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01 / 05
China’s Fertility Flip-Flop Shows the Folly of Legislating Family Sizes

Blog Post | Pregnancy & Birth

China’s Fertility Flip-Flop Shows the Folly of Legislating Family Sizes

Keep central planning out of family planning.

Summary: Recent attempts by the Chinese government to encourage higher birth rates have raised concerns about government interference in personal matters. These new measures continue the pattern of authoritarian regimes enforcing coercive family policies. State intervention in family planning has often resulted in human rights abuses. While some policymakers advocate for incentives to boost fertility rates, a cautious approach that prioritizes individual freedom offer a more effective and ethical solution to addressing declining birth rates.


After decades of the disastrous policy of limiting family growth by force, China, according to news reports, is now pestering its women through text messages and social media to have more babies. This meddling by the state, like past coercion, is counterproductive. China should stop telling couples how many children to have. Keep central planning out of family planning, and families will flourish.

Not content to regulate life outside the household, authoritarians have a long history of intervening in family affairs. The Chinese Communist Party’s recent family-policy flip-flop is unsurprising. Throughout history, communist countries have alternated between coercive measures aiming to produce larger families and ones intended to shrink the average family size. China’s one-child policy, for instance, was in force for 36 years (1979–2015).

Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union financially penalized those without children, enacting a so-called “childless tax” that the country enforced from 1941 to 1990 in various degrees. The tax punished childless men between the ages of 20 and 50 and childless women between the ages of 20 and 45. A decree in 1944 expanded the childless tax to also penalize parents who had merely one or two children.

Communist Romania and Poland (post–World War II) implemented similar taxes modeled on the Soviet law. Those taxes, like their inspiration, lasted until the collapse of the USSR bloc in 1991. Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania went furthest of all, enacting strict prohibitions on birth control that resulted in a large number of abandoned children whose parents often could not afford to raise them.

The conditions in the communist nation’s overcrowded orphanages — nicknamed “child gulags” — were nightmarish. Yet signs at the inhumane institutions mockingly boasted, “The state can take better care of your child than you can.”

If communists are consistent on one point, it is that the state knows best. Always. Even when it comes to how many children each couple should bring into the world. Where communists have been inconsistent, though, is on whether that number ought to be higher or lower.

Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, it became fashionable among intellectuals around the world to worry about “overpopulation,” a concept that overwhelming evidence has since called into question. The resulting panic had its darkest manifestation in China’s one‐​child policy, which saw more than 300 million Chinese women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions, an unknown share of which were coerced.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency has boasted that the one-child policy prevented 400 million births. “Excess birth” fines could reach up to ten times a family’s annual disposable income.

Revenue-hungry local officials continued to fine families and enforce childbearing limits even after the country loosened its one-child policy to a two-child policy (2016–2021) and then loosened it further into a three-child policy. As China’s officials grew increasingly concerned about the population’s aging and shrinking, the three-child policy was, at last, rendered merely symbolic in 2023.

Yet China’s vast population-planning bureaucracy remains in place and could easily be reoriented toward attempts to coercively engineer the size of the country’s population upward. In a CCP-run paper, some Chinese academics have called for a tax on childlessness.

And China is not alone. Some Russian politicians also would like to reinstate a childless tax (Russia’s leaders have been toying with the idea for more than a decade).

Today, while unfounded overpopulation fears retain popularity in some circles, plummeting global birth rates have led the pendulum of policy-maker opinion to swing toward the idea that the world might benefit from more, rather than fewer, children. The number of countries with “raising fertility” as an explicit policy objective keeps rising.

Thankfully, in most cases such initiatives do not involve coercion. From South Korea to Estonia, various countries have tried offering government subsidies, expensive new state programs, cash bonuses, or similar incentives to encourage their citizens to have larger families. But an overview of past efforts to alter birth rates, whether upward or downward, shows that such efforts have had lackluster results at best and resulted in tragic human-rights abuses at worst.

Rather than pursuing new initiatives that are costly and questionably effective, and risk wading into the territory of social engineering or worse, policy-makers concerned about birth rates should take a “first do no harm” approach to fertility.

As my colleague Vanessa Calder and I outlined in a recent policy paper, removing government rules and regulations that disproportionately affect families would enhance families’ freedom of choice and may reduce the cost of child-rearing enough to boost fertility. In other words, policy-makers can make it easier for parents to form the families they desire by simply stepping back and removing government barriers to fertility and family life.

The state’s thumb shouldn’t be on the scale of intimate family decisions, one way or the other. Reforming policies that artificially make family life harder offers a better way forward. Hopefully, policy-makers in China and elsewhere will come to recognize that.

This article was published in National Review on 1/18/2024.

Blog Post | Economic Growth

What Unifies the Enemies of Civilization?

Socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism all have one thing in common.

This article was excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

Summary: Anti-merit, authoritarian, collectivist ideas like socialism, environmental extremism, and doomerism are enemies of human progress because they impede innovation, limit personal freedom, and prevent societal growth. Fostering decentralized creativity, by contrast, improves the continued ability of human civilization to advance.


We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people—but rather bad ideas.

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.

Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded . . . blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract dogmas . . . luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Our enemy is speech control and thought control—the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual . . .

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death . . .

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.

We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.

We invite everyone to join us . . .

The water is warm.

Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.

—Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Although our society is becoming more dynamic over time, some creativity-suppressing memes that had dominated our static ancestors survive to this day, albeit under different guises. As we saw, those memes ensured that societies like Sparta made practically no progress at all. Thankfully, in our time, such memes don’t stop us from improving our lives and the world more broadly. But they do slow us down, and if left unchecked, they could come to dominate our dynamic society and revert it back to the static societies of old. We, therefore, have a duty not only to recognize them for the threat that they are but to do everything in our power to eradicate them entirely.

Socialism advocates for centralized institutions, like States, to take the means of production away from citizens against their will. Socialists falsely assume that States can better allocate wealth in the form of consumer goods and services better than the private sector. But in the absence of free markets, States cannot determine prices and so cannot discover how resources can be best allocated. Resources like wood and gold could go toward producing all sorts of consumer goods, and market prices signal to entrepreneurs which resources should go into producing which consumer goods. That is, entrepreneurs use prices to “calculate” whether or not a particular venture will improve consumers’ lives. For instance, entrepreneurs might want to buy wood to build houses that they wish to sell. But they can only determine whether such a venture is profitable—that is, if it makes people better off—if they know the prices of the wood they’d buy and the houses they’d sell. But centralizing all of society’s resources into the hands of a single institution obliterates the possibility of prices. As economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “The paradox of ‘planning’ is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark. There is no question of a rational choice of means for the best possible attainment of the ultimate ends sought. What is called conscious planning is precisely the elimination of conscious purposive action.”

The impossibility of socialist-style central planning came to light in 1989, when Boris Yeltsin, then the president of the Soviet Union, visited a grocery store in the United States. Back in Russia, people waited in line for food and other goods, but in the capitalist United States, Yeltsin could buy as much of any of the countless items he wanted, and the lines were nothing like they were back home. In recognition of the stark contrast, Yeltsin told some Russians who were with him that if Russians saw what American supermarkets were like, “there would be a revolution.”

Many socialists think that wealth is a fixed pie. They see rich people and poor people and think that such inequality is unfair or unjust. Because they think wealth is fixed, they are sure that the moral thing to do is to forcibly transfer wealth from the rich people to the poor people. They think that the State ought to do such things—hence, they want the State to own the means of production, use them to create goods and services, and allocate them in a fair and just way to the people.

But wealth is not a fixed pie. Mankind was born into utter poverty, and now billions of people are wealthy enough to have the free time to read articles such as this one. So, yes, poverty is a tragedy. But with enough progress, we can all become as wealthy as today’s billionaires—indeed, most modern Westerners are wealthier than the kings of old, who died of diseases we’ve long since cured and who lacked basic comforts such as air conditioning.

The answer to poverty is not socialism, which only makes it more difficult to create more wealth. But trends indicate that young people in the West don’t know that—an Axios poll showed that 41 percent of American adults in 2021 held favorable views toward socialism.

Extreme environmentalism, or the so-called degrowth movement, aims to minimize humanity’s environmental impact by having fewer children, consuming less energy, and releasing less carbon into the atmosphere. As documented in a June 2024 New York Times article, anthropologist and prominent degrowth advocate Jason Hickel once wrote, “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”

The author of the New York Times piece, Jennifer Szalai, further writes, “The distinctive argument that Hickel and other degrowthers make is ultimately a moral one: ‘We have ceded our political agency to the lazy calculus of growth.’”

But there is nothing moral about slowing down growth for the planet’s sake or of rebalancing our relationship with nature. Growth is not some abstract thing that greedy capitalists have made a deity of. Growth means more wealth for people in the form of lifesaving and life-enhancing technologies, from shelter to protect us from the violent forces of the Earth to mass food production to bring starvation to an all-time low.

Some environmentalists are willing to sacrifice the well-being of humans for the sake of the Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants. But they fail to appreciate that it is only humans who stand a chance at saving the planet and every species in existence! After all, the sun will eventually engulf the Earth, and most species have gone extinct, never mind what humans have done. But only humans are capable of developing the technology to protect the Earth from the sun’s death and revive any species we so choose. This might sound like science fiction, but already we deflect asteroids from the Earth and create cells with synthetic genomes. The gap between those feats and the ones you think are science fiction is not insurmountable—but human civilization will need to grow to achieve them.

So, even by the environmentalists’ own standards, people are the primary moral agent in the world. Any side effect we cause can, in principle, be reversed in the long run. Incidentally, the primacy of people serves as a devastating criticism against those who advocate that we have fewer children—after all, more people means more creativity and more boundless potential to make progress.

And if something like climate change is judged by its effects on people, things have never been better thanks to growth. The Earth doesn’t care about us—but we care about each other. As philosopher Alex Epstein notes, “If you review the world’s leading source of climate disaster data, you will find that it totally contradicts the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 420 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures have risen by 1°C.”

Yes, fossil fuels have changed the Earth. But they’ve also given us enough energy to create solutions to an uncountable number of problems, including developing safe, manmade environments that shield us from Mother Earth’s dangers. Degrowth would rob us of such creations and leave us cold, dark, and vulnerable. “On a human flourishing standard,” Epstein writes, “we want to avoid not ‘climate change’ but ‘climate danger’—and we want to increase ‘climate livability’ by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.”

You may laugh at those environmentalists who throw paint at art, but they’ve been effective at halting the development of nuclear power, a potential source of abundant energy that we’ve known how to build for decades. We can’t calculate how much suffering could have been ameliorated had we been free to build nuclear power plants across the Earth.

Scientism is the false idea that scientific knowledge trumps all other kinds of knowledge—that science alone can answer all our questions. But moral, economic, political, and philosophical problems can’t be answered by science alone. This is why the phrase “follow the science,” as we heard so often during the 2020 pandemic, doesn’t make sense. Scientific knowledge can inform our choices, but it alone cannot tell us what to do next, either in our personal lives or in politics more widely. For instance, science might offer us an explanation for how and why COVID-19 spreads, the conditions under which masks reduce spread, and the effect of age and body fat percentage on the risk of infection. But science cannot tell us whether the trade-offs associated with government-mandated lockdowns are worth it, whether the government should invest public funds into drug companies for the development of a vaccine, whether all questions pertaining to a pandemic should be left to the most local level of government or to the most global level of government, whether a grandparent ought to risk infection to visit his grandchildren, or whether a businessman should run an underground (and illegal) speakeasy during lockdowns so that he can afford rent. The answers to such questions require more than just scientific knowledge—they require political, economic, and moral knowledge. Knowledge about what one ought to want in life, knowledge about the trade-offs involved in our decisions, knowledge about the intended and unintended consequences of governmental policy, knowledge about legal precedent, and knowledge about what our political institutions are capable of doing. None of this could possibly be found in a science textbook. Those who claim otherwise are guilty of the sins of scientism.

As the Nobel Prize–winning economist F. A. Hayek, inventor of the term “scientism,” wrote, “It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences—an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the ‘scientistic’ attitude—an attitude which . . . is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”

But if we cannot acquire moral, economic, or political knowledge via the methods that work so well in physics, how do we get such knowledge? The same way we always do: by conjecture and criticism. We guess what the right policy is, how we ought to act in the world, and how the economy works. And we criticize all those guesses—maybe not with the rigorous experiments we conduct in the physics laboratory, but experimentation is just one way of criticizing ideas.

Ironically, with the staggering advances made in the hard sciences over the past century, scientism has been on the rise. Quite simply, people think that they can take science’s successes and carry them over into every other field of human endeavor. In political and cultural battles, it is often thought that he who knows the most science must be in the right. If only we put the most scientifically minded people in charge of the world, it is thought, then they could solve all our problems from on high. But science alone cannot tell us whether children have a right to take hormone blockers, whether circumcision should be legal, or how long patents should last. That is no reason to despair—with or without the microscope, we can continue to make progress with creative guessing and criticizing.

Relativism comes in many forms, but perhaps the most dangerous is moral relativism—the idea that there is no difference between right and wrong or good and evil. “Who’s to say who is in the wrong?” the relativist ponders high-mindedly. “What Hamas did to Israel on October 7th is barbaric, but we must end this cycle of violence,” a relativist would say, implicating both sides. “Russia may have invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine is conscripting its own citizens. Therefore, both sides have committed wrongdoing.” “If Hitler was a villain for his genocide, then so was Churchill.”

Relativism might seem open-minded and fair, but it is neither. For it is not open to the possibility that one party is in the right and the other in the wrong. It is not open to the idea that one society is open and dynamic and the other closed and static. It is not open to the notion that one country cherishes life while the other worships death. Nor is relativism fair—the relativist does static societies no favors by denying that they could become as prosperous as dynamic ones should they choose to do so. In their own way, relativists trap evil under the weight of their own suppressive culture when they could have cleansed it with the light of better ideas. And the relativist distorts the self-confidence of dynamic, progressive societies by muddying their understanding of why they’re so successful in the first place, mitigating their ability to make even further progress and spread the right ideas to static societies. The relativist is no highfalutin hero—he keeps evil on life support long past its expiration date.

Perhaps relativism is thriving in the West right now because people can afford to make such an egregious error. But not forever. For the enemies of the West are the enemies of civilization more broadly. They will not stop their anti-human ambitions, no matter how much relativists deny that that is what they are. Nor will it be relativists who ultimately stand up to them but rather those who distinguish between right and wrong, stasis and progress, victory and defeat.

Dogmatism refers to an idea that is considered, implicitly or explicitly, uncriticizable. The final truth. Known with certainty. Never to be changed. People tend to associate religious doctrines with dogmatism, but the connection is not a necessary one. After all, some religions have evolved to cohabitate with the rapid progress we’ve undergone since the Enlightenment (to be sure, other religions, tragically, have not yet done so—and whenever someone admits to “taking something on faith,” dogmatism is surely at work). But dogma is not confined to the cathedral. For instance, many political ideologies are thought to have perfect foundations by their adherents. And even in science, our best theories could, in principle, spread by dogmatic means. Karl Popper described Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis as dogmatic. As philosopher Bryan Magee described psychoanalysts, “We should not . . . systematically evade refutation by continually reformulating either our theory or our evidence in order to keep the two in accord. . . . Thus they are substituting dogmatism for science while claiming to be scientific.” Even in the hard sciences, we could imagine a world in which people are not persuaded that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is true but rather are pressured to accept it as an uncriticizable foundation of our scientific worldview.

Because all our ideas contain errors, dogmatism always prevents us from improving on the ideas locked in dogma’s cage. Couple that with the fact that any error, no matter how small, could result in the eventual extinction of the human race, and we have good reason to rid our society of all dogmatic elements.

Doomerism is the idea that humanity has no shot at continuing to make progress, or that our extinction is just around the corner, or that we are uniquely vulnerable to being wiped out today, or that we are just one innovation away from guaranteeing our decline.

This attitude neutralizes the human spirit—after all, if humanity is sunk, why bother trying in the first place?

One of the primary examples of doomerism today is the debate over artificial intelligence. Some think that if we just keep innovating, we will eventually create an entity that is more intelligent and/or powerful than people could ever be and that we will fall to the status of slaves or animals beneath its feet. First, if the machine is not creative, it will be precisely as obedient as our microwaves are. And any unintentional side effects of AI can be accounted for with safety measures, as are currently being developed for self-driving cars. Second, if we do end up creating a machine that is as alive as we are—a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI—it is no more rational to assume that it will pursue our destruction as it is to assume that new humans will do so. New humans—namely children—are raised to adopt the values of the culture around them. Of course, sometimes they rebel, especially when adults force them to do things they don’t want to do. Therefore, the problem of how to integrate an AGI into our society is the same as the problem of how to raise children into happy, productive adults—and we’ve been improving at that for centuries.

Another dangerous effect of doomerism is tyranny, whether through cultural taboos, governmental regulations, or outright bans. They all amount to slowing the growth of knowledge and wealth, and of progress more generally. For if the next innovative step marks our doom, then surely a little—or a lot—of tyranny is justified! But innovation is the very panacea that doomers are worried about. It is stasis, not change, that will mark our end.

Moreover, we might choose to slow ourselves down, but the bad guys won’t. So there’s no world in which AI doesn’t continue to progress. But there is a world in which the bad guys get a hold of novel technologies before we do—and, with it, the end of our sustained Enlightenment.

So socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism have all earned their bona fides as enemies of civilization. In one way or another, they curb our ability to make progress, a stain on the project that is humanity. But is each stain a unique color, or do they come from the same poisonous ink jar?

Indeed, all memetic enemies of civilization have one thing in common: They slow the growth of knowledge.

This article was excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

Newsletter | Population Growth

Weekly Progress Roundup

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The history of Easter Island has long served as an environmental fable.

The popular “ecocide” theory claims that, during their escalating obsession with building the famous Moai statues, the native Rapa Nui people deforested their once-verdant island, creating an ecological crisis that led to population collapse, cannibalism, and a complete reordering of Rapa Nui society.

A new study raises serious doubts about this narrative. After analyzing the remains of 15 ancient islanders, researchers found no evidence of the drop in genetic diversity one would expect after a population collapse. In fact, the genomes suggest Easter Island’s population grew steadily until European contact. According to archaeogeneticists Stephan Schiffels and Kathrin Nägele, “the study concludes that there were never more than 3,000 people living on Rapa Nui — a number close to that observed by the first colonizers and far from a previous estimate of 15,000 inhabitants — implying that the hypothesized collapse was always a fantasy.”

Clearly Easter Island was deforested, but it seems the Rapa Nui adapted to that environmental change and continued to thrive for hundreds of years. Humanity has once again proven to be more resilient than we give ourselves credit for.

Malcolm Cochran, Digital Communications Manager


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Blog Post | Population Growth

People Are the Ultimate Existential Resource

Even if technological advances help mitigate the problems with a shrinking population, young people are an irreplaceable existential resource.

Summary: The decline in global birth rates has shifted concerns from overpopulation to potential economic and existential crises. Economist Julian Simon posited that humans are the ultimate resource due to their abilities to solve scarcity problems, but it’s also their need for meaningful existence that drives societal progress. As birth rates fall, it’s crucial to recognize the profound role of family and social connections in providing purpose and motivating efforts that enhance human flourishing and ensure a better future for coming generations.


Birth rates dropping below replacement level in much of the world has become a growing concern. However, this is a relatively recent worry. For a long time, the rapid growth of the world’s population led many experts to fear the depletion of our natural resources and the potential collapse of civilization. The late economist Julian Simon did not share these overpopulation concerns. Instead, he argued that humans are the ultimate resource, proposing that more humans would actually help solve our scarcity problems. His reasoning was that more humans means more brain power, which in turn leads to more discoveries, creations, and innovations. This insight is crucial. As Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley detail in their excellent book, Superabundance, our species has demonstrated a remarkable ability to leverage our cognitive capacities to solve scarcity issues throughout history.

However, there is another crucial factor to consider when thinking about what makes humans the ultimate resource. The cognitive capacities that make us an intellectual species, combined with our distinctly human self-conscious emotions, also make us an existential species driven to find and maintain meaning in life. We don’t merely seek to survive; we want our lives to matter. We aspire to play a significant role in a meaningful cultural drama that transcends our individual existence. This deep-seated need for meaning is a fundamental aspect of the human experience, shaping our goals, decisions, and actions. Critically, our need for meaning plays a central role in individual and societal flourishing.

Meaning is more than a feeling; it is a self-regulatory and motivational resource. When we find meaning in life, it provides us with a compelling reason to get up each day and strive to do our best, even in the face of challenges and setbacks. Inevitably, we will encounter failures, make mistakes, and have moments of weakness when we act impulsively or allow bad habits and patterns of living to shift our attention away from the goals and actions that would make life more fulfilling. We may also let our character flaws derail us from time to time. However, when we perceive our lives as meaningful, we are more likely to believe that we have a strong reason to work harder at self-improvement, to course correct when needed, and to persistently pursue our potential while prioritizing what matters most to us. Indeed, research has shown that the more people view their lives as full of meaning, the more they tend to be physically and mentally healthy, goal focused, persistent, resilient, and successful in achieving their objectives.

Crucially, our need for meaning is inherently social. No matter what specific activity we are engaged in, we derive the greatest sense of meaning from it when we believe that it has a positive impact on the lives of others. 

Years ago, I was invited to give a presentation to professors on how to improve their public outreach efforts. During the Q&A session, a math professor expressed his doubts about the relevance of my presentation to his field. He said that it’s easy for me, as a psychologist, to engage the public because people are inherently interested in the topics psychologists study. However, he wondered how he could get people interested in hearing about math. He noted that most people find it boring. I asked him why he became a math professor. He responded that he finds the work intrinsically interesting and really enjoys sharing that passion with eager students. I then asked him why that matters – why is it important to mentor the next generation of mathematicians? He replied, “Because math is fundamental to the continuation of civilization.” As he said those words, I could see the realization dawn on him that my presentation was, in fact, applicable to his field. The central theme of my talk was that for academic scholars to succeed in public outreach, they need to be able to articulate the social significance of their work to non-experts. 

However, being able to identify the social significance of one’s work isn’t just about public outreach; it’s also crucial for one’s own ability to find personal fulfillment in their work. I believe that one of the reasons people lose passion for their work, even if they are highly successful, is that they don’t believe it makes a real difference in the world. Regardless of the nature of their work, whether paid or unpaid, people are most likely to derive meaning from it when they recognize its social significance. For instance, research shows that employees are more likely to find their work meaningful when they focus on how it positively impacts the lives of others, rather than on how it advances their own career goals. 

I’m emphasizing the social nature of meaning because it is essential to understanding why humans are the ultimate existential resource. The motivational power of meaning is derived from our connections with other humans and the impact we have on their lives. They are the existential resource that inspires us to tackle significant challenges and advance human progress, ensuring that future generations can enjoy a better life than we do today. 

In an article published earlier this week by USA Today, I discuss this issue in the context of the current birth rate decline, focusing on the special role that family plays in our search for meaning. Individuals can certainly live meaningful lives without having children or close family relationships. There are many paths to achieving social significance by making contributions through entrepreneurship, science, art, education, mentorship, leadership, service, and philanthropy. However, for the majority of people, family remains an essential component of a meaningful life, providing a deep sense of belonging and continuity that extends beyond one’s own existence.

Current conversations about the baby bust are largely dominated by concerns over the economic and policy challenges it presents. As our population ages, we may face worker shortages, increased strain on social safety net programs, and economic stagnation. While these challenges are very important and demand our attention, it is equally crucial that we do not overlook the profound personal and existential consequences of this demographic shift.

Even if you believe that advances in automation, artificial intelligence, or other technological innovations will help mitigate the problems caused by a shrinking population, it is crucial to recognize that young people are an irreplaceable existential resource. They are the reasons we care about the future, providing us with the opportunity to achieve a level of social significance that transcends our brief mortal lives. No machine can replace the profound sense of meaning that raising the next generation of humans provides.

While human intelligence makes the creative, innovative, and industrious activities that lead to abundance possible, it is the meaning in life we derive from mattering to others that gives us the fundamental reason to pursue these activities in the first place.

This article was published at Flourishing Friday on 6/7/2024.

Blog Post | Human Development

1,000 Bits of Good News You May Have Missed in 2023

A necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.

Reading the news can leave you depressed and misinformed. It’s partisan, shallow, and, above all, hopelessly negative. As Steven Pinker from Harvard University quipped, “The news is a nonrandom sample of the worst events happening on the planet on a given day.”

So, why does Human Progress feature so many news items? And why did I compile them in this giant list? Here are a few reasons:

  • Negative headlines get more clicks. Promoting positive stories provides a necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.
  • Statistics are vital to a proper understanding of the world, but many find anecdotes more compelling.
  • Many people acknowledge humanity’s progress compared to the past but remain unreasonably pessimistic about the present—not to mention the future. Positive news can help improve their state of mind.
  • We have agency to make the world better. It is appropriate to recognize and be grateful for those who do.

Below is a nonrandom sample (n = ~1000) of positive news we collected this year, separated by topic area. Please scroll, skim, and click. Or—to be even more enlightened—read this blog post and then look through our collection of long-term trends and datasets.

Agriculture

Aquaculture

Farming robots and drones

Food abundance

Genetic modification

Indoor farming

Lab-grown produce

Pollination

Other innovations

Conservation and Biodiversity

Big cats

Birds

Turtles

Whales

Other comebacks

Forests

Reefs

Rivers and lakes

Surveillance and discovery

Rewilding and conservation

De-extinction

Culture and tolerance

Gender equality

General wellbeing

LGBT

Treatment of animals

Energy and natural Resources

Fission

Fusion

Fossil fuels

Other energy

Recycling and resource efficiency

Resource abundance

Environment and pollution

Climate change

Disaster resilience

Air pollution

Water pollution

Growth and development

Education

Economic growth

Housing and urbanization

Labor and employment

Health

Cancer

Disability and assistive technology

Dementia and Alzheimer’s

Diabetes

Heart disease and stroke

Other non-communicable diseases

HIV/AIDS

Malaria

Other communicable diseases

Maternal care

Fertility and birth control

Mental health and addiction

Weight and nutrition

Longevity and mortality 

Surgery and emergency medicine

Measurement and imaging

Health systems

Other innovations

Freedom

    Technology 

    Artificial intelligence

    Communications

    Computing

    Construction and manufacturing

    Drones

    Robotics and automation

    Autonomous vehicles

    Transportation

    Other innovations

    Science

    AI in science

    Biology

    Chemistry and materials

      Physics

      Space

      Violence

      Crime

      War