Today marks the twenty-eighth installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.
As many great cities lay in ruins after World War II, New York City assumed a new global prominence and even overtook London’s central position in the international financial markets. It soon became home to the world’s largest and most prestigious stock market on Wall Street and forever changed finance. Wall Street is often considered to be both a symbol and geographic center of capitalism.
Today, New York City is the most populous city in the United States, with over 8 million people. And the greater New York metropolitan area, with over 20 million people, is among the world’s most populous megacities.
In the American psyche, New York represents opportunity. Ellis Island was the historical gateway through which many immigrants arrived in the country during the 19th and 20th centuries, and New York remains a popular immigrant destination in the United States. In fact, it may be the world’s most “linguistically diverse” city, with hundreds of languages spoken within its boundaries.
New York is also where ambitious Americans of all stripes traditionally go to make a name for themselves in industries as diverse as writing, theater, commerce, fashion, mass media, investment banking, and more. And those who “make it” often stick around. New York is home to more billionaire residents than any other city. The metropolis’s nicknames include The City That Never Sleeps, The Big Apple, Gotham, The Capital of the World (popularized by Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White), The Greatest City in the World, and, in the surrounding region, simply The City.
New York’s cultural and economic importance is difficult to overstate. The city is a popular tourist spot, home to the iconic Statue of Liberty, the towering Empire State Building, the famous Broadway theater district, and the bustling Times Square that is the site of the famous New Year’s Eve ball drop. As such, New York has been called the world’s “most photographed” city. It has been estimated that if the New York metropolitan area were a country, it would boast the eighth-largest economy in the world (a rank currently held by Italy). The city is also a research hub, home to over a hundred colleges and universities, including New York University, Columbia University, and Rockefeller University.
Perhaps the city’s geography destined it to be a center of commerce. Located in one of the world’s largest natural harbors, the site where New York now stands was a logical place for human settlement. Originally the area was inhabited by the Lenape people and other Native American tribes. They used the natural waterways for fishing and to trade and wage war with nearby tribes. The first European to visit the site was an Italian, Giovanni da Verrazzano, who was exploring the region in service to the French, in 1524. He named the area New Angoulême, after the French King Francis I (who was known as Francis of Angoulême before assuming the French throne) and soon departed.
Then in 1609, the English explorer Henry Hudson (the namesake of Hudson Bay) arrived. He also soon left, but not before noting the large local beaver population. Beaver pelts were a valuable commodity. Word of Hudson’s discovery spread quickly and inspired the Dutch to found several fur trading outposts in the area in the early 17th century. Those included a 1624 settlement in what is now Manhattan, initiated by the Dutch West India Company. By 1626, the Dutch had constructed Fort Amsterdam, which would serve as the town’s nucleus until the fort’s demolition in 1790. The town was appropriately named New Amsterdam and served as the capital of the local Dutch colonies collectively called New Netherland. To this day, several local place names maintain Dutch origins, including Harlem and Brooklyn (named after Breukelen).
The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667), despite ending in a Dutch victory, resulted in the British gaining control of the city as part of a treaty. In exchange, the British ceded the Dutch what is now Suriname, as well as Run, a small island that produces nutmeg, in what is today Indonesia. At the time, it seemed as though the Dutch had gotten a far better deal than the British—nutmeg was extremely valuable, and the island complex that includes Run was famous in Europe, while New Amsterdam was a relatively obscure outpost. “Few would have believed a small trading village on the island of Manhattan was destined to become the modern metropolis of New York,” according to Australian historian Ian Burnet.
After the exchange, New Amsterdam was promptly renamed New York after the English King Charles’ brother James. James’ title was the Duke of York, and he was the admiral who led the campaign to conquer the city during the war. The city rapidly grew. By 1700, New York had a population of almost 5,000 people. By the time of American independence in 1776, New York’s population was about 25,000. In 1800, New York City had approximately 60,000 inhabitants. Boosted by immigration, it had well over 3 million by 1900.
New York City took on its central importance in the postwar period. The Germans never acted on plans to bomb New York, deeming the operation too expensive. Thus, spared by the protective breadth of the Atlantic Ocean, New York emerged from World War II not only unscathed, but prospering and poised to dominate global business and culture.
By the late 1940s, New York had risen to become the world’s biggest manufacturing center, boasting 40,000 factories, a million factory workers, and the world’s busiest port, which handled 150 million tons of waterborne freight goods a year. New York was suddenly the city of choice for many top corporations doing business internationally—including Standard Oil, General Electric, and IBM. The nickname “Headquarters City” was added to the metropolis’s collection of monikers. Even the newly formed United Nations was headquartered in New York (built 1947–1952). “The New York [of] 40 years ago was an American city,” reminisced the British writer J. B. Priestley in 1947, “but today’s glittering cosmopolis belongs to the world, if the world does not belong to it.”
The city inherited Paris’s role as the center of the art and fashion world. New York was a refuge for foreign artists fleeing war-battered Europe, like the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), and a hothouse of creativity cultivating groundbreaking American artists like Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). The city’s musical influence also expanded rapidly, from influential interpretations of classical music by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall to bebop, the new form of music pioneered in Harlem’s nightclubs that would take the world by storm.
Above all, the city was at the center of postwar globalization. The British writer Beverly Nichols described the state of the megalopolis in 1948:
“There was the sense of New York as a great international city to which all the ends of the world had come. London used to be like that, but somehow one had forgotten it, so long had it been since the Hispanos and Isottas [luxury cars from Spain and Italy, respectively] had glided down Piccadilly, so many aeons since the tropical fruit had glowed in the Bond Street windows. Coming from that sort of London to America, in the old days, New York had seemed just—American; not typical of the continent, maybe, but American first and foremost. Now it was the center of the world.”
Fittingly, the newly internationalized New York took on the role of the world’s financial capital and the site of the world’s two largest stock exchanges: the New York Stock Exchange and, later, National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ).
Since its humble origins in 1792, when 24 brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement, thus establishing a securities trading operation in the city, the New York Stock Exchange has flourished in the face of adversity. The U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) helped the financial district expand by prompting more securities trading and the stock exchange moved to its current location at 11 Wall Street in 1865. But it was World War II that let the stock exchange gain unparalleled global prominence.
Credit cards were also among New York’s postwar financial innovations. In 1946, a banker named John Biggins thought to create charge cards that could be used at various shops throughout New York’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Shopkeepers could deposit the sales slips at Biggins’ Flatbush National Bank, which would then bill cardholders.
In 1989, an iconic bronze statue known as the Charging Bull or the Wall Street Bull was erected in the Financial District of Manhattan to represent capitalism and prosperity. (A play on the term “bull market” that denotes positive market trends).
As the symbol of capitalism, Wall Street became the target of the anti-capitalist “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement in 2011. The protestors were concerned about economic inequality, fearing that the prosperity created by the market system was not widely shared. In reality, Gordon Gekko-types are hardly the only beneficiaries of financial markets. Wall Street plays an invaluable role in everything from facilitating ordinary Americans’ retirements through their 401ks to funding promising innovations—ultimately expanding the economic pie and raising living standards. As my former colleague and securities lawyer Thaya Brook Knight put it:
“At its core, here’s what Wall Street does: It makes sure that companies doing useful things get the money they need to keep doing those things. Do you like your smartphone? Does it make your life easier? The company that made that phone got the money to develop the product and get it into the store where you bought it with the help of Wall Street. When a company wants to expand, or make a new product, or improve its old products, it needs money, and it often gets that money by selling stock or bonds. That helps those companies, the broader economy and consumers generally.”
New York City remains the world’s leading financial center and the heart of the U.S. finance industry, to the point that “Wall Street” has become shorthand for financial capitalism itself. While many still consider Wall Street the world’s financial center, new technologies have allowed investing to become increasingly decentralized. Today, anyone can buy and sell stocks using a smartphone while enjoying the comforts of home, and internet forums with names like “Wall Street Bets” can compete with traders on the literal Wall Street. Still, anyone who shares in the economic benefits of the financial sector should thank New York City for taking banking to new heights. It is appropriately our twenty-eighth Center of Progress.
AI Is a Great Equalizer That Will Change the World
A positive revolution from AI is already unfolding in the global East and South.
Zion Lights —
Summary: Concerns over potential negative impacts of AI have dominated headlines, particularly regarding its threat to employment. However, a closer examination reveals AI’s immense potential to revolutionize equal and high quality access to necessities such as education and healthcare, particularly in regions with limited access to resources. From India’s agricultural advancements to Kenya’s educational support, AI initiatives are already transforming lives and addressing societal needs.
The latest technology panic is over artificial intelligence (AI). The media is focused on the negatives of AI, making many assumptions about how AI will doom us all. One concern is that AI tools will replace workers and cause mass unemployment. This is likely overblown—although some jobs will be lost to AI, if history is any guide, new jobs will be created. Furthermore, AI’s ability to replace skilled labor is also one of its greatest potential benefits.
Think of all the regions of the world where children lack access to education, where schoolteachers are scarce and opportunities for adult learning are scant.
Think of the preventable diseases that are untreated due to a lack of information, the dearth of health care providers, and how many lives could be improved and saved by overcoming these challenges.
In many ways, AI will be a revolutionary equalizer for poorer countries where education and health care have historically faced many challenges. In fact, a positive revolution from AI is already unfolding in the global East and South.
Improving Equality through Education and Health Care
In India, agricultural technology startup Saagu Baagu is already improving lives. This initiative allows farmers to increase crop yield through AI-based solutions. A chatbot provides farmers with the information they need to farm more effectively (e.g., through mapping the maturity stages of their crops and testing soil so that AI can make recommendations on which fertilizers to use depending on the type of soil). Saagu Baagu has been successful in the trial region and is now being expanded. This AI initiative is likely to revolutionize agriculture globally.
Combining large language models with speech-recognition software is helping Indian farmers in other ways. For example, Indian global impact initiative Karya is working on helping rural Indians, who speak many different languages, to overcome language barriers. Karya is collecting data on tuberculosis, which is a mostly curable and preventable disease that kills roughly 200,000 Indians every year. By collecting voice recordings of 10 different dialects of Kannada, an AI speech model is being trained to communicate with local people. Tuberculosis carries much stigma in India, so people are often reluctant to ask for help. AI will allow Indians to reduce the spread of the disease and give them access to reliable information.
In Kenya, where students are leading in AI use, the technology is aiding the spread of information by allowing pupils to ask a chatbot questions about their homework.
Throughout the world, there are many challenges pertaining to health care, including increasing costs and staff shortages. As developed economies now have rapidly growing elderly populations and shrinking workforces, the problem is set to worsen. In Japan, AI is helping with the aging population issue, where a shortage of care workers is remedied by using robots to patrol care homes to monitor patients and alert care workers when something is wrong. These bots use AI to detect abnormalities, assist in infection countermeasures by disinfecting commonly touched places, provide conversation, and carry people from wheelchairs to beds and bathing areas, which means less physical exertion and fewer injuries for staff members.
In Brazil, researchers used AI models capable of predicting HER2 subtype breast cancer in imaging scans of 311 women and the patients’ response to treatment. In addition, AI can also help make health resource allocations more efficient and support tasks such as preparing for public health crises, such as pandemics. At the individual level, the use of this technology in wearables, such as smartwatches, can encourage patient adherence to treatments, help prevent illnesses, and collect data more frequently.
Biometric data gathered from wearable devices could also be a game-changer. This technology can detect cancers early, monitor infectious diseases and general health issues, and give patients more agency over their health where access to health care is limited or expensive.
Education and health care in the West could also benefit from AI. In the United States, text synthesis machines could help to address the lack of teachers in K–12 education and the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people.
Predicting the Future
AI is already playing a role in helping humanity tackle natural disasters (e.g., by predicting how many earthquake aftershocks will strike and their strength). These models, which have been trained on large data sets of seismic events, have been found to estimate the number of aftershocks better than conventional (non-AI) models do.
Forecasting models can also help to predict other natural disasters like severe storms, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. Machine learning uses algorithms to reduce the time required to make forecasts and increase model accuracy, which again is superior to the non-AI models that are used for this purpose. These improvements could have a massive impact on people in poor countries, who currently lack access to reliable forecasts and tend to be employed in agriculture, which is highly dependent on the weather.
A Case for Optimism
Much of the fear regarding AI in the West concerns the rapid speed at which it is being implemented, but for many countries, this speed is a boon.
Take the mobile phone. In 2000, only 4 percent of people in developing countries had access to mobile phones. By 2015, 94 percent of the population had such access, including in sub-Saharan Africa.
The benefits were enormous, as billions gained access to online banking, educational opportunities, and more reliable communication. One study found that almost 1 in 10 Kenyan families living in extreme poverty were able to lift their incomes above the poverty line by using the banking app M-Pesa. In rural Peru, household consumption rose by 11 percent with access to phones, while extreme poverty fell 5.4 percent. Some 24 percent of people in developing countries now use the mobile internet for educational purposes, compared with only 12 percent in the richest countries. In lower-income countries, access to mobile phones and apps is life-changing.
AI, which only requires access to a mobile phone to use, is likely to spread even faster in the countries that need the technology the most.
This is what we should be talking about: not a technology panic but a technology revolution for greater equality in well-being.
Women’s Financial Inclusion Boosted in Sub-Saharan Africa
“In the 10 years leading up to 2021, the share of women in sub-Saharan Africa who owned a financial account more than doubled to reach 49%, according to data from the Global Findex.
Since 2017 alone, account ownership rates for women in the region increased 12 percentage points, driven entirely by increased adoption of mobile money accounts.”
Bitcoin Brought Electricity to Countries in the Global South
It won’t be the United Nations or rich philanthropists that electrifies Africa.
Joakim Book —
Summary: Energy is indispensable for societal progress and well-being, yet many regions, particularly in the Global South, lack reliable electricity access. Traditional approaches to electrification, often reliant on charity or government aid, have struggled to address these issues effectively. However, a unique solution is emerging through bitcoin mining, where miners leverage excess energy to power their operations. This approach bypasses traditional barriers to energy access, offering a decentralized and financially sustainable solution.
Energy is life. For the world and its inhabitants to live better lives—freer, richer, safer, nicer, and more comfortable lives—the world needs more energy, not less. There are no rich, low-energy countries and no poor, high-energy countries.
“Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done,” in Canadian-Czech energy theorist Vaclav Smil’s iconic words.
Electricity matters because it is the ultimate poverty killer. No matter where you look, as electricity use has increased, so has economic growth. Having electricity does not guarantee wealth. But its absence almost always means poverty. Indeed, electricity and economic growth go hand in hand.
To supply electricity on demand to many of those people, especially in the Global South, grids need to be built in the first place and then have enough extra capacity to ramp up production when needed. That requires overbuilding, which is expensive and wasteful, and the many consumers of the Global South are poor.
Adding to the trouble are the abysmal formal institutions of property rights and rule of law in many African countries, and the layout of the land becomes familiar: corruption and fickle property rights make foreign, long-term investments basically impossible; poor populations mean that local purchasing power is low and usually not worth the investment risk.
What’s left are slow-moving charity and bureaucratic government development aid, both of which suffer from terrible incentives, lack of ownership, and running into their own sort of self-serving corruption.
In “Stranded,” a long-read for Bitcoin Magazine, Human Rights Foundation’s Alex Gladstein accounted for his journey into the mushrooming electricity grids of sub-Saharan Africa: “Africa remains largely unable to harness these natural resources for its economic growth. A river might run through it, but human development in the region has been painfully reliant on charity or expensive foreign borrowing.”
Stable supply of electricity requires overbuilding; overbuilding requires stable property rights and rich enough consumers over which to spread out the costs and financially recoup the investment over time. Such conditions are rare. Thus, the electricity-generating capacity won’t be built in the first place, and most of Africa becomes dark when the sun sets.
Gladstein reports that a small hydro plant in the foothills of Mount Mulanje in Malawi, even though it was built and financed by the Scottish government, still supplies exorbitantly expensive electricity—around 90 cents per kilowatt hour—with most of its electricity-generating capacity going to waste.
What if there were an electricity user, a consumer-of-last-resort, that could scoop up any excess electricity and disengage at a moment’s notice if the population needed that power for lights and heating and cooking? A consumer that could co-locate with the power plants and thus avoid having to build out miles of transmission lines.
With that kind of support consumer—guaranteeing revenue by swallowing any excess generation, even before any local homes have been connected—the financial viability of the power plants could make the construction actually happen. It pays for itself right off the bat, regardless of transmissions or the disposable income of nearby consumers.
If so, we could bootstrap an electricity grid in the poorest areas of the world where neither capitalism nor central planning, neither charity worker nor industrialist, has managed to go. That consumer of last resort could accelerate electrification of the world’s poorest and monetize their energy resilience. That’s what Gladstein went to Africa to investigate the bourgeoning industry of bitcoin miners electrifying the continent.
Bitcoin Saves the World: Energy-Poverty Edition
Africa is used to large enterprises digging for minerals. The bitcoin miners springing forth all over the continent are different. They don’t need to move massive amounts of land and soil and don’t pollute nearby rivers. They operate by running machines that guess large numbers, which is the cryptographic method that secures bitcoin and confirms its transaction blocks. All they need to operate is electricity and an internet connection.
By co-locating and building with electricity generation, bitcoin miners remove some major obstacles to bringing power to the world’s poorest billion. In the rural area of Malawi that Gladstein visited, there was nowhere to offload the expensive hydro power and no financing to connect more households or build transmission lines to faraway urban areas: “The excess electricity couldn’t be sold, so the power stations built machines that existed solely to suck up the unused power.”
Bitcoin miners are in a globally competitive race to unlock patches of unused energy everywhere, so in came Gridless, an off-grid bitcoin miner with facilities in Kenya and Malawi. Any excess power generation in these regions is now comfortably eaten up by the company’s onsite mining machines—the utility company receiving its profit share straight in a bitcoin wallet of its own control, no banks or governments blocking or delaying international payments, and no surprise government currency devaluations undercutting its purchasing power.
No aid, no government, no charity; just profit-seeking bitcoiners trying to soak up underused energy. Gladstein observes:
One night during my visit to Bondo, Carl asked me to pause as the sunset was fading, to look at the hills around us: the lights were all turning on, all across the foothills of Mt. Mulanje. It was a powerful sight to see, and staggering to think that Bitcoin is helping to make it happen as it converts wasted energy into human progress. . . .
Bitcoin is often framed by critics as a waste of energy. But in Bondo, like in so many other places around the world, it becomes blazingly clear that if you aren’t mining Bitcoin, you are wasting energy. What was once a pitfall is now an opportunity.
For decades, our central-planning mindset had us “help” the Global South by directing resources there—building things we thought Africans needed, sending money to (mostly) corrupt leaders in the hopes that schools be built or economic growth be kick-started. We squandered billions in goodhearted nongovernmental organization projects.
Even for an astute and serious energy commentator as Bryce, not once in his 40-page report on how to electrify the Global South did it occur to him that bitcoin miners—the very people who are turning the lights on for the poorest in the world—could play a crucial role in achieving that.
It’s so counterintuitive and yet, once you see it, so obvious. In the end, says Gladstein, it won’t be the United Nations or rich philanthropists that electrifies Africa “but an open-source software network, with no known inventor, and controlled by no company or government.”
Digital Transformation Drives Development in Africa
“However, in the last decade, the region has made substantial strides toward digital transformation, with hundreds of millions of people gaining access to the internet and productively utilizing a wide variety of digital services, such as mobile payments and online learning platforms.”
