“U.S. military operations targeting transnational criminal groups escalate to direct strikes in Venezuela, destabilizing the Maduro government” – marked “probably or highly likely to occur in 2026” when this was written in December 2025. It took three days.
high likelihood, high impact: conflict over (clearly illegal under international law) Israeli settlements in the West Bank; “renewed fighting in the Gaza strip” is also listed as depressingly “likely to occur” [I find this deeply tragic and a human rights catastrophe for everyone involved. I am not sure I find it hugely consequential for global war and peace. I think it is more politically correct for the U.S. media to treat it as such. There are other human rights catastrophes going on in the world which will not get equal media or political attention.]
“An intensification of the Russia-Ukraine war, caused by expanding attacks on each side’s critical infrastructure and population centers” – also listed as “probable or likely to occur” – so they don’t see this one dying down in 2026 either
“Renewed armed conflict between Iran and Israel” – they mark this one as “an even chance of occurring in 2026”
“A state or nonstate entity undertakes a highly disruptive, artificial intelligence–enabled cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure” – also marked as an even chance, and I find this one deeply disturbing
“Intensified military, economic, and political pressure by China on Taiwan precipitates a severe cross-strait crisis involving other countries in the region and the United States” – also marked as 50% likely to happen in 2026
“Armed clashes between Russia and one or more NATO member countries, precipitated by increasing Russian provocations toward European states” – 50% likely
“A resumption of North Korean nuclear weapons tests heightens tensions on the Korean Peninsula, triggering an armed confrontation involving other regional powers and the United States” – 50% likely
So the cyberattack we need to be ready for – are we? Not to worry, I am sure the tech companies that created the technology underlying the weapons also have massive government contracts to create counter-measures. Let’s hope the power stays on.
So if we were to gamble (which I guess we can on the futures sites), we would put even money on armed conflict breaking out in at least 2 of these 4 situations, and we should not expect to get through the year without at least one of them: (1) between Iran and Israel, with the U.S. pretending to be reluctantly dragged in [3 NUCLEAR STATES], (2) between China and Taiwan/U.S./Japan [2 NUCLEAR STATES, 1 THRESHOLD NUCLEAR STATE, 1 AMBIGUOUS THRESHOLD NUCLEAR CITY-STATELET], (3) Russia and NATO [4 NUCLEAR STATES], (4) North Korea and South Korea/U.S. [2 NUCLEAR STATES, 1 THRESHOLD NUCLEAR STATES].
There are a couple things they say are low likelihood, so at least we have these: a U.S. armed attack on Mexico, and a China/U.S. armed conflict over the Philippines.
An insurance company called Aon publishes an annual list of natural disasters and their estimated costs. They also provide fatalities. Costs and fatalities do not track because the highest costs tend to be in developed countries and the highest fatalities tend to be in developing countries. Case in point – the most expensive disasters of 2025 were the January California wildfires (~USD 60B, 31-400 deaths depending on source), and the worst loss of life was the flooding in Southeast Asia that just happened in November (~USD 25B, 1750 deaths). Given what I know about real estate and informal land use in Southeast Asia, the latter was a massive disaster.
Other notable disasters were flooding in China, Pakistan/Bangladesh, and Texas; and hurricanes/typhoons that hit Jamaica/Cuba/Bahamas, Philippines, Australia, and Reunion which is a small island near Madagascar and Mauritius. Finally, a drought affecting Brazil makes the “top 10” list.
Every single one of these disasters is a type that will be more frequent and more severe due to global warming, I would say. Flooding, fires, and food – this is how climate change will hit home for almost everyone eventually.
The headline calls 2025 “one of the costliest years”. Is this right? It’s hard to say, but I got CoPilot to give me a plot of estimates released by Aon for the past 10 years. It wasn’t able to access Q4 for 2025 so I asked it to project the trend from the first three quarters, which is likely to be inaccurate. But nonetheless, 2025 doesn’t look particularly exceptional over the past decade. This doesn’t prove anything except that year to year variability is high.
CoPilot (ChatGPT4?) – not extensively verified by any human!
It’s easy to find predictions for where AI technology, the “AI race”, and the knock-on effects for the US and world economies might go in 2026. I find myself slightly fatigued from hearing about it, but nonetheless it is important.
The AI-driven stock market bubble may pop, or it may not. The exact words here are “the beginning of the end”. Well, I can predict with 100% confidence that the stock market will either go up, down, or stay the same.
AI will be discussed in the US midterm elections.
Okay, nothing too earth shattering here. On the subject of “countries in the AI race”, one perspective is that the US is focusing nearly all its investment on private sector AI, while China is spreading its investments across a basket of technology and infrastructure investments including AI, “electric vehicles, batteries, robotics, solar panels, wind turbines and other forms of advanced manufacturing” (“the Antimonopolist” blog). The US was also at least trying to do this during and after the Covid-19 pandemic era, but that sensible long-term strategy has been monkey-wrenched by a certain fool in 2025.
Then again, we could ask whether the basic econ 101 lessons are completely disproven? Is it possible we should invest more in what we are good at and sell it to others, while buying things from them that they can make better, faster, or cheaper? There’s a tension of course between being highly efficient and focused on comparative advantage, and also being diversified so you are resilient if something happens to upset your trade flows. But we are certainly not seeing rational debate about all this in the US political context.
Chartbook makes an argument that if you compare the US and European economies, it is really just the performance (measured by profits and stock market values) of the “superstar” US tech firms that makes the US look better. And while life at the top of the heap may skew the US numbers, quality of life for the average working European aided by their bumbling, stumbling social welfare systems is actually not that bad.
Rapacious corporations sometimes put out interesting infographics. I wonder what it takes to get a job like this in one of these corporations, where I assume most jobs are not like this. Anyway, this entry from Goldman Sachs has some interesting ones. I’ve screenshotted a few interesting graphics – this is fair use and I am steering people to your publicly posted info, please don’t sue me guys!
So basically, a bank or bank-like entity is allowed to take a dollar and issue you a digital currency that you can spend just like a dollar. Crucially, it appears that they have to keep your dollar as a dollar or invest it in U.S. Treasury bonds while they are holding it. So they can make interest on your dollar and you cannot, but they can’t actually create new money by issuing more stablecoins than people give them dollars.
U.S. government debt interest payments are historically high
We often hear “debt is X percent of GDP”. But this is comparing a stock and a flow, so there is no reason 100% has any meaning as a benchmark and it certainly does not mean the entire economy is being spent to service the debt. This measure is really a proxy for interest payments as a percent of GDP. This is really the “hangover” from past spending – what we are spending on interest can’t be spent on anything else, and we can’t really control it in the short term. What is really concerning here is that the high interest payments of the 1980s might be explained by high interest rates, but the debt payment level never came down as interest rates came down during the historically low interest rate period since then. Now interest rates are spiking, and this is directly sucking dollars away from real priorities. So clearly, we have to either “grow our way out”, reduce spending, and/or increase taxes (and/or tariffs) if we want to reduce this number. But reducing spending, increasing taxes, and putting up trade barriers all tend to decrease growth in the near term so this is the conundrum. The government can just create money of course, but this tends to be inflationary and at the moment, we appear to be in the midst of a spiral of inflationary expectations that is not going to go away soon. Thanks Biden…but really thanks Obama, Trump and Biden administrations for making the necessary hard choices to stimulate the economy and head off panic during the financial and Covid-19 crises. This has left less slack to deal with the next crisis though – the current number may be sustainable absent an external shock, but of course external shocks happen. The only good thing about external shocks is they sometimes tend to reduce interest rates. By the way, this section of the publication concludes by showing that government debt is not a uniquely U.S. problem.
Basically, it is just counting the number of newspaper articles mentioning geopolitical conflict in a specified number of “papers of record”. I suppose it provides a somewhat objective measure to ground discussions on interest rates for them. But it could be useful for the rest of us to gauge whether our impressions of geopolitical instability are matching the evidence.
Now is the time on the show when I summarize my monthly wrap-up posts and try to draw some conclusions.
2025 Post Roundup
Most frightening and/or depressing story of each month:
JANUARY: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.
FEBRUARY: Donald Shoup died in February. He was a pioneer in parking economics, which doesn’t sound all that sexy, but his clear explanations really helped me see the light of what walkable, livable, healthy and low environmental impact cities can potentially be. What they can’t be is low-density and automobile-oriented. I put this in the depressing category both because I am sad at his passing, and because I do not see these trends going in the right direction.
MARCH: The U.S. might be headed forrecession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competentadvice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.
APRIL: Maybe an irreversible methane tipping point is happening. This could be the scariest thing out there short of nuclear war.
MAY: The India-Pakistan conflict seems to have died down a bit (or did the media outlets I pay attention to just lose interest?). But both the potential nuclear conflict and the long-term loss of glacial ice billions of people depend on are terrifying.
JULY: In case we still don’t have enough feedback loops to worry about, loss of Antarctic ice could also trigger volcanoes under Antarctica.
AUGUST: A gigantic incoming object could be the alien ship that will put us out of our misery. Okay, probably not. The interesting and scary thing is that as our ability to look at the nearby universe improves, we are seeing more surprising stuff. But how are we supposed to think about let alone do anything about a very low probability existential threat like this one? We are not even responding to the “somewhat likely” (nuclear war, pandemics) and “likely happening right now” (a climate tipping point leading to future collapse) existential threats in front of us. I suggested that the tipping point will be called in retrospect, and 2025 might be a nice round number for the history books.
SEPTEMBER: We are most likely on a path to the AMOC tipping point. I distinguished between the tipping point, which is when collapse becomes inevitable, and the actual collapse itself. These are separated in time, which means the tipping point may only be called in retrospect when it is too late to prevent the collapse. This is why being “on the path to the tipping point” is important, because we can still do something.
OCTOBER: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!
NOVEMBER: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.
JANUARY: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).
FEBRUARY: The fool in the White House and the devils whispering in his ear can weaken enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, but they can’t actually make laws go away. They can try to ignore them, and then we will see how effective our court system and third party legal action can be at activating the checks and balances we are supposed to have. The other potential players are congress and widespread public action, and these do not seem to be active at the moment.
APRIL: 3-30-300 is a nice, simple idea. “you can see 3 trees from your window, your neighborhood has 30% tree canopy cover, and you are within 300 m of a half-hectare park.” Sure, you have to figure out some details and make some sustained effort over time to implement simple ideas. Still, not rocket science. Combined with the “15 minute city”, this is a pretty good urban planning philosophy that should be communicable.
MAY: I came up with four keys to my personal happiness in the moment: sleep, coffee, exercise, and down time. What, no family, community, career accomplishment, or making a lasting difference in the world you ask? No, those are about reflecting on life satisfaction, not being in the moment. No “fun”? Well, my idea of fun may be different than your idea of fun. I wish you joy and happiness as you pursue your idea of fun, only try to have some empathy and don’t force your own idea of fun on others. So there.
JUNE: This is the best I can do – Biden wasn’t able to take political credit for his infrastructure and energy transition accomplishments because his accomplishment was getting money appropriated for them, whereas implementation of these will be painfully hard and painfully slow. (Yes, I believe based on evidence and logic that investments in infrastructure and energy production that do not destroy the biosphere are good ideas.) But at least part of this agenda will be implemented over time, and Trump is spending substantial energy of his own only partially rolling back these programs.
SEPTEMBER: Spain has been so successful at rolling out solar power that the price of solar power has “collapsed”. I’ve been beating a drum lately that economic incentives have tipped in favor of renewable energy worldwide and this fact is being largely hidden from us in the US by propaganda.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.
DECEMBER: From Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions in the US and most developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Global internal combustion engine vehicles peaked around 2018, while electric vehicle sales are rising. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially as costs of existing technology fall, and there are some promising advances in materials science that could improve wind turbines and batteries. There is hope for fusion power, although it still seems to be the proverbial two decades away.
Most interesting story of each month, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
FEBRUARY: I continued to follow the emergence of AI agents in February. Outside the bananas state of U.S. and global geopolitics, this is one of the biggest things going on, or at least a big change playing out quickly. Even a “singularity watch” item – I’m going to give a 5% chance this is the start of the singularity. Hopefully not the Terminator version. But has anyone noticed we now have Starlink and Stargate – these even sound like Skynet. We already had Operation Warp Speed of course. What puzzles me is that conservatives usually don’t like science fiction because they lack imagination. So either somebody is a science fiction fan, or more likely they have these words in the backs of their minds from indirect exposure to science fiction, and now they think they thought of them.
MARCH: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.
APRIL: I made what I would consider a “common sense” trade policy proposal. “I generally support…free trade. But if we are going to trade freely, we need a safety net for people who are hurt. We could do this with generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs. We could help people relocate to places with jobs. We could provide much better communication and transportation infrastructure allowing them to commute regionally to places with jobs. We could educate their children so they are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We could institute a value added tax on our productive, growing economy and use it to provide services or cash to workers. We could invest even more in research and development to make our economy even more productive and growing. We could invest in neighboring countries to help them be more productive and growing, import cheap stuff from them, and reduce some of the migration pressure on our borders.”
MAY: The U.S. approach to R&D is a partnership between government (through both grants and procurement power), universities, and the private sector (historically, including regulated monopolies like Bell Labs). Other countries including China have copied this model somewhat successfully, and our own government taking a monkey wrench to our own system that has worked so well seems like a really stupid idea. First we need to stop the damage and then let’s hope it can be repaired.
JUNE: A Minimal Quality of Life index has been developed which is intended to better capture the cost of living real working families and parents are experiencing.
JULY: Policies to increase housing supply in the most economically dynamic cities can theoretically accelerate economic growth, since housing supply is not expanding fast enough and is therefore holding economic growth back. A lot of discussion has been focused around zoning, which is a local matter. But I offered some additional suggestions: investment in better transportation and communication infrastructure to reduce the friction of working across distances between homes and offices, effectively enlarging housing markets. And serious investments in construction productivity, which has been flat in the U.S. for decades. Ideas include more factory-based modular components. The U.S. has tried and failed at this before, but of course China is now leading the way. AI should also be pretty good at construction scheduling and logistics. The U.S. is somewhat successfully partnering with Korean ship-building expertise, at least on a small scale.
AUGUST: Designer babies are here, and the trend towards the rich and powerful accelerating their own evolution (and a few governments making this available to the masses) can only accelerate.
OCTOBER: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.
NOVEMBER: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.
DECEMBER: BBC lists 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century. Highlights include various genetic technologies (stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, tissue engineering for human organ transplants), attribution analysis, and of course large language models. Science magazine echoes some of these adds gene editing, new antibiotics, and progress on heat-resistant rice strains as 2025 breakthroughs.
Brilliant(?) Synthesis
The world is slowly bending the curve on emissions and energy. One theme that emerges is the clear arrival of economically viable renewable energy technology. All the international treaty-making and policy hand-wringing might have accelerated us toward this point, but it is now technology and markets that are finally in the driver’s seat. I was surprised to learn that peak emissions have already occurred in the U.S. and other developed countries. Emissions are still high and growing in developing and middle income countries including China and India. This makes sense – for all we hear about China being so advanced, their levels of income, consumption, and pollution at the individual level are still catching up to western countries. This is both good for them and terrifying for the world because China and India (add Indonesia, Brazil, others here if you want to) have such vast populations that their impact is going to dwarf anything the rest of the world does going forward. They are going through the same transition that the US, UK, Germany, Japan, or whatever western countries you want to name went through, just later in history, on a vaster scale, and when our planet’s ability to absorb the impact is mostly used up. So this is how China can simultaneously be the world leader on clean technology and the world’s largest creator of world-destroying pollution. Now, we want Africa to eventually develop and lift another 1.5 (headed to 3!) billion people out of poverty, but clearly we have to find lower-impact ways to develop if our civilization is going to survive.
But we could end up calling 2025 as the tipping point to disaster in retrospect. Getting over that technology and cost-effectiveness hump is nice, but it may still be too little too late to avoid disaster. An important concept I discovered/reminded myself about in 2025 is that a tipping point is not the point where a system changes drastically, but the point where that change becomes inevitable. As such, we may call the tipping point only in retrospect. The gradual increases in heat and sea level – overlaid with extreme events like heat waves, floods, fires, and storms – may have put us on a path towards unavoidable destruction of our food supply and our urban areas. That’s my elevator pitch for how climate change is hitting home – climate change is coming for our food and it’s coming for our houses. Add to the trends and extreme events the possibility that we have crossed a threshold leading to runaway methane releases and major shifts in ocean circulation patterns. We may look back and determine that the 2020s were when these outcomes became inevitable due to our failure to act quickly enough or on a broad enough scale. And if we decide the 2020s or mid-2020s are when this outcome became inevitable, why not pick 2025 as a nice round number when the climate shit hit the fan?
Earth’s ecosystems are past the tipping point. Yesterday’s environmentalism has sort of evolved to focus almost fully on climate change, but intertwined with the climate crisis is the destruction and destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems, from the oceans to tropical forests. It is hard to make that elevator pitch that draws a straight line from ecosystem and biodiversity collapse to human wellbeing. A reliable food supply is certainly part of it, and yet our industrial food system is somewhat decoupled from natural ecosystems. To me this is a moral failing of our species and civilization, and it is just deeply sad. While there still might be a theoretical possibility to head off the worst possible damage to our climate, the damage to our ecosystems cannot be reversed at this point. Of course, this does not mean we should give up. We can always take action to make the outcome less bad than it could have been. We have a moral responsibility to do so, but I do not see much public or political energy directed at this issue. And maybe it makes sense to focus on the relatively simple to understand issue and relatively straightforward solutions (which is not to say easy!) to greenhouse gas emissions. Getting emissions under control is certainly necessary to protect ecosystems though not sufficient.
While we are focused on emerging artificial intelligence technology, biotechnology has matured all around us. We are hearing that artificial intelligence may be a bubble waiting to pop in the near term, a promising boost to productivity that will raise all boats in the medium term, and either a ticket to utopia or an existential threat in the (somewhat?) long(er?) term. But while so much attention is focused on this emerging technology, biotechnology has sort of matured and arrived fully all around us. We can now edit the genes of embryonic and adult humans, grow genetically engineered human body parts in pigs and then implant them back in humans, and genetically engineer vaccines. In agriculture, genetic technology has some promise to overcome the downward pressure on our food supply caused by global heating and extreme weather. The fact that all this technology is available doesn’t mean it will automatically applied morally or that it will be accessible evenly across countries and demographic groups, of course. Biotechnology is improving many of our lives and has potential to improve all human lives, but reaching that potential and managing the risks is going to vary depending on where you are and who you are.
It’s crystal clear the United States is in decline. The child poverty metric (13% in 2023) alone is damning. The state of Native Americans. Entrenched resistance to rational energy, transportation, housing, trade, and immigration policies with solid evidence of success in leading countries elsewhere in the world. Active, intentional weakening of Civil Rights Act enforcement. Corruption and propaganda (as I write this on January 4, it appears the US has invaded a sovereign UN nation-state to make it safe for US-headquartered multinational oil companies, who bankroll our elections). Intentionally destroying our research and development system which got us to the level of prosperity we enjoy today. The ineffectiveness of our legislative branch. We’re lucky at the moment that the stock market and incomes of top earners are allowing our economy to keep bumping along. If there is a financial panic or some external shock, I can envision the country going into a tailspin the current clowns and amateurs in charge will not be able to competently manage. Let’s hope we are lucky enough to bumble through the next three years without a major crisis, and then able to get better leadership in place. Chillingly, I probably said something like this in January 2018, and we only made it to the two year mark.
Whither war and peace? The stories that have come out about Israel using algorithms to target suspected Hamas associates and their families are chilling to me. As the use of big data and artificial intelligence becomes more and more widespread in all aspects of our economy and lives, this is one cautionary tale of how it can be used by governments in immoral ways. I see the technology as neutral, but we clearly need safeguards on how it is applied in the worlds of surveillance, social control, and outright war. We also had several examples of direct military confrontations between nuclear-armed nation-states in 2025 – India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, the U.S. and Iran; and by proxy the U.S. and western Europe vs. Russia. This is clearly very risky for the future of the whole world. I would also note that in all these cases except the Russia one, the supposed liberal democracy appears to be the more aggressive party. (The U.S. has also illegally invaded Venezuela as I write this.) So the parliamentary and presidential democratic systems we have in place are not acting as safeguards against cross-border aggression like we might have hoped they would. Luckily none of these conflicts seemed to come close to a nuclear exchange in 2025, but we can’t continue to rely on luck. We need renewed respect for sovereignty as a bedrock principle. We need to reverse the recent expansion of nuclear arsenals, and we need new talks and treaties on arms control and non-proliferation. And we need to get serious about the risks of biological and AI-powered cyberwarfare.
Bloomberg has an article on progress in U.S. transportation policy and technology in 2025. My thoughts in brackets.
New bus lanes in a number of U.S. cities. [This is really a big win, when modern cities around the world are expanding subway and light rail networks? This “win” represents tiny, incremental progress or holding the line in our current reactionary cultural and political climate. Calling this a win is a pretty good indicator of where this climate stands.]
New York City congestion pricing. [This is an evidence-supported, objectively very good policy that probably all major cities should be following. The fact that one major city is able to do it against massive external opposition is an indication of our current reactionary cultural and political climate. One thing that makes this work in NYC, I believe, is that they have one municipal transit agency in charge of roads/streets/bridges, public transportation, and parking, and they also have a successful and powerful interstate transportation commission that coordinates well with that agency. I’d like to see some journalism on what the legislative and institutional barriers are to achieving this in other major cities, even if we were to eventually emerge from the current reactionary cultural and political climate. For example, in Philadelphia we have a state-chartered regional public transportation authority that operates buses, subways and trains; another interstate commission that operates bridges and some trains; a neighboring state-chartered authority that operates some buses and trains; a municipal authority (which has been state-controlled in the past) that regulates street parking and parking garages, and a municipal transportation department that designs/constructs/maintains most streets, although some streets are designed/constructed/maintained by the state transportation department. All these entities are mostly uncoordinated and certainly do not share revenue. So it would be virtually impossible to use parking and bridge toll revenue to cover public transportation costs, even though this would make total sense if the objective were to move people from point A to point B efficiently, safely, and cheaply. (Would this not be the objective of any rational transportation policy?) Could all these agencies be reorganized to look more like the NYC system? Planning and implementing something like that would be a heavy lift, but again I would like to know if it would even be legally possible or if legislation at the state level in multiple states would be required. State-level legislation in Pennsylvania to rationalize policies in the major metropolitan areas is virtually impossible in the current reactionary cultural and political climate…]
Automatic speed controls in cars. There are some minor wins allowing judges to impose this on people who have speeding tickets. This makes sense to me, but seems fairly small and incremental. I might be the only one looking forward to automating as much vehicle operation as possible. Let violations of speed limits and intersection signals be matters for your vehicle warranty or insurance company, not decisions of human drivers to take reckless risks or not.]
Legalizing small cars and golf carts on public streets. [I’m mostly for this. Vehicles designed for highway travel are the wrong way to get around inside cities. The problem is that you put these lighter vehicles on the public streets, and human beings in them are going to be hurt and killed by other human beings choosing to irresponsibly operate highway vehicles inside cities. They will also hurt and kill pedestrians on occasion. You need to either have separate infrastructure for the light vehicles, or have vehicles regulated or controlled by computers or passive means (see above). Advances in street design, construction and maintenance in the U.S. are so slow I find it hard to hold out hope that there will be big changes in the course of a single generation of humans. But technology is moving much faster so I am going to put more of my hopes for near-term progress in the technology basket.]
So there it is. I don’t have much hope for seeing widespread progress in subway, light rail, and modern street design and construction (with separate infrastructure and signals for pedestrians, light vehicles, and highway vehicles) in U.S. cities in the next few years. We can hope for slow, incremental progress on congestion pricing, parking pricing and policy, and passive speed controls for some vehicles. The rollout of automated, electric vehicles has been slower than I might have predicted 5-10 years ago, but it is happening. It is uneven because the barriers seem to be more legal/institutional/cultural/political than technological and this varies by location. And it’s not a straight-up red/blue divide because pro-big-business forces on the right are favoring automated vehicles at the same time reactionary cultural/political forces on the right and pro-labor forces on the left are opposing them. So this tension will just play out state-by-state and city-by-city for some time to come. Very slowly, we may realize that the demand to devote so much of our urban space to parking and maneuvering inefficient vehicles has decreased. This feels like it might take a decade or more and be obvious to most people only in retrospect. Overall, when Americans travel I think we will increasingly get the sense that urban conditions in our country are continuing to stagnate while European and Asian cities march into the future. Those of us Americans who don’t travel will be cocooned in reactionary cultural/political propaganda and will not realize life is improving elsewhere while transportation in our cities is stuck at a 1970s technology and safety level.
May the streets of our cities be soaked with less blood in 2026 and beyond!
thegreatestbooks.org aggregates 41 “best of” lists. Here are the first 5 that catch my eye:
#7: Death Of The Author by Nnedi Okorafor. “After losing her job and facing family pressure, Zelu writes an experimental science-fiction novel about androids and AI in a post‑human world. As her book takes on a life of its own, the boundaries between her fiction and her reality begin to blur, forcing her to reckon with love, loss, and the power of stories.”
#10: King Of Ashes by S. A. Cosby. “Roman Carruthers returns to his Virginia hometown after his father is badly injured and discovers his family is in deeper trouble than he expected: a brother owing dangerous money to criminals and a sister determined to uncover the mystery of their mother’s disappearance years earlier. Using his financial skills and ruthless determination, Roman must confront old secrets and new threats to protect his family before everything unravels.” [I suppose just because I have a Virginia hometown. One assumes we are not talking about suburban DC here.]
#11: Abundance by Ezra Klein. “Abundance argues that many modern shortages—from housing and workers to clean energy and chips—stem not from conspiracies but from a failure to build and adapt: past rules and fixes have become obstacles to new solutions. Klein and Thompson examine political, regulatory, and cultural barriers across sectors and call for a mindset and institutions that prioritize construction, scaling, and practical problem-solving over preservation and restraint.” Well, that is not really how I summarized the (reviews and summaries I have read of) the book. But looking back after some time, many of the themes ring true to me. As a political agenda, it does not. The Democrats’ recent harping on the word “affordability” seems much more likely to hit the political mark.
#13: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami. “In a near-future world where dreams are monitored, Sara is detained by a government agency after an algorithm predicts she will harm the person she loves. Held in a retention center with other women whose dreams are used as evidence, she faces shifting rules and prolonged confinement. A new arrival unsettles the facility’s order and sets Sara on a path that forces her to confront the surveillance systems controlling her life.” Some obvious similarities to The Minority Report by Phillip K. Dick. Which was a neat story so why shouldn’t talented sci-fi authors continue riffing on the general idea.
#15: Tilt by Emma Pattee. “Annie, nine months pregnant, is at IKEA when a major earthquake devastates Portland. Cut off from her husband and without phone or money, she must cross the chaotic city on foot. Along the way she encounters danger, compassion, and an unlikely ally, while confronting fears about her marriage, career, and impending motherhood as she tries to reach safety.” Sure, the author is using the disaster as a back drop for character development, I am sure. But a Pacific Northwest earthquake/volcano/tsunami disaster is a scenario we hope won’t happen anytime soon, but could happen anytime.
Does Science with a capital S speak for science? I don’t know, science, or nature or Nature might have something to say about that. Small-s science, after all, is just a way of asking questions and trying to strengthen our confidence in what we think we know about nature. Despite all that, the magazine/publishing conglomerate known as Science nominates candidates for scientific breakthrough of the year and then chooses one. This year’s winner is renewable energy.
This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June, according to energy think tank Ember. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year…
China’s mighty industrial engine is the driver. After years of patiently nurturing the sector through subsidies, China now dominates global production of renewable energy technologies. It makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries, at prices no competitor can match.
The article makes the point that this progress is not really a technological breakthrough, but rather a successful scaling up of technology invented during the space race half a century ago. Materials science does offer some possibilities for breakthroughs on the near horizon:
Solar cells today are made of crystalline silicon, but another kind of crystal, perovskites, can be layered in tandem with silicon to make cells that gain efficiency by capturing more colors of light. Material advances are enabling wind turbine blades to get longer and harvest more energy, while designs for floating turbines could vastly expand the offshore areas in which they could be deployed. And the giant lithium-ion batteries now used to store energy when sunshine and wind falter could one day give way to other chemistries. Vanadium flow batteries and sodium batteries could be cheaper; zinc-air batteries could hold far more energy.
And there you go – an agenda for research and development that the U.S. could get behind, or better yet, cooperate internationally on a win-win basis.
Meanwhile the nominees that were not chosen were:
Gene-editing to cure rare diseases in human babies and adults
New antibiotics effective against antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, which continues to evolve
A breakthrough in understanding how cancer can spread through the nervous system
Advances in telescopes
DNA reconstruction of early humans
Large language models conducting math and scientific experiments on their own – In 2025 this was done with thorny math problems, chemical and drug development. The article notes that AI agents did not really live up to their hype overall in 2025.
Stuff involving subatomic particles. Honestly, this stuff is interesting but it’s hard for us normals to draw straight lines to how it might eventually affect our daily lives. Of course this doesn’t mean it won’t, it just means a lot of twists and turns as it works its way through the worlds of science and technology over time.
Genetically engineered organs grown in pigs and transplanted to people (successfully, at least for a period of months which seems to be much longer than these particular people were expected to live without the experimental transplants.). Are these pig organs or human organs grown in pigs? At some point it doesn’t matter.
Advances in heat-resistant rice
The article makes a parting shot at the U.S. government under Trump, for just intentionally shooting our entire scientific development pipeline in the foot. These were not the actions of a patriot, if I need to remind anyone.
Well, I’m writing this on December 20 so there is always the chance things could change drastically in the next 11 days. And of course, I have no idea when you my dear reader might be reading this. I will just assume you are an alien archaeologist reading this in 3025 as you sift through the rubble of our vanished civilization.
Anyway, a few themes right now:
The possible “AI bubble”. This can refer to the stock market index gains being dominated by AI-related companies. In rational econ world, this should mean that investors collectively think the future earnings of these companies are most likely to be very large.
The companies certainly think their future earnings are likely to be very large, and this justifies borrowing large amounts of money to invest in the technology and infrastructure. This might be okay, but there are a couple concerns. First, loans are being made to these companies under a framework of “speculative private credit“, which some say resembles the sub-prime mortgages leading up to the 2008 crash. You would like to think the banks might know what they are doing, but of course they didn’t leading up to the 2008 crash and the world is still paying the price today.
Second, there are some suggestions that all the borrowing and investing in AI is driven by a fear of not being a “first mover” in some sort of winner-take-all, zero-sum race to artificial general intelligence. And if that is the case, it might come crashing down if the market at some point collectively decides that particular milestone is not in fact on the near term horizon. In other words there is a risk of a hype bubble popping even though the underlying trend of slow, steady, technological progress is bumping along just fine. This is analogous to the dot-com bubble. Technological progress tends to be exponential, but we don’t know if we are on the early, slow and steady part of the curve or close to the knee where it will take off. But collective opinion can be wrong on this either one way or the other.
My head spins when I try to understand the relationships between bond yields, prices, economic growth, and investment returns across countries. But Reuters says real bond yields are negative in many countries and “Five of the Group of Seven major economies have experienced growth contraction this year, with Japan and the euro zone already half way into recession — defined as two quarters of negative growth.” [Um, so if my calculations are correct they had a quarter of negative growth?] There is also a clear real estate bubble deflation going on in China, which looks something like the one in 1980s Japan, but whether it will usher in several “lost decades” like it did there I am not able to say. The quality of life for many citizens of Japan seems to be just fine, I note. And China just really seems to have a winning approach to the intertwined manufacturing, education and research, infrastructure, and export issues.
Climate change is manifesting itself in extreme weather. There is some evidence that recent extreme weather, and not just the steady creeping advance of average temperature and sea levels, has caused gains in crop yields to plateau globally. Then, there are projections showing these yields falling steadily in the future, with the rate of decline of course dependent on the climate scenario chosen. The rate of population growth has slowed and seems likely to eventually plateau itself, but that will take awhile and the world is still projected to add around 2 billion more people (these forecasts themselves subject to scenarios, of course.) Less food and more mouths to feed translates in economic terms to inflation in more developed economies and potentially malnutrition/starvation in less developed ones, and in the segments of society left behind in the more developed ones.
So what did we just learn about the global economy at the end of 2025? Nothing really, except that things are objectively not that bad for many of us humans here on Earth, and yet we are nervous and have some good reasons to be nervous. At a policy level, we can be cautiously optimistic but clearly need contingency plans if things don’t go well. At an individual level, it seems like a good idea to scrape together some well-diversified savings. Maybe owning a bit of land and learning how to grow a bit of one’s own food would not be a terrible contingency plan, and besides this can be fun and rewarding.
There is so much here you could spend all of 2026 digging into the data from 2025 and not get through it. This is a pretty amazing organization! I attempted a top 10 list and only got to 7 because I lumped together some similar things.
Carbon dioxide emissions in the US and other developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Meanwhile they have skyrocketed in China and India and continue to increase more or less exponentially. Per capita emissions follow similar trends. Global sales of internal combustion engine cars appear to have peaked in 2018, and are very slowly declining while sales of electric vehicles are very slowly rising. Overall, the sale of cars in general appears to have declined slightly over the past decade or so. Interesting – does this represent other forms of mobility slowly coming to the fore? The world also appears to have passed “peak air pollution” a few years ago, with the one exception being ammonia from agricultural intensification. (I am not aware of ammonia as an air pollutant being a major human health risk, other than those exposed on or near farms. It is however a critical water pollutant and the intensification bodes badly for our surface and coastal waters. There may also be a connection between ammonia and nitrous oxide as a greenhouse gas that I do not fully understand.)
Two different stories show a democracy index by country for the world and GDP per capita by country for the world. The two maps look about the same. Coincidence?
Does the News Reflect What we Die From? The answer is no, of course. People die from heart attacks, cancer, and strokes, while the news focuses on homicide and other violence. I understand “If it bleeds, it leads” but I have always thought if they just put the anecdotal news in the context of some running statistics, it might help people put things in context. At the same time, another story shows that death rates from heart attacks and strokes have come down dramatically over the past century or so.
Men commit suicide at higher rates than women in every country studied. In the US, the ratio is about 4 to 1 (access to guns, I wonder). In South Korea, only 2 to 1 but the overall rate of suicide is one of the world’s highest. In general, women live longer than men in most countries, but the gap is shocking in Russia. The Covid-19 death rate was also shocking in Russia. Now, part of the issue is the old one where choropleth maps draw your eye to the biggest countries.
Overall, the world has made striking gains in poverty reduction because rates have gone from very high to very low in East Asia and South Asia between about 1990 and 2020. (But notably, Pakistan is lumped with the Middle East rather than South Asia and I am not sure about Bangladesh.) However, the progress stalled around then and has been reversed by increasing poverty in Africa.
The map of where same sex marriage is legal looks a lot like the map of democracy and per capita income. One interesting thing is that many countries recognize foreign same sex marriages even if they do not allow their own citizens to marry. Homophobic attitudes have dropped dramatically in western countries between 1984 (75% in the United States) and 2022 (28%) although they are still higher than in Europe. (The way I look at it, trans-phobia is sort of the new homophobia, now that straight-up homophobia does not represent a viable political stance. Kind of like singling out Haitian or Somali immigrants is the mutated form of racism, now that straight-up anti-black racism is mostly out of style. So ugly as these things are, you could see them as indicators of progress.)
Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially, led by solar energy.
