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01 / 05
Reclaiming Our Sci-Fi Future | Podcast Highlights

Blog Post | Human Development

Reclaiming Our Sci-Fi Future | Podcast Highlights

Chelsea Follett interviews James Pethokoukis about how to reignite American optimism and build the sci-fi world we were promised.

James Pethokoukis —

Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.

Order James Pethokoukis’s new book here.

Tell me about the title of your book, The Conservative Futurist. It’s very counterintuitive. How did you come up with the title? 

It does sound like an oxymoron. Like military intelligence or man bites dog. But I think conservatism and futurism do go together. I view conservatism as preserving the best parts of our inheritance, which I view as liberal democracy and market capitalism. It’s our sacred responsibility to preserve that, work to make it better, and then hand it off to future generations.

That’s what we should be thinking about. Conservative futurism is not nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s about using all these fantastic tools that we’ve developed to build a better world.

So, you’re using conservative in the sense of being classical liberal, pro-innovation, and pro-free market. But there’s another term that you use, which is “up-wing.” Can you tell me a little bit about that? 

It’s a play on left-wing and right-wing, but up-wing could be a Democrat or a Republican. Up-wing is seeing the potential of humanity and then working to achieve it. It’s people who think it’s a big shame that we don’t have nuclear power and that we’re now worried about not having enough energy. Down-wing refers to people who want to go backward, who want a poor world so we don’t use up the earth. I see a lot of that vision, unfortunately, all around.

How did we go from the optimistic vision of the 1960s to Black Mirror and other dystopian science fiction? 

I make the economic case. If you have a slowing economy, it’s tougher to be positive. One reason we had this economic slowdown, which began in the early 1970s, is that we extracted all the big productivity gains from the great inventions of the Industrial Revolution: electrification, factories, the combustion engine, the chemical industry. That was eventually going to happen. But what did not have to happen was our response. We did two things wrong. One, we stopped funding basic science at the level we saw during the space program. And the other is we regulated.

I went into this book not wanting to blame environmentalists because I think there’s a kind of environmentalism that is good. But environmental laws made it very difficult to build things in this country and created this caution about technological progress that has seeped into our culture. Suddenly, we saw all this negativity about the future. The book Limits to Growth came out. You had Silent Spring; you had this confluence of factors that created the notion that it was silly to think that the future would be better. And unfortunately, that’s where we still are today.

Do you see the degrowth mindset that’s very popular today as a direct descendant of 1970s environmentalism? 

We hear the same language and ideas today that we heard 50 years ago. There is an idea stagnation, a certain point of view that froze in about 1972 and has not changed. You can imagine an environmental movement that wants cleaner air, that doesn’t want lead in our gasoline so that we are healthier and happier. But the environmentalism we got said that humans were the problem on the planet. Fears about radiation turned into the anti-nuclear craze. You had people with a problem with capitalism who saw nuclear power as a consumerist conspiracy to strip the planet. These views came together in the Vietnam War, which they saw as a perfect example of US techno-capitalism run amok. They saw it as this mega machine of the military and science and corporate America that was not only ruining this country through war but would eventually ruin the planet. And you see many of those same ideas today with people who don’t like big tech and fear science. That view has just re-manifested in this degrowth movement.

How do we nurture an up-wing culture?

To believe that progress is worth it, people need to believe that they can adapt to change, and that progress will lead to a better world. So that’s what we have to get across. One thing that kept popping into my head when I was writing this book was the “Doomsday Clock,” which was started during the Cold War and was supposed to tell us how close we were to midnight or absolute nuclear destruction. It’s still around today, measuring the risk of everything from AI to pandemics and inequality. I want a Genesis Clock. How close are we to a period of amazing progress? Are we reducing the number of people in extreme poverty? How close are we to creating energy sources that are clean, abundant, and cheap? How close are we to dawn? If we start thinking about possibilities rather than constraints, we could have a very different society, which is more likely to make those achievements happen.

Another great thing I would like to return to is World’s Fairs. World’s Fairs were places where people would go to see new technologies up close. I think of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, which had a 20-minute ride through the world of tomorrow with all the classic stereotypes: undersea cities, space colonies, soaring skyscrapers. People saw what we were trying to build. Fundamentally, economic growth is about change, change for the better, but it’s still change. You have to convince people to tolerate that.

Big, exciting, inspirational projects also play a role, like Apollo. Maybe we should think about trying to build a space elevator. But listen, I work at a think tank. I’m going to talk about policies. And I think, again, a lot of what went wrong is policy-related. For every policy a government does, someone should be asking, “Is this making it easier or harder to innovate?” We also need economic openness. Letting strivers, smart, talented people, come to your country where they can do great things. Great Elon Musk quote: “There’s no better place in the world to make your dreams come true than the United States.” That’s important. But I think what’s more important than policies is thinking about what we want those policies to accomplish. We want connection, the ability for people and their ideas to connect so that we can create an innovative economy and build the world we want.

How hopeful are you that humanity will embrace this up-wing vision? 

I wasn’t hopeful when I started writing the book, but I’m more hopeful now. I see things like this nuclear renaissance. The rejection of nuclear power encapsulates everything that went wrong. But that is changing. They’re building and recommissioning reactors across Europe and even in Japan. It’s hard to do a poll about people’s views of technology, but that’s a great stand-in.

I think about my friends on the left who are talking about the abundance left or supply-side liberalism. I may not agree with their methods, but they are thinking about how to make America more productive. That’s fantastic. And, of course, competition with China. If OpenAI had been a Chinese company rather than an American one, it would have been a Sputnik moment. I think that the fear of losing the AI race is also a tailwind.

World Bank | Economic Growth

Developing Countries Have Seen Sustained Growth Since 1987

“Since the late 1980s, the classification of countries into income categories has transformed. The number of low-income countries has steadily declined, while the number of high-income countries has increased.

This shift reflects broader global economic developments, including sustained growth in many developing countries, greater integration into the global economy, and the effects of policy reforms and international organizations’ support. In 1987, 30% of reporting countries were classified as low-income and 25% as high-income countries. By 2024, these ratios shifted to 12% low-income and 40% high-income.”

From World Bank.

Blog Post | Population Growth

No, Prosperity Doesn’t Cause Population Collapse

Wealth doesn’t have to mean demographic decline.

Chelsea Follett —

Summary: For decades, experts assumed that rising prosperity inevitably led to falling birth rates, fueling concerns about population collapse in wealthy societies. But new data show that this link is weakening or even reversing, with many high-income countries now seeing higher fertility than some middle-income nations. As research reveals that wealth and fertility can rise together, policymakers have an opportunity to rethink outdated assumptions about tradeoffs between prosperity and demographic decline.

For years, it was treated as a demographic law: as countries grow wealthier, they have fewer children. Prosperity, it was believed, inevitably drove birth rates down. This assumption shaped countless forecasts about the future of the global population.

And in many wealthy countries, such as South Korea and Italy, very low fertility rates persist. But a growing body of research is challenging the idea that rising prosperity always suppresses fertility.

University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde recently observed that middle-income countries are now experiencing lower total fertility rates than many advanced economies ever have. His latest work shows that Thailand and Colombia each have fertility rates around 1.0 births per woman, which is even lower than rates in well-known low-fertility advanced economies such as Japan, Spain and Italy.

“My conjecture is that by 2060 or so, we might see rich economies as a group with higher [total fertility rates] than emerging economies,” Fernández-Villaverde predicts.

This changing relationship between prosperity and fertility is already apparent in Europe. For many years, wealthier European countries tended to have lower birth rates than poorer ones. That pattern weakened around 2017, and by 2021 it had flipped.

This change fits a broader historical pattern. Before the Industrial Revolution, wealthier families generally had more children. The idea that prosperity leads to smaller families is a modern development. Now, in many advanced economies, that trend is weakening or reversing. The way that prosperity influences fertility is changing yet again. Wealth and family size are no longer pulling in opposite directions.

This shift also calls into question long-standing assumptions about women’s income and fertility. For years, many economists thought that higher salaries discouraged women from having children by raising the opportunity cost of taking time off work. That no longer seems to hold in many countries.

In several high-income nations, rising female earnings are now associated with higher fertility. Studies in Italy and the Netherlands show that couples where both partners earn well are more likely to have children, while low-income couples are the least likely to do so. Similar findings have emerged from Sweden as well. In Norway, too, higher-earning women now tend to have more babies.

This trend is not limited to Europe. In the United States, richer families are also beginning to have more babies than poorer ones, reversing patterns observed in previous decades. A study of seven countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia — found that in every case, higher incomes for both men and women increased the chances of having a child.

This growing body of evidence challenges the assumption that prosperity causes people to have fewer children. 

Still, birth rates are falling across much of the world, with many countries now below replacement level. While this trend raises serious concerns, such as the risk of an aging and less innovative population and widening gaps in public pension solvency, it is heartening that it is not driven by prosperity itself. Wealth does not automatically lead to fewer children, and theories blaming consumerism or rising living standards no longer hold up.

Although the recent shift in the relationship between prosperity and fertility is welcome, it is not yet enough to raise fertility to the replacement rate of around 2.1 children per woman — a challenging threshold to reach.

But the growing number of policymakers around the world concerned about falling fertility can consider many simple, freedom-enhancing reforms that lower barriers to raising a family, including reforms to education, housing and childcare. Still, it’s important to challenge the common assumption that prosperity inevitably leads to lower birth rates: Wealth does not always mean fewer children.

This article was published at The Hill on 6/16/2025.

Axios | Wealth & Poverty

Being a Millionaire Is Kind of Middle Class Now

“The number of ‘everyday’ millionaires — those with wealth between $1 million and $5 million — is soaring…

There were nearly 52 million ‘everyday’ millionaires in the world last year, per a recent report from UBS. That’s four times the number in 2000.

Even accounting for inflation, the number of everyday millionaires in 2024 was 2.5 times what it was in 2000. The wealth manager does not break down how many of these folks live in the U.S. But America has, by far, more millionaires than any other country in the world.

New American millionaires were minted at a rate of about 1,000 a day last year. There are nearly 24 million millionaires in the U.S., 40% of the global total, and about four times the number than runner-up China.”

From Axios.

World Bank | Quality of Government

Côte D’Ivoire’s Land Reforms Are Unlocking Jobs and Growth

“Secure land tenure transforms dormant assets into active capital—unlocking access to credit, encouraging investment, and spurring entrepreneurship. These are the building blocks of job creation and economic growth.

When landowners have secure property rights, they invest more in their land. Existing data shows that with secure property rights, agricultural output increases by 40% on average. Efficient land rental markets also significantly boost productivity, with up to 60% productivity gains and 25% welfare improvements for tenants…

Building on a long-term partnership with the World Bank, the Government of Côte d’Ivoire has dramatically accelerated delivery of formal land records to customary landholders in rural areas by implementing legal, regulatory, and institutional reforms and digitizing the customary rural land registration process, which is led by the Rural Land Agency (Agence Foncière Rurale – AFOR).

This has enabled a five-fold increase in the number of land certificates delivered in just five years compared to the previous 20 years.”

From World Bank.