“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.”
From World Bank.
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria | Charity & Aid
“During the first nine months of 2025, remittances to Mexico totaled 45,681 million, 5.5% less than the 48,360 million received during the same period in 2024.
Despite this decrease, remittances increased in several states in the central-southern region during the first nine months of the year, notably Chiapas (+1.2%), Oaxaca (+2.0%), Puebla (+1.9%), Guerrero (+4.2%), Veracruz (+0.9%), and Morelos (+1.3%).
1.1 million people in Mexico have been lifted out of multidimensional poverty thanks to remittance transfers. If remittance income is not included in the 2024 measurement, the population living in poverty in Mexico would increase from 38.5 million to 39.6 million people.”
“American companies led by Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo have drawn much of the limelight with driverless cars deployed almost entirely on home soil. Now that some are beginning to look abroad, they’ll have to share roads with Chinese companies quietly making plenty of progress.
Baidu Inc.’s Apollo Go, WeRide Inc. and Pony AI Inc. are outnumbering their American counterparts with more robotaxi projects progressing from testing to various stages of commercialization, according to a BloombergNEF analysis. While much of that headway is being made domestically, the Chinese companies are standing up operations in places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Singapore, and looking to launch in Germany, the UK and elsewhere in Europe.”
From Bloomberg.
Blog Post | Energy Consumption
Summary: In just two centuries, humanity has turned light from a rare luxury into one of the most abundant resources on Earth. What once demanded hours of labor now costs a fraction of a second’s work, thanks to relentless innovation and human creativity. From candles to LEDs, the story of light reflects a larger truth: when people are free to invent and exchange ideas, they transform scarcity into abundance and darkness into illumination.
Our book Superabundance (2022) was inspired in part by the work of Nobel Prize–winning economist William Nordhaus, who conducted an extensive analysis on the “time price” of light over the span of human history. He called time prices the true prices. Light can be measured in lumens. Comfortable reading light is around 1,000 lumens. Nordhaus reported that in 1830, earning sufficient money to buy the candles necessary for one hour of light at 1,000 lumens required around three hours of labor. A candle generates around 12 lumens; therefore, one would need 83 candles to generate 1,000 lumens.
Innovation replaced candles with kerosene lamps and then with incandescent lighting and then LED lighting. Today, for 75 cents, one can buy a Cree J Series 5050C E Class LED that generates 228 lumens per watt. By increasing the wattage to 4.4 watts one can, therefore, generate 1,000 lumens of light. Electricity prices are currently around 17 cents per 1,000 watt hours, commonly known as kilowatt hours or kWh. One watt hour costs 0.017 cents; thus, the 4.4 watts to power the Cree LED for one hour would cost a mere 0.0745 cents. The average worker earns $36.53 an hour, or slightly more than a penny per second. Working for around 0.0735 seconds, therefore, the average worker earns enough money to buy 1,000 lumens for one hour.
The light that cost 10,800 seconds in 1830 costs only 0.0735 seconds today. The time price has dropped by 99.99932 percent. For the time it took to earn the money to buy 1,000 lumens for one hour in 1830, workers today earn 146,980 hours of light today. That’s a 14,697,900 percent increase. Light abundance has been increasing around 6.3 percent annually on a compound basis, doubling every 12 years.
Calculating Changes in Global Light Resources
Over the last 195 years (1830-2025), the world’s population rose from 1.2 billion to 8.2 billion—a factor of 6.83, or a 583 percent increase. To measure how humanity’s resource base has changed, we calculate the size of the global resource “pie” by multiplying personal resource abundance by population. That reveals how much “total abundance” exists across humanity at a given moment.
As we already saw, during the 195-year period, personal light abundance rose by a factor of 146,980. Assuming for argument’s sake that everyone in the world enjoys American prices of LEDs and energy, combined with the 6.83-fold increase in population, the global light abundance factor would amount to 1,004,360. In other words, the global light pie has grown by 100,435,912 percent—from an index value of 1 in 1830 to 1,004,360 today.
Light abundance would have grown at a compound annual rate of roughly 7.3 percent for almost two centuries, doubling about every 9.8 years. What was once scarce, flickering, and expensive has become nearly boundless—flowing at the speed of electrons and photons across the planet.
Resource Elasticity of Population
In economics, elasticity compares the percentage change in one variable against the percentage change in another. Between 1830 and 2025, global light resource abundance increased by 100,435,912 percent. During same period, the world’s population increased by 583 percent. Dividing 100,435,912 percent by 583 percent gives us 172,176. Every 1 percent increase in population thus corresponds to a 172,176 percent increase in global light abundance.
Let There Be More Light
We have witnessed an exponential efflorescence of light—an illumination not merely of our cities but of the human spirit itself. More people with light has meant more minds, more ideas, and more ventures into the unknown. When free to imagine and innovate, humans transform scarcity into abundance—and ignorance into insight. Over the past two centuries, we have converted the darkness of want into the radiance of wealth, beginning with light itself. From the barbarous glow of whale oil to the humble candle, and from the flicker of gas and kerosene to the steady blaze of electricity and the brilliance of silicon, each technological leap has kindled new horizons of discovery. Every advance has multiplied the possibilities for the next. The ultimate source of growth is not material—it’s the human mind set free.
The next time you turn on a light switch, please take a moment to appreciate the great work of free and creative people toiling to bring us out of the darkness. Compared to the abundant light of today’s world, our ancestors really did live in the “dark ages.”
Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.
Summary: Fearing job losses and loss of control, some politicians are calling to halt technologies like driverless cars and artificial intelligence. Yet history shows that efforts to “protect” people from innovation only delay progress and raise costs. Automation inevitably disrupts, but it also saves lives, boosts efficiency, and expands opportunity.
Some US conservatives want to slam the brakes on progress, quite literally. At the recent US National Conservatism conference, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri declared: “Only humans ought to drive cars and trucks.”
His techno‑scepticism runs deeper than opposing driverless vehicles. “Every so‑called innovation the tech class has delivered in recent decades operates as a power transfer … from us to them,” he warned. “Us” meaning the honest “common man”. “Them” being Silicon Valley transhumanist elites and their job-killing code.
We must take this urge to ban driverless cars and smother AI seriously. Not because Hawley is right, but because his anxieties are commonly held here. A recent survey by the Schwartz Reisman Institute found just 8 per cent of Britons are strongly positive about artificial intelligence, putting us last except for Australia. Only France and the US had higher negative sentiment than the UK too (33 per cent). On driverless cars, just 22 per cent of us say we’d feel safe in one. This is fertile ground for populists looking to appeal to displaced workers in our own politics.
Fears of job loss from new technology aren’t irrational. But trying to resist the tide can smother the benefits of new tech while making any eventual adjustment harder. Still, politicians can’t help themselves. Last year, in opposition, Labour’s Louise Haigh warned that automated vehicles could repeat “the ravages of deindustrialisation”. That’s Labour-speak for “government intervention required”. The tool of choice, of course, is typically “safety” regulation.
This instinct isn’t new. In 1865, parliament passed the Locomotive Act, capping self-propelled vehicle speeds at 2mph in towns and 4mph in the countryside, while requiring each be preceded by a man waving a red flag. Branded as a safety measure, it was backed by the horse-drawn carriage and rail lobbies. Maybe it spared a few pedestrians, but it certainly stunted any early car industry. Innovation was sacrificed to protect incumbents, with safety the excuse.
The US mis-stepped too. For decades, cities required human lift operators even after automatic elevators became safer and cheaper. A few thousand jobs were saved, with higher costs for building owners and slower productivity in sectors based in tall buildings. Like red flag laws, the aim of this safety regulation was really to preserve jobs in aspic.
The Hawley instinct would repeat this error. Trials of autonomous vehicle systems like Waymo in the US show 70–90 per cent reductions in crash rates compared with human drivers. In the UK, where human error is a factor in 88 per cent of collisions, industry modelling suggests autonomous vehicles could save 3,900 lives and prevent 60,000 serious injuries by 2040, with just 20-24 per cent market penetration. Studies predict less congestion, lower fuel use, and cheaper deliveries and logistics. And then there’s time freed. The average Brit spends over 120 hours per year behind the wheel, which is ripe for reclaiming for work or leisure. All these efficiencies would boost downstream sectors.
Yet the public isn’t sold. Polls show most Britons still consider driverless cars unsafe. That gives our own Hawleys an opening. Regulation to slow innovation always attracts both well-meaning safety worriers and affected workers with political allies. Labour has passed enabling legislation for automated vehicles, but seems to be dragging its feet on rollout. Meanwhile, the diffuse benefits of improved safety and efficiency get downplayed and delayed.
As AI spreads through the economy, such political battles will proliferate. Someone will always stand ready to highlight the freak accident, the displaced worker or the imperfect chatbot. And certain politicians will promise to protect workers affected.
That’s why it falls to those not wedded to the status quo to state the obvious: yes, automation is disruptive. But it’s also the path to safer roads, cheaper goods, and higher productivity. Hiding behind a modern red flag is no answer.
Progress that is delayed amounts to progress denied.
This article was originally published by The Times on 9/17/2025.
