Last year turned out to be a busy one for all the members of the Human Progress team. I spent much of the year on the road, promoting Superabundance in the United States and abroad. The book continues to sell well, and, more importantly, the ideas that it contains are getting attention on both the left and right of the political spectrum. I was particularly pleased with a reference to our work in the much-discussed Techno-Optimist Manifesto penned by the U.S. venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Intellectually, my most satisfying piece of writing was a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-written with the Oxford University physicist David Deutsch. I hope you’ll like it.
Chelsea Follett published her first book, Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World, and spent the last few months of the year promoting it in person, in print, and across the airwaves. Together with George Mason University’s Vincent Geloso, she also published an important paper that measures inequality in global well-being. The main point of the paper is that while many people obsess about global income inequality—which, incidentally, is shrinking—there are other, arguably more important inequalities, such as longevity and infant mortality, which are also declining. Chelsea also conducted many fascinating interviews that we released as Human Progress podcasts. Please check them out.
Malcolm Cochran continued his excellent work curating our social media and expanding our online presence. He continues to gather the weekly news items that document human progress and delight so many of our readers and followers. He has also taken on the additional responsibility of producing our podcasts. This fall, Malcolm participated in the Roots of Progress fellowship, a program that helps writers interested in human progress launch and accelerate their intellectual careers. As part of the fellowship, Malcolm started his own blog on pro-growth environmentalism. You can learn more about the program and the other fellows here.
Saul Zimet has given the website a fresh new look. Using Midjourney and other recent AI developments, he is now creating more vivid and eye-catching illustrations of Human Progress blog posts, news, and trends. He has also enhanced the website by publishing audio versions of each article and frequently posting great content from relevant external sources such as the Pessimists Archive. As the quality of available progress data from global research institutions continues to improve, he is also constantly updating the data workspace to make it more useful and informative than ever before.
On a sadder note, one of our valued team members, Luis Ahumada Abrigo, left us to join the great scholars at the Mercatus Center in Virginia. While Luis will be greatly missed, we continue to think very fondly of him, are grateful for all the work that he has done for Human Progress, and wish him the very best of luck in his future endeavors.