This Thanksgiving comes in the wake of an emotional election that left some celebrating and others mourning. In such a charged political moment, it can be hard to focus on the big picture. Amid the continued effects of pandemic-era inflation, the ravages of natural disasters such as Hurricane Helene, intensifying culture wars, not to mention ongoing actual wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, some may find it hard to feel thankful even during a holiday devoted to thankfulness. Yet there remain many real reasons for gratitude—regardless of whether your preferred candidate won or lost.

Rising prosperity. Extreme poverty characterized the life of most of our ancestors. When George Washington prayed that “the great Lord [might] grant unto all Mankind . . . temporal prosperity” in his Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789, the average income in the United States, adjusted for inflation, was lower than that in Kenya today. Extreme poverty still plagued over 70 percent of people around the world when Abraham Lincoln made his own Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863. Today, that figure has fallen to less than 9 percent. In 1990, when I was born, over 2 billion people lived on less than $2.15 dollars a day (in 2017 purchasing power parity dollars); today, fewer than 700 million endure that level of poverty, as more than 1.3 billion have risen into higher income brackets. Thanks to rising incomes, literacy and electricity access are spreading, while malnutrition and unsanitary conditions are rarer. And although there is still more progress to be made, rising prosperity thus far has been widely shared, making the world wealthier and more equal. The rate of progress has in some cases stalled amid pandemic-related disruptions, but the long-term trends are still heartening.

Health and abundance. Many Americans will gather with their families for the Thanksgiving holiday. One underappreciated cause for thankfulness is that we now enjoy more years with our loved ones, alive and well. After being flat for most of human history, life expectancy has risen exponentially. While the rate of increase has slowed in the past three decades, the long-term gains are nonetheless dramatic. Death rates are falling, even among those with cancer. What’s more, people spend less of their lives working than in the past. Also, we are earning more at jobs that are safer and more interesting than the endless grind of agricultural labor endured by the majority of people in the past—including the storied Plymouth pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe with whom they feasted during the first Thanksgiving in 1621. Speaking of feasts, farmers now produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet even as the population has grown, making famine a thing of the past outside of areas disrupted by war or natural disasters. The 17th-century pilgrims would have a hard time comprehending that food is so plentiful today that obesity presents a bigger problem than starvation.

Technological advancement. We live in an era of technological wonders. In 2024, for the first time in history, a paralyzed man was able to play chess online using a brain implant. This year, the world’s largest 3D printer debuted. This past year also saw artificial intelligence advances aid everything from breast cancer detection to archeological discoveries. And there has been much progress toward the final frontier. In 2024, Japan became the fifth country to achieve a soft moon landing, and the US private sector landed the first-ever commercial vehicle on the lunar surface. Astronomers detected water molecules on asteroids for the first time. A SpaceX Starship rocket booster landed safely in the mechanical arms awaiting it back at the launch pad.

Environmental stewardship. Farmland has peaked and is shrinking even as we produce more food, while land set aside for nature is increasing, as is support for nuclear energy (currently the cleanest, though not the cheapest, scalable energy source). Harmful emissions have decoupled from economic growth in many countries. A 2024 Nature study found that the pace of total global emissions growth may have plateaued, and some scientists, such as the University of Oxford’s Hannah Ritchie, now believe the world has passed “peak pollution.” Many beloved animal species whose numbers were dwindling are making a comeback. Thanks to the growth in their numbers, the Iberian lynx wildcat, the red-cockaded woodpecker, and the Apache trout all officially ceased to be endangered in 2024. And as developing countries grow wealthier, the world will very likely see further gains in environmental quality.

Freedom. Last, but certainly not least, remember the policies and institutions that underlie so much of human progress. In the United States, there is even more reason to contemplate these pillars of the modern world. As the late Cato Institute distinguished senior fellow David Boaz once wrote as Thanksgiving neared, let us remember to “step back and consider how America is different from much of world history.” Our country helped to birth modern liberal democracy, which has rapidly spread. True, authoritarianism is rising in many parts of the world, but democracies still outnumber autocracies. Finally, consider freedom, which strongly correlates with democracy. The latest Human Freedom Index numbers show that liberty is in retreat globally, “including significant declines in the rule of law; freedom of movement, expression, and association and assembly; and freedom to trade.” Yet the United States is still among the freest countries in the world, especially when it comes to economic freedom. It is that freedom and the American spirit of entrepreneurship that drives the largest economy in our beautifully interconnected world and produces riches beyond our forebears’ wildest dreams. The United States also enjoys robust protections for freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of conscience and religion, and many other freedoms we should treasure and defend. Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation celebrated, among other things, “our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity.” When you count your blessings this Thanksgiving, remember to include freedom among them. Happy Thanksgiving!

“The Bureau of Land Management issued a decision record approving the Cape Geothermal Power Project in southwest Utah, which would have the capacity if fully built to generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power about 2 million homes.

The Interior Department also said it is proposing a new categorical exclusion that would streamline the process to evaluate and approve ‘geothermal resource confirmation operations’ of up to 20 acres. These could include drilling wells that would be used to to confirm the existence of a geothermal resource, the agency said.

The goal is to ‘accelerate the discovery of new geothermal resources throughout the West,’ and particularly in Nevada, which the agency says is ‘home to some of the largest undeveloped geothermal potential in the country.'”

From E&E News.

“The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday Issued Long-Awaited Rules That Will Help Pave the Way for the Commercialization of Electric Air Taxis as Soon as Next Year…

Driving the News: FAA Administrator Mike Whittaker Announced the Final Regulation During a Speech at a Business Aviation Convention in Las Vegas.

• It Includes Qualifications and Training Requirements for Pilots of These New Aircraft Which Have Characteristics of Both Airplanes and Helicopters.
• The Rule Also Addresses Operational Requirements, Including Minimum Safe Altitudes and Required Visibility.
• The Rule Is ‘The Final Piece in the Puzzle’ for Safely Introducing These New Aircraft to the u.s. Airspace, He Said.’”

From Axios.

Read the full transcript or listen to the podcast here.

We hear so much about the risks and downsides of technology. What are some areas where you believe digital technologies have improved our lives?

There are so many areas that we’ve seen transformed by technology over the last decade. Think about when we were faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, and so much of our lives shifted to our homes. Now imagine if that same thing had happened in 2010. How different would that have been? How much more limited would the options have been to stay connected to friends and family, entertain yourself at home, and continue your education and job?

Because the US has maintained a light-touch regulatory approach to the technology sector, we empowered entrepreneurs to create products that benefit consumers, sometimes in ways that we never could have imagined. I still remember the days when you had to have atlases in your car. And I remember when MapQuest seemed like such a huge deal. Now, if you’re going somewhere new, you often don’t even look it up in advance.

I’m hearing a lot of calls for more regulation of digital technologies. President Biden is saying we need to clamp down on AI, while Nikki Haley has said we must deanonymize social media. What are some of the dangers of over-regulating these technologies?

I’m going to start by asking you a question. How often do you think you use AI?

When it comes to ChatGPT, every few days. But I’m sure that what you’re hinting at is that AI is incorporated into far more than we’re even aware of.

Exactly. Most of us have been using AI for much longer than we realize. Search engines and navigation apps use AI. If you’ve ever tried to do a return and interacted with a chatbot, some of that is possible because of advances in AI. We’ve also benefited from AI in indirect ways. For example, AI can be used to help predict forest fires and to assist in medical research. Because AI is such a general-purpose technology, a lot of the calls for regulation may lead to fewer of those beneficial applications and could even make it harder to use many of the applications we’re already used to.

Oftentimes, people just don’t think about the consequences of regulation. When we think about an issue like anonymous speech, many people immediately jump to their negative experiences with anonymous trolls online. But we should also think about the costs of deanonymizing speech. Think about dissidents trying to communicate with journalists or people trying to alert each other to social problems in authoritarian regimes. Anonymous speech is incredibly valuable to those people, and we have a long-standing tradition of protecting that kind of speech in the US. When we look at creating backdoors or deanonymizing things, that’s not just going to be used for going after the bad guys. It’s also going to be exploited by a whole range of bad actors.

And this country was arguably founded on a tradition of pseudonymous and anonymous speech; think of the Federalist Papers.

Right.

What do you think is driving this distrust of new technologies?

Disruptive new technologies like social media and artificial intelligence are naturally going to make us uncomfortable. They create new ways of doing things and force societal norms to evolve. This is something that happened in the past, for example, with the camera. We’re now used to having cameras everywhere, but we had to develop norms around when, where, and how we can take pictures. With AI, we’re watching that process happen in real-time.

The good news is that we’re adapting to new technologies faster than ever. When you look at the level of adoption of technologies like ChatGPT and the comfort level that younger people have with them, innovations seem to be becoming socially acceptable at a much quicker pace than in the past.

The current technology panics are also not unique to the present. We’ve seen a lot of concern about young people and social media recently, but before that, it was young people and video games, and before that, it was magazines and comic books. We even have articles from back in the day of people complaining that young people were reading too many novels.

There’s also this fear of tech companies having too much market share. Can you walk us through that concern and provide your take on it?

I’m sure you’re talking about Myspace’s natural monopoly on social media. Or maybe you’re talking about how Yahoo won the search wars. These were very real headlines 20 years ago with a different set of technology giants. So, my first point is that innovation is our best competition policy.

My second point is that before we implement competition policy, we need to figure out why big companies are popular. If a company is popular because it’s serving its consumers well, that’s not a problem; that’s something we should be applauding. When we think about incredibly popular products like Amazon’s Prime program, people choose to engage with it because they find it beneficial.

We should really only want to see antitrust or competition policy used if anti-competitive behavior is harming consumers. We don’t want a competition policy that presumes big is bad. And we certainly don’t want to see competition policy that focuses on competitors rather than consumers. We don’t want a world where the government dictates that the Model T can’t put the horseshoe guys out of business.

People of all stripes want to restrict how private companies moderate content. People on the left are concerned about potential misinformation online, while those on the right worry about political bias in content moderation. What’s your take on this issue?

Online content moderation matters for a lot more than social media. We often think about this in the context of, “Did X take down a certain piece of content or leave up a certain piece of content?” But this is actually much bigger. Think about your favorite review site. If you travel and you’re going to a new place and looking for somewhere to stay or go to dinner, you’re probably going to go to your favorite review site rather than read what some famous travel reporter has said.

The review sites allow you to find reviewers with your same needs. Maybe you’re traveling with young children, or you have someone with dietary restrictions. This is something that only user-generated content can provide. But what about bad or unfair reviews? What happens when someone starts trying to get bad reviews taken down? We want these sites to be able to set rules that keep reviews honest, that keep the tool useful, where they’re not being overrun by spam, and they aren’t afraid of a lawsuit from someone who disagrees with a review.

This is one example of why we should be concerned about these online content moderation policies. When it comes to questions of misinformation, I think it’s important to take a step back and think, “Would I want the person I most disagree with to have the power to dictate what was said on this topic?” Because if we give the government the power to label misinformation and moderate content, the government will have that power whether or not the people you agree with are in charge. So not only do we have First Amendment concerns here in the US from a legal point of view, but we should also have some pretty big first principles concerns regarding some of these proposals.

That’s a good segue into another concern a lot of people have with new technology, which is its effect on young people. What do you make of those concerns?

Youth online safety can mean so many different things. Some people are concerned about how much time their child spends online. Some people are concerned about issues related to online predators. Others are just concerned about particular types of content that they don’t want their children exposed to. The good news is we’ve seen the market respond to a lot of these concerns, and there are a lot of tools and choices available to parents.

The first choice is just when you allow your child to use certain technology. That’s going to vary from family to family. But even once you’ve decided to allow your child to have access to a device, you can set time limits or systems that alert you to how the child is using the device. There, we have seen platforms, device makers, and civil society respond with a great deal of tools and resources for parents. To reduce harm to children, we should look to education rather than regulation. We need to empower people to make the choices that work best for them because this isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all decision, and policy intervention will result in a one-size solution.

Many people are also concerned about privacy. Whenever there is a large gathering of data, that data can be leaked to the government or to bad actors. How should we think about data privacy?

When we talk about privacy, I think it’s important to distinguish between the government and private actors. We need very strong privacy protections against government surveillance, not only for consumers but also for the companies themselves, so that they can protect their consumers and keep the promises they’ve made to consumers regarding data privacy.

When it comes to individual companies, we need to think about the fact that there are a lot of choices when it comes to data privacy, some of which we don’t even think are data privacy choices.

One example is if you go to a website and sign up for a newsletter in order to get a ten percent off coupon, you’re technically exchanging a bit of data, such as your email address, for that 10 percent off coupon. You get a direct benefit in that moment. That’s a privacy choice you make. If we think about privacy as a choice, we start to see that we make these choices every day. Even where we choose to have a conversation is a data privacy choice.

The other element when it comes to data privacy is that an individual’s data, while we deeply care about it, is not actually that valuable. What’s been valuable is how data can be used in the aggregate to improve services. So, when we hear that we should just treat data like any other piece of property, it doesn’t necessarily work because data doesn’t act like other forms of property in many cases. Not only is the value of the data not tied to a single data point, but the data also is often not tied to a single user. This makes regulating data privacy very complicated. If you and I are in a picture together, whose data is that? Is it the person who took the picture’s or people in the picture’s? Or does it belong to the location we were in while taking the picture? Can you invoke a right to be forgotten that removes the picture? And if so, then what does that do to the person who took the picture’s speech rights? These are not easy questions, and they’re often better solved on an individual basis than with a one-size-fits-all approach.