and continuing with lessons in the dark, or by loading students onto a bus to carry on teaching on the road. It is hard to quash the system when demand is so strong.

South Korea already has the highest share of young ter­tiary graduates in the OECD, and its competitive job market means that degrees from the most prestigious universities are immensely valuable. The acceptance rate for the country’s top three universities, known as the SKY colleges, is just one percent.

Parents know that unless they are wealthy, having a second child will damage their ability to pay for the best education for their first. Korean parents with more children usually spend less per child on education and 27 percent of Korean parents, when polled, say they think the high education and childcare burden is the main reason for falling fertility.

High performance in the university entrance exam is an arms race: if everyone becomes better at the exam, nobody is better off. Yet parents are individually incentivized to force their child­ren to take part, at great cost to their whole families.

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The decline of marriage

Across the world, men and women are more and more divided. In the public sphere, this manifests as political polarization in which gender is becoming a salient political division, just like class and age. In the private sphere, we see that people are living alone and eschewing romantic love.

As with the other trends we have discussed, this is true everywhere, but in South Korea it is happening to an extreme degree. About 43 percent of South Korean women aged 15–49 are married, compared to 52 percent in the US.

A chasm between young South Korean men and women has been opening up for years. In 2018, the MeToo movement took off in the country. The inciting event was when prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun accused a Justice Ministry official of groping her at a funeral in 2010. Initially she just asked for an apology and was, instead, demoted. She uploaded evidence of this in 2018 with the MeToo hashtag and was interviewed on television.

Her story kicked off an investigation in the prosecutor’s office and a series of other women, in other sectors, were emboldened to come forward. At first, the MeToo movement found broad popularity among younger people: 77 percent of South Korean men under 30 said they supported it.

But Korean men turned on the move­ment and there were several suicides by men accused of wrongdoing. The Journalist Association of Korea says that the press, in general, was too sensationalist in its reporting and didn’t respect the rights and privacy of the people involved.

Because of decades of sex-selective abortion, young men in Korea outnumber young women. For today’s 30-year-old South Koreans, there are 115 men for every 100 women. This skewed sex ratio, combined with the fact such a large proportion of young Korean women are persistently single, means that men face a punishing dating market. Combined with a competitive labor market, in which men are competing for jobs against their better-educated female counterparts, and two years of male-only conscription, Korean men who are unlucky in love and employment may end up blaming women for their problems.

The resentment goes both ways. The now-defunct feminist troll site Megalia used a pinching hand as its logo to make fun of men for having small penises, supposedly mirroring the high standards of beauty that Korean women are held to by men. Even though the website shut down in 2017, the gesture is still associated with misandry.

The ‘finger pinching’ conspiracy started in May 2021, with an advert for a convenience store chain showing a hand pinching towards a small sausage. There was outcry and the company pulled the advert and apologized. The protestors said the gesture was a misandrist dog whistle and several other companies and women were attacked for supposedly using it to mock Korean men.

By this time, in 2021, only 29 percent of young men said they still supported MeToo. Now, majorities of young men view themselves as victims of female supremacy and of sex-based discrimination.

In 2022, Yoon Suk Yeol was elected President of South Korea on a tide of male support. Over half (59 percent) of male voters aged 18–29 voted for Yoon, in comparison with only 34 percent of women aged 18–29. Yoon embraced the gender war narrative, attributing South Korea’s ultra-low fertility to feminism and arguing that structural discrimination against women did not exist in South Korea. He also vetoed a law that was attempting to expand the definition of rape to include all nonconsensual sex, making it so that violence and intimidation were not necessary prerequisites.

In the June 2025 presidential election, the two conservative candidates together won the support of 74 percent of men in their twenties and 60 percent of men in their thirties. Meanwhile, only 36 percent of women in their twenties and 41 percent of women in their thirties voted for these candidates.

Conservative gender attitudes remain common across the country. Fifty-three percent of South Koreans still agree that ‘when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women’. A third of South Koreans say that a university education is more important for a boy than for a girl.

Other countries are seeing political polarization between the sexes. Across all ages, more men voted for Donald Trump in 2024 than women. Young Americans are also increasingly saying that shared political values are an important feature in a partner. In other places, including Germany, Poland, and the UK, younger men are moving right as younger women move left.

Yet South Korea’s polarization is particularly stark, because it has happened so quickly and because gender issues have become so central to the country’s politics.

This gap in values might be one reason that younger South Koreans are less likely to date and marry. It could also be a symptom of a culture in which men and women live bifurcated lives: they go to different schools, consume different media and news, and socialize in unmixed groups. Less than half of Korean women in their childbearing years are married.

But marriage rates have fallen so fast that this number doesn’t give us a full picture. In many countries, the age at which women are getting married for the first time is increasing and the number of women who will ever get married is decreasing. It is difficult to fully separate these trends: how can we know if the decrease in the number of 30-year-olds marrying is going to show up as an increase in the number of 35-year-olds marrying until it has happened? But other statistics imply that most of these women aren’t ever going to marry.

In Korea the average age at which women have their first marriage, if they marry at all, is 31. This is within the stand­ard range for a rich country: in the US it is 29, in the UK 31, in Japan 29 and in Sweden it’s 35. But while about half of American women are married by their early thirties, a staggering 77 percent of Korean women aged 30–34 are unmarried.

South Koreans in their twenties have been less and less likely to be dating over the decades (from 40 percent without a partner in 1991 to 65 percent in 2018) and singleness is rising in all age cohorts.

The decline in marriage is particularly significant in Korea – like most East Asian countries, childbirth out of marriage is much rarer than in other developed countries. Today, only 3 per­cent of babies in South Korea are born to unmarried parents, compared to 40 percent in the US and 55 percent in Sweden. The collapse of marriage in Korea, therefore, means an even greater collapse of birth rates than it would elsewhere.

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Where South Korea is unique: antinatalist campaigns and negative population momentum

So far, South Korea’s fertility crisis sounds similar to that in the rest of the world – just a much more extreme version. But one cause of its low fertility rate is unusual, especially compared to the Western world. This is the legacy of decades of sustained government action to reduce fertility.

In 1961, a military junta led by General Park Chung-Hee seized power. At the time, the average South Korean woman had six children. Park believed that shrinking family sizes would fuel economic development by freeing up more women to work and decreasing the number of dependents per worker.

Park’s government started by giving every hospital a family planning unit and promoting contraceptive measures, particularly vasectomies and IUDs. In 1963, every government department was ordered to participate in the national effort: the Defence Ministry offered soldiers vasectomies and the Education Ministry incorporated the supposed dangers of overpopulation into the school curriculum.

In the 1970s, the government introduced tax breaks for families with no more than two children. Parents with less than three children who underwent sterilization received priority access to public housing. There were extra social security payments for parents of small families who opted for sterilization.

Official messaging also promoted smaller families. The government’s first antinatalist slogan was ‘Have few children and bring them up well.’ Later posters encouraged parents to prioritize ‘quality over quantity’, with mottos such as ‘Let’s have two children and raise them well’, or the frantic ‘Two children is already too many!’

Family planning propaganda also attempted to address South Korea’s cultural preference for male over female children, which meant that couples who had only daughters were motivated to continue having children in pursuit of a son. The sex preference was a strong one. In 1971, 50 percent of South Korean women who were asked what a woman should do if she could not give birth to a boy said that the woman should let her husband try for a son with a different woman. Slogans introduced on this matter included “A well bred girl surpasses ten boys”.

In many ways, South Korea was simply doing what the world’s great philanthropists, policymakers, and politicians of that time wanted. Fears about a busy, hungry world went mainstream in the sixties. The Kennedy administration publicly argued that population control was a legitimate policy focus. In 1967, President Lyndon B Johnson asked Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ‘to join a truly worldwide effort to bring population and food production back into balance’. Henry Kissinger was worried that ‘excessive population growth’ would hold back economic development and social progress and would undermine US interests by creating political tensions that could lead to instability. The president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, made family planning a priority for the Bank, giving direct financing for contraception in 1970 and tying population targets to aid. John D Rockefeller III, who founded the Population Council, went on to chair Nixon’s population commission. He spent Rockefeller Foundation money on research and education about contraception.

By 1976, Korea’s fam­ily planning policy, centering on the promotion and distribution of contraceptives, is estimated to have averted between 1.8 million and 2.1 million births. And it did so remarkably cost-effectively, at a cost of just $103 per prevented birth in today’s money. Between 1960 and 1978, South Korea’s total fertility rate fell from six children per woman to three. Comparable drops took 96 years in the UK and 82 in the US.

These antinatalist policies survived the end of Park’s dictatorship in 1979. The fertility rate continued to plummet, falling below replacement rate (2.1 children per woman) in 1984. In 1989 the government stopped giving out free contraceptives and relaxed the sterilization drive. By 1990, South Korea was experiencing the consequences of these policies: the average age of the country was now rising, its working age population had begun to fall, and the country now had an imbalanced sex ratio caused by sex-selective abortions. In 1994, the government officially abandoned its population suppression targets. It would begin its explicitly pro-natalist policies only 11 years later.

Once the number of people at or below reproductive age has shrunk below a certain level, averting pop­ulation decline becomes extremely difficult. Even if the remaining young people rapidly increase their fertility, there are not enough of them to avert decline from attrition in larger, older groups. And a culture dominated by older and childless people becomes less child friendly. Schools and parks close down and institutions are shaped to cater for the majority. Korea is known for its ‘no children’ policies in many cafes and restaurants.

Between 1990 and 2023, the number of South Korean children declined by 50 percent, while the number of over-65s increased by 340 percent. For South Korea to just maintain its current old-age dependency ratio – 3.9 working adults for every person over 65 – in 30 years’ time, its fertility rate would have to skyrocket to over 10 babies per woman. If it were to fall only as low as Japan’s dependency ratio, the lowest in the OECD – 2 working adults for every person over 65 – it would still have to increase its birth rate to 4.2 babies per woman.2 This requires extreme behavioral change in a narrowing group of people.

While the number of South Korean children has halved since 1990, the US has seen its number increase by 11 percent, the UK 9 percent, and Sweden 19 percent. While these countries all have large cohorts of older people who will be difficult to replace as they die, the number of young people has not fallen to South Korean levels, both because of South Korea’s extra-low fertility rate and low levels of immigration. Foreign nationals represent only 5.1 percent of its population. In contrast, with so many more young people, the mountain that the Americans, Brits, and Swedes must climb to stabilize populations is far less steep than that faced by South Korea’s leaders.

Childbearing decisions are memetically influenced. They are shaped by the decisions peers make and the examples they see around them in everyday life. Thirty years of antinatalism have left their mark on South Korean attitudes. By normalizing small family sizes and childlessness, the government ushered in a self-perpetuating culture of lowered fertility. Only 28 percent of unmarried South Koreans aged 19–49 now say they want children, while 51 percent of childless Americans aged 18–34 say they want children.

South Korea’s recent pro-child policies have still probably helped

Since 2022, in an explicit effort to raise fertility rates, the South Korean government has given couples a grant of $1,500 upon the birth of a first child. As of 2023, this is followed by $528 a month until a child is one, $264 until a child is two and then $150 a month until elementary school starts. Every South Korean baby is now accompanied by some $22,000 in government support through different programs over the first few years of their lives. But they will cost their parents an average of roughly $15,000 every year for eighteen years, and these policies do not come close to addressing the child penalty for South Korean mothers.

While the government’s attempts to revive fertility might appear unsuccessful, the situation would likely be worse without them. New evidence, which analyzes the variation in the generosity of South Korean baby bonuses across districts and time, suggests that more generous cash transfers are causing more babies to be born.

For each ten percent increase in the bonus, fertility rates have risen by 0.58 percent, 0.34 percent, and 0.36 percent for first, second, and third births respectively. The effect appears to be the result of a real increase in births, rather than a shift in the timing of births. For example, where a district increased the generosity of a bonus for second births, more second children were born, but births of first and third children did not change. This suggests that the decline would have been faster and harder in the absence of pro-child policies. These gains, while real, just aren’t enough to counteract decades of antinatalist policy, the world’s toughest gender divide, the world’s biggest marriage penalty, and the world’s most intense schooling culture.

This aligns with global examples suggesting that child-friendly policies can raise fertility rates. For a century, France was Europe’s lowest-fertility nation. After launching an active pronatal campaign in the 1920s, France is now Europe’s highest-fertility country. The French sides of the Franco-Spanish border and the Italian-Franco border have higher fertility than the regions they border. The program includes family-friendly tax breaks, baby bonuses, and strong maternity employment protections. France has consistently sat about 0.3 children above the Western European average.

Similarly, South Tyrol in northeastern Italy has a fertility rate higher than any other Italian region, and it has actually increased since the 1990s. South Tyrol has a highly functional childcare system and gives parents a monthly €200 payment for each child under three.

There are other examples too. Nagi in rural Japan saw its fertility rate increase from 1.4 in 2005 to 2.7 today after giving parents cash, cheap childcare, housing subsidies, and free healthcare for children. Australia, Spain, Poland, the UK, and Russia all had more births after introducing different policies that gave families more money. Germany increased births among educated women by creating a generous earnings-dependent parental leave allowance

It may be too late for South Korea. It is surrounded by real and potential enemies, including one which is committed to its destruction, and its army relies on a rapidly waning number of young con­scripts. As its popu­lation gets older, more and more resources are going to be spent sustaining the elderly. This means less money for baby bonuses and more for nursing homes, as well as perpetually increasing taxes and hours. At some point, the few youngsters that are left may start to leave for less burdensome futures else­where, worsening the load on those that remain.

This is a future worth avoiding: the rest of the world would be much poorer without South Korea. South Korea is an extremely innovative nation. It files the most patents in the world – not per capita, in absolute terms – with a population just one sixth of the US’s.

South Korea has a genuinely unique culture. Isolated from the rest of the world, Korean culture has been able to grow and flourish on its own. For example, Koreanic languages (Korean and Jejuan, from the island of Jeju in South Korea) are considered to be an isolated family of their own, totally separate from other languages in East Asia. And its cultural exports, from K-pop and K-dramas to skin care and Korean barbecue are popular throughout the world.

Along with its technology and culture, Korea is also exporting a warning about what is to come for us all. Much of the world is getting older for the same reasons as South Korea. Families, especially mothers, are made poorer when they choose to have children. As the demands of educational institutions get more extreme, children are getting more expensive to raise. And while less extreme than in Seoul, men and women are drifting apart around the developed world.

South Korea is often seen as a testament to the futility of pro-child policies. This conclusion is the opposite of the truth. South Korea’s pro-child policies have not been that well-funded and may not have been perfectly targeted, but they have still been fairly effective. They just fall far short of what is necessary.

Phoebe Arslanagić-Little is director of Boom and leads two projects at UK think tank Onward. Follow her on Twitter.

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It’s April 1984. Two men are sleeping in a car park in Basel. Each morning they wake, leave their borrowed Volkswagen Westfalia, and wash in the train station toilets. Then they go to their new stand at the Basel fair: the high point of the watch industry’s annual calendar. Their stand is arresting: every case is empty. With only two models to show, probably better not to show them at all. Instead, the pair focus on pitching the great and the good of the Swiss watch industry. If anyone asks them where they’re staying, they’ll say the Hilton.

The two men are Jacques Piguet, born into a family of watchmakers; and Jean-Claude Biver, a disgruntled ex-exec from Omega. The plan is to relaunch Blancpain, a brand they’d acquired in 1981 but had yet to bring back to life. The move is somewhat audacious: the Swiss watch industry is in a tailspin, disrupted by a new technology, the quartz wristwatch, that has left Switzerland’s traditional watchmakers obsolete.

Japanese factories are churning out watches that are faster, cheaper, and more precise than the Swiss mechanicals could ever hope to be. Over half of Switzerland’s watch companies collapse. Two thirds of its watchmaking jobs disappear. But Swiss watchmaking isn’t dead yet, and a handful of people are about to snatch it from obsolescence.

From the city to the mountains

The story of Swiss watchmaking began in Geneva in the 1540s. At the behest of John Calvin, the city imposed a ban on jewelry, the craft that had sustained Geneva’s artisans. The law, however, left one deliberate loophole: timepieces, those most practical and Protestant of devices, were still permitted to be worn. Denied their old market, the city’s artisans, joined by religious refugees from France and Italy, retooled and got to work.

At that point, despite Calvin’s strict­ures, watches remained more a curiosity than a necessity. When mathematician and astrologer Thomas Allen visited his friend, Sir John Scudamore, at the turn of the seventeenth century, and decided to bring his watch with him, a maid presumed its ticking to be the noise of the devil, and promptly threw it out of the window.

Time was measured in a mongrel fashion: references to ‘one o’clock’ in diaries sat comfortably alongside those to prime (first daylight prayer) and vespers (sunset prayer). Few people owned watches; most relied on public clocks and sundials, each town stubbornly keeping its own solar time. Precision in timing was reserved for only the most important moments, most obviously births and deaths. For everything else, a half day, or maybe a quarter day, if the subject were feeling adventurous, would suffice.

Time remained this way until the turn of the eighteenth century, with the needs of industrialization and navigation demanding a greater degree of precision. Aided by the 1656 invention of the pendulum clock by Dutch inventor Christiaan Huygens, clocks began to migrate from church towers to parlor walls: between 1740 and 1780, Bristol probate records list more clocks than mirrors. Clocks had become so commonplace that, at the very moment of Tristram Shandy’s conception, the deed stalls on his mother’s anxious reminder: ‘Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?’

As watches became small and reliable enough to carry, producing them seeded thriving workshops in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Struggling to deal with demand, many of the watchmakers in each of the cities decided to follow a tried-and-tested business strategy: outsourcing their production. Geneva was the beneficiary, by 1760 boasting approximately 800 masters employing ‘some 4,000 workers in the city’, collectively making around 85,000 timepieces a year.

From the outside, Geneva’s watch­ making boom looked like a triumph. Inside the city’s workshops, however, the artisans were struggling to keep up. Their solution was to look beyond the city to an unlikely source: the remote mountain villages of the Swiss Jura, where long winters and cheap labor made ideal conditions for production. The Jura’s craftsmen worked longer, earned less, and turned watchmaking into a family trade, eventually outpacing their Genevan counterparts.

Frederic Japy, an entrepreneurial French horologist, introduced an arsenal of specialized tools – bored-arbor lathes, multi-wheel tooth-cutting machines, and bespoke punch presses (a big selling point being that all the machines could be easily worked by children) – paving the way for true mass production in the region, centered around the towns of Le Locle, La Chaux-de-Fonds, and Neuchâtel.

The increase in supply met ever greater demand in the nineteenth century, spurred, in particular, by the standardization of time. In 1847, the British Railway Clearing House recommended every station run on London Time, synchronized to that of the Greenwich observatory – rail travel’s first nationwide clock. Commercial time zones followed in the 1870s, paving the way for global acceptance (bar France) of Greenwich Mean Time as the world’s prime meridian in 1884.1

With the advent of cheaper watches, pio­neered by American firms such as Ingersoll, which in 1895 brought the first dollar watch to market, ownership spread rapidly. Watch ownership became routine for adult men throughout the western world. As historian Alun Davies has noted, between 1909 and 1913 Britain imported 17 million watches – almost one for every adult male in the country – along with 13 million clocks.

32,768 times per second

By 1870, the Swiss already commanded more than two thirds of the world’s watch output – the first and biggest winners of the new age of time. From 1907 onwards, Swiss watches won first prize in the pocket-watch category every year at the British chronometry competitions at Kew. Their victories built on advanced escapements, a finer class of finishing, and Guillaume balances that shrugged off heat and cold. In 1945, a few decades later, the Swiss accounted for over 80 percent of the global watch market.

Yet just as Swiss watchmaking reached its zenith, a rival technology was stirring: quartz timekeeping, first proven in 1927 by a room-size crystal clock developed by a team at Bell Labs, then refined, miniaturized, and perfected by Seiko at its R&D lab in Suwa, Japan.

A mechanical watch begins with a coiled strip of metal: the mainspring. As the mainspring unwinds, it drives a series of precisely cut gears, transferring energy to a tiny mechanical timing controller: the escapement. The escapement then transfers that power to a weighted balance wheel designed to oscillate at a consistent frequency, the rhythm of which is then used to drive the watch hands. Each swing of the balance wheel releases one gear tooth, turning the mainspring’s uneven energy into steady, even ticks.

It’s an intricate system which evolved over centuries, but one that ultimately involves tiny physical objects bumping up against other physical objects – something that hasn’t really changed since the earliest documented mechanical clocks were installed in the fourteenth century in cathedrals such as St Albans, Norwich, Salisbury, and Wells.

In 1880, however, Pierre and Jacques Curie made a curious discovery: applying an electrical charge to certain types of crystals – in particular, ones made of quartz – makes them vibrate at a very precise frequency. They called this the piezoelectric effect.

In a quartz watch, every movement (watch jargon for the main part of the watch that does the work) contains a piezoelectric crystal, finely cut to oscillate at a specific frequency. (Modern ones are manufactured to vibrate at exactly 32,768 times per second.) The crystal is mounted between two electrodes and sealed in a protective cage to prevent decay.

A battery in the watch passes an electric current through the crystal, triggering the piezoelectric effect. The electrodes detect these vibrations and relay them to an integrated circuit.

Fifteen electronic dividers systematically halve the frequency: 32,768 becomes 16,384, then 8,192, 4,096, and so on, reaching a single pulse to represent one second. The signal is received by a stepping motor, and the screen on your Casio F-91W cycles forward a second.

Millions of calculations occur in a fraction of a second, meaning that quartz watches only lose a few seconds of accuracy each month – versus the seconds-per-day drift even today’s finest luxury watches show – powered by a mass-produced movement anyone can order online for about a dollar apiece (wholesale PC21 quartz movements list from $0.60 each).

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For the price of a Toyota Corolla

Back in 1969, when Seiko debuted the Astron, the first quartz production wristwatch, that kind of precision was still exotic and eye-wateringly expensive.

The watch had been decades in the making. First came marine chronometers, then complex multi-instrument systems.

The real prize, however, was a quartz wristwatch. The Swiss had set up an industrial laboratory in Neuchâtel in the 1960s to study the technology, but did not pursue it as doggedly as Seiko.

Although the Astron was 100 times more accurate than any existing watch, it cost $1,250 (just under $11,000 today), about the same as the original Toyota Corolla, launched three years earlier. What would set Seiko apart was the speed with which they innovated over the following decade.

Over the 1970s Seiko slashed power draw dramatically – ​from about 30 microwatts in the Astronto roughly to 3 micro­watts by 1979 – thanks to lower-power circuits and more efficient crystals.2 It introduced LCD displays; slimmed movement thickness from over five milli­meters to less than one and, due to these improvements, was able to cut retail prices to just two to three percent of what the Astron cost. The team also added as much functionality as possible to their watches: calendars, stopwatches, multiple alarms, and calculators. The first two are relatively difficult to incorporate into any mechanical watch. The second two, nearly impossible.

Even worse for the Swiss, Seiko licensed its key quartz patents to other makers, a strategic move aimed at setting global standards, accelerating adoption and cementing Seiko’s lead. The result was a flood of Japanese competitors, most notably Citizen and Casio, both of which launched their first quartz watches in 1974. Buoyed by extremely favorable exchange rates, Japanese watch production tripled during the 1970s, soaring from just under 24 million units in 1970 to nearly 90 million by decade’s end.

By 1977, Seiko had become the world’s largest watch company by revenue, and by 1980, Japan had over­taken Switzerland as the world’s largest watch producer. Between 1974 and 1983, Swiss watch production plunged from 96 million units to 45 million, while employment collapsed – from 89,000 in 1970 to just 33,000 by 1985.

Even the most ardent supporters of Swiss watchmaking were giving the industry its last rites. The year Piguet and Biver launched their brand, historian David Landes published Revolutions in Time, a history of mechanical watchmaking, with a notably elegiac tone:

The quartz timekeeper is a superior instrument in terms of both precision and price, and is bound to win out. Here we have a rare opportunity to study the birth, maturity, and obsolescence of a major branch of manufacture.

One of Seiko’s adverts of the era put it even more pithily: ‘Someday all watches will be made this way.’

A lord of time

In the pre-Quartz era, Omega was synonymous with watches. A key decision to bid on a mysterious and demanding tender from an unnamed buyer in 1962 had paid off: the unnamed buyer was NASA and when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, they were wearing Omega Speedmasters.

Quartz, however, sent Omega into crisis. Instead of choosing either to double-down on mechanicals or fully embrace quartz, Omega tried to do both. The resulting sprawl – roughly 2,000 different references (models) by 1980 – drove sales into a steep decline and prompted key executives to walk out.

One of those was Jean-Claude Biver, a watch obsessive, born in Luxembourg, who had spent time at both Audemars Piguet and Omega. During this time, he developed a theory: Swiss watchmaking could survive only by rejecting quartz and doubling down on high-end, handmade mechanical watches.

Biver knew Omega’s parent com­pany, SSIH, was desperate to offload its dormant assets. So, in 1981, he partnered with Jacques Piguet, whose family firm was transitioning to quartz, to purchase Blancpain, a storied brand that had fallen from selling over 200,000 watches in 1971 to the brink of oblivion. Blancpain cost him 22,000 Swiss francs, about $44,000 in today’s money.

With the acquisition in hand, Biver and Piguet set up shop in a farmhouse in the Swiss mountains. Their strategy was simple: position Blancpain as the ultimate in handmade, human, and artisanal watches, backed by a bold slogan devised by Biver himself: ‘Since 1735, there has never been a quartz Blancpain watch. And there never will be.’

Biver’s philosophy was that watches are not just functional tools but artistic objects, designed not merely to tell the time, but to convey something about the wearer. This idea is now the foundation of the entire modern watch industry. But at the time, it was radical.

Most prestige pieces then marketed themselves first and foremost as tools, a consequence of the fact that it was war, not peace, that drove mass adoption of the wrist watch (as opposed to the pocket watch) among men in the first half of the twentieth century.

The job of a watch was to help you to get things done. The more exotic the watch, the more important the thing you had to do: hence Rolex’s 1950s brand ambassador of choice, General Eisenhower, and its favored class of tagline (example: ‘when a man has the world in his hands, you expect to find a Rolex on his wrist’).

That utilitarian pedigree persisted into the 1980s. Apart from a few slim dress pieces, high-end watches drew prestige from what they could do: survive a saturation dive, time a flight, measure speed with a chronograph. The Rolex Submariner Sean Connery wore in Goldfinger might be iconic, but it was standard military issue for Royal Navy divers at the time. And even if Bond had bought one himself, it would have set him back barely two weeks’ pay.3

Biver saw that, in a world where machines were taking over, he could command a premium with the work of human hands. He turned the precision of quartz against itself: ‘That famous quartz precision became of secondary importance. Who cares about ultra-precision to a quarter of a second in everyday life? As a famous Italian retailer explained to his customers: you’re a lord, and a lord doesn’t need the exact time!’

The results came quickly: by 1985, Blancpain had made nearly 9 million Swiss francs in sales and by 1991, that figure had surged to 56 million francs. Compared to the established luxury players these numbers were small. But it was a victory for the emotional appeal of Swiss watches and set a clear course for the future of the luxury watch industry.

Biver had written the playbook and the bigger players emerged from their defensive crouch. In 1985 IWC released the DaVinci; in 1988, Rolex debuted a new version of the Daytona; and in 1989, to mark its 150th anniversary, Patek Philippe unveiled the Calibre 89, then the most complicated mechanical timepiece ever made.

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Calling Mr Hayek

This pivot to luxury, however, came at a cost. In Biver’s world, Swiss watch­making had to make a choice: embrace the luxury market or pursue volume instead. Choosing the former – shrinking product lines, raising prices, and focusing on craft above all else – would allow a few survivors to carry on in the new world of quartz, but at the cost of accepting that the heyday of Swiss mass watchmaking was over.

The problem, however, was that by the time Biver and Piguet arrived on the scene, most of the watch industry had been moving in the opposite direction, clustering into two sprawling holding groups. SSIH controlled Omega, Tissot, and Lemania; ASUAG specialized in parts and movements but, to protect its customer base, had spent much of the 1970s hoovering up dozens of mid-tier brands. Independent houses such as Rolex, Patek Philippe, and IWC stayed outside these blocs.

Together, these two companies employed over half of the watch industry’s remaining workforce. They were also technically insolvent,4 surviving instead only on emergency credit lines from a consortium of Swiss lenders. By 1982 those creditor banks decided it was time for an exit plan, so they jointly hired Lebanese-born consultant Nicolas Hayek to tell them whether to liquidate, merge, or attempt a turnaround.

Hayek began his corporate life at Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest insurers and reinsurers, before setting up his own firm, specializing in engineering and supply chains. He was very good at it: by 1979, Hayek Engineering had over 300 clients in 30 countries, including the Swiss Army, putting him firmly on the banks’ radar. When the call came to advise, Hayek accepted. If you were to pick a businessman as philosopher, you’d struggle to find a finer example than Hayek. He loved building things and believed that a country that couldn’t build, frankly, was no country at all: ‘We must build where we live. When a count­ry loses the know-how and expertise to manufacture things, it loses its capacity to create wealth – its financial independence. When it loses its financial independence, it starts to lose political sovereignty’.

Hayek saw the choice between luxury and volume as a false dilemma. If a country couldn’t produce everyday goods in a category, it would eventually lose the ability to make the luxury ones too.

Here was the perfect chance to prove his theory: beat the Japanese at mass production, in Switzerland, a country then among the highest-wage nations in the OECD. So instead of breaking up the companies, Hayek proposed merging them into a single entity.

Both boards eventually agreed, and the Swiss competition authority raised no objection, so in 1983, the two firms were folded into a new holding company, the Swiss Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking (SMH). Hayek was installed as chairman.

Before Hayek, SSIH and ASUAG followed a simple model: thousands of semi-independent workshops made components while the parent conglomerates handled marketing and distribution. It was a system unchanged since the first watchmakers of the Jura, when families built watches at home and salesmen carried them over the mountain passes to sell to the world.

To Hayek, this was completely back­ward. It led to inefficiencies and uncompetitive costs on the production side and to undifferentiated brands that tried to be everything and ended up as nothing.

Manufacturing was progressively pulled into a handful of high-capacity ETA plants, chiefly those based in Grenchen and Fontainemelon, while brand workshops that once made their own calibers were refocused on design and marketing. Lines were automated: CNC-machine-milled main plates, material transport conveyors, and rotary presses looked on as plastic cases were welded in a single pass.

Standardization followed. Watches across the group now shared the same Micro Crystal tuning forks, Renata silver-oxide cells, and workhouse move­ments like the ETA 2824-2. Even the most prestigious brands in the group’s stable – Omega, Longines and Rado – were no longer permitted to produce their own movements. In many cases, they were forced to rationalize their lines. The effect was dramatic: Omega cut its catalogue from 2,000 references to 1,000, then to just 130 models within five years, and production costs fell and reliability jumped.

Secondly, marketing was radically decentralized. Each brand was given a clear segment of the market, and its job was to dominate that segment. The center’s only role was to defend each brand’s differentiation.

But there was still a missing piece. In his 1982 report, Hayek split the global watch market (roughly 500 million units per year) into three tiers: low, middle, and high. The low tier, according to Hayek, watches priced up to $75, made up 90 percent of the market. None of those 450 million watches were Swiss-made.

To do that, the Swiss needed a brand that could out-quartz the quartz.

A jewelry store in Texas

If you stepped into a jewelry store in Dallas, Texas, in the run-up to Christmas 1982, you’d find something unusual. A simple watch, probably black or dark green. No clamshell case – the hallmark of watch sales at the time – but instead, a plastic cover. And a price tag of just twenty dollars.

In 1978, ASUAG’s board merged several parts and movement companies into a single entity, concentrating watch­making talent under one roof. They called it ETA.5 Within a year, its micro crystal division became the first in Europe to mass-produce quartz blanks: rare good news in a time of crisis.

The same engineers then took on a publicity challenge: build the world’s thinnest watch. Launched in 1979, the first Delirium was just 1.98mm thick – a marvel of Swiss engineering. But at $5,000 (about $25,000 today), it was no savior of the Swiss watch market.

The Delirium team made radical manufacturing decisions, most notably eliminating the bottom plate of the movement and integrating parts directly into the caseback (the rear cover of the watch that normally just seals the internals). Ernst Thomke, ETA’s managing director realized the same one-piece architecture could be applied to a mass-produced watch as well.

He set up a separate R&D team to pursue a plastic, mass-molded version. But progress was slow. At the same time, however, two other ETA engineers, Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller, had been working on an off-the-books prototype of their own. But they were limited by technology: they needed an injection molding machine – at a cost of 500,000 Swiss francs (around $1,000,000 today).

Without authorization, Mock placed the order. Thomke called him in that same day. The meeting was at 1pm – meaning Mock, who found out at 11am, had two hours to save his job. Working fast, he and Müller sketched out a design. In the meeting, instead of resigning, Mock went on the offensive – pitching his unauthorized purchase as a necessary step in creating a new, inexpensive plastic watch.

Shortly after, Mock was stripped of his regular duties, as was Müller. They weren’t fired, but instead reassigned, tasked with developing their new prototype in secrecy. By December 1980, they had hand-assembled five working prototypes. The injection-molding press still hadn’t arrived.

Their prototypes took the Delirium’s approach even further, using ultrasonic welding to build the mechanism directly into the watch’s plastic case. The result was a radical simplification. Instead of the usual 91 parts found in quartz watches at the time, the new watch had just 51, each of which could be inserted from above by a machine, perfect for mass production. It was three times cheaper to produce than any other Swiss-made watch, and could be assembled in a matter of seconds.

The team called it the Vulgaris. We know it as the Swatch.

Fashion that ticks

When Hayek arrived, Thomke quietly revealed what his team had built: an inexpensive Swiss-made quartz watch that could put the industry back into all three market segments: the final realization of Hayek’s original vision. The watch launched in March 1983, and soon after, it took off, a true Swiss-made alternative to Japanese quartz.

The impact was immediate. By 1985, Swiss watch production had surged from 45 million units to 60 million.6 By 1992, ETA had produced its 100 millionth Swatch; three years later, its 200 millionth. Before Swatch, the idea that the Swiss could mass-produce a watch for under $50, while still turning a profit, was a fantasy. Swatch made it a certainty.

Swatch, in particular, wasn’t just an innovation in process. It was a revolution in design and marketing. Only when Swatch fully embraced color and self-expression did the product take off. As one designer put it: ‘What we were selling was fashion that ticks.’

Few can match Swatch in its early years when it comes to marketing. In 1984 alone, Swatch hosted the world’s first breakdancing championship, launched the first national hip-hop tour, debuted its first artist collaboration, and hung a 13-ton Swatch off the side of Frankfurt’s Commerzbank building.

Swatch’s real importance wasn’t in dominating the lower end of the market (Swiss watch revenues remain extremely top-heavy to this day), but in giving Swiss watchmaking its confidence back.

The Carnaby Street Mob

It took half an hour for the police to arrive on Carnaby Street. Some in the queue had been waiting for over two days, setting up tents and chairs outside the shop as soon as Swatch announced its latest release, a collaboration with Omega based on the iconic Speedmaster that Armstrong and Aldrin had taken to the moon with them all those years back.

The design was nearly identical, except for one detail: instead of metal, it was made from a Swatch-developed eco-plastic. The price, however, would have made Thomke proud: just £240, more than seven thousand pounds cheaper than its Omega-made sister. They called it the MoonSwatch.

At 9am on 26th March 2022, the doors opened and the queue became a mob. In the weeks that followed, the same scenes played out across the world, from New York to Tokyo, from Milan to Singapore. Thousands of people fought for something that they, in a world where 95 percent have a smartphone, no longer needed to tell the time.

It’s easy, with hindsight, to mock predictions like David Landes’s. But, ultimately, he was right: Swiss watch­making should have died with quartz, along with the lamplighters of Victorian London, the ice harvesters of New England, and the telegraph operators of Western Union. Instead, Biver, Hayek, and the watchmakers of Switzer­land found a way to outlive their own obsolescence – not by competing on function, but by redefining value.

Biver doubled down on the human touch: craftsmanship, heritage, and emotion. His approach became the blueprint for the largest watch companies of today, as well as the new wave of independent artisans. In 1996, Patek Philippe launched its iconic advertising campaign: ‘You never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation.’

Hayek took the other approach: em­bracing the new technology, re-engineering everything from the ground up, and applying it to a changed world. It was the same approach picked up by Apple when it launched the Apple watch in 2014. Once again watches had a function – not just as a timepiece, but as a medical device.

There is room for both approaches. Apple and Rolex, at time of writing, now jostle for the top spot as largest watch company by annual revenues. Full functionality or full artistry. Take your pick.

Things came full circle when, in 1993, SMH acquired Blancpain and Hayek handed Biver his toughest challenge yet: reviving Omega. After Omega, Biver moved to Hublot, led TAG Heuer, and took charge of LVMH’s watch division, before retiring, only to unretire soon after. ‘Who can retire from a passion?’ he said in a recent interview. He now owns an independent watch company with his son.

Hayek became something of a celebrity in Switzerland. He died in 2010 in his office, still working. Shortly before his death, he was voted by the Swiss public the sixth greatest son of Switzerland.

Like the watchmakers of the Jura before him, Hayek turned SMH into a family business: his son now runs Swatch; his grandson, Blancpain. Walk into one of Swatch’s 3,400 stores today and you’ll likely see their follow-up to the MoonSwatch in the front window: a Swatch-made recreation of Blancpain’s most famous watch, the Fifty Fathoms.

Today, Swiss watchmaking is a $30 billion business, with a near monopoly on luxury manufacturing. The country ships just two percent of all watches made each year, yet that sliver captures almost 45 percent of all revenue from watches worldwide. An industry that once faced extinction is stronger than ever. Some things survive not because they have to, but because we want them to. Instead of causing the end of Swiss watchmaking, the Quartz Crisis was the moment it was reborn.

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Aled Maclean-Jones is chief executive of Ashore and was previously a special advisor to the UK Prime Minister. Follow him on Twitter.

Competition between companies is seen by most economists as the engine of innovation, economic growth, and prosperity in modern market economies. Competition is one of the only economic forces to have laws and dedicated regulators set up to promote it, and nearly everyone agrees that some interventions to promote it are worthwhile. But while virtually everyone agrees that competition is a very good thing, it is much harder to agree on what competition actually looks like.

Instead, economists, courts, and regulators rely on imperfect proxies for competition. But these are often contradictory. They can even lead to perverse outcomes that few people think desirable: legal challenges, prohibitions on business practices that would actually increase innovation or growth, and bans on mergers that, paradoxically, can leave markets less competitive.

A reliable and usable measure of competition that actually matched up with other measures of whether a market is healthy or not is something of a holy grail in economics.

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Imperfect proxies for competition

Traditional accounts of competition use proxy measures like market concentration, which looks at how much market share the biggest companies have.

A country that had only two grocery store chains, each of which had 50 percent of the market, would be said to be highly concentrated compared to a country that had a thousand stores, each of which earned 0.1 percent of shoppers’ grocery spending. This may seem intuitive enough, but it can be misleading.

For one thing, looking at concentration at a national level can obscure what’s going on at the local level. Nationwide, concentration in America’s retail sector has been rising since the early 1990s as chains like Walmart, Kroger and Target have opened more branches across the country. Concentration as it’s usually measured more than tripled between 1992 and 2012. But retail concentration at local levels increased by only about a third over the same period. The growth of nationwide chains meant new stores opening up in areas that only used to have a handful of smaller local stores, exposing them to new and often intense competition to cut their prices and improve their offerings.

Even when concentration does rise, it’s not always bad for competition. Bigger companies can benefit from economies of scale that allow them to invest in better technology and purchase or produce goods in bulk, which allows them to drive down prices. These benefits can outweigh any loss to competition from fewer companies being in the market. Rising concentration can be a sign of a market that is working well, with more productive companies growing at the expense of lesser ones.

The problem with concentration exists when we zoom out from countries too, and consider international trade. When trade barriers fall, the best companies in a country will grow larger as they expand overseas, and weaker domestic businesses may exit under the pressure of competition from foreign companies, and from their most efficient domestic rivals, which now enjoy greater economies of scale from exporting internationally.

In general, concentration is an outcome of market processes, not a cause. This isn’t just a data collection problem that better measurement could solve. Even if we could measure concentration perfectly – counting every firm, tracking every market share change in real time – it still wouldn’t tell us what we actually want to know about competition. The measure is not just noisy: it often points in the wrong direction. Why would we continue to use it?

Instead of market concentration, more sophisticated analyses of market power have turned to markups: the gap between how much it costs a company to produce more of its product, and the price it charges for them. But this approach is nearly as flawed. High markups could simply be a reward for investment in better products or cost-saving technologies.

A pharmaceutical company might charge high prices relative to manufacturing costs to recoup large R&D investments. Novo Nordisk, the company behind Ozempic and Wegovy, saw annual profit growth of 27, then 36, then 31 percent in 2022, 2023, and 2024 as the world realized that its diabetes drug was also an effective weight-loss tool.

Companies that make breakthroughs or other productivity improvements must earn higher markups for some period of time, or else there would be little incentive to bear the costs of becoming more productive. As with concentration, the presence of markups is often a signal that a market is working well, not that there is a competition problem.

A more useful measure of competition would be based on what we’re actually trying to get competition to do, working backwards from the outcomes we want in order to see what the features are of markets that deliver them. Competition works because it rewards businesses that find better ways to serve customers, and punishes ones that overcharge their customers or offer substandard products. If markets are competitive, then businesses that make desirable products at lower cost will grow larger as customers switch to them, putting pressure on their competitors to improve by cutting prices or making better products. They may face the prospect of having to exit the market altogether.

In short, we want to measure whether markets are rewarding excellence or sclerosis. It turns out that such a measure exists: what is called the Olley-Pakes decomposition. The decomposition measures whether customers are switching to more productive companies. If productive companies are gaining market share, we might judge that the market is competitive and working well. If they’re not, and more productive businesses are not doing better than less productive ones, something is wrong, and intervention could be necessary.

Measuring dynamism

In 1950, Japanese auto manufacturers produced 31,597 vehicles, only as much as the US produced in a single day. But the constraints imposed by post-war Japan led them to choices that would make them much more productive than American manufacturers.

After reading a newspaper article about American supermarkets, Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno imposed a system of ‘pull’ manufacturing: rather than each supplier sending along the same output no matter the demand (as in the ‘push’ system preferred by US suppliers), Toyota’s plants would only ever have in their inventory what was needed for the next production run with a small buffer. In order to further limit expenses, Toyota engineers bought cheap general-purpose stamping presses, limited the number of models on offer, and standardized the parts that went into them.

Workers were generalists, and told to oversee much larger production lines than their American counterparts. By 1963, Toyota workers were overseeing five machines each, compared with three in 1949, and one in 1946. Seeing the problems that American firms had with labor disputes, auto bosses packed their unions with white-collar workers, and offered union leaders management roles and influential workers lifetime jobs.

By the time Toyota and Nissan started entering the US auto market en masse in the 1970s, the Japanese manufacturers were significantly more efficient than their American counterparts, producing more reliable cars and employing fewer labor hours per vehicle.

But the industry’s overall productivity would see only a minimal improvement after the arrival of these Japanese companies. While their extremely productive plants, both in Japan and the United States, had now joined the market, and slightly raised the average productivity of automobile manufacturers selling cars to Americans, the Japanese companies were producing so few cars that this barely affected the total, compared to the dominant, but less efficient, American incumbents.

Over time, American consumers began to realize how good Japanese vehicles were. As Toyota and Honda expanded production, their more efficient plants began capturing larger market shares. The Japanese manufacturers were using the same production techniques as before, but over time, customers switch­ing to them meant more resources shifting towards them. This was a competitive, dynamic market working more or less the way it should.

This shift is what is captured in Olley-Pakes, which breaks productivity down to two components: the average efficiency of firms weighted by market share; and the simple unweighted average efficiency of all firms, regardless of size. The difference between these, called the ‘covariance’, reveals whether the market is actually rewarding efficiency. If it is positive, larger firms are more productive than the industry as a whole and the market is performing well. If it is negative, something is stopping better companies from growing larger than their rivals.

In the auto industry’s case, the unweighted average efficiency of the companies in the market barely changed when the Japanese auto makers arrived. But as efficient Japanese manufacturers sold more and more cars to Americans, the covariance increased substantially.

The advantage of this approach is that, instead of relying on judgements about how many firms constitute a competitive market, which might differ in different markets at different times, or about how much money companies ‘should’ make, it looks at whether the market is actually rewarding more efficient firms, and separates technological progress from market allocation.

The covariance can increase even as concentration rises. Unlike concentration measures, the Olley-Pakes decompositions can judge that competition is strengthening as industries consolidate, if the success of more productive firms is what is driving that consolidation. Studies have found that the relationship between productivity and market share tends to strengthen following pro-competitive reforms and is higher in countries that are generally viewed as having more competitive markets.

In order to see how the Olley-Pakes decomposition would affect competition policy if we used it instead of other measures, I’ll look at two instructive examples: the end of the AT&T monopoly on telephones, which is near perfect example of a legalized monopoly ending, and Colombia’s economic liberalization in the 1990s, which is a good case of nationwide pro-competition reform outside of a crisis.

America’s telephone monopoly

For most of the twentieth century, AT&T operated America’s dominant phone network and provided both phone services and the devices that connected to the network. It served around 75 percent of the country’s local telephone service, and almost all long-distance calls. Households did not buy phones: they leased them; and because AT&T generally did not permit third-party devices to be used on its network, its manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric, supplied 90 percent of the equipment on AT&T’s network.

The standard desk phone was the Western Electric Model 500: a solid black rotary phone. Insofar as there was any competition at all, it was between AT&T telephones and highly imperfect substitutes like sending letters or telegrams, or actually traveling to the person you wanted to speak to, and so on.

The 1968 Carterfone decision forced AT&T to allow certain third-party equipment to connect to its network. This had a dramatic effect on competition: the number of manufacturing plants of telecommunication equipment like central office switches and telephones nearly doubled between 1967 and 1972 as new firms rushed in. By 1987, there were 584 plants operated by 481 different firms, up from just 164 plants and 131 firms in 1967.

Turnover was high: around 60 percent of the plants operating in 1972, accounting for 40 percent of the output and jobs in the industry, had closed by 1987. Over two fifths of plants active in 1982 failed to survive to 1987, representing about a quarter of 1982’s production.

This high turnover of the companies making consumer telephones became even more pronounced after a legal decision forced the breakup of AT&T’s network into seven regional networks in 1984.

We can use this as a base case of an extraordinarily competitive market. All three of our measures would correctly identify it as such: concentration fell as a monopolist was forced to share the market with many competitors. Markups were not tracked, but almost certainly fell as the products were simple and similar, not based on extensive R&D or intellectual property protection.

The Olley-Pakes decomposition finds the same result: the average manufacturing plant’s efficiency didn’t see much improvement between 1974 and 1987.

Individual plants weren’t suddenly becoming dramatically better at making phones just because of new competition. What shifted was which plants were doing most of the production. At the start of this period of competition, a plant’s ef­fi­ciency had virtually no connection whatsoever to how much it produced (the correlation was just 0.01 in 1974). Factories that could make phones quickly and efficiently had essentially no ability to gain market share at the expense of their slower, costlier rivals. Since AT&T’s customers had no choice which company to buy their device from, and since AT&T would not lose customers by making them go to inefficient suppliers, there was no extra business for manufacturers who could outproduce their competitors.

By 1980, this had changed. The open­ing up of the telephone market to choice and competition meant that, at last, customers could shop around for cheaper, better phones, and more efficient producers could benefit. The correlation between a plant’s efficiency and its share of production jumped from 0.01 to 0.28 by 1980. A year later, it reached 0.35.

This historical example is like a control group: it shows that in the most obvious cases of increased competition, the Olley-Pakes decomposition finds the right thing, agreeing in these cases with both concentration and, very likely, markups.

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Reforms in Colombia

We can think about competition in this way not just for individual sectors, but for entire economies. Unlike many other countries that have gone through significant economic reforms, 1990s Colombia was not in the midst of an economic crisis. Instead, a convergence of external pressure, from the World Bank to the growing popularity of the Washington Consensus, provided the initial impetus for the reforms, and President César Gaviria’s reformist government then pushed them even further.

Trade liberalization was central to the reform program. The country slashed its average tariff on imports from over 62 percent to around 15 percent, exposing domestic producers to much stronger international competition​. Labor markets were also liberalized: the costs of dismissing workers fell by 60 percent or more, making it easier for firms to restructure their workforces.

Before these reforms, a factory’s success often had little to do with how efficient it was at making products. A plant could be relatively wasteful with materials and labor but still do well if it had a strong local customer base, since only domestic companies could compete and it was expensive and risky for new companies to enter the market.

In the case of the car industry, Colombia’s protectionist policies supported a market dominated by just three domestic assemblers of parts made abroad. Foreign-assembled vehicles were effectively locked out by tariffs, which averaged around 200 percent. Cars sold in Colombia typically cost two to three times their international price while offering fewer features and lower quality.

The reforms cut tariffs on foreign-­made cars from 200 percent to ap­­pro­ximately 38 percent between 1990 and 1992. In 1991, only 26 car models were available in Colombia, all domestically assembled. By 1992, just one year after the reforms, 71 different models were on offer, 44 of which were imports.

The price of cars collapsed after the reforms, from a high of $25,000 (in 1996 terms) in 1987 to just over $15,000 ten years later, while car sales doubled almost immediately. Domestic manufacturers also grew their sales, as the car market in general grew, but they lost market share. Market liberalization led to lower prices, expanded consumer choice, and a reallocation of market share reflecting the new competitive landscape.

Over five years, existing factories got better at what they did, improving their own efficiency by about three percent. But the biggest gain came from the market’s new ability to reward efficiency. More productive factories grew larger faster than less productive ones, which meant that overall productivity grew nearly eight percent. Hence, the difference between weighted and unweighted productivity – the covariance – increased.

This was part of a broader pattern across Colombian manufacturing. New competition from overseas forced domestic producers to get their acts together or lose market share. Manufacturers that faced the greatest import competition simultaneously increased their productivity and lost demand to even more productive overseas rivals.

Britain’s missing productivity

Measuring competition accurately can also allow us to explain more complicated stories, such as British economic stagnation in the decade after the 2008 crisis.

Economic recessions often have a ‘cleansing’ effect: less productive firms exit while more efficient ones survive and potentially expand. In the immediate crisis years between 2007 and 2010, the correlation between productivity and market share in Britain remained stable, suggesting that competition was working just as it did before the crisis, with market share still flowing to more efficient producers.

But beneath this surface stability, more troubling patterns were emerging. Unlike the 1990–92 recession, after which productivity within manu­facturing firms rebounded strongly, the post-2008 period saw persistent weakness in productivity growth inside companies, and this occurred across sectors as diverse as financial services, mining, and electricity and gas.

So what was going on? Subsequent Bank of England research found that, in the years following the financial crisis, many companies facing falling demand were nonetheless holding onto their employees. Before the crisis, in more normal times, about nine in ten companies with falling output also cut employment. During the recession, that fell to four in five. Since their staff had less to do, because demand was down, productivity fell.

In a highly competitive market like retail, where profit margins are razor thin and labor costs can represent around a fifth of total business expenses, having just ten percent more workers than your competitors is a huge burden. Businesses facing stiff competition can’t afford to keep excess workers: competitors would undercut their prices and steal their customers.

But many of these struggling companies continued operating. Company death rates were estimated to be as little as half what they would be in a counterfactual world where the economy behaved like it did in previous recessions. Net entry, which is firm entry minus exit, was actually positive by 2010, despite the terrible economic environment.

In prior recessions these firms would have died. Instead they staggered on, tying up workers and capital that could have flowed to more dynamic new businesses. While in the earliest crisis years we saw a stable correlation between market share and productivity, over time, the UK’s reallocation engine began sputtering, and the link between productivity and business growth measured by the Olley-Pakes decomposition began to fall.

This twin deterioration – falling productivity within firms, plus impaired reallocation between them – is one good candidate for explaining the UK’s puzzling post-crisis economic performance. Between 2010 and 2019, worker productivity grew by eight percent in the United States and 9.6 percent in France (from a lower level), but by just 5.8 percent in Britain. And this is despite the fact that British productivity was already substantially lower than both the French and the American level.

The Olley-Pakes measure detected meaningful changes in market functioning that help explain the UK’s productivity performance after 2008. This is what we want from a competition metric: the ability to identify when markets are or aren’t effectively reallocating resources to more productive firms.

None of this tells us what went wrong, of course. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, along with most other competition authorities, would wonder if something was amiss if it saw rising concentration in a market, or rising markups. It has a kit full of tools for tackling issues in markets that have these problems. But the post-crisis stagnation wasn’t caused by traditional competition problems like cartels or monopolies. Instead, it was caused by a breakdown in the mechanisms that normally reward productive firms and pressure unproductive ones.

If the search were thought about in terms of falling reallocation from unproductive companies to more productive ones, it might look for other culprits. Those might be things like bank forbearance policies, under which struggling firms were kept alive for longer; low interest rates, which allowed companies to refinance debt rather than going broke; or housing policies preventing workers from moving from struggling parts of the country to relatively prosperous ones. One way or another, if policymakers at the time had used Olley-Pakes, they might have had a better idea about what was going wrong and been able to address it sooner.

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Better measurement leads to better policy

These four examples show how useful the logic underlying the Olley-Pakes decomposition can be to capture meaningful changes in how markets function. Olley-Pakes tells us competition is rising in the obvious cases that concentration and markups get right, as in US telecommunications after the AT&T breakup. But where it excels is giving us the right answer when markups and concentration fail: for example in post-Great Recession Britain, where the process of creative destruction stalled despite no real change in markups or concentration.

British policymakers, seeing no change in markups or concentration after the 2008 recession might judge that competition was not the problem, and that they didn’t need to worry about it. But they would be mistaken because they had the wrong data.

Increasing concentration and rising markups are often signs of functioning markets where demand is flowing to the most productive firms, such as is the case with weight loss medication today. In order to distinguish between those cases, and ones where markets genuinely are dysfunctional, such as in pre-liberalization Colombia, we need a metric that tells us whether the largest firms are in fact the best.

The Olley-Pakes covariance term itself requires more data and detail than we have from some of these episodes. It needs firm-level information on both productivity and market shares over time, data that are rarely available across all sectors. The studies that have implemented this approach well, like the Colombia case above, required exceptional datasets with plant-level price information, physical output measures, and detailed input tracking across many years. But if competition and statistics authorities decided that there was merit in this measure, they could start to collect this data more thoroughly, and we could really begin to understand if we’ve found the key to understanding competition as it really works.

Brian Albrecht is chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics. Follow him on Twitter.

Clinical trials for new drugs are expensive and uncertain. More than nine out of every ten drugs that enter human trials fail because of harmful side effects or a lack of efficacy. Safety and effectiveness in animals often fail to translate to humans. Imperfect as animal trials are, though, we need to know what happens when we block or boost certain biological pathways with drugs.

But there is another source of this data that we are beginning to draw on. Nature has already done lots of the trials we want to run, through random genetic mutations and natural selection. Since the first full mapping of the human genome in 2003, and the rise of technologies to sequence human DNA, we now can study the genetic mutations in nature that do the same thing as the drugs we want to test. For the first time, we are starting to peer into nature’s laboratory and learn from the millions of years of experiments it has done.

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Trials and errors

On 13th March 2006, eight healthy young men began a clinical trial at Northwick Park Hospital in North London. A new drug called theralizumab was being tested on humans for the first time.

Theralizumab is a monoclonal antibody, a lab-made protein that mimics the body’s immune system antibodies. It is engineered to activate a type of immune cell in the blood called T cells. Normally, these cells are activated only when two proteins on their surface make a signal. These proteins are called the T-cell receptor and CD28.1 Theralizumab can circumvent this ‘two-factor authentication’ and activate the T cell directly through CD28 alone.

In early animal studies, the drug appeared to have many medical benefits, such as killing cancerous leukemia cells and dampening autoimmune responses in rheumatoid arthritis. Injecting the drug into crab-eating macaque monkeys, which are commonly used in drug testing because their physiology and immune systems closely resemble those of humans, suggested it could be safe even in higher doses than researchers planned to ever use. The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency allowed TeGenero, the company developing the drug, to use it in human trials.

Volunteers were randomly assigned into either receiving theralizumab or a placebo, with infusions that were, relative to body size, 1/500th of the dose the macaques got. The volunteers received their infusions within minutes of one another. Within an hour, they all developed life-threatening reactions: their heads and necks swelled dramatically giving them an ‘elephant man’ appearance; they experienced severe pain, difficulty breathing, plummeting blood pressure, and racing heart rates. They ended up in the intensive care unit with multiorgan failure.

Further investigations found that the drug had activated T cells uncontrollably, flooding the volunteers’ bodies with inflammatory proteins called cytokines. There had been unseen subtle differences in the CD28 expression patterns between macaques and humans, which may have resulted in the monoclonal antibody triggering adverse reactions in humans but not in macaques. The resulting drop in investor confidence drove TeGenero to bankruptcy. The ‘elephant man’ trial stands out as a catastrophic failure in the history of clinical trials.

After the theralizumab tragedy, regulatory agencies implemented tighter clinical trial protocols. These included requiring sequential dosing, starting at much lower doses, with longer intervals between participants, and requiring more rigorous preclinical testing of biological drugs. Despite these stricter rules, serious adverse events continue to occur: between 2010 and 2015 UK clinical trials saw 7,187 adverse reactions, of which 493 were life threatening.

Nature’s laboratory

One option is to keep doing slower trials at greater cost. But nature often provides an alternative: random mutations produce the same changes researchers try to achieve with drugs, in effect providing millions of natural experiments.

The human genome is three billion base pairs long, and every individual inherits millions of genetic variants from their parents: places where they differ from the average person. They also get an additional 70 to 90 new mutations (on average), which they then pass onto their offspring.

With three billion base pairs and nearly eight billion humans alive today, any mutation that is compatible with life and reproduction likely exists in at least one person’s genome somewhere in the world. These naturally occurring mutations serve as a comprehensive catalog of genetic changes. The effects range from subtle changes in cellular processes to dramatic differences in enzyme levels, disease susceptibility, and other medically relevant traits.

Human genetic variations and the traits they cause (known as phenotypes) can be thought of as natural experiments. A genetic variant that inactivates a gene – a string of the genome that codes for a protein – can tell us about the potential effects of a drug that inhibits that same protein.

Take the example of DGAT1 inhibitors. The DGAT1 enzyme catalyzes the final step in synthesizing certain types of blood fat, and is essential for fat absorption in the intestine. Researchers hypothesized that inhibiting this enzyme would reduce fat absorption and promote weight loss. Preclinical studies in mice and rats supported this idea. However, during clinical trials with healthy human volunteers in 2011, many participants experienced severe diarrhea and vomiting, which led to the early termination of the trials.

As the DGAT1-inhibitor trials failed, pediatric doctors at Boston’s Mass General Hospital for Children found a clue as to why. They had been studying two siblings who had been born with a rare diarrheal disorder whose symptoms closely resembled those of the trial participants: healthy at birth, but developing severe diarrhea and vomiting on the third day after starting breast milk. Each child required months of intensive care and parenteral nutrition (tube feeding). Both became malnourished and suffered infections due to immunosuppression. The girl survived, but the boy died at eight months old. Genetic testing revealed both siblings carried two copies of a mutation that inactivated DGAT1. The researchers concluded that this lack of functioning DGAT1 had given their intestinal cells an extreme intolerance to food.

Genetic research can also identify new drug targets: proteins in the body that can be bound by drugs to treat diseases.

HIV enters human immune cells via the protein receptor CCR5. In 1996, researchers discovered that some people are immune to HIV because they have a genetic mutation that stops their immune cells from having this receptor. About 10–15 percent of Europeans have one gene with this mutation, and about two percent have two genes, which gives them immunity without making them unhealthy in any other way. This discovery led to the development of Maraviroc in 2007, which binds with people’s CCR5 receptors and stops HIV from entering their cells.

A 2015 study combined human genetic association databases with data on drug development programs and matched drugs with genes that coded for the same protein the drugs targeted.

The researchers tested how often a drug program that corresponded with real genes succeeded compared to those without. The odds of a drug getting regulatory approval doubled if there was supporting genetic evidence. A 2024 follow-up analysis found an even higher result: 2.6 times higher approval rates for genetically informed drugs.

Private investment in sequencing

Genotyping is the cheapest and most common method for mapping human genetic differences. But it only directly measures the 500,000 or so locations of the human genome where people most commonly differ, called ‘single nucleotide polymorphisms’ or SNPs (pronounced ‘snips’). Because the genetic variants that have significant disease relevance like the CCR5 mutation are rare, genotyping is not good at picking these up.

To uncover disease-relevant genetic variation, we needed to sequence large numbers of people and look at about tens of millions of locations. This means mapping the entire exome, which is the 1.5 to 2 percent of the genome that acts as instructions to cells about how to make proteins.

Only since the 2010s have drug companies begun to sequence people’s exomes at scale, allowing for much more efficient drug discovery. This began with projects such as DeCODE genetics, which includes genetic data on nearly half the population of Iceland, about 150,000 people, and links this information to disease diagnoses, blood tests, and various phenotypic data from nationwide registers. Before the rise of 23andMe and the UK Biobank, it was the world’s largest genetic database.

Using DeCODE, researchers discovered a mutation in the amyloid precursor protein that is common among Icelanders and which confers protection from Alzheimer’s disease. This discovery validated a drug class that was already under active development for the treatment of Alzheimer’s.

In 2013, the drug company Regeneron began using human genetics for drug discovery by sequencing the DNA of 100,000 people and linking this genetic data with medical records to identify genetic associations. Its scientists quickly uncovered a variant of a gene called HSD17B13 that conferred protection from liver disease. The gene encoded a liver-specific enzyme localized to fat droplets in the liver cells. Individuals carrying this variant, which gave them less of this enzyme, had a lower rate of chronic liver disease than average.

Pharmaceutical companies’ ambitions have continued to grow. In 2018, a group of pharmaceutical companies launched a project to sequence the exomes of half a million people. The participants came from the UK Biobank, a trove of longitudinal health information gathered since 2006, covering people who have already been genotyped. This 2018 population-scale exome sequencing has already proved enormously consequential, showing the protective links between variants in GPR75 with obesity, ANGPTL7 with glaucoma, CIDEB with liver disease, CHRNB2 with smoking addiction, and MAP3K15 with type 2 diabetes.2

Diversity matters

Scaling up sample sizes and doing more thorough mapping are not the only ways to discover rare genetic variants in humans. There is a cost-effective alternative: inbred populations.

Human populations around the world differ in their genetic makeup thanks to geographical isolation and linguistic and cultural segregation. With rare exceptions, population groups were never completely isolated from each other, resulting in genetic diversity that exists mostly as a continuous spectrum rather than as distinct groups.

Genetic variants vary in their frequencies: what is common in one population group is rare in others. The CCR5 mutation is present in 10–15 percent of Europeans but less than two percent of Africans and South Asians have it. To discover its protective association with HIV infection, scientists would have needed to study significantly more people if they had studied only Africans and South Asians.

The same applies to variants that are common in other populations but rare in Europeans. The initial discovery of protective association between PCSK9 and low-density lipoprotein cholest­erol was possible because the genetic variants were common in Africans but rare in Europeans. When researchers sampled 128 individuals from a multiethnic cohort with extremely low low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, more than half of the sample had African ancestry.

Early sequencing efforts focused predominantly on Europeans. Nearly 90 percent of the UK Biobank participants are of European ancestry, reflecting the UK’s historic ethnic makeup. Many sequencing projects have now started targeting ex­clusively non-European participants. Regeneron and AstraZeneca have recently partnered with academic researchers in the UK and Mexico to sequence 150,000 Mexicans. A group of drug companies has established Together for Change to build the world’s largest genetic database of people with African ancestry, with 500,000 Af­rican American participants. Similar initiatives are in the making around the world.

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Human knockouts

These ethnically focused databases are already paying off. Since individuals carry their genetic variants throughout their lives, a mutation in humans can show us what the lifelong effects of taking a drug that had the same effects would be, giving us much better safety data than an early-phase drug trial. This is especially true when mutations affect both the functional copies of a gene, leading to a complete gene deficiency and making the affected individuals what are called ‘knockouts’.

Primary hyperoxaluria type 1 (PH1) is an extremely rare genetic disorder. People with PH1 lack the enzymes to detoxify glyoxylate, which oxidizes into a compound called oxalate. These oxalates cannot all be excreted through urine and form into kidney stones which steadily damage the kidneys. People with PH1 develop kidney failure early in their life and do not live beyond their twenties without dialysis or liver and kidney transplantation.

In the 2010s, Alnylam began developing a medicine for PH1. The idea was to block the activity of glycolate oxidase, the enzyme one step up in the chain, which turns glycolate into glyoxylate. Instead of glyoxylate, water-soluble glycolate would accumulate and be safely urinated out.

The approach worked in preclinical studies, and the researchers did not find any adverse effects. But researchers faced some important questions. Is the drug safe to give to humans to take over an entire lifetime? What are the long-term consequences of inhibiting glycolate oxidase? The answers came from a British Pakistani woman who enrolled in the Genes and Health cohort, a UK research project dedicated to individuals of South Asian origin. The researchers found that the woman was a knockout for the gene, HAO1, which encodes the glycolate oxidase enzyme. Her existence showed that a healthy life is possible without glycolate oxidase, and it is safe to switch off HAO1 permanently in humans. The drug passed through all phases of clinical trials and received Food and Drug Administration clearance in 2020.

The longstanding cultural practices of consanguinity (marrying with close relatives) and endogamy (marrying within a small community) make South Asians in India and Pakistan a particularly good source of these ‘human knockouts’ with no copies of a gene.

Researchers estimate that the odds of observing the same mutation that was found in the British Pakistani woman in an outbred population are 1 in 30 million. Many South Asians carry two copies of such mutations, and they can be found by sequencing only a few thousand individuals; to identify the same in an outbred population, one would need to sequence millions of individuals.

The Pakistani Genomics Resource is the largest South Asian cohort in the world, comprising more than 150,000 participants from communities known for their longstanding tradition of consanguineous marriages. Results from the first 10,000 participants, published in 2017, found at least one human knockout for 1,317 genes in the human genome, nearly twice the rate in the five-times-larger UK Biobank. A 2022 update found around 14,000 knockouts across more than 5,000 genes from looking at just 80,000 Pakistanis. To identify the same number of knockouts in an outbred population would have required more than 11 million individuals.

For many of those genes, dozens of knockouts have been identified, often clustering within a single extended family. In 2017 the Pakistani Genomics Resource reported a pedigree chart of a Pakistani family where 33 members were knockouts for APOC3, a major heart-disease-related drug target.

The family was Traced by Recontacting a participant from the database who was found to be an APOC3 knockout. Not only the participant, but his wife and all their nine children also lacked a functional copy of APOC3 – plus a further 23 members of their extended family. Not a single homozygous carrier for that same mutation has been found among the 500,000 UK Biobank participants.

One man’s curse, another man’s blessing

The focus on identifying beneficial mutations has led to a bias in genetic databases, favoring data from healthy people. This is useful for finding protective mutations. But by sequencing only healthy volunteers, researchers miss rare, disease-causing mutations, which can be just as helpful for drug development.

One example of such a mutation is the one that creates excessive fetal hemoglobin. Until birth, humans produce fetal hemoglobin, which binds aggressively to oxygen to ensure that a baby receives sufficient supply from its mother’s blood. After birth, humans start producing adult forms of hemoglobin, which bind less aggressively to oxygen. The switch from fetal to adult hemoglobin is controled by many genes, including BCL11A (discovered in 2007 through genetic association studies of fetal hemoglobin levels in blood).

Normally, adults stop making fetal hemoglobin and switch almost entirely to the adult type. But in some people, a little bit of the fetal version sticks around, helping to protect against sickle cell disease.

Vertex used this insight to design a gene-editing therapy: they edited blood stem cells to produce less BCL11A and so more fetal hemoglobin. The trick was figuring out how much to dial down BCL11A. Too much suppression kills blood cells, but too little doesn’t help.

The answer came from kids with a rare brain disease, who were born with only one working copy of BCL11A. Their blood naturally had more than enough fetal hemoglobin, well above the level sickle cell patients needed to fight their illness. This showed that cutting BCL11A by half in blood cells is sufficient to push the fetal hemoglobin levels above 20 percent. While partial BCL11A deficiency throughout the body from conception is harmful, selectively reducing BCL11A in blood cells is life-saving for sickle cell patients.

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From exomes to genomes

Genotyping and sequencing have made it possible to find protective variants such as CCR5 and confirm drug safety thanks to healthy ‘human knockouts’ who live without key proteins. But the focus so far has been on protein-coding regions, which leaves much of the genome unexplored.

The future will involve sequencing not just the exome, the 1.5 to 2 percent of genes that code for proteins, but the entire genome. Once mistakenly deemed ‘junk DNA’, these non-coding regions affect how, when, and where coding genes work. Identifying non-coding mutations that disrupt a gene’s function in a specific tissue or at a particular developmental stage will help drug developers identify still more targets that are currently overlooked.

There are moves in this direction. UK Biobank completed whole genome sequencing of its entire 500,000 participants with funding from a consortium of drug companies. The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Biobank opted for whole genome sequencing of its entire million participants and has completed sequencing of the first 250,000 individuals.

Natural experiments help scientists discover drugs and conduct safe trials. Our ability to study them depends on both what is sequenced and the amount of data from underrepresented human populations and patients with rare diseases.

By digging through new datasets, we will soon see whether non-coding genes tell us what the coding genome couldn’t. An era of rapid drug discovery awaits. By studying the genome we can use nature’s experiments to replace our own.

Veera Rajagopal is a geneticist at Regeneron. You can follow him on Twitter here.

In 1890, most continental European cities allowed between five and ten storeys to be built anywhere. In the British Empire and the United States, the authorities generally imposed no height limits at all. Detailed fire safety rules had existed for centuries, but development control systems were otherwise highly permissive.

Over the following half century, these liberties disappeared in nearly all Western countries. I call this process ‘the Great Downzoning’.1 The Great Downzoning is the main cause of the housing shortages that afflict the great cities of the West today, with baleful consequences for health, family formation, the environment, and economic growth. One study found that loosening these restrictions in just five major American cities would increase the country’s GDP by 25 percent. The Downzoning is one of the most profound and important events in modern economic history.

The Great Downzoning happened during a period in which anti-density views were widespread among planners, officials, and educated people generally. Most people thought that urban density was unhealthy and dysfunctional, and supported government efforts to reduce it. It is natural to assume that this was why the Downzoning happened. Although there is surprisingly little literature on the Great Downzoning, historians who do discuss it often implicitly take this view, seeing it as of a piece with other anti-density measures taken by municipal governments across the West.

While there is undoubtedly some truth in this explanation, the evidence for it is surprisingly ambiguous. The Downzoning was extremely pervasive in existing suburbs, where it tended to raise property values by prohibiting kinds of development that were seen as undesirable. But in other contexts, it proved much harder to apply anti-density rules. In some European countries, ferocious battles were fought over whether municipal authorities should restrict the density of greenfield development. Doing so tended to reduce land values, prompting fervent resistance by rural landowners, who were generally successful in thwarting the proposed reforms. In the late twentieth century, planners and governments reversed their views on density, and became notionally committed to densification as a public policy objective. But they have had very limited success in reforming rules on suburban densification.

The general pattern is that the Great Downzoning was driven by interests more than by ideology. The Downzoning happened where it served the perceived interests of property owners, and failed to happen where it did not. Ideas-driven explanations of social changes are sometimes absolutely correct. But in this case, the correct explanation seems more materialist.

This has implications for the politics of housing reform today. In some places, anti-densification rules continue to raise property values, and in these places we should expect the Downzoning to be as politically robust as it has been for the last century: it really does give property owners something they want.

But in the great cities of the West, the housing shortage that the Downzoning has created may prove to be its un­doing. Anti-density rules now reduce property values in these places rather than increasing them, and there is growing evidence that property owners opt out of such rules when they have the opportunity to do so. Winning the principled argument for density will not be enough to undo the Great Downzoning, because it never rested chiefly on principled arguments in the first place. But where the Downzoning is doing the most damage, it may now be possible to build new coalitions of interests in favor of reform.

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The story of the Great Downzoning

In most European cities before the nineteenth century, elites were concentrated in city centers. Suburbs were unplanned, mixed use, and generally impoverished, a home to those people and businesses that were excluded from the urban core. Their inhabitants were powerless to resist densification, and often had little reason to do so anyway. The situation for suburbs was especially bad in continental Europe, where many cities retained massive fortifications until the nineteenth century that physically cut them off from their outskirts. Paris, Rome, Vienna, Milan, Madrid, and Barcelona are all examples of this.

These walls were often customs barriers as well as defensive ones – most Continental municipalities charged customs duties on goods entering the city until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and Paris’s excise duty lasted until 1943. This meant that municipal governments had an incentive to discourage economic activity in suburbs, through, for example, excluding their residents from membership of economically vital guilds.2

More affluent suburbs did occasionally emerge, such as those that grew up around royal palaces and hunting lodges like Hampton Court and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, or along arterial roads like the Strand in London or the Bockenheimer Landstraße in Frankfurt. But even these were often developed haphazardly and generally remained quite mixed in social and economic terms.

A key step in the emergence of modern low-density suburbia was taken when developers began developing entire suburban neighborhoods, rather than just individual houses. This first became common in eighteenth-century Britain, probably because of Britain’s relatively deep capital markets and high rate of urban growth: developing a whole neighborhood involves huge outlays on laying out streets and amenities before any revenue starts to come in, so it is facilitated by low borrowing costs and confidence in future healthy sales.

Examples of early planned neighbourhoods include the West End of London, the Georgian extensions of Bath, the Bristol suburb of Clifton, and the Edinburgh New Town. These neighborhoods were still built with relatively high densities, so they are not exactly what we think of as suburbs today. But they were lower density than the urban core, as well as being exclusively or nearly exclusively residential, and exclusively upper-middle or upper class.

Suburbia really took off internationally in the nineteenth century, when planned suburbs spread across the British Empire, the United States, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and, to a lesser extent, France. The most universal and decisive factor behind this was probably again deepening capital markets and higher rates of urban growth. Other factors – none of which applied everywhere, but all of which were important in some places – included better roads, the development of suburban railways, buses and trams, improved policing, the abolition of customs boundaries around towns, the reform of feudal land tenures, and the demolition of city walls.

At the upper end of the market, densities quickly fell to levels similar to those of modern affluent suburbs. Many of the elite suburbs of this period are still famous neighborhoods today. American examples include Llewellyn Park in New Jersey, Forest Hills on Long Island, and Riverside outside Chicago. Examples from the British Isles include Rathmines in Dublin, Bedford Park in London, and Edgbaston in Birmingham. Some continental examples are Le Vésinet outside Paris, Pasing in Munich, or Westend in Berlin, named after London’s West End as a marketing gambit. Even small towns often had a tiny ‘villa district’, maybe just a couple of streets, like the Kingsland neighborhood of Shrewsbury. Only in the poorer countries of Mediterranean Europe did planned suburbs fail to catch on.

Social decline was common, even normal, for nineteenth-century neighborhoods, and homeowners lived in constant fear of it. Right from the start, suburb developers tried to safeguard neighborhood character through imposing covenants. This episode forms a fascinating prequel to the Great Downzoning, so much so that we might think of it as a ‘First Downzoning’ or ‘Proto-Downzoning’.

A covenant is a kind of legal agreement in which the homebuyer agrees to various restrictions on what they can do to their new property. Covenants generally forbade nearly all non-residential uses, as well as forbidding subdivision into bedsits or flats. They frequently imposed minimum sales prices, and in the United States, they often excluded sale or letting to non-white people. In all countries, they often included explicit restrictions on built density. Most covenants were intended to ‘run with the land’, binding not only the initial buyer but all subsequent ones too.

Here are the rules binding homeowners in Grunewald, Berlin’s premier suburb, reading like thousands of other similar documents before and since:

a) buildings may not be constructed higher than three storeys inclusive of the ground floor; b) all buildings must be provided with [ornamented] facades on all sides; c) at most two houses may be built conjoined to each other; otherwise there must always be a gap of at least eight meters between buildings, for which exception may be made only in the case of covered walkways; d) a fenced front garden of at least four metres in depth must be retained between any building and the street. 3

Covenants were extremely widespread. Although rigorous quantitative studies do not exist, my impression from wide reading is that all elite planned suburbs were covenanted, along with many middle-class ones. They were used in all English-speaking countries, and similar mechanisms existed in France (servitudes in cahiers des charges), Germany (Grunddienstbarkeiten), the Low Countries (erfdienstbaarheden), and elsewhere (e.g. Italy, Spain, Scandinavia). Under Japanese law at the time, covenants were legally unenforceable, but the idea was so appealing that Meiji-era suburban developers sometimes imposed them anyway, apparently as a purely moral inducement to conformity.4

Covenants became more elaborate over time, and by the early twentieth century they sometimes included provisions on such matters as where laundry could be hung and what colors joinery could be painted in.

Developers would not have imposed covenants if they had not expected them to increase the value of neighborhoods, so their pervasiveness reveals a widespread demand for development control among nineteenth-century people. But they were not very effective. One problem concerned whether courts would enforce them. To secure the development in perpetuity, covenants had to apply not only to the initial homebuyer, but to all future ones – people with whom the developer would never have any direct dealings, and who might indeed live long after the developer’s death. It was legally impossible for normal contracts to do this, so alternative mechanisms had to be employed.

Continental countries generally used the ancient concept of servitudes from Roman law, but common-law jurisdictions had to rely on the system of equity developed in the English Court of Chancery. The problem with this was that courts varied greatly in which restrictions they considered equitable, creating a system fraught with risk and unpredictability for developers and homeowners. Although there was a general tendency for covenants to become better established in law as the nineteenth century went on, there remained much uncertainty about exactly what development rights could be restricted, who had standing to enforce against infringements, and when restrictions could be discharged (voided).5 In fact, the law on this is still hazy today.

Another problem with covenants was that they could not be modified retroactively, meaning that any flaws or loopholes were unfixable. This could prove disastrous for covenanters. For example, as already mentioned, many covenants included minimum price thresholds. These were normally given in nominal figures, which worked fine in the nineteenth century because there was no inflation. After 1914, how­ever, inflation took off, swiftly making the thresholds trivially easy to meet. There was no way to insert inflation-adjustment clauses retroactively, so one of the pillars of nineteenth-century covenanting effectively vanished. For example, one Edwardian covenant stipulated that no dwelling worth less than £375 be built on the plot. To achieve the same exclusionary effect in 1920, the corresponding figure would have been £1,030. Since the number could not be increased retroactively, the covenant became effectively useless.

A third problem concerned the costs of enforcement. Covenants fall under private law: breaking one is not a crime, and the state will not prosecute it. Enforcement thus requires a private lawsuit, which was and is expensive. Today, a simple case will cost at least £25,000 in Britain, while a complex one can cost £60,000. Costs in the USA are similar or higher. Historical costs of litigation varied but were notoriously high. Developers were often willing to bear these expenses as long as they still had plots elsewhere in the development to sell, but once the entire neighborhood had been sold off, they usually lost any interest in policing its built form.

In theory, the covenants would subsequently be enforced by affected neighbors under a system known as ‘reciprocal enforcement’. In practice, however, this was beleaguered by free-rider problems, with no one resident willing to bear the costs of enforcement alone. Mechanisms eventually developed for pooling enforcement costs in some places, like the famous homeowner associations in the United States. But the overall bill remained high, meaning that covenant enforcement tended to be haphazard in any but the most affluent neighborhoods.

The upshot of all this was that covenants were usually a weak kind of development control, which disintegrated upon contact with serious demand for densification. An example of this is the Berlin suburb of Friedenau, originally developed in the late nineteenth century as what the Germans called a ‘villa colony’, an elite suburb of large detached houses.

Friedenau was originally built some way from the edge of Berlin, but the urban core expanded rapidly and reached Friedenau during the 1880s. Friedenau’s restrictions proved completely in­effective and the entire neighborhood was redeveloped with large blocks of flats. Only a handful of villas endured long enough to be protected by later conservation laws, surviving today as a curious reminder of Friedenau’s original form.

The stage was set for the Great Downzoning proper, when suburban density restrictions were introduced by public authorities. This began in the final years of the nineteenth century in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The key innovation was ‘differential area zoning’, whereby different areas within a given jurisdiction were subjected to different building restrictions. This allowed for development controls to be applied to suburban areas that would keep them at suburban densities without having the absurd side effect of applying suburban density restrictions to dense city centers.

After a couple of decades of experimentation, the 1891 Frankfurt zoning code caught the imagination of municipal governments across Central Europe.6 It was swiftly emulated. By 1914 every German city had a zoning code, and many had gone through multiple iterations, usually with progressively lower densities. In existing elite suburbs, these zoning codes tended to effectively duplicate the content of developers’ covenants, but because they had a stronger legal basis and were enforced by the state, they were far more effective.

For example, Grunewald’s zoning designation in the first decade of the twentieth century permitted two storeys plus a roof storey and basement, banned everything except detached and semi-detached buildings, and required a four-meter setback from the street – much the same as the covenant quoted above. The zoning code remains similar today, and has successfully preserved Grunewald as Berlin’s premier villa colony.

The example of Germany and Austria was quickly followed abroad. The Netherlands introduced a kind of zoning system in 1901. Italian cities began to follow suit before the First World War. Japan began to introduce a zoning system nationally in 1919, albeit one that continued to permit fairly high densities. Poland introduced a national system in 1928. American and Canadian cities started introducing zoning systems in the 1910s, which became widespread in the course of the interwar period. Zoning provisions began to be introduced in interwar Australia and were consolidated in the 1940s.

Britain and France followed relatively late: although they introduced planning systems of a sort in 1909 and 1919, respectively, these had limited effectiveness, and robust national systems were not introduced in either country until the 1940s. In broad terms, the Great Downzoning was in place by the 1950s, though density restrictions continued to be tightened in the following decades in many countries.

There are some limitations on the spread of the Great Downzoning, which we will explore in the next section. In many ways, though,the Downzoning was remarkably thorough. Virtually every wealthy suburb that existed in 1914 retains its suburban character today. Long ago, too, the Downzoning spread beyond the homes of the elites. When Central European cities began introducing zoning in the 1890s, suburbia was still largely the preserve of their upper-middle and upper classes. Today, a great part of the working and middle classes of all Northwest European countries and of North America live in suburbs, and they too enjoy the ambiguous blessing of the Downzoning’s protection. Wherever planned residential suburbs of owner-occupiers develop, it seems, the Downzoning has ultimately followed.

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An idealist explanation for the Great Downzoning

At the time of the Great Downzoning, a negative view of the cities of the nineteenth century was extremely common. Frank Lloyd Wright described the cities of his day as a ‘conspiracy against manlike freedom’, a ‘disease of the spirit’, and a ‘senseless reiteration of insignificance’.7 Werner Hegemann, a prominent German urbanist who later wrote the United States’s first suburban zoning code in Berkeley, described Berlin’s urban fabric as comprised of ‘Dwellings so bad that neither the stupidest devil nor the most diligent speculator could have devised anything worse’.8 Le Corbusier claimed that ‘The nineteenth century has made the house into a ridiculous, revolting, and dangerous thing’ and observed that ‘We are living in a dustbin … in a kind of scum choked by its own excretions.’9

These views spread far beyond architectural and planning elites, to the point that a negative view of nineteenth-century urbanism became one of the standard background opi­nions of educated people. To give one striking example, Lord Rosebery, chairman of the London County Council and thus the closest thing that existed to a mayor of London, said:

There is no thought of pride associated in my mind with the idea of London. I am always haunted by the awfulness of London [...] Sixty years ago a great Englishman, Cobbett, called it a wen. If it was a wen then, what is it now? A tumour, an elephantiasis sucking into its gorged system half the life and the blood and the bone of the rural districts.10

Both professionals and laypeople tended to see lowering residential densities as part of the solution. Planners often converged on twelve dwellings per acre (30 per hectare) as a good upper limit. In Britain, the famous urbanist Raymond Unwin promoted the slogan ‘twelve houses to the acre’ as the norm for residential areas.11 Ebenezer Howard also advocated twelve dwellings per acre in Garden Cities of Tomorrow, perhaps the most influential planning text of modern times.12 The influential American planner John Nolen adopted the same figure, arguing that ‘there must be a limitation of houses to not more than twelve per gross acre’.13 Josef Stübben, whose textbook Der Städtebau was the standard authority on urban planning in German-speaking Europe, advocated twelve dwellings per acre in most contexts, though he allowed for somewhat higher densities in central areas.14

Public policy reflected this view in a range of ways. In all countries, public transport was subsidized and price controlled with the explicit aim of fostering urban diffusion.15 In Britain, the 1918 Tudor Walters Committee set a standard of twelve dwellings per hectare for social housing. This benchmark remained influential for many decades, and local councils often succeeded in meeting it.

In the United States, the Federal Government began to conditionalize mortgage support on densities of 4-8 dwellings per acre, while conceding that this might rise to 12-16 dwellings per acre in central areas. The French and Belgian governments sponsored an extensive program of garden cities in the interwar period, aspiring to similarly low densities, though not always reaching them. In Germany, the Weimar government extended subsidies for single-family houses with private gardens under the 1920 Reichsheimstättengesetz (Reich Homestead Act). The Nazis continued these in their own Reichsheimstättengesetz in 1937, illustrating how the aim of urban diffusion was shared between otherwise radically different political movements.

The other instrument that planners used to achieve low densities was, of course, zoning. All contemporary written justifications for suburban low-density zoning appealed to these background anti-density views, and virtually any of the planning officials who worked on early zoning plans would have seen their work as justified by such considerations. So part of the explanation for the Great Downzoning is very simple: it happened because it was seen as an obvious way of achieving an uncontroversial public policy objective.

But this cannot be the whole explanation. When existing suburbs were downzoned, the new rules merely confirmed the densities that market forces had already chosen for the neighborhood. Indeed, as we shall discuss in the next section, brownfield downzoning almost certainly tended to increase land values by protecting neighborhoods from blight. In such cases, then, planners were simply going with the grain of property owners’ interests. In places where planners’ priorities and property owners’ interests were not so aligned, planners’ success was far more doubtful.

A vivid example of this is the attempt of planners to lower the density of greenfield development (new neighborhoods on previously undeveloped land). In Anglophone countries, the density of greenfield development was already fairly low by the early twentieth century, and there was not much for planners to do in lowering it further. In continental countries, however, much greenfield development still took the form of densely massed apartment blocks, which were seen by planners and officials as a shameful humanitarian disaster. Lowering these densities was widely seen as just as much of a priority as protecting existing suburbs, and in many countries it dominated public debate about zoning.

The problem was that, unlike in existing suburbs, downzoning greenfield sites generally reduced their value. Developers built dense apartment blocks because, given prevailing market conditions, that was the most valuable use of the land. Requiring them to build terraced houses or cottages instead crashed land values and annihilated the asset wealth of landowners. Planners and municipal officials thus faced a powerful special interest group, against which they had great difficulty in prevailing.

The classic illustration of this is Rome.16 Like most Medi­terranean cities, Rome had not really developed planned low-density suburbs in the nineteenth century, but Italian planners shared the contemporary belief that public policy should promote lower densities. In 1907, a coalition of liberals and socialists won the municipal elections under the leadership of Ernesto Nathan, breaking the longstanding hold of the landowning interests over the city’s government. The coalition prepared a zoning plan that aimed at making Rome’s urban extensions into international models of good practice, by the standards of the day.

The 1909 zoning plan for Rome was radical. The red-shaded areas still allowed traditional courtyard blocks, but at lower densities than before. The green-shaded areas allowed only ‘villini’, small detached apartment buildings of no more than three storeys, covering a maximum of half of their block area. The huge areas with green outline and white infill are marked for ‘giardini’, literally ‘gardens’. Only 1/20th of the plot area in giardini areas could be built over, a density that would count as low even by modern American standards.

The affected land was mostly owned by the ‘black nobility’, the traditional Roman ruling class (black was a symbol of mourning for the Papal government that had ruled Rome before its annexation by the Kingdom of Italy). The black nobility was appalled at the loss of land value that Nathan’s downzoning had wrought, and they embarked on a long campaign to reverse it. In 1913, an alliance of Catholic and nationalist parties won the municipal elections and loosened the zoning restrictions. Then in 1923 Mussolini seized power, dissolved Rome’s municipal government, and appointed a black noble as governor. For many decades there­after, higher densities were permitted on many Roman greenfield sites than in the urban core.

Rome’s story is particularly dramatic, but the basic pattern is typical of Southern Europe. Planners in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece generally shared the standard European aspiration towards lower densities, but they had few existing planned suburbs to defend: the only possible downzoning would be on green­field land, suppressing density in new urban areas. This would run contrary to the interests of the landowners.

In all four countries, this failed to happen, and urban densities remained stubbornly high, only falling gradually in the late twentieth century under the influence of market forces. Today, these cities may seem like rather remarkable survivals of semi-traditional urban forms, but they were generally not so understood by contemporaries: Southern European writers in the twentieth century generally saw them as obvious urbanistic failures, the product of avaricious landowners and weak, corruptible states.17

The story was initially similar in Germany and France. German planners made strenuous efforts to downzone greenfield sites before the First World War, but met with fierce resistance from landowners. In general, the landowners were successful in preserving their right to build apartment blocks, although they sometimes had to include larger courtyards and front gardens. In France, the planning movement was much weaker, and made little progress against landowner and developer interests.18 The maximum densities permitted in Paris actually increased in 1884 and 1902.19

A kind of greenfield downzoning did later happen in France and Germany, but its story is a strange one, and the anti-density views of planners played no role in it. In 1914, both countries introduced tight rent controls to protect the families of soldiers from eviction (Britain followed a year later). As so often in the history of rent control, these rules proved difficult to lift when the crisis that had occasioned them was over. Rent controls persisted in both France and Germany throughout the interwar period and long into the second half of the twentieth century. Coupled with high inflation, this meant that the real value of rents rapidly fell.

This undermined the build-to-rent sector, because the rental value of apartments was generally no longer great enough to cover their build cost. Neither country had a well-developed system for selling buildings into multiple ownership: the modern French and German equivalents of condominium ownership, copropriété and Wohnungseigentum, only developed later in the twentieth century. The remarkable effect of this was that there was generally no way to build flats profitably, resulting in the collapse of the private flat-building sector. The surviving private builders switched over to building small houses for owner occupation, beginning the vast low-density suburbs with which German and especially French cities are surrounded today.

We are confronted, then, with a striking contrast: nearly total success in downzoning existing suburbs, and nearly total failure in downzoning greenfield development. This contrast casts doubt on the idea that the down­zoning was driven by the will of planning elites.

Another context in which planners struggled to lower or even cap densities was in city centers. Many American city centers declined in the decades after the Second World War due to rising crime and traffic congestion, while densification was prevented in some European centers by architectural conservation laws. But in places where neither of these factors applied, densification of city centers continued apace, reaching some of the highest floorspace densities ever attained. Many Australian and Canadian cities are particularly clear examples of this, though there are also cases elsewhere. Again, this is puzzling for the ideas-driven theory of the Great Downzoning: in places which lacked an owner- occupier lobby for restrictions on densification, planning ideology seems to have been ineffective.

What happened at the end of the twentieth century is no less problematic for the planner-driven explanation of the Great Downzoning. From the 1960s onwards, the intellectual tide began to turn in favor of density, and by the 1990s, density was wildly fashionable again.

I once worked as the research assistant to a British government commission on the built environment, in the course of which I had the unenviable task of reading every major official document on British urban policy since the 1990s. From Richard Rogers’s Towards an Urban Renaissance (1999), through the Urban Design Compendium of English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation (2000) and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment’s By Design: Urban Design in the Planning System (2000), to the Greater London Authority’s Defining, Measuring and Implementing Density Standards in London (2006) and the Farrell Review of Architecture and the Built Environment (2014), they were united in praising urban density. Government documents like Planning Practice Guidance Note 3 (2000), Planning Policy Statement 3 (2006), and the National Planning Policy Framework (2012) endorsed and besought it. Every planning school in Britain teaches its students the importance of density, walkability, and mixed use.

Instead, it has been concentrated in former industrial or logistics sites, in city-centre commercial areas, or in social housing, which the authorities regularly demolish and rebuild at greater densities. Towns without much of this, like Oxford and Cambridge, have stable or even declining populations in their city centres. An effort to enable more suburban densification nationally in the 2000s aroused much controversy and was soon abandoned. A more recent attempt to allow more densification in an area of South London, widely praised by planners, led to a local political revolution and the policy’s revocation.

This is not a British peculiarity. All over the West, urban density is valued by planners and officials. Governments pursue it, and have had some success in enabling it in industrial and commercial areas and through the redevelopment of public housing. In the United States, densification is the central theme of a vast YIMBY movement. But progress on densifying owner-occupier suburbs has been extremely limited, and the vast suburbs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain almost untouched. The unified opinion of the planning and policy elites has proved ineffective in the face of homeowner opposition. If the idealist theory were the whole truth, and the Downzoning was purely the creation of planners, this would be extremely strange.

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A materialist explanation of the Great Downzoning

The alternative theory is that the Downzoning was driven less by elite ideas than by the way that the Downzoning served the perceived interests of homeowners. This theory fits better with the evidence.

When people buy a home, they care not only about the home itself, but about the neighborhood in which it stands. This was why nineteenth-century developers started building whole villa colonies and streetcar suburbs rather than just individual houses: by developing entire neighborhoods, they could satisfy a wider range of buyers’ preferences, giving people the neighborhood of their dreams rather than just the house.

All else being equal, many people prefer neighborhoods built at low densities. Some of the perceived advantages of low density will apply virtually anywhere, like quieter nights, greener streets, more and larger private gardens, and greater scope for social exclusivity. Other attractions are more specific to certain contexts. Where urban pollution is bad, people seek suburbs for cleaner air. Where crime is high, suburbs are often seen as a way of securing greater safety. In eras with high levels of racism and increasing racial diversity, people moved to suburbs to secure racial homogeneity.

Restrictions on densification were a way of preserving these ‘neighborhood goods’ in perpetuity. The prevalence of covenanting constitutes extremely strong evidence that suburban people wanted this. Covenants were imposed by developers, whose only interest was in maximizing sales value. They judged that the average homebuyer valued the neighborhood goods that covenants safeguarded more than they valued the development rights that covenants removed. The ubiquity of covenants shows that, under nineteenth-century market conditions, density restrictions were generally desired by suburban residents. As we have seen, however, covenants were not very effective. The fact that public zoning followed under these conditions is not greatly surprising: it gave suburban people something they demonstrably wanted, and were not able to secure without the help of public authorities.

One question we might ask about this theory is: why did the Great Downzoning happen when it did, as opposed to at some earlier point in history? The answer is simple: it happened because of the emergence of planned suburbia in the preceding century. The whole point of planned suburbs was that they provided neighborhood goods like exclusivity and amenity: this was what made the large upfront costs of developing a neighborhood worthwhile. The impoverished peripheries of medieval and early modern cities may have had some of these goods by accident – presumably they were greener than medieval city centers, for example – but they would not have had many of them, because they had no way of excluding noxious land uses and ‘undesirable’ people. Many were regarded as dangerous and blighted places, where nobody would live if they had any alternative. Until the nineteenth century, suburban people frequently did not stand to lose much from densification.

The inhabitants of planned suburbia had some obvious political advantages over their predecessors, too. They were relatively affluent, which was an advantage for lobbying purposes in 1890-1950 as in all times and places. They were also extremely homogeneous, in the sense that most neighborhoods were planned for exclusively residential use by people of a given social class. This meant that their interests were likely to be aligned, and they could form a united front to campaign for their community’s interests.

One other feature of planned suburbs deserves mention, which is home ownership. In nearly all countries, planned residential suburbs were predominantly sold into owner occupation.20 If you are renting a property and its neighborhood declines in amenity, your economic loss is low: neither your income nor your asset value is affected, and if you move to another neighborhood with better amenity, your only economic loss is the cost of relocation. If you are a homeowner, the loss of neighborhood values destroys your wealth, as embodied in your property value. So you are much more invested in these neighborhood values, and probably more likely to fight for them.

A second question is why the Downzoning began in Central Europe, rather than in, say, England, where suburbia had existed for much longer. I offer three possibilities.

One possible explanation is varying state capacity, to­gether with varying tolerance of state intervention.21The princely states in Germany had been relatively activist in city planning throughout the early modern period: a number of German cities had planned street networks, and the authorities sometimes even micromanaged details of facades, as in Potsdam. In Berlin, the authorities enforced a minimum height limit because they felt that low-rise buildings gave the royal capital a ridiculously countrified appearance.

In the nineteenth century, the German state became much more activist than the French or Anglophone ones in a whole range of areas, pioneering mandatory health insurance, old age pensions, universal compulsory education, and a range of labor regulations. It is plausible that this attitude to government made zoning a more natural intervention for Germans than it was elsewhere.

Another factor was that pressure for densification was greater. As we have seen, Central European cities at the end of the nineteenth century had a strikingly clear distinction between a dense urban core and low-density villa colonies. When the expanding dense core reached a villa colony, the villa colony was faced with total transformation.

No other country had quite such a neat dichotomy. France did not have elite suburbs to the same extent, while Italy and Spain hardly had them at all. Anglophone cities had few purpose-built flats until the late nineteenth century, even in the urban core, and the ‘mansion blocks’ and ‘co-ops’ that then started to emerge tended to be targeted at the middle classes rather than the poor, alleviating one motive for exclusion. Perhaps, then, the German villa colonies were exposed to a form of densification that was particularly alarming to their residents. The late introduction of density controls in Britain and France may also be explained in this way: as we have seen, rent controls stymied flat building in the interwar period, thus relieving the political demand for restrictions on densification.

A third factor is that private sector density controls were probably varyingly effective in different countries. In Britain, most suburbs were developed under the unique ‘Great Estates’ system. Instead of selling homes outright, they sold extremely long leases of eighty or a hundred years, after which the properties reverted to the original landowner, called a ‘Great Estate’. The Great Estates thus retained an interest in safeguarding neighborhood goods in order to preserve the reversionary value of the properties. They thus acted as a form of quasi-government, enforcing against covenant breaches much more effectively than neighbors usually would. Some even provided local public services like parks and sanitation. As noted above, some other countries eventually developed systems somewhat analogous to this, like American homeowner associations. But in Britain they existed right from the start, and were ubiquitous. It is plausible that this contributed to the relatively lower demand for public density controls in Britain, in spite of Britain’s precocious suburbanization.

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The Great Upzoning?

One element of the preceding argument may have puzzled some readers. I have argued that density controls were originally imposed because they increased property values, suggesting that allowing densification is net value destroying. But many housing reformers, including me, have argued that granting additional development rights to streets or neighbourhoods increases their value, for the obvious reason that the additional floorspace is worth a lot. This has been confirmed by recent examples. For example, residents of the London neighbourhood South Tottenham recently persuaded their local councils to let them double the height of their houses. All properties in the neighbourhood enjoyed an immediate boost in value once the council agreed.

In South Korea, some neighborhoods are allowed to vote for much larger increases in development rights. This generates abundant value uplift, as a result of which residents of such neighborhoods nearly always vote in favor. In Israel, apartment dwellers can vote to upzone their building: this has proved so popular that half of the country’s new housing supply is now generated this way. How can such cases be reconciled with the argument I have given here?

The answer lies in how the housing market has changed since the nineteenth century. Over the last century, in large part because of the Downzoning, housing shortages have emerged in many major cities, in the sense that floor­space there sells for much more than it costs to build. This means that the development rights lost through density controls have become steadily more valuable. At a certain point, their summed value became greater than that of the neighborhood values for which they had been sacrificed. It was at this point that they became value-destroying.

It is also at this point that opportunities for innovative reforms like the one in South Tottenham start to emerge, because existing residents would now be net economic beneficiaries of allowing greater densities. The Downzoning was originally extremely desirable to residents, because the neighborhood goods it secured were more valuable than the floorspace it precluded. In places where that is no longer true, we should be cautiously optimistic about the prospects of reform. This is the reasoning behind proposals like street votes, which would allow individual streets or blocks to vote by qualified majority to upzone themselves to higher densities.

It is important to stress, though, that this is not true everywhere. Although housing shortages exist in nearly all Western countries, they do not exist in all parts of those countries. In fact, they are heavily concentrated in a small number of major cities. In most of the United States, sales prices are generally not far above the physical costs of construction: only in a handful of the major cities, like New York and San Francisco, are they consistently substantially higher.

In Britain, the housing shortage is heavily concentrated in the South East, with prices fairly near build costs in much of the rest of the country. In France, a large divergence has emerged only in Paris and certain areas popular with wealthy holidaymakers. Similar results are evident elsewhere in continental Europe, Australia, and Canada. In much of the West – probably the majority of its urban area – market conditions are not fundamentally altered since the nineteenth century, and density controls probably still maximize property value.

The fact that something maximizes property value need not make it morally good. Property value is determined by preparedness to pay. It may be maximized by preserving the view from a billionaire’s spare bedroom rather than by providing housing for a thousand destitute people, or by fulfilling the exclusionary preferences of snobs and racists. This means that there may be strong arguments for zoning reform even in places where its net effect on the value of individual neighborhoods would be negative.

Politically, however, reforms that reduce particular people’s property values are likely to be much more difficult. For more than a century, there has been an overwhelming tendency for residential suburbia to secure protections for itself against densification. We saw in the last section that this is hardly surprising: it is almost as though this neighborhood type had been designed to generate exactly this political outcome. The history of the Downzoning suggests it is very hard to triumph against the united interests of suburban homeowners.

The political upshot of this history, then, is that reform efforts should be focused. Making the principled case for density is useful, but unlikely to be sufficient: principled argument did not make the Downzoning, and it probably won’t unmake it either. Instead, campaigners should consider ways in which the changing structure of homeowners’ interests can be mobilized in the cause of reform. The examples of South Tottenham, Seoul, and Tel Aviv suggest that homeowners may be vigorous in pursuit of upzoning when they realize how much they stand to benefit from it. There is no reason why this could not be replicated elsewhere. Across the major cities of the West, homeowners are sitting unwittingly on one of the greatest mines of potential wealth in the history of the world. Once they notice, their actions may amaze us all.

Samuel Hughes is an editor with Works in Progress.

Without gravity, people’s muscles atrophy and their bones weaken. Astronauts develop eye problems and anemia, get blood clots and have to exercise a few hours each day to overcome weight­less­ness’s effects on the body. Many experience space-motion sickness.

Animals living at very low or zero gravity develop osteoporosis, problems with their eyes and kidneys, and reproductive issues. In 1962, NASA had viable designs for rotating wheel space stations that could have given astronauts artificial gravity. The Apollo program effectively killed this path. While NASA’s lunar focus delivered its moonshot, it abandoned other promising work. Had NASA maintained its parallel pursuit of artificial gravity, we might now have permanent orbital settlements supporting deep space missions rather than the limited, temporarily occupied outposts we’ve settled for.

This historical pivot point matters today as commercial space companies contemplate artificial gravity once more. In doing so, they could correct this detour in humanity’s path to becoming a spacefaring civilization.

Wernher von Braun and the von Braun wheel

Early space visionaries, from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky to Wernher von Braun, strongly believed that settling the solar system would need technologies to generate artificial gravity within orbiting habitats.

Von Braun was convinced that rotating wheel space stations would be needed to prevent physiological problems associated with space and were thus ‘as inevitable as the rising sun’. In these systems, humans would live in the rim of a wheel where its spin induces perceived weight. While the idea was popularized by von Braun in his 1949 sci-fi novel, Project Mars, the concept actually traces back to Herman Potočnik‘s 1929 book The Problem of Space Travel.

The difficulty of building large stations

This elegant solution comes with a major engineering challenge. Much like a ferris wheel, the rotation of a space station wheel could disorient astronauts if spun too fast. If the wheel spins slowly, then physics dictates it must be quite large – the force pushing you down, which acts like gravity, is stronger the further you are from the central point of rotation. One of von Braun’s designs called for a massive 75-meter-diameter wheel – three times the wingspan of a Space Shuttle – that would generate lunar gravity if spun at three revolutions per minute or Earth like gravity at five revolutions per minute, a speed considered reasonable for astronauts.

However, the physics of rockets presents a competing obstacle: they must be slender, like an arrow, to escape Earth’s gravity well and reach orbit. The challenge is fitting enormous space structures into slender rockets. SpaceX’s Starship is the largest rocket ever launched into space, and yet even its upper stage, which is about 9 meters wide and 22 meters tall, could fit only about a sixth of von Braun’s conceptual station.

The architects of the International Space Station (ISS), the largest space structure ever built, tackled this packing problem by flying up habitable modules in parts and assembling them in space. Such in-space assembly involves spacecraft either gently crashing into each other at specific connection points (a maneuver called rendezvous and docking) or astronauts using space cranes to catch and attach spacecraft to the ISS (known as berthing).

While this ‘space Ikea’ assembly method has been effective, it puts a ceiling on our ambitions. Assembling the ISS meant launching more than 40 rockets over several years (plus even more launches for cargo resupply and repairs). Even with all these launches, the resultant space station is so small that it can support a typical crew of only seven, a little over twice what the first ever space station, Salyut 1, managed in 1972.

Even with the huge cost reductions in delivering payloads into space made by SpaceX, the sheer scale of materials needed for one of these structures makes it hard to imagine that modular in-orbit assembly will scale to von Braun’s anticipated 80 humans or the 100 people that SpaceX’s Starship is intended to hold any time soon. Civilization-scale megastructures like the Stanford Torus and O’Neill cylinders, which might hold tens of thousands to millions of people, appear even more outlandish today than when they were first proposed half a century ago.

The bottleneck is using small ‘tin can’ modular spacecraft as the centrepiece for assembly. There is a viable alternative, but to find it we need to look to pre-Apollo space technology.

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Unitized Stations

Between 1959 and 1962, NASA Langley explored architectures that progressed towards von Braun’s vision of a large space station, without the constraints imposed by modular construction.

A 1959 conference instigated by Larry Loftin, Director of Aeronautical Research at NASA Langley, came up with two prototypes for ‘unitized’ structures, structures that eliminated or reduced the need for in-orbit assembly.

The first idea explored inflating large Goodyear tire tubes into wheel-shaped space stations. Made from soft materials like rubber and nylon, the Langley team was concerned that these tires would be vulnerable to collisions with micrometeorites hurtling through space that could puncture the station, with fatal outcomes.

The second idea came from North American Aviation, which proposed a series of (mostly) rigid hexa­gonal space stations. This resulted in a 15-foot prototype, made from six rigid hinge-connected pipes. This design folded neatly into a rocket for launch, deploying automatically once in orbit. The rigidity of its habitable elements offered better protection against micro­meteorite collisions than Goodyear’s rubber donut. Another three inflatable pipes connected the outer habitat ring to a central hub via air-lock doors, which could be sealed in case of rupture.

These studies also estimated that either system could be realized for $100 million (approximately a billion dollars in 2025). Over time, the hexagonal station emerged as the most promising concept within Langley’s Manned Space Laboratory Research Group, where space station R&D was one of the most active focus areas.

The Apollo Applications Program

The Apollo Program would change everything. In May 1961, President Kennedy’s landmark speech committed America to a lunar landing instead of the original plan to merely orbit the Moon. The Langley team’s vision of artificial gravity space stations was sidelined by Apollo program priorities, which shifted budgets and administrative focus away from other projects, including space stations.

By 1963, the grand rotating hexagon designed for 36 crew members was replaced by the more modest Manned Orbiting Research Laboratory program – a zero gravity facility for a crew of four focused on conducting basic biomedical and engineering experiments. Threatened by cuts, Langley’s leadership managed to keep the project alive into 1965 only through persistent lobbying, which positioned larger stations as the next logical step after Apollo.

This project would go on to become part of George Mueller’s Apollo Applications Program Office. Mueller, NASA’s Associate Administrator and head of the Office of Manned Space Flight, was both a champion of space stations and a shrewd leader. He had a background in military missile testing, and had accelerated the development of the Saturn V rocket with the ‘all-up testing’ method, which involved testing all components of a rocket in a single flight instead of distributed testing over several launches. Thanks to Mueller’s approach, Apollo 8 would orbit the Moon in just the third launch of a Saturn V rocket.

Apollo 8’s premature success could have led to layoffs across von Braun’s Saturn V rocket team. Mueller’s Apollo Applications redirected von Braun’s team to think of life after Apollo, creating an umbrella program that explored multiple new station concepts, including a potential platform for crewed Mars missions, and specialized Earth-orbiting stations for astronomy and meteorology. But NASA Headquarters and the Bureau of Budget would only allocate $300 million ($2.7 billion in 2025 dollars) for follow-on work, instead of the $1.5 billion originally requested, effectively eliminating the possibility of ambitious post Apollo missions.

The competition for Saturn V rockets, which were to launch the lunar missions, further limited station development. NASA Administrator James Webb, having fought to secure funding for 15 Saturn V vehicles to accomplish Apollo’s goals, was initially unwilling to allocate any for space station deployment. Apollo 8’s unexpected early success, however, opened up the possibility of sparing a Saturn V for other uses.

Skylab – America’s first space station – would launch in 1973 on the last ever Saturn V. It fell far short of the grand rotating wheel stations previously imagined: it was a three-person station meant for short stays, built without a dedicated propulsion system. The spacecraft that ferried astronauts to and from Skylab had to provide the orbital boosts necessary to maintain its altitude; it embodied the shrinking visions to come.

After Apollo, NASA dropped the parallelized program strategy, which ran projects like the Apollo Applications Program and Manned Orbiting Research Laboratory alongside the Moon missions. Instead, it adopted a more incremental and sequential approach to space technology development, focusing on the Space Shuttle, and dropping crewed space stations. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union shifted its focus from lunar landings and launched the Salyut program, followed by Mir, conceptually much closer to NASA’s scaled-down Manned Orbiting Research Laboratory than to the ambitious rotating station concepts.

The early visions of large crews living in rotating structures with artificial gravity are now relics of a more optimistic era.

So will I ever get my Von Braun Wheel?

Possibly.

The commercial potential for crewed rotating space stations is gaining attention once again. Vast is one of the faster-­moving companies aiming to build one. It is currently developing smaller zero-gravity Haven stations; their 2035 plan is for a 40-person artificial gravity station. Its habitable region is shaped like a long stick which would spin about its center like a two-bladed fan to produce a range of gravities along its length. The limiting feature of its design is that the most desirable higher gravity-zones will only be at the very ends of the stick. This is unlikely to allow its entire crew to enjoy gravity’s perks constantly.

The US government wants NASA to put humans on Mars, giving private space companies a business case for large crewed stations. Almost all space station companies also hope to offer platforms for in-space manufacturing to startups like Varda and Space Forge. Ultra-low gravity just outside the Earth’s atmosphere may produce better pharmaceuticals and semiconductors because this microgravity enables unique crystal growth patterns, prevents convection, and eliminates sedimentation, allowing for purer mater­ials and more uniform structures than possible on Earth.

This focus on manufacturing would remove the immediate need for artificial gravity, potentially making the path to gravity easier by allowing station manufacturers to first focus on rapidly deploying large unitized volumes for uncrewed factories. If Mars does take priority, then a large inflated ring, conceptually similar to the Goodyear tube, could be spun around a rocket to create gravity on journeys to Mars and beyond. Modular designs that build on the ISS’s design cannot be adapted to do this.

Volume is a useful metric for evaluating comfort in zero-­gravity stations where astronauts utilize all three spatial dimensions equally. The measurement becomes less relevant for artificial gravity stations, because rotation creates a gravitational force. The ‘up-down’ dimension functions more like it does on Earth, making floor area per astronaut the more meaningful measurement – just as we use square footage rather than cubic volume to assess terrestrial living spaces. Still, larger volumes are a necessary first step toward higher floor space. The problem is that this race for volume makes rigid space stations less and less viable: there is a battle to pack larger volumes as compactly as possible into a rocket.

Volume restrictions are why inflatable stations, like the ones modeled on Goodyear tires proposed early on in the space age, may be ready for a comeback. Volume is a problem they do not face: the difference is like carrying a packed tent in a backpack versus trying to fit a prefabricated modular home into a bag.

The Langley team’s counterintuitive idea to stuff an inflatable tire into a rocket was ingenious, but it was ahead of its time. Without advanced, high-strength fabrics to ensure astronauts’ safety from objects flying through space, the rigid hexagonal station was always going to be the victor.

Fifty years and many advances in materials later, things are changing. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, a small inflatable module, was added to the ISS in 2016, based on TransHab, a NASA technology development program from the 1990s. The Bigelow module is made from high strength, but flexible fabrics, including Vectran, and has proven more resistant against colliding micrometeorites and orbital debris than even the metallic modules of the ISS. Bigelow Aerospace, which is now defunct, also claimed the module offered superior thermal management and protection from radiation.

Despite the return to manned space stations, including some with artificial gravity, there is still nothing with the ambition of von Braun’s 6,000-cubic-­meter wheel. This is surprising: a wheel built to von Braun’s imagined 75-meter diameter, would require just eight tonnes of compressed air to inflate the structure into its wheel shape, and to maintain an Earth-like atmospheric pressure inside it. That leaves 92 tonnes of usable payload capacity aboard Starship for the structure itself and associated systems.

The actual mass of such a large inflatable habitat is heavily influenced by operating orbit. TransHab was designed to operate in low Earth orbits where orbital debris is abundant. Consequently, about 68 percent of its fabric mass was allocated to shielding against collisions. However, in a low debris environment, shielding mass could be reduced to as low as 14 percent.

If optimized for low debris environments, the fabric-based hull of a 6,650 cubic meter wheel-shaped station, built using the same materials as the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, could weigh as little as 28 tonnes and pack down to as little as 490 cubic meters (see appendix for calculations). This would fit nicely within Starship’s limits. More conservative assumptions, accounting for low Earth orbit operation with full shielding, yield a structural mass closer to 120 tonnes.

Some engineering challenges remain unresolved, especially regarding the strength and form factor of multi-layer high-strength fabrics used in Bigelow Expandable Activity Module and TransHab. The primary load-bearing component in both cases is Vectran which has only been tested in relatively small cylindrical configurations (up to TransHab’s 8.2 meter width). Whether it can withstand pressure loads in a 75-meter-diameter torus, subject to rotation for artificial gravity, remains unknown.

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Starship

Apollo-era NASA was not too dissimilar from today’s SpaceX: beholden to the singular vision of a leader with an arsenal of technical talent capable of executing at speed.

While today’s NASA lacks both vision and investment, it has still engineered multiple successful landings on Mars. NASA’s early Viking landers and the sophisticated Perseverance Rover exemplify the kind of success that other national space agencies can only dream of. The European Space Agency’s Beagle 2 and its joint effort with Russia’s ROSCOSMOS in Schiaparelli both failed to land softly on the Martian surface. Meanwhile, technologists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab pioneered the development of SpaceX’s reusable rockets.

For the first time since the Saturn rockets, we are on the cusp of having a launcher – Starship – that offers the opportunity to make human civilization a spacefaring one. But this future needs artificial gravity space stations.

As impressive as SpaceX’s achievements have been, we should want as many other players as possible pushing progress forward in space. This might mean NASA singularly focusing on rapidly building larger volumes in space, at a scale of funding currently out of reach for companies. It may also require loosening prohibitive regulations, such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which ensure only a select few nations can collaborate on widening our species’ presence in Earth orbit and beyond. It could mean looking to new research models, such as Focused Research Organizations, that have a mandate to focus on developing artificial gravity space station technologies.

So where is my von Braun wheel? Still in 1962. But it could be back, and sooner than 2062 if we want it enough.

Angadh Nanjangud is Lecturer in Spacecraft Engineering at Queen Mary University of London, where he is assembling a research group to design and build inflatable space stations.