🔙 Why we retreat from progress

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … journalist and author Adrian Wooldridge on capitalism and meritocracy

In This Issue

The Essay: Why we retreat from progress

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … journalist and author Adrian Wooldridge on capitalism and meritocracy

Micro Reads: the post-modern investment cycle, modular nuclear, geoengineering, and more …

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Quote of the Issue

“The overall results suggest that the United States became less future oriented beginning around 1970. This change has persisted.” - Yale University economist Ray Fair on the decline in US infrastructure spending and rise in budget deficits.

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The Essay

🔙 Why we retreat from progress

Breakthrough mRNA vaccines aren’t the only medical innovations underused during this pandemic. Hundreds of Americans are still dying every day from COVID-19 despite the existence of a highly effective anti-viral pill, Pfizer’s Paxlovid. And while supplies were initially constrained, the company greatly ramped up production earlier this year. The problem then shifted to the pill sitting on pharmacy shelves. Among the culprits: patient awareness, doctor hesitancy, and FDA rules on using the drug.

Thankfully, use is increasing. Earlier this month, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Paxlovid prescriptions in the US increased to nearly 80,000 patients for the week ending April 22, up from about 8,000 in late February. (I’m also thankful that, to my knowledge, Paxlovid hasn’t been the subject of the same sort of kooky conspiracy theories that have plagued the vaccines.) Yet the Paxlovid story reminded my friend Derek Thompson of The Atlantic of another example of an important invention that has been either underused or pretty much rejected. Thompson:

What if I told you that scientists had figured out a way to produce affordable electricity that was 99 percent safer and cleaner than coal or oil, and that this breakthrough produced even fewer emissions per gigawatt-hour than solar or wind? That’s incredible, you might say. We have to build this thing everywhere! The breakthrough I’m talking about is 70 years old: It’s nuclear power. But in the past few decades, the U.S. has actually closed old nuclear plants faster than we’ve opened new ones. This problem is endemic to clean energy. Even many Americans who support decarbonization in the abstract protest the construction of renewable-energy projects in their neighborhood.

The dreams of the past that didn’t happen.

Americans in 2022 do not zoom between mile-high Manhattan skyscrapers in the comfort of our autonomous flying cars. We are not a multi-planetary species where robust 150-year-olds possessing 150-plus IQs spend retirement zipping among space colonies. You will not find intelligent apes chauffeuring us to the airport before we board our 90-minute, sub-orbital hypersonic flight from New York to Paris. Hurricanes are not diverted from coastal cities by bureaucrats at regional weather command centers. And we sure haven’t figured out how to vaccinate against any and all viruses. I mean, we’re not even doing nuclear fission much right now.