This piece is from Issue 18 of Works in Progress, released last week. You can read this article on our website and the rest of the issue here.

In 2020, an odd food product hit the shelves of North American supermarkets, courtesy of the agrofood company Del Monte.

It was a new type of pineapple, called the ‘Pinkglow’, notable for the color of its flesh: not the typical yellow, but a striking pink. It retailed for $49, ten or twenty times as much as a regular pineapple.

The hefty price tag was justified by the Pinkglow’s long development time. Del Monte claims it spent 16 years genetically engineering it. As a 2012 patent describes, the unusual color comes from overexpressing one enzyme and suppressing others so that the naturally occurring red pigment lycopene (think of tomatoes, watermelons, or pink grapefruit) accumulates in the pineapple flesh instead of being converted to yellower substances like beta-carotene, lutein, and zeaxanthin.

But mostly, the Pinkglow is expensive because it is a luxury product. Del Monte’s marketing makes this abundantly clear: the product’s website calls it ‘the jewel of the jungle’ and explicitly encourages consumers to post pictures of it on social media.

It seems silly, doesn’t it? Nobody needed a pink pineapple. Whatever resources Del Monte poured into its development bought precious little for the welfare of humanity: a mere curiosity. Couldn’t we have just gone on enjoying regular yellow pineapples indefinitely?

Perhaps. But it may be useful to remember that the yellow pineapple that we can buy in any supermarket is, itself, the product of many careers’ worth of work. In fact, for centuries, the ‘ordinary’ pineapple was a supremely expensive luxury item in Europe, fit for the early modern equivalent of posting social media pictures (displaying the fruit at dinner parties among aristocrats). It is only because its prestige drove many technical and commercial innovations that the pineapple became commonplace. Del Monte’s pink pineapple is only the latest in a long series of experimentations to make the fruit as tasty and widely available as possible.

A brief history of the pineapple’s rise to fame

The bromeliads are a family of plants native to the tropical and subtropical Americas. Only one is of agricultural importance: Ananas comosus, the pineapple, which still grows today in its original habitat, the tropical forests of what is now Paraguay and southern Brazil. The wild type is small and full of seeds, but that did not prevent the local Tupi-Guarani peoples from domesticating it starting perhaps 6,000 years ago.¹

The innovations that allowed for this process are poorly understood but would have involved selection for low fiber content, fewer seeds (and, therefore, the asexual vegetative propagation necessary today), and lower production of the bromelain enzyme, which degrades protein (and is why pineapple can be used to tenderize meat). We do know that the pineapple spread far and wide across indigenous America, possibly all the way north to the Maya and Aztec homelands in Mexico. Notably, it was cultivated by the Caribs on the island of Guadeloupe, which is where Christopher Columbus was to land near the beginning of his second voyage in 1493, making him and his men the first Europeans to encounter the fruit.

With its unique appearance and extremely sweet taste, the pineapple was an immediate sensation among the crew. At the end of his expedition, Columbus stopped at Guadeloupe again and stocked up on pineapples to bring back to Spain. Sadly, over the seven-week-long trip back, all of his specimens rotted, save one. Columbus hastened to court to present it to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. As told by the chronicler Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, the king declared that he preferred this fruit ‘to all others’. The pineapple had received a glowing royal endorsement within days of its arrival in Europe.

Over the next couple of centuries, as Europeans conquered and settled the Americas, a variety of people wrote of the pineapple, almost always in eulogistic terms. In his 1535 book on New Spain, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes interrupts his sober analysis with a six page hagiography to the pineapple with passages such as ‘My pen and my words cannot depict such exceptional qualities’, or ‘To taste it is so appetizing a thing, so delicate, that words fail to give it its true praise for this.’

Given that this was a typical reaction to tasting the fruit, it is unsurprising that the pineapple soon piqued the interest of wealthy aristocrats. There was, however, a major problem. Pineapples are non-climacteric: they do not ripen after harvest. They must be picked when perfectly mature, which means right before they start to decay. Before the development of steam-powered transport in the nineteenth century, ships were too slow to import ripe pineapples, so the only option for the curious aristocrat was to travel to the colonies – or to try to grow the fruit at home since fruitless live plants could survive a transatlantic trip.

But pineapple is a demanding crop. It takes two to three years for a plant to yield a single fruit, and those two to three years must be spent in constant tropical temperatures – quite the challenge in early modern Europe.

Many tried anyway. The first person to succeed may have been Agnes Block, a horticulturist and art collector in the Netherlands, in around 1685. To commemorate her achievement, she commissioned a medal saying: ‘Fert arsque laborque quod natura negat’, meaning ‘art and labor bring about what nature cannot’.

Mirroring this competition with Nature itself, there was also a competition among the gardening-inclined rich. It soon became a must for an English gentleman to build, at great expense, a ‘pineapple pit’ on his estate. For the professional gardener, to succeed at maturing a pineapple was a top sign of competence. In France, the pineapple became a court favorite at Versailles after the first homegrown pineapples were presented to Louis XV in 1733.

All this competitive pressure spurred on technological innovation. Perhaps starting with Amsterdam’s botanical gardens in 1682, hothouses (heated greenhouses) began to appear in Europe during the 1680s to grow exotic plants from the colonies. Improvements in glass manufacturing, thermometers (mercury-in-glass thermometers were invented by Gabriel Fahrenheit in the 1710s), heat sources (such as tanner’s bark, a powder made from tree bark in the tanning industry that slowly releases heat as it decomposes), and hothouse design (for instance, the addition of chimney flues) appeared in a steady trickle throughout this period.

By the late eighteenth century, ‘pineries’, as pineapple gardens were called, had become a regular feature of large European estates. The fruit had gone from being a rare curiosity to become an expensive but attainable luxury, at least for the wealthy. It became common practice to display a fresh pineapple at dinner parties to impress guests. This led to delightfully absurd situations: the pineapple became valued more for showing than for eating, and some people, who wanted to show their wealth but couldn’t afford multiple specimens, reused the same one again and again for weeks until it began to rot. A rental industry of pineapples arose to meet this demand. A pineapple was one of the riskiest items a maid could carry around since it presented a particularly attractive target for thieves.

At the height of this pineapple mania, it became a symbol of decadence and excess as shown by satirical cartoons.

One can still notice the fruit’s nineteenth century legacy in architectural and decorative elements from that period, most strikingly at the Dunmore Pineapple hothouse in Scotland. It would take several more innovations to turn the king of fruits into an ordinary commodity.

Steamships, cans, and refrigerators: how the pineapple went from aristocratic to mundane

The engineer George Stephenson was a key figure in the Industrial Revolution. Hailed as ‘the father of railways’, he built the first locomotive that hauled a passenger train on a public railway in 1825 with his son Robert. Twenty years later, he retired and devoted himself to his other passion: gardening. To compete with his friend, the renowned gardener Joseph Paxton, he built himself a 68-foot-long pine house and a separate 140-foot-long pine pit at his home.

But Stephenson’s efforts came during the last stages of the pineapple mania era. As standards of living rose, buoyed by new technology, farmers and merchants saw the money-making potential of bringing the aristocratic pineapple to a wider audience.

Thus, in 1764, at the peak of pineapple mania in England, it is estimated that the average cost to cultivate a pineapple – taking into account the construction of the pinery, the import of pineapple plants from the Caribbean, and the gardening labor for three or four years – was approximately £80. This translates to about £12,000, or $16,000, today. By the time of Stephenson’s retirement in the 1840s, cartoons show that in London even the lower classes could try a pineapple slice for a mere penny, about the price of a large loaf of bread.

What happened? First and foremost, imports. While the British, Dutch, and French elites obsessed over hothouse designs for their pineries, the pineapple had, of course, been growing easily in tropical regions. The West Indies, in particular, became a large provider to North America, to the delight of gentlemen like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Starting in the 1820s, and even more so in the 1830s, steamship transport finally allowed transatlantic imports to reach Europe after a mere two to four weeks of travel – fast enough for ripe pineapples to survive the voyage. A company named Keeling and Hunt shipped 1,000 pineapples from the Bahamas to Liverpool in 1842. Most of the shipment was then transferred to London by rail, thanks to Stephenson’s work.

Less than a decade later, in 1850, ‘200,000 pineapples had been imported in the space of just three months’. The Bahamas was the main source, along with other West Indian islands like Antigua and St. Bartholomew, and farther afield corners of the Empire like Sierra Leone. In the 1870s, the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores would become the main pineapple exporter to Europe.

There was still a major limitation: even in the tropics, pineapples ripen only in summer. European-grown pineapples, since they were planted indoors, were available year-round. So for a time, English pineapples, by then cultivated as a cottage industry of pineries all over the country, kept a competitive advantage. In 1845, they became even cheaper when the glass tax was repealed, making greenhouses less costly. Caribbean pineapples were also deemed cheap, small, and ‘mostly ill-grown’.

But this couldn’t and didn’t last. A chance discovery in the Azores in 1874 – that burning dead leaves in a greenhouse releases ethylene gas, which makes pineapples flower – allowed farmers to induce pineapple flowering on demand and ‘provide fruits for the high-value holidays of Christmas, New Year and Easter’.

Then came refrigerated transport. In 1881, the Dunedin served as a proof of concept for refrigerated ships, successfully transporting a full cargo of meat from New Zealand to England. Refrigerated train cars appeared a bit earlier. Within a few years, fresh produce from all over the world could reach Britain and Europe, and the pineapple market was quickly flooded.

Concurrently, another innovation greatly facilitated access to pineapples: cans. By the second half of the century, pineapple canning factories began to spring up in cultivation locales like the Bahamas and Southeast Asia. In the 1890s, with the invention of George Zastrow’s ‘machine for treating pineapples’, the premier pineapple canning location moved to Baltimore. The city produced hundreds of thousands of cases, and the fruit was ‘gradually being looked upon more as a necessity than, as heretofore, a luxury’.

A sign of the wide availability of pineapples was the multiplication of recipes for preparing it. Initially, the proper way to eat a pineapple was to cut it into slices and serve it plain so that diners could savor the fruit – like it was a fine wine or cheese. But as pineapples reached the middle and lower classes, recipe books began providing instructions for preserved pineapple, pineapple pies, pineapple fritters, or pineapple chips.

Meanwhile, gardening publications stopped treating growing pineapples as an impressive feat of skill. According to an expert in an 1866 issue of the Journal of Horticulture, ‘no secret was involved in the matter [of growing pineapples], and no extraordinary management was necessary to attain a moderate degree of success; but that the whole affair was one of pocket’.

The great twentieth-century cheapening of the pineapple

Around the turn of the twentieth century entrepreneurs realized that steamship transport, refrigeration, and canning could be combined into a new business opportunity.

The first person to understand this was a young man named James Dole. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in agriculture, Dole moved to Honolulu in 1899 (it helped that his cousin, Sanford D. Dole, had been president of the short-lived Republic of Hawaii and now held the position of the first governor of the US territory of Hawaii). He bought a farm, experimented with some crops, and settled on the pineapple. In 1901, he formed the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (today known as Dole), and by 1903, he was shipping canned pineapple to the mainland US. His success was quickly imitated by other businesses, notably by the California Packing Corporation, now known as Del Monte.

In the next three decades Hawaiian pineapple production skyrocketed. This was due in part to Hawaii’s climate, where the pineapple plantations grew to be the largest in the world. Famously, the island of Lanai, the sixth-largest of the archipelago, was turned into an island-wide plantation for Dole in the 1920s.

Then came technical innovations in processing. In 1911, James Dole hired the engineer Henry Gabriel Ginaca to build a machine that would ‘automatically center the pineapple on the core, cut out a fruit cylinder, eradicate the crushed and juice material from the outer skin, cut off the ends and remove the central fibrous core’. This allowed the processing of pineapples for canning to rise from 10–15 fruits per minute to about 50. Further improvements to the Ginaca machine during the twentieth century increased that number to 75 per minute, and Ginaca’s design is still the main way we process pineapples today.

But the most notable innovation of the period was not technical: it was cultural. The pineapple in the early twentieth century was in somewhat of an ambiguous cultural spot. It still carried a bit of its erstwhile prestige, which limited sales to housewives who couldn’t justify it as an everyday expense (especially when the Great Depression hit). At the same time, it was mostly available in canned form, which was the object of elite prejudice: an 1884 author complained of ‘piles of gaudy canisters that embalm every constituent of a dinner, from the soup to the pineapple’.

To counter these problems of perception, the Hawaiian pineapple companies spared no effort at marketing their product to the masses, capitalizing on images of tropical paradise. They also benefited from both world wars, when the militaries of the Allied powers bought enormous quantities of canned pineapple to send as rations to soldiers. Suddenly, many more people had become acquainted with the king of fruits.

Propelled by these marketing successes, the Hawaiian production of canned pineapple rose steadily before and after the Great Depression until it peaked in 1957. After this, the archipelago’s industry experienced a decline as production relocated to countries such as Thailand or the Philippines. The last Hawaiian cannery closed in 2007. Yet Hawaiian pineapple left an enduring legacy in the form of companies like Dole and Del Monte as well as cultural associations. Pizza with pineapple as a topping is called ‘Hawaiian’, despite having nothing to do with Hawaii.

Today we produce about 30 million tons of pineapple worldwide every year, especially in Costa Rica, Southeast Asia, and the pineapple’s homeland of Brazil – and very little in the places that served as the main settings of its history, including Hawaii, the Bahamas, the Azores, and northern Europe.

And innovation has not stopped. Before it created the Pinkglow, Del Monte released the Gold variety (also known as MD-2) in 1996. The Gold, being sweeter, yellower, and easier to grow, replaced the Smooth Cayenne as the most common cultivar and is credited for more than doubling fresh pineapple consumption in both the US and the UK.

Progress and the uses of luxury

While it is obviously a good thing that the pineapple is now widely accessible, people still feel something has been lost with its fall from grace. Such conflicting attitudes have accompanied the pineapple throughout its history. In the nineteenth century, it was still a recognizable luxury and an object of desire, and yet it couldn’t quite fulfill this role now that anyone could get a slice of the tropics for one penny. O’Connor writes of the Victorian paradox of progress: ‘The aim of scientific and economic progress was the betterment of the human condition, but any gains challenged established social hierarchies . . . The elite felt threatened by the new middle class, which in turn felt threatened by the rising working poor’. The pineapple was the perfect luxury good to illustrate this, and indeed, Victorian authors sometimes used it as a direct metaphor for social and technological progress.²

To understand what happened, it’s useful to think about what luxury even is. Most luxury goods have intrinsic desirable qualities, like the pineapple’s sweet taste. But often, they are luxuries primarily because they are positional goods: their value comes from showing off status. When procuring a pineapple is difficult or costly, displaying one is a strong, unfakeable ‘signal’ of wealth. This, however, increases demand, which gives entrepreneurs like Keeling and Hunt or James Dole an incentive to provide pineapples at a lower price. For a time, the poorer people who can now afford them may benefit from the lingering prestige, but eventually, society catches on, and the prestige vanishes.

Thus luxury is self-defeating: any particular luxury good, unless inherently limited in supply (like historical artifacts or real estate near Central Park), can eventually become mundane. Aluminum used to be more precious than gold and is now common enough to be used in disposable packaging. Purple dye used to be reserved for Roman emperors; now we have cheap ways of manufacturing pigments in any color. Spices, mirrors, ice, citrus fruit, and even celery are all examples of items that used to attract the attention of the wealthiest but have now become widely available at very little cost. All of them are victories for our quality of life.

If the Pinkglow pineapple seems mildly absurd, its cousin, Del Monte’s Rubyglow pineapple – available in China and North America for a mere $395.99! – seems downright preposterous. It is difficult to imagine how the rise of a new, luxury red-skinned pineapple could benefit the masses.

But who knows? Perhaps the future will grant us dozens of pineapple colors to choose from, just as we now can select tomatoes, grapes, and citrus fruit in a variety of shapes, flavors, and hues. Small improvements to the taste and appearance of specialty crops are certainly not the most pressing problem in the world, but they make life a little nicer, and cumulatively, that’s worth a lot. After all, the typical eighteenth-century aristocrat was willing to spend a fortune to access the tiniest fraction of the food diversity we take for granted today. They would surely be delighted by the idea of posting pictures of a pink pineapple on their Instagram for everyone to envy.

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We released Issue 18 of Works in Progress last week. Before you read the rest of our links, read out articles on the failure of the British land value tax; how to extend women’s fertility into their 40s; why the Hanseatic league rose and fell; prehistoric psychopaths; the technologies that made pineapples one of the world’s top fruits; why America builds 5-over-1s while China builds towers in parks; and the century-old steam network that heats and powers Manhattan.

Science

Are seed oils actually bad for you?

Edward Cohn was a protein chemist who discovered and quickly scaled a new way of providing soldiers with blood-derived treatments during World War Two.

A man survives 100 days with an artificial heart. (Not as long as the 10 years a person can survive with a donor heart, but longer than anyone has survived with a pig heart.)

Evolutionary psychology is often criticized for telling ‘just-so’ stories. Adam Hunt and Adrian Jaeggi published a new paper outlining their framework for analysing evolutionary hypotheses, using autism as a case study. If academic papers aren’t your thing you can read Adam’s blog post.

Metascience

The Tony Blair Institute has published a report on how to accelerate scientific discovery in the UK in an age of AI .

In defence of weird research.

People expect universities to serve lots of roles in society – scientific research, training and credentialing people for the work force, inventing technology, creating informed citizens. Ben Reinhart argues that universities would be better if we unbundled them.

Tech

Are better AI models actually better?

Faculty AI have made a new font based on old street signs in London.

Why don’t you have a robot butler?

We have autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and Phoenix but not New York and London? Why is it harder to make robotaxis in cold weather?

How to use AI in your writing.

Reflections on Palantir – its culture, morality, and how it works – from someone who worked there for eight years.

Will MacAskill, one of the founding fathers of Effective Altruism, returns to the 80,000 Hours podcast to discuss what a world with superintelligence is going to look like.

Traditionally biotech innovations came from startups that were then bought by Big Pharma. Now AI-aided drug discovery could shift innovation to different organizations, maybe to Big Pharma which may benefit from better data sets, increased process power, and vertical integration.

China is far ahead of the west on robots – installing more, building them cheaper with a mostly localized supply chain, and with a clear plan to replace human labor.

Housing

The Irish Department of Housing is considering proposals to allow people to build cabins and modular homes in their back gardens without planning permission.

Research shows that four to six story apartments with a single set of fire stairs are no more risky than two stair apartment blocks.

Hundreds of roofs in Gujarat, India have been painted white to keep residents cooler in the hottest months.

‘Affordable housing’ is a misleading moniker. We should call it what it is – subsidized – and deal with the tradeoffs that implies.

Fertility

People usually use total fertility rate as a way of gauging how many children are being born. But it doesn’t tell you everything.

A team are trying to create a new sport: sperm racing. They’re building a microscopic race-track and they’re going to be taking bets. Hopefully the data they gather will help us understand more about male fertility.

Despite having the highest birth rate in Europe, there were more people born in France in 1946 than 2024.

The child penalty is a measure of how much, on average, a woman’s earnings decrease when she has a child. In the rich world, countries with higher child penalties have lower birth rates.

Misc

We live like royalty and we don’t even know it.

How fantasies about future technology can stymy progress in the present.

Japan gets a lot wrong – per capita incomes have barely increased since 1990. But it’s still a nice place to live. What are they getting right?

Matthew Yglesias argues that propaganda is overrated and misinformation mostly confuses your own side

How did footbinding end?

People often say that Europe is less innovative than America because of cultural reasons. Alex Chalmers argues that these ‘cultural differences’ are downstream of other, primarily economic, factors.

An OECD report finds that small energy price shocks can be good for the economy (probably because it hastens the death of unproductive firms) but that severe shocks are not.

Why regulators should have red teams to argue, internally, against bad regulations.

How postcodes work in different countries.

Too cheap to meter is a film that makes the case for abundant energy and explains why nuclear energy – fission and fusion – is our path to get there.

Books

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back is a new book from Marc J Dunkelman. He talks about the contradiction between the left’s ‘Hamiltonian’ impulse to give the state more power to enact good works and their ‘Jeffersonian’ impulse to protect citizens from whims of people in power. He argues that these contradictory impulses lead to a system of vetocracy in which it is difficult to get anything done like build infrastructure, fight climate change, or have a working welfare system. If a book is too long for you, you can listen to Marc summarize his thesis on Matthew Yglesias’s podcast.

South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world with a total fertility rate of only 0.7 babies per woman. There are probably a number of reasons why this is the case but one notable reason is poor gender relations – young men in South Korea are increasingly right wing and women are increasingly left wing (Paywall, The FT).

Flowers of Fire by Hawon Jung describes the culture of sexism in South Korea today. Alice Evans has written a comprehensive review on her Substack.

We released Issue 18 of Works in Progress last week. Do not miss out on our articles on the failure of the British land value tax; how to extend women’s fertility into their 40s; why the Hanseatic league rose and fell; prehistoric psychopaths; the technologies that made pineapples one of the world’s top fruits; why America builds 5-over-1s while China builds towers in parks; and the century-old steam network that heats and powers Manhattan.

Matt Clancy is the interim lead of Open Philanthropy’s new Abundance and Growth Fund, and the permanent lead of its Innovation Policy program. He also writes a living literature review on social science research about innovation.

Does technological progress really make us better off? Not just richer, or healthier, but happier and able to lead the kind of lives we want to?

You could try to adjudicate this debate with reference to psychological and sociological data on subjective well-being. You could look at the data on social media and depression, or loneliness, or climate change. That would all be worthwhile. But I’m going to do something different here. Rather than an impersonal investigation based on aggregated data, I’ll closely examine the lived experience of technological progress over the last forty years in the USA, looking at one particular case study I know very well: myself.

Looking at the evidence of my own life has downsides. Most obviously, it’s hard to draw any conclusions from a sample size of one. But the approach has one major offsetting virtue: I have views on what a good life looks like, and I can evaluate technological progress directly on those terms, rather than relying on proxies like health, income, or survey responses.

Better options

I think a good life has many components. Let’s walk through them.

A first component is the enjoyment of pleasures. For instance, I like the ambience of working in a coffee shop. Thanks to advances in computing, wifi, and the internet, I can spend a few hours a day working in them. That’s not an option I had growing up. Another thing I enjoy? Photography. Digital photography has improved my photo-taking skills and means I always have a good camera to hand. It’s also made it easy for me to look at the photos I’ve taken. My phone has access to practically every photo I’ve ever taken and algorithmically shows me something different from my life several times a day. Mostly pictures of my kids. Little pleasures, thanks to new technology.

Technological progress has also radically improved my experience of some forms of art. I streamed more than one movie a week over the last year, and most of them were really good (I am working through BFI’s 2022 Sight and Sound poll). According to Spotify, I listened to roughly 55,000 minutes of music from more than 1,000 artists between January and mid-November 2024; that’s about 16 percent of my waking life during that interval! The diversity of choices, the quality of presentation, and the option to enjoy art like this at all odd hours, are all the fruits of myriad technological advances made during my life.

Enjoying pleasures is nice, but there’s a lot more to a good life. For me, another part of living well is learning about your world. Over my lifetime, there has been a revolution in our options for learning. To start at the most obvious level: there’s just more stuff to know than at any point in history. More science, history, stories, and ideas than ever. Available in more languages and from more perspectives. We’re way beyond what anyone can learn in a lifetime. Much of this new knowledge is a result of technological advances of all stripes; telescopes, large hadron colliders, gene sequencing, historical document digitization, statistical software, and more.

But beyond helping us discover more, technology has also vastly improved the mediums I use to take in ideas and analysis. The internet has enabled the flowering of a vast ecosystem of written explanations that tries to explain complicated material in an accessible way (think blogs, substacks, wikipedia, and the like). Large language models have expanded text-based options for explanation to an even higher degree. Beyond text, we’ve had a video revolution that is better suited for learning about some kinds of things (for me, film criticism and household repair). And it’s easier than ever to download, sort, and plot different kinds of data.

Going further, there have also been huge improvements in the ability to sift through this plethora of ideas. If I know exactly what I’m looking for, such as the title, author, or a specific quote, google can find that needle in the hay mountain. If my memory is hazy, large language models are a useful way in. And for the things I didn’t know I wanted to know about, the internet – or more specifically newsletters, blogs, twitter/X (though who knows for how much longer), and other curators – has exposed me to more ideas than anything available to me in the pre-internet world. Technological progress over the last few decades has dramatically improved my capacity to learn.

Another part of the good life, in my view, is being able to use your capabilities well, and to participate in work you find meaningful. Looking at myself, some of what I do in my job could have been done with the technology around at my birth (though I think at considerably more inconvenience). But a big part of my job for the last few years has been writing a living literature review, which is the kind of thing that became technologically feasible only during my lifetime. Lucky me: it turns out I am good at it, I enjoy it, and I believe it matters.

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Moving on: our relationships with other people are another part of a good life. Technology has helped again here. Some of the connections I make with people are now mediated by digital technology, whether it is texting, tweeting, or talking over Zoom. No doubt meeting in person would be better, but sometimes that’s impossible, and these modes beat letter writing. Other times, technology actually enables me to have in-person meetings that might not otherwise have happened, especially with people who live far away. For example, I fly for work more than my father at this stage in his career (in part because progress means it takes fewer hours of work to pay for a flight). And in other ways, technology lets me have way more control over who I meet in person. I grew up in Iowa, and that’s where I live now, after moving away for work and school at several points in my life. My extended family lives here too. Because technology lets me work remotely, I can live among my extended family: I see them in person, and my work colleagues through digital technology, instead of the reverse.

So far, I’ve argued technological progress during my lifetime has allowed me to live a better life, in a non-superficial way, along several different dimensions: enjoying life’s pleasures, learning about the world, exercising my abilities, performing meaningful work, and connecting with other people. A final component of a good life, in my view, is acting morally. I’m much less sure that technology has given me better ‘options’ for moral living; I’m not even sure if that’s a coherent idea. But in my view, part of morality stems from curiosity about other people turning into sympathy and empathy for them, so that we want their lives to be better. To the extent that’s true, our ability to learn about other lives might mean our ability to act morally has indeed improved via technology.

More time

The other major way that technological progress during my life has contributed to better living is by giving me more time to use on the better things of life.

Lots of these advances are incremental things that are hard to get excited about. I steam frozen vegetables for my kids in a bag in the microwave now, instead of in a pot on the stove. That’s a few minutes less minding the pot and washing up. Most of my financial transactions are now contactless, which is a bit faster than a debit card or cash (and it means that I don’t have to go to an ATM). Cars are 15-30 percent more fuel efficient than when I first learned to drive which means a bit less time spent at gas stations. They need an oil change every 5,000 miles, instead of 3,000. Some of my electric home appliances like an electric snowblower and leaf blower don’t need maintenance at all. I’m sure there are lots of other conveniences too individually small for me to even notice. But they add up. All told, it’s easy for me to believe these little conveniences save me at least four minutes a day, which adds up to an extra day per year.

Other advances are more noticeable. Because I work remotely, I don’t drive to work anymore. Because of online shopping and delivery, I spend a lot less time driving to shops and picking stuff up, unless I positively want to do it. Many goods – movies, music, and audiobooks – are available instantly, over the internet. A lot of the most boring stuff is delivered my way via subscriptions now. All together, if I save an hour a day on commuting, shopping, and walking shop floors, that’s 15 days over a year, longer than many US company vacation policies, and all compressed into waking hours.

Those advances are particularly valuable, because the time saved can be used any way you like. But if technologies of convenience have freed up 15 days per year for me to do anything, other technologies have probably opened up as much time or more for a more limited set of options. Life is filled with all sorts of odd little moments, where it previously wasn’t possible to do much beyond think: waiting for a bus, for the kettle to boil, for the doctor to see you, for the checkout line to move, for the kids piano practice to end, etc. Thinking is great, but mobile phones, plus the internet, mean I have more options now. It’s a bit on me how well or poorly I spend this time, but I think I do alright using it to learn more about the world, in bite-sized pieces. Those moments add up, as anyone alarmed by the weekly report of how much time they spent on their phone can attest.

Technology helps me recapture odd moments and do more with them, but it also gives me more time by letting me double-spend time. For many years now, something like half of the books I have ‘read’ have been audiobooks that I listened to while doing something that would formerly have made reading impossible (such as walking, doing the dishes, or driving). Audiobooks have existed for a long time, but over my life various technologies have made them much more convenient to use. Slightly less important for me, but still a huge improvement on my options from two decades ago, are podcasts, which for me tend to feature in-depth interviews. I also use speech-to-text software to read me articles and websites where no recording exists.

And this continues to sell short the benefits of extra time. A lot of technology saves time to perform work tasks. In other words, technology also increases labor productivity. Workers don’t generally recapture that time for their own use, but it does mean they can sell their labor for a higher price. US median household income is up around 35 percent over my life, while GDP per capita has almost doubled. As it happens, my family’s income has grown by a roughly similar amount in recent years, so I have a pretty good sense of what this level of additional income feels like. Mostly, I think everything is a bit nicer, though we also buy more convenience (occasional babysitting and eating out) and security (we save more). Notably, most of what we spend the extra money on are technologies that were invented before I was born; but because of technological progress during my lifetime, we can afford more of it.

But there is one last way that technology gives us more time, and this one is the most salient of all: life-saving medical advances. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid serious medical issues in my life. For me, the medical advance that has probably most improved my personal life has been the covid-19 mRNA vaccines. But I have friends and family who’ve fought cancers, difficult births, heart attacks, blunt force trauma, and rare diseases. Many would likely be dead if medical progress had stopped at my birth. Over my life, the US life expectancy rose by at least three percent and when I think about my friends and family who survived medical problems that would have been fatal 40 years ago, that tracks.

Better living

Increasing options, more free time, and higher incomes complement one another. We have more time to spend how we want, and better things to spend it on. And the gains are not just trivial diversions either, but can be meaningful parts of a good life.

But maybe I am cherry picking. There are downsides to progress too. I think it’s possible that social media has made people less happy overall. The ability to shop, work, and get entertainment without leaving home probably contributes to rising loneliness. And in the future, maybe AI and robotics will replace a lot of labor and make it harder for people to find meaningful work.

This post isn’t the place to try and resolve those concerns. That’s a job for the aggregate statistics and academic studies, which I am avoiding here today. Restricting attention to the evidence under consideration in this post, my own life, I think the benefits of these technologies have (so far) outweighed the costs by a large margin.

I come away from this exercise pretty reassured that technological progress certainly has made my life better, in meaningful ways, even though the technology level when I was born was already pretty good. So much the better, I suspect, for people who start off in a worse place. But I think that raises another question: if technology does make our lives better, then why does it so often feel like it doesn’t? Why is this a question worth thinking about at all?

On the basis of this exercise, I’ll speculate that part of the answer is that the question is too big. If you ask me a smaller question about some specific technology I have no problem. Has the latest iPhone update made my life better? Sure, a bit. Has the mRNA vaccine? Very much so, on net. But as this post has helped to make clear, technological progress in our lives is the sum of thousands upon thousands of mostly little things. It’s just too much to get your head around and render a holistic judgment. If asked to render a judgment on all technological progress, I think we either think of lines on a graph, which are real but too abstract to feel in a visceral way, or we think of a handful of tangible technological improvements. But pick any few technologies at random (say, fuel efficient cars, streaming music, and zoom) and yeah they seem fine, but they don’t add up to much against the big things in our lives that we value. It’s only when you go through the effort of enumerating all the different technologies that come to mind, and write them down, that you can start to get a sense of the enormity of what technological progress delivers.

Works in Progress Issue 18 is out today.

Our lead piece is on the century-old pipelines hurtling megapounds of superheated water vapor below the streets of New York.

We also have articles on:

• How technology can allow women to choose both careers and children;

• How Britain’s attempt to implement a land value tax in the early 1900s broke not just its Liberal Party but also its existing property tax system;

• Why Chinese and American apartment blocks look completely different (the secret is regulation);

• What the Hansa can teach us about coalition building and breaking;

• How the once-precious pineapple became an affordable supermarket item;

• And, war and peace amongst hunter gatherers (and why psychopaths ruin it for everyone).

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In 1882, Manhattan pioneered underground steam delivery, writes Jamie Rumbelow, creating what is now a 105-mile network that heats three quarters of the island's residential spaces. Steam solved problems as the city densified: coal-fired boilers wasted real estate and polluted the air. It also comes with downsides. Superheated vapor loses energy faster than modern district heating that uses water, plus faults in the system can lead to occasional explosions. But today’s steam network is a modern machine nothing like inventor Birdsill Holly’s initial creation.

Britain's early twentieth century experiment with land value taxation ended in failure, writes Samuel Watling. It may be why land value taxes remain largely theoretical today. Though championed by Henry George and embraced by the Liberal Party, the tax was a disaster. It cost four times more to administer than it collected in revenue, led to legal battles over valuations, and drove housing construction down two fifths in just three years. By 1922, the same politician who introduced the tax – David Lloyd George – was forced to repeal it. And the Liberal Party never led a British government again.

Grants replaced rates as the backbone of British local government funding

Share of total local government income in Britain

The pineapple was once Europe's ultimate status symbol, says Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Aristocrats spent fortunes on purpose-built ‘pineries’ to grow a single fruit for centuries after Columbus introduced them. But technological progress – steamships, refrigeration, and the Ginaca processing machine – transformed luxury into an everyday product.

China builds apartments as ‘towers in a park’, whereas when Americans build apartments, they favor mid-rise 5-over-1s. Despite the height of Chinese towers, the two building forms achieve nearly identical densities, explains Alfred Twu. The reason they do things so differently isn't cultural but regulatory. Culturally Chinese developers and apartment buyers in Taiwan, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong all prefer forms more similar to the American, and global, norm. But in China, building codes mandate apartment buildings to provide at least two hours of direct sunlight to their lowest floors on the coldest day of winter. A surprising number of urbanistic differences stem not from the cultural preferences of buyers but technical documents that can be changed with the stroke of a pen.

Hunter-gatherers weren't born killers, argue John Halstead and Philip Thomson. Prehistoric violent death rates were four times lower than previous estimates thought, making them only twice as homicidal as the most violent countries today. What makes humans dangerous isn't our proclivity for violence, but our capacity for efficient killing, and it is precisely this danger that drove humans to find ways to make peace with one another. Where violence did exist among hunter gatherers, it came from sociopathic individuals victimizing their fellow group members rather than endemic warfare. Only the advent of agriculture dramatically increased inter-group violence – by creating resources worth fighting over and hierarchies that allowed leaders to benefit from conflict.

After decades of slow but steady progress, the gender pay gap persists, largely because childbearing and childcare responsibilities fall disproportionately on women and disproportionately during their prime career-building years. As a woman's fertility declines, she faces an impossible choice, explains Ruxandra Teslo. We should look to new reproductive technologies as the next frontier in sexual equality and freedom. From egg freezing to in vitro maturation and stem cell-derived eggs, science is working to extend women's fertility windows and let them ‘have it all’.

Medieval merchants traveling across Northern Europe faced extraordinary dangers – from pirates to extortionate toll collectors. Their solution, writes Agree Ahmed, was to form coalitions. The biggest and best coalition was the Hanseatic League, formed by merchants from Germany’s trading cities. Despite no formal territory or central government, the League established trading posts from London to Russia, negotiated with kings, and occasionally won wars. The League built Northern Europe's first long-distance trade network and transformed regional crafts into proto-industries. But economic coalitions are inherently fragile. The Dutch built cheaper industries and undercut the Hansa, broke their embargoes, and permanently undermined their coalition.

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More from Works in Progress

• Far-UVC could revolutionize disease fighting, if we were willing to use it. Richard Williamson writes about how far-UVC eliminates 98.4 percent of airborne bacteria and a similar fraction of viruses (equivalent to 184 air changes per hour) yet languishes in obscurity due to regulatory gaps.

• Tom Chivers reviews Charles Piller’s new book Doctored, on how fabricated data on the likely nonexistent ‘Aβ*56’ protein diverted researchers for 16 years, publication bias allowed deception to flourish, and decades of treatments failed.

• M. Nolan Gray eulogizes Donald Shoup, whose groundbreaking work on parking economics spawned an international movement. Shoup showed how free parking costs billions in wasted time and distorted urban development, and proposed policy ideas that have been implemented in at least eight countries.

• We launched a fellowship for writing on scientific progress together with Asimov Press, for which applications have just closed.

• We published Links in Progress posts on everything from Greenland’s new airport, America’s finest new mid-rise building development, at Chevy Chase Lake, a breakthrough in developing a synthetic antivenom, housing shortages and fertility rates, and why access to contraceptives cannot explain falling fertility in Africa.

Housing supply: a syllabus

For a new site collecting reading lists that provide introductions to interesting subjects, Sam, Ben and John Myers (who wrote The Housing Theory of Everything together) put together a reading list about why housing supply matters and how to get more homes built. There’s a lot in there about urban economics as well as policy and mechanism design.

Saloni contributed a syllabus on improving clinical trials, and our friends Devon Zuegel and Henry Oliver contributed syllabi on cities and great English literature respectively.

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New recruits

The Works in Progress team has grown since we last sent out a newsletter.

Pieter Garicano is our new managing editor, commissioning and editing articles for the magazine and making sure we keep up our quality standards.

Aria Babu has also joined the editing team. She’s also managing the creation of a new type of Works in Progress content. Stay tuned.

Alex Chalmers is working on building nuclear power quickly and cheaply, and providing the infrastructure the world needs for artificial intelligence.

Atalanta Arden-Miller will be WIP’s new art director, overseeing the new print magazine that is coming soon.

Samuel Hughes will be leading our work on building beautifully, and understanding what makes truly great cities.

And of course Sam Bowman, Rachel Edwards, Ben Southwood, Saloni Dattani and Virginia Postrel are all still knocking around, while Nick Whitaker is mostly working on other projects.

What we’ve been up to

• Sam wrote for the Sunday Times on Labour’s growth plans, came up with 11 ways the UK government could boost growth quickly with policy, was interviewed by the 80,000 Hours podcast, was interviewed by The Atlantic, told the Adam Smith Institute why he was optimistic about Britain, and debated about economic growth at the Society of Professional Economists.

• Ben has spent nearly all of this time looking after his two children under three. He found a little time to do jury service and wrote a thread about where new towns in the UK should be.

• Saloni created lots of data visualizations about the baby boom, a period that most people have heard about but don’t know the details very well. She also wrote about the Golden Age of Antibiotics, a period of rapid antibiotic drug discovery in the mid-20th century, and how we might reignite more antibiotic development today.

• Rachel visited Dublin for the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition; planned parties in San Francisco, New York, and London celebrating the launch of Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation; and shared her book recommendations in Eclectic Letters.

• Pieter joined Works in Progress in February. Since then, he has edited from Washington DC and London. He has also written on Europe and growth for his blog, including on whether Spain is booming (not really), whether policy should target quantities or prices (prices usually) and why Europe doesn’t have trillion dollar companies (failure costs).

• Aria bought a new kitten, finally chose a wedding dress and, of course, joined Works in Progress. Tonight, she’s debating the former CEO of Population Matters on whether falling birth rates are a good thing.

• Alex joined Works in Progress in February to unleash a nuclear renaissance in the UK. He's also written for his blog on whether culture determines economic success, the need for more policy people to do nothing, and European defence. He's currently headed to the Emergent Ventures Unconference in Arlington.

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Around the web

• The story of declining birth rates is often told using total fertility rates. The problem is that they are a prediction of births per woman, not a measure – and the prediction is not always accurate.

• Japan hasn’t been growing for decades. Yet thanks to abundant housing, high capital investment, and its orderly culture it is still a very nice place to live.

• Why we ought to have red teams for regulators.

• Second staircases are often mandated for fire safety reasons, raising costs and lowering construction. They don’t actually make us much safer.

• Reviewing scientific papers internally, rather than externally, might be the easiest possible win to reform and improve academic science.

• Politicians who push out misinformation tend to fool their own voters and supporters much more than they fool the other team.

• There are more people alive in France who were born in 1946 than who were born in 2024.

• Ireland is going to make it easy to build granny flats, or seomrai, in back gardens.

• What Starship could mean for humanity.

• Weird research can feel extremely wasteful sometimes, but a surprising faction of it is good.

• How China’s air force works.

• How and why to let Cambridge grow to become the UK’s second-biggest city.

• Four ways to make the UK’s new nuclear taskforce a success.

• For Britain to grow, Heathrow must grow. And six things that critics of Heathrow expansion get wrong. Most plans for Heathrow expansion involve subsidies – because it is not allowed to sell the landing and takeoff slots that such an expansion will generate at their market price.

• The first principles of energy.

• Beating antibiotic resistance means understanding peptides. Understanding peptides means keeping data on them. We need a million-peptide database!

• Inference Magazine: a new journal on technological sovereignty, building datacentres, enabling nuclear power, frontier AI research, and much more.

• Tyler Cowen, the man who wants to know everything (and is why Works in Progress exists).

• We live like royalty and don’t even know it: how the background stuff in our life works.

• Should we drop an 81-gigatonne atomic bomb below the seafloor to rapidly weather enormous amounts of basalt, sucking trillions of tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere very quickly? Almost certainly.

• Lindus Health raises $55 million to fix clinical trials.

• Giving Brazilian couples housing makes them much more likely to have children.

• Standard Ebooks takes old out-of-print classics and makes beautiful and readable ebook versions of them.

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Happy reading!

– Sam, Ben, Saloni, Rachel, Alex, Aria and Pieter

For all of the progress that humanity has made against water-borne, food-borne, and vector-borne disease, we remain devastatingly vulnerable to germs that spread through the air.

One of the best shots we have at turning the page on airborne disease is an emerging type of germicidal UV (GUV) light called far-UVC. Over the last decade, researchers have documented its ability to eliminate pathogens while being safe for humans. A landmark study from 2022 found that far-UVC reduced the concentrations of airborne bacteria by 98.4 percent in a room-sized chamber, all while operating within safe UV exposure limits. Compared to standard ventilation, this was the equivalent of changing the air completely over in the room 184 times every hour. To put that in perspective, the CDC recommends 5 or more air changes per hour in the workplace. Even hospital operating rooms in the US only require 20. Far-UVC is effective against viruses too; airborne coronaviruses are more susceptible to far-UVC than the same bacteria used in the other study.

Writing for Works in Progress two years ago, I called far-UVC ‘the most promising new candidate for building a pandemic firewall.’ Since then at the nonprofit where I work, Blueprint Biosecurity, we’ve spent thousands of hours poring over the academic literature. We’ve spoken to hundreds of experts in photobiology, atmospheric chemistry, indoor air quality, building science, environmental engineering, epidemiology, public health, and many other disciplines. With the benefit of all that further investigation, I still stand by that original claim today.

Considering the impressive findings quoted above, as well as society’s urgent need for better defenses against airborne pathogens, you might expect there to be a booming market for far-UVC devices. But most people have still never heard of it, let alone considered using it. What could explain this?

While we have promising lab studies, far-UVC researchers have not yet produced the kind of compelling real-world data that is needed to support safety and efficacy. If far-UVC were a drug, the situation would be straightforward: it would not yet be approved by the FDA, and would need to go through clinical trials before anyone could even buy a lamp.

But there is no FDA that needs to approve of installing a far-UVC lamp in an office, school, or nightclub. This is a double-edged sword. Lamps are freely available for purchase, but the flipside of there being no regulator is that there is also no entity to confer public trust in the safety and efficacy of the technology.

Nor is there a corporation willing to make an upfront investment in expensive clinical research when other far-UVC manufacturers will be able to free ride off a successful outcome. No for-profit entity can afford to obtain the standard of evidence expected by risk-averse institutions who are in a position to confer public trust.

The absence of a coordinator between research, industry, and these institutions is also a hindrance to progress. Instead of the select amount of ongoing far-UVC research being purposefully directed towards a common goal, it takes place in academic silos.

Herein lies the challenge and opportunity for catalyzing the development of far-UVC. There is no clear precedent for a technology like far-UVC gaining the trust of the public. This is the problem we set out to solve.

Over the past two years, Blueprint Biosecurity has been hard at work creating a plan. We’ve captured it in a report that we call our far-UVC Blueprint. Today, March 10th 2025, it’s being released to the public in preprint form.

In addition to detailing what we know about how, and how well, far-UVC works, the report identifies a handful of critical research questions that must be answered to enable trusted institutions to confidently endorse far-UVC. It starts with activities analogous to the goals of FDA Phase I and II trials: quantifying the doses of far-UVC needed in real applications and making sure our understanding of its biological and chemical effects is complete. After that comes Phase III: cluster-randomized controlled trials to obtain high quality evidence of far-UVC’s real world effectiveness.

As we publish the preprint, there are three things we’re launching today to move our work on this forward.

• For the next month, we’re actively soliciting public feedback on our plan and looking to grow our pool of external reviewers we use to sharpen our work before public release. Find out more here.

• We’re growing our far-UVC team. We’ve just posted a job listing for a central role in managing our forthcoming far-UVC field building work. Apply here.

• Finally, we’ve launched a new Substack we’re calling Far-UVC Field Notes. Each issue will document the progress of far-UVC and our work on it. Read more about it and subscribe here.

Notes on Progress are irregular pieces that appear only on our Substack. In this piece, Tom Chivers reviews Charles Piller's Doctored, which explains how fraud derailed Alzheimer's research for decades

In 2006, an apparent breakthrough was found in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease. A protein, awkwardly named 'amyloid beta star 56' or Aβ*56, when injected into rats, apparently caused memory loss and other symptoms of dementia. Its discoverer was Sylvain Lesné, a young scientist at the University of Minnesota. His boss, the neuroscientist Karen Ashe, touted the discovery as 'the first substance ever identified in brain tissue in Alzheimer’s research that has been shown to cause memory impairment', and the excitement was enormous: Nature called it 'a star suspect.' The original paper, also in Nature, has since been cited 2,300 times.

There is a problem, however. Aβ*56 may not exist.

Dementia is a huge killer. The World Health Organisation estimates it kills 1.8 million people a year, and lists it as the seventh biggest cause of death. But while efforts to treat other illnesses – infectious disease, heart disease, cancer – have made progress in recent decades, the same is not true of Alzheimer’s. 'Between 1999 and 2015, rates for the top three causes of death in the United States fell sharply,' writes Charles Piller in his new book Doctored. 'Alzheimer’s rates and fatalities went in the opposite direction.'

Piller, an investigative journalist and a beneficiary of nominative determinism, was instrumental in uncovering part of why that is, in an article in Science in 2022.

Lesné, who published many more papers on Aβ*56, was almost the only researcher ever to detect the substance: Only a handful of other groups have published anything on it, and other researchers have tried and failed to find it. Certainly, no other group has found any indication that it affects memory.

And 20 of Lesné’s papers, it would turn out, thanks to dogged detective work by other scientists, contained fabricated results, in the form of doctored images. The original Nature paper, along with several others, has now been retracted. Efforts to chase this phantom have cost millions of dollars of public money, and given false hope to Alzheimer’s patients and their families – but most crucially, they helped send Alzheimer’s research down a false path.

Amazingly, this wasn’t even the only time that has happened in Alzheimer’s research. The drug simufilam, when it was first developed in the 2000s, was originally intended to be a pain-relief drug. That didn’t work, but its creator Cassava Sciences soon found another use: apparently, it helped detangle misfolded proteins in the brain, potentially preventing or curing Alzheimer’s. Once again, the findings – in frozen-but-revivified brain tissue – all came from a single researcher, City University of New York neuroscientist Hoau-Yan Wang, whom Piller describes, archly, as having 'magic hands' – that is, 'a preternatural talent to achieve hoped-for, problem-free results, time after time, experiment after experiment.'

Once again, it appears to have been based on doctored images, and Wang has since been found by his university to have engaged in 'egregious misconduct.'

Alzheimer’s research has for decades focused on the 'amyloid hypothesis' – that certain misfolded proteins build up in the brain and cause dementia. Both the Aβ*56 research and simufilam grew out of that hypothesis and, with their apparent success, reinforced it.

As Piller points out, though, despite that focus, the hypothesis has led to little in the way of meaningful treatments. In 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the pharma company Biogen’s drug aducanumab, which reduced the levels of amyloid plaques in brains. It was said to be the first drug to slow the progress of Alzheimer’s.

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But aducanumab, trademarked as Aduhelm, had two subtle flaws: Biogen’s own trial was stopped early because it showed no benefit and because 41 percent of patients suffered brain bleeding or swelling. That’s called a 'termination for futility'.

So how did it get approved? Well: Biogen reanalysed the data looking at a subset of participants, found a slight improvement compared to placebo, and asked the FDA to approve the drug on the strength of it. The FDA appointed a panel of experts to assess it: 10 out of the 11 voted against approval and one was uncertain. But the FDA approved it anyway, a shocking decision that led to three FDA advisors resigning.

Aducanumab’s story is shocking, and the treatments that followed it to FDA approval, lecanemab and donanemab, are only somewhat better: they both also cause dangerous bleeds in many patients, with some deaths recorded, and both only slow patients’ rate of decline rather than reversing it – and even that is borderline imperceptible, clinically speaking.

As I was reading Piller’s book, incidentally, after years of accusations of fraud and malpractice, Cassava Sciences announced the results of a major trial into simufilam. To the surprise of nobody who had paid attention, the results were null: 'Volunteers who took the drug performed no better in cognitive or everyday-life activities than those who received a placebo,' Piller wrote in Science, and the drug had no impact on biomarkers of Alzheimer’s either.

As Piller tells it in Doctored, the amyloid hypothesis has dominated research. Some researchers talk darkly of an 'amyloid cabal' that chokes off possible alternative avenues. And the discovery of (what looks very much like) fraud in some of the most high-profile areas of amyloid research could understandably make people lose confidence in the whole idea.

Maybe that would be justified. Reading Piller’s book, though, I wanted to tell another story as well – one which Piller himself mentions, but understandably, since he has done so much work uncovering the fraud, does not make his main focus.

Since 2011 much of science, notably the social sciences, has been rocked by the 'replication crisis', something Works in Progress has addressed before. The statistical methods used in science turned out to be churning out a lot of false positives: slicing up data in arbitrary ways, or using small sample sizes or poor measurement tools that are vulnerable to noise, in particular. And the incentive structures were off: journals would be more willing to publish positive results, so negative results tended to sit unseen in file drawers, skewing later reviews of the literature; and scientists’ careers progressed according to how many papers they published, so they would chase those positive results, sometimes by putting their thumb on the statistical scales.

None of that required 'fraud' per se, although it was and remains far from unheard of. You can get a lot of exciting-looking results without making up data if you just take real but noisy numbers and keep chopping them up until they say what you want.

That is the story that Alzheimer’s research makes me think of. The fraud is shocking and scandalous. It really is – I am not in any way downplaying that; the idea of falsifying images and results, giving terrified, dying patients and their families false hope, and sending research down useless paths for years, is morally outrageous.

But in a way, the fact that the not-fraudulent stuff is less shocking is itself a disaster. One of the early studies that Cassava used to tout simufilam’s potential – which it claimed showed actual improvement, not merely a slowing of decline – had 50 participants and no control group and should have been ignored. Both Cassava and Biogen re-analysed data after finding null results and came back with suddenly exciting findings.

And, as Piller notes, negative results often went unpublished, because journals and pharma companies are often not interested in them. Many unsuccessful efforts by other labs to discover Aβ*56 never saw the light of day, because boring we-didn’t-find-anything studies are not as exciting as 'maybe we’ve solved Alzheimer’s!' – but if they had been published, then perhaps the apparently fabricated results would have been detected sooner, and scientists would have moved onto more promising avenues. Researchers wouldn’t have spent 16 years chasing a protein that may not even exist.

I’ve written a lot about the replication crisis in the past, and it’s usually in the context of social sciences. It matters: it’s important if, say, the education system wastes money and time trying to instill a 'growth mindset' in children – an idea that hasn’t replicated – or people convince themselves that 'power posing' will make them confident. But it won’t, in a direct sense, kill anyone.

The sorry state of Alzheimer’s research, though, is a reminder that good epistemic practice in science matters much more than just a bunch of psychology professors publishing counterintuitive results that can win them lucrative after-dinner speaking gigs. Getting the stats and incentives wrong can very literally kill people, by pushing research away from useful areas towards useless ones, and derail efforts to solve one of humanity’s biggest and most horrifying killers.

Professor Donald Shoup died on February 6th. M. Nolan Gray explains how his mentor changed political economy of parking, and cities themselves, forever.

As we might say in Los Angeles, Donald Shoup was a professor out of central casting.

His wardrobe consisted of tweed sport coats, earth-tone khakis, and unfashionably broad ties. He had a long, scruffy beard and spoke in a plodding, measured way. His stalling quirk was a long, ponderous ‘well, yes…’. For much of his career, he biked to campus. From his stuffy office on the fifth floor of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, he had chosen to make parking the focus of his studies—an impossibly boring topic, even by the low standards of a city planning department.

Yet by the final accounting, Shoup has a strong claim on being the scholar who will have had the greatest impact on your day-to-day life, radically changing how we approach the unglamorous problem of how and where we park our cars—and, in turn, where we can live, how we move about, and the form our cities take.

Inspired by his work, San Francisco formally adopted demand-based pricing for curb parking in 2017. That same year, Hartford and Buffalo abolished minimum off-street parking requirements citywide. In 2022, California abolished them within a half-mile of transit statewide; around the same time, New Zealand abolished them nationwide. With religious zeal, an army of self-identified shoupistas has gone on to implement his ideas in thousands of cities across dozens of countries—and this is likely only the beginning.

The old professor resisted attempts to hitch his ideas to any particular creed—except Georgism, that school so preoccupied with how we price land. Parking reform is neither conservative nor progressive, neither libertarian nor socialist. (It’s all of these things, Shoup certainly would have argued.) He definitely wouldn’t have identified as a Marxist. And yet, he fully realized that old exhortation from Marx that ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’

In a world full of professors with fine enough ideas, what made Shoup different?

The premise of The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup’s 800-page magnum opus, is as simple as it is provocative: parking is nearly always too cheap.

An unfortunate fact about cars is that they occupy a lot of space. Worse yet, they only spend about five percent of their lifespan in motion. The remaining 95 percent of the time, we must find a place to put them. When Americans first started buying cars en masse in the early twentieth century, the solution seemed obvious: park them along the curb. In the most radical shift in city planning in human history, urban streets—once the site of gathering, selling, and playing—were redesigned around moving and storing cars.

The result was a classic ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation: When a good is unpriced, we naturally overconsume it. In pure economics terms, the demand for a good at a price of zero nearly always exceeds the supply, resulting in scarcity. Hence, the ‘tragedy.’ In the case of curb parking, unpriced curbs rapidly fill up with cars whose drivers have no incentive to free up space. Thus, the state of a typical residential street: a travel lane or two framed by two parking lanes lined with cars that rarely move.

All of this ‘free’ curb parking is hardly free. Rather, the typical driver must instead spend time cruising around, looking for parking. One survey of the literature suggests that drivers in the typical American city spend an average of eight minutes looking for parking at the end of each trip. If a driver makes seven trips like this a week, she will waste nearly 49 hours each year merely looking for parking. If she values her time at the median US hourly wage, these delays will cost $1,898.75.

The hidden costs of ‘free’ curb parking only start there. The same surveys suggest that around a third of all drivers in the typical American city are actively cruising for parking. The share is likely even higher in dense residential neighborhoods like South Philadelphia or Boston’s Back Bay. If we could flip a switch and reduce traffic by 30 percent—with all the attendant costs to air quality, street safety, honking, wasted time, and street damage—we would almost certainly do it.

As the token economist in UCLA’s planning department, Shoup recognized the solution: price the commons. If you set a high enough price, at least one spot will always be available. Nobody will have any incentive to waste their time cruising. Better yet, if prices can fluctuate in response to demand, drivers will be incentivized to adjust their trips efficiently. Those with options could instead take the bus, minimize driving at peak times, or park a little further away and walk the rest of the way. Thus, the demand and supply would naturally equilibrate.

In fits and starts, cities have tried to price curb parking. In 1935, Oklahoma City installed a newfangled device called the ‘Park-O-Meter’ at the behest of downtown merchants with a financial interest in parking turnover. Absent pricing, commuters would fill up the spots each morning, boxing out shoppers. Yet properly priced curb parking remains the exception. The vast majority of curb parking remains ‘free.’ In New York City, where every square inch of land is enormously valuable, 97 percent of curb parking is unpriced.

Why? In the Seinfeld episode aptly named ‘The Parking Space,’ George balks at Elaine’s suggestion that he pull into a paid garage rather than waste time cruising. ‘It's like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?’ To the extent homo sapien falls short of homo economicus, the politics of pricing curb parking are bleak. We struggle to make sense of the time value of money and hate paying for something we had thought of as free—even if doing so would improve our lives. (Not to imply that you should pay for sex.)

Instead, American city planners turned to minimum off-street parking requirements, ‘solving’ the parking problem by mandating that vast amounts of it be built as part of any new residential or commercial development. In 1923, Columbus, Ohio, became the first city to require that any new apartment building provide each unit with at least one off-street parking space. Over the next century, such mandates rapidly spread worldwide, becoming a mainstay of modern land-use planning.

Today, residential developers are nearly always required to supply one parking space per housing unit. Commercial developers must build anywhere from 2.5 to 10 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet (93 square meters) of office or retail space. These rules are frequently amusing in a byzantine way: In one city, gyms must provide one parking space for every 2,500 gallons of water in a pool, as if deeper pools invite more patrons. In another city, nunneries must provide one parking space for every 10 nuns. What happened to church vans?

Most cities set their requirements based on the Parking Generation Manual, a $500 tome published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. The book estimates parking demand for everything from airports to wineries. At first blush, it seems very scientific, replete with charts, numbers, and statistical jargon. But the typical estimate in the Fifth Edition is based on fewer than 10 observations, often with no clear correlation—that is, pseudoscience. If you submitted such work as part of an introductory statistics course, the professor would likely ask you to come to his office hours. And yet it became official policy in cities the world over.

Nor are minimum parking requirements even needed: developers have the knowledge and incentives to provide the appropriate amount of off-street parking. If a developer builds too little parking, she will struggle to attract tenants and command lower rents. If she builds too much parking, she will find she cannot compete with other developers on cost. In contexts where no minimum requirements exist, but parking is still needed, developers virtually always provide it. For all their faults, markets have a way of solving issues like this.

The practical effect of these requirements is to force the construction of far more off-street parking than could ever conceivably be necessary. As the Strong Towners have long documented, suburban shopping mall parking lots are so cartoonishly overbuilt as a result of minimum off-street parking requirements, that they usually sit empty even on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.

Minimum parking requirements might seem innocuous. But it’s hard to overstate the deleterious effect they’ve had on the form of our cities. In neighborhoods built before the car, they made a wave of demolitions legally necessary. Today, over a third of the typical American downtown is now taken up by surface parking lots—and that’s before considering parking garages. In the suburbs, built out consistent with these rules, the result is a landscape of garden apartments, strip malls, and office parks surrounded by acres of parking lots that are virtually never full.

Of course, none of this off-street parking is ‘free’ either. All of this parking takes up space and increases development costs. In the worst case—as with the adaptive reuse of historic buildings or the construction of infill housing—it may make development altogether infeasible. In the best case, it merely makes development more expensive. Estimates vary, but each additional parking space adds as much as $20,000, $50,000, or $80,000 to the cost of a project, based on whether it involves a surface lot, above-ground garage, or below-ground garage, respectively.

These costs don’t magically disappear. Instead, they translate into higher prices. You might think that Whole Foods parking spot was free, but you can be sure you’re paying for it in more expensive groceries. The impact of minimum parking requirements on housing affordability has earned them the special ire of YIMBYs, who would like to see higher rates of construction and lower prices.

To understand why, imagine a 675 square foot (63 square meter) two-bedroom apartment—hardly glamorous, but the sort of accessible housing many cities need to get costs under control. In much of the US, a developer could profitably bring this unit to market for under $300,000. But if the city imposes a parking requirement of two spaces per unit or one space per bedroom, it could increase the cost of the unit by as much as a third, requiring future residents to consume as much parking space as they do living space. Many families might happily make that tradeoff. But the thing about a requirement is that you don’t have a choice.

Indeed, the most pernicious thing about these requirements is that they write automobile dependence into law. Perhaps most people like living amid vast parking lots and towering parking garages, spending thousands of dollars each year to shuttle themselves by car. Perhaps nobody wants a smaller, more affordable apartment in a neighborhood where they can safely walk to a storefront café or barbershop, or hop on a subway downtown. Less sophisticated observers insist that everything that exists is merely what consumers prefer. But in a world without choices, who is to say?

At this point, the typical policy essay would end: In my infinite wisdom, I have shown yet another way in which the world is bad. But I’m sorry to say that the politics of this suboptimal equilibrium are solid. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for planners to keep curb parking ‘free,’ no matter the harm, while mandating the construction of endless ‘free’ off-street parking that will quietly increase costs in every other aspect of life. Oh, well.

But that’s not where our story ends. In 2005, Donald Shoup published The High Cost of Free Parking. As an academic treatise, it’s a profoundly weird text: the obligatory scholarly patter about what we still don’t know is absent. The wonky theory, supply-demand curves, and tables of figures are all there, but they’re punctuated by jokes, media snippets, personal anecdotes, and more than a few peculiar allegorical digressions. Taken collectively, it’s the closest a city planning textbook will ever come to House of Leaves.

It is also strikingly practical. Shoup empathized with the plight of the typical planner: Yes, we know that minimum off-street parking requirements cause all sorts of problems. But if we don’t impose them, we’ll need to price curb parking to avoid a tragedy of the commons situation—and pricing curb parking is beyond the pale.

His solution to this political problem would end up being his greatest contribution: parking benefits districts. If you take curb parking revenue and invest it in conspicuous local improvements, such as street trees, repaved sidewalks, or regular street sweeping, locals will not only support pricing curb parking—they will often demand it. Once a parking benefits district is established, the politics of pricing curb parking will be secure, and planners can remove minimum off-street parking requirements without fear of backlash.

As Shoup would readily admit, the idea wasn’t handed down from heaven—though Pasadena comes close. In 1993, the city started installing parking meters in what was then a rundown downtown. Customers, merchants, and landlords balked. As a compromise, city leaders agreed to allocate a share of the revenue to local improvements. Streets were repaved, palm trees replanted, graffiti removed, and sidewalks regularly power-washed. Thirty years later, Old Pasadena is one of the poshest shopping districts in North America.

The release of The High Cost of Free Parking in 2005 immediately generated buzz among practicing city planners. By then, Shoup had spent decades training generations of planning practitioners and scholars—including Michael Manville, the current chair of the UCLA planning department—turning parking studies into a lively discipline. In its official timeline, the American Planning Association recognizes the book’s publication as one of the seven most important things to happen in planning over the past 25 years.

Shortly after its publication, Patrick Siegman, a planning consultant and early Shoup acolyte, went on a rant about parking at Zeitgeist, a popular bicyclist bar in San Francisco. His conversation partner, local bicycling advocate Dave Snyder interjected: ‘Oh, you’re just a shoupista.’ The name stuck. A movement had been born. At the depths of the Great Recession in 2008—planners no doubt finding themselves with a lot of free time—a group of shoupistas started a Facebook Group to take turns ranting at each other about parking.

Across California, planners wasted no time rebuilding parking policy along shoupista lines. In 2005, Redwood City overhauled its downtown parking management with the goal of ensuring that at least one or two spaces were always available on each block, eliminating cruising and improving walkability. Closer to home, Ventura started pricing curb parking in 2010, directing part of the revenue into free public WiFi. In Los Angeles, LA Express Park brought sanity to downtown parking in 2012. It was a revolution from above.

In retrospect, these were just a trial run for what would be the most thoroughgoing implementation of Shoup’s ideas: SFPark. Program director Jay Primus’ goal was not merely to install parking meters in a few busy areas. Rather, the goal was to take the program citywide, with prices fluctuating based on demand using sensor-based monitoring. Prices would then be communicated via an app, allowing drivers to make tradeoffs in real time.

The result was a rare win for San Francisco governance: We know from pilot areas that implementing demand-based pricing reduced congestion and parking citations while speeding up transit and increasing overall sales tax revenue. The program is now widely regarded as a model for parking management.

Alongside these California developments, the revolution was being exported, with shoupistas guiding the creation of parking benefits districts in cities like Bangalore, Beijing, and Mexico City.

Then a strange thing happened: normal people started becoming shoupistas. In 2015, a cartoon version of Shoup appeared in an episode of the hit TV show Adam Ruins Everything, making the case against minimum off-street parking requirements. In 2017, a Vox video exploring Shoup’s ideas quickly garnered millions of views. The old shoupista Facebook Group swelled from hundreds of members to thousands, with members producing an endless stream of memes. Shoupistas eagerly shared photos of themselves with Shoup, dressing up as Shoup for Halloween, and their tattered copies of The High Cost of Free Parking.

Back in the real world, the rising YIMBY movement enshrined Shoup as a minor saint and made abolishing minimum off-street parking requirements one of its top priorities. In 2017, the dam broke, with Buffalo, New York, and Hartford, Connecticut, being the first cities to abolish minimum off-street parking minimums—citywide, and for all uses. In 2020, they were abolished nationwide in New Zealand. And in 2022, California abolished minimum off-street parking requirements within a half-mile of transit statewide.

At the time of Shoup’s passing, 99 cities in eight countries had completely abolished minimum off-street parking requirements. Thousands more cities have made incremental progress in rolling back these mandates. In 2019, YIMBY activist Tony Jordan founded the Parking Reform Network, institutionalizing the revolution—and kicking it into overdrive.

In 2005, ideas like implementing dynamic curb pricing or abolishing minimum off-street parking requirements were unthinkable. A mere twenty years later, they now seem inevitable.

Academia is overflowing with hard-working professors with clever ideas that go nowhere. Yet Donald Shoup, perhaps the most unlikely candidate, somehow managed to kick off an international movement and usher in a wave of policy reform. What gives? In my capacity as the teaching assistant for his legendary ‘Parking and the City’ course at UCLA these past four years, I spent a lot of time puzzling over this question. Every quarter I helped teach the course, we had to expand the capacity to let in students desperate to take it. I have come to at least three conclusions.

First, Shoup picked a topic that was simultaneously important, tractable, and neglected. If you ever had more than a 30-minute conversation with him, you no doubt heard the following shoupism: ‘I’m a bottom feeder. But there’s a lot of food down here.’ The way we manage parking is of profound importance to nearly every aspect of our lives. It’s also something local planners have a lot of control over. And yet, before Shoup took up the issue, there was virtually no scholarship on parking—and even less in the way of activism around the issue. We could use a Donald Shoup on many more issues.

The addicting thing about shoupism is that, once you’re on board, you start to see parking everywhere: A story in the newspaper about two drivers getting in a fight over parking? Well, the parking must have been underpriced. (Henry Grabar starts his excellent book on parking by inviting the reader to try to make sense of such a seemingly senseless story.) Finding yourself depressed by yet another town gutted by parking? That’s the minimum off-street parking requirements for you. You know you’ve fully come around when you start taking strange pleasure in paying for parking.

Second, Shoup exercised unparalleled message discipline. He published his first paper on the topic in 1978 and spent the next half-century writing on little else. Aware of the responsibility of his celebrity, Shoup studiously avoided taking a position on almost any other issue. When protesters and counter-protesters flooded UCLA’s campus in response to the Israel-Palestine conflict, I asked for his take. ‘I’m just wondering where they all parked,’ he replied.

Indeed, Shoup worked hard to make his ideas palatable across the political spectrum. Are you a conservative? People should pay for the services they consume. Are you a progressive? All this unnecessary driving can’t be good for the environment. Are you a libertarian? Clearly, the solution to scarcity is prices and markets. Are you a socialist? Let’s stop privatizing the public realm by turning it into a free parking lot. As a result, the typical shoupista gathering is an oasis of peaceful coexistence.

Finally, Shoup built up the next generation. He not only trained many young planning practitioners and scholars—he often bent over backward to help them start their careers. Shoup eagerly responded to emails from planners in even the most unremarkable small towns and often helped young scholars to co-author some of their first research on parking. In his seminars, students were encouraged to publish their work via op-eds or academic papers. Regularly, I hear from former students telling me it changed the course of their careers.

Nor did Shoup shy away from activism: When the aforementioned California bill was in trouble, he sprung into action, calling everyone in Sacramento who would listen. (The bill’s author, Laura Friedman, is now one of at least a dozen self-identified shoupistas in Congress.) In the last quarter Shoup taught, he had students pestering UCLA administrators with memos explaining why they should designate safe parking sites for homeless students. When Los Angeles seemed poised to end a pandemic-era order allowing outdoor dining on parking lots, he worked with former students to make the case against a crackdown.

If you were ever trying to visit Shoup on campus, you probably didn’t need to look up his office number. His was the room with the door covered with newspaper comics about parking—and the source of periodic laughter. When my book on zoning was about to come out, Shoup counseled: when you work on a superficially boring topic, you have to start by making it funny. One of Shoup’s favorite ways to open a talk was by noting that ‘in an audience this large, some of you were probably conceived in a parked car.’

Perhaps being able to laugh at a problem is the first step toward fixing it.

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Today, we’re opening applications for a long-term writers’ fellowship, hosted jointly by Works in Progress and Asimov Press. We are looking for four to six writers who, over a six-month period, will produce richly detailed articles about a selected area of scientific progress. These could include writing on biotechnology, metascience, technology in China, the history of science, or just about anything in between. We will prioritize writers covering issues that are of interest to both of our organizations. This fellowship was made possible with support from Stripe.

The fellowship’s goal is to help writers produce one complete article of a standard suitable for publication in either of our magazines, every month. We will provide:

• Mentorship. Partner up with an editor at one of our organizations, and check in with them regularly for advice and feedback. We will connect you to external experts as needed.

• Editorial guidance. Asimov Press and Works in Progress will work with you to edit your work and help you strengthen your writing and editing skills.

• Publicity and promotion. Asimov Press and Works in Progress will work together to support and promote your work, as well as help you publish articles in our magazines or elsewhere.

• Networking: Network with other writers in the cohort at dinners and in-person events.

• Payment. We will pay each fellow a stipend of $1,500 per month, contingent on the completion of a high-quality, edited piece of writing. (Regardless of whether we choose to include it in either of our publications, or encourage you to put it on your own Substack or blog.)

• Additional support. Our goal is to find and develop writers who will become long-term contributors. We’ll provide reasonable support for reporting trips, scientific illustrations, and whatever else you need to produce your best work.

• No lectures. Just a Slack group and asynchronous support.

If this sounds appealing, we hope you’ll apply. We’re especially keen to work with writers who already have a blog or have done public-facing writing, and who have a deep fascination with a specific slice of science. We appreciate nonconformism and originality,, as well as young people who deserve more recognition for their ideas.

Applications are open and should take about 15 minutes to complete. We’ll close applications on March 1st, invite a few people to interview, and make final selections by early April. The fellowship will run from mid-April to mid-October.

We look forward to hearing from you!