Faster, Please! · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:32:22 +0000
Also: Key Up Wing and Down Wing news from the week that was ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- # 🚀 FP! Week In Review, Briefly #18 ### Also: Key Up Wing and Down Wing news from the week that was Jan 24 --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in the USA and around the world: **All weekend, I 'm offering free subscribers a pretty great deal: a 50% discount on a paid subscription! Just click the Big Blue Button below!** Get 50% off for 1 year * * * ## **In Case You Missed It ...** **⚛ ️ A final (and lasting?) nuclear revival: My chat (+ transcript) with nuclear energy advocate Jessica Lovering** (Tuesday) ⚡ **America 's electrostate inevitability** (Thursday) 📈 **Democracy 's growth dependence** (Friday) * * * ## **⤵ Up Wing/Down Wing** A selection of pro-progress and anti-progress news items from the past week. ### **⤴ Up Wing Things** * Claude Is Taking the AI World by Storm, and Even Non-Nerds Are Blown Away - WSJ * China's Birthrate Plunges to Lowest Level Since 1949 - NYT * Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life - NYT * America's 250th Isn't Just a Birthday - The Free Press * New Scientist's guide to the 21 best ideas of the 21st century - NS * The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff - Ars Technica * Life Resembles 'The Addams Family' With Thing-Like Robotic Hand - NYT * The first commercial space station, Haven-1, is now undergoing assembly for launch - Ars Technica * mRNA cancer vaccine shows protection at 5-year follow-up, Moderna and Merck say - Ars Technica * The pioneer behind Google Gemini is tackling an even bigger challenge--using AI to 'solve' disease - Fortune * Another Jeff Bezos company has announced plans to develop a megaconstellation - Ars Technica * Logical Intelligence brings LeCun on board as it touts AI breakthrough - FT * How Playing Pokemon Became the Ultimate Test of AI's Intelligence - WSJ * * * ### **⤵ Down Wing Things** * How the Tech Industry Is Responding to Data Center Backlash - Heatmap * How tech billionaires spurred an exodus of rich people from California - WashPost * China will clinch the AI race - FT * Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying - WSJ * Trump's First Year Could Have Lasting Economic Consequences - NYT * Big Tech is taking on more debt than ever to fund its AI aspirations - WashPost * American decay versus American dynamism - Economist * * * ## **Essays and Q &As** **⚛ ️ A final (and lasting?) nuclear revival: My chat with nuclear energy advocate Jessica Lovering** | | ---|---|--- **Forgotten Future:** In the 1950s and '60s, nuclear power was seen as a cornerstone technology of the future -- not just for electricity, but for medicine, research, and national progress. It symbolized abundance and energy independence. Over time, however, nuclear came to be framed as outdated and backward-looking, a sharp reversal from its original "Tomorrowland" image. **Perfect Storm:** The US nuclear industry expanded too fast, building ever-larger reactors without enough operational experience. Costs escalated as project management, construction, and safety systems struggled to keep pace. Meanwhile, oil prices fell, inflation surged, and electricity demand slowed in the late '70s and '80s, making large capital projects unattractive. **A Fine Balance:** Stricter safety regulation after the creation of the NRC added uncertainty, but it wasn't decisive on its own. Electricity-market deregulation made it difficult to finance any large, long-term infrastructure. Utilities focused on optimizing existing assets rather than building new plants, sidelining nuclear alongside coal and hydro. **Changing Climate:** Today's nuclear revival is driven by fundamentals, not just shifting ideology. Climate goals, energy security concerns, aging coal capacity, and rapidly rising electricity demand -- from AI data centers, electrification, and EVs -- have renewed interest in clean, reliable power. **Policy Boost:** Nuclear's high costs are not intrinsic; they reflect missing demand and policy support. New tax credits, deployment incentives, and regulatory modernization -- especially under the IRA and ADVANCE Act -- are aligning public policy with private investment, encouraging innovation and cost reduction. **Division of Power:** Large reactors will remain viable in regulated markets, while small and modular reactors could expand nuclear's reach. Holding nuclear at 20 percent of US power would be progress; 30-40 percent is realistic. **Up Wing Up Shot:** This nuclear revival looks structurally stronger than past false starts -- anchored in demand, policy, and capital moving together. _Below is a lightly edited transcript of our podcast conversation._ **In This Episode** * **The lost Atomic Age (1:30)** * **To regulate or not to regulate (8:26)** * **Reactor capacity past and future (10:44)** * **The economics of nuclear (14:51)** * **Power projection (18:32)** * **The new nuclear status quo (24:04)** ### **The lost atomic age (1:30)** I think, in a lot of ways, nuclear did not live up to its promise, and there's a lot of different reasons for that. Some of it's industry's fault, some of it's different government's fault, some of it's just bad luck with accidents, and there's also a lot of market forces. **Pethokoukis: What happened to the atomic age? Why are there not 1000 nuclear reactors coast to coast across the United States, as perhaps some envisioned 50 years ago?** Lovering: That's a really interesting question. I like to think about it, as you said, 50 years ago . . . at the start of what we call the nuclear age, when commercial nuclear started, we really thought of . . . nuclear energy as this technology of a future, not just for power generation, but it could do all these things: medicine, and research, and it held so much promise. But now -- **It was like the everything solution.** It was like Tomorrowland at Disney with flying cars and nuclear power. And I'll get to what happened, but I think it's really interesting that now, at least in a lot of the discourse -- and it is changing, but nuclear is kind of thought of as a technology of the past. It's antiquated, it's outdated, it's not the future. And I think that change has been really interesting. What happened? Why don't we have 1000? I think, in a lot of ways, nuclear did not live up to its promise, and there's a lot of different reasons for that. Some of it's industry's fault, some of it's different government's fault, some of it's just bad luck with accidents, and there's also a lot of market forces. We had alternatives that became available, and oil got cheaper and more available, and the need for that sort of secure energy source to ensure energy independence -- which was really the primary driver for interest in nuclear power in the beginning -- that motivation wasn't as strong. But that's changing now. I think in the last, not just five years, but maybe 10 to 20 years, we have seen this resurgence and interest in nuclear for new reasons like climate, but also for some of the same old reasons. Energy security is still a big motivator. **You mentioned a number of reasons why we stopped building nuclear reactors in the US -- to what extent were those reasons factors beyond our control, like declining oil prices, and to what extent was it bad regulatory decisions? And to what extent was it the fault of the private sector doing a bad job on delivering these reactors cheaply?** It depends on the country, but obviously this was a global phenomenon. France did a really good job getting to 80 percent nuclear in their electricity sector. Sweden, very successful buildout of nuclear, that's where I live now. But globally, we didn't keep up that pace of builds that was started in the 1970s. It's really a confluence of factors, and that's why I did say bad luck. I think there's a lot of forces at play that all came together in the '80s. I'll try to get through them really concisely. So to focus on the US, which still has the largest fleet of commercial nuclear power -- might be surpassed by China in a decade, 15 years, but for now and for the whole history of nuclear power, the US has really been the leader. And in the '60s and '70s, they were just turning out tons of nuclear power plants, starting construction, but I think the industry had a lot of growing paints. In particular, the technology got too big too fast, I would say, in that the project management, the construction, the builders couldn't keep up with the safety precautions and the engineering that was needed for these new technologies. Because if you think about it, they're building a reactor that's twice as big as what they were building 10 years ago, and they haven't gained that experience of operating those reactors. So I think the industry scaled up too quick, and you can see this difference in other countries like France, or like Canada, where they just scaled up much more slowly in terms of size, and they changed technology slower, more of a paced buildout, which leads to much more stable industry. So I think that's one thing that's kind of the industry's fault, but it's pretty US-specific, but since the US was at the forefront and was building so much, it kind of looms large. If you look at the economic literature about why is nuclear so expensive, it's really focused on the United States and why cost escalated so much in the US. That was a fault of the industry, but it was really because it was an emerging industry that was new, and we were still learning how to operate nuclear, how to build nuclear. And then after, there's this big push in a lot of Western countries to build nuclear in the '70s because of the oil crisis, but then when you get into the '80s, the oil prices stabilize, it's coming down, we're discovering lots more places to get oil, then you have really high inflation, and recessions. That makes it very expensive to build capital intensive projects. And then in the US, in the late '70s, of course, you have Three Mile Island, which I would say was industry's fault, there's blame there, but it also came at a really bad time when fear was already growing around nuclear because of lots of smaller accidents. Something that happens also in the late '70s, and why I said there's sort of this complex of events, is you start to see deregulation in the power sector, particularly in the US, but then in the 1980s and 1990s, it starts to spread through a lot of other Western countries. And what deregulation did . . . is it made it very challenging for utilities to build large capital-intensive projects. They got a lot more power out of their existing infrastructure, out of their existing power plants. That was good, a lot more efficiencies, which is what deregulation was meant to do, increase competition, but it made it hard to build big things -- any big thing, not just nuclear, but coal plants, hydroelectric. You really don't see much building of any kind until the early 2000s when lots of plants are retiring, all kinds, coal is retiring, and you need more power plants. And now we're trying to figure out how do you actually get power plants built when you have all these deregulated markets. And that's why where you see nuclear today is successful tends to be in places that are so regulated. ### **To regulate or not to regulate (8:26)** The rules got a lot stricter when the NRC was founded, but as I said, a lot of other things were happening at once. Inflation, demand for electricity started to stagnate, so that means that utilities have less incentive to build new capacity and there's less economic demand for new power plants. **It seems to cut both ways, because typically, the story you hear is that we made it expensive to build nuclear because the government demanded so many safety regulations and really wasn 't interested in building, ultimately. But you're simultaneously telling me another story about deregulation making it difficult. So both of those stories are true?** I think that the safety regulation, like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- which was established also in the mid-'70s, so again, all these things changing all at once -- that gets blamed a lot for the decline of nuclear, particularly in the US, or the stagnation in nuclear builds, and there's definitely a role there. Safety got a lot stricter. The rules got a lot stricter when the NRC was founded, but as I said, a lot of other things were happening at once. Inflation, demand for electricity started to stagnate, so that means that utilities have less incentive to build new capacity and there's less economic demand for new power plants. So a lot of things were happening at once. Definitely changes in regulation, particularly instability in safety regulations, so not knowing how much the safety regulation is going to change year to year, that can definitely put the chill on an industry, and we see that in cross-country comparisons. Looking at differences between the US and France, France had much more gradual changes in the safety regulations. The US had a much more stable regulatory environment. I think it definitely plays a role. . . Me personally, and other people I work with don't think it's the silver bullet, but there has definitely been, in the last five years, a call for regulatory, what we say "modernization," making regulation more efficient, more streamlined, so that it's more supportive of innovation, of new nuclear technologies, to this point of supporting the industry to get . . . new reactors built while maintaining good safety. Important, but not the linchpin that fixes everything. ### **Reactor capacity past and future (10:44)** There's a need to replace aging capacity, nuclear and otherwise. A lot of coal plants are also aging, becoming uneconomic to keep open. **Can you imagine a realistic scenario where the US would have kept building lots of reactors from the '60s all the way through the '90s, given all of the factors you've described, or was our nuclear pause sort of inevitable? Is there anything we could have done about it?** Because of a lot of the market forces, I think it was kind of inevitable in that we just didn't need a lot of new nuclear capacity. We didn't need a lot of new power plant capacity at the time, in the '90s, and nuclear was quite expensive in the US at the end of the 1980s, so I think that was somewhat inevitable. I think a lot about Sweden now. They just scaled up nuclear so fast. In 1975, they had one large nuclear reactor under construction for every million people in the country. So thinking about if the US had been building at that scale, having hundreds of reactors under construction in a given year, it's definitely doable in a country, but I do think that particularly the market forces made it somewhat inevitable, and then the public sentiment was not there as well. Now, if the public sentiment was different, could you have seen maybe more nuclear builds? Probably more, and probably less canceled projects in the '80s, but I don't think it would've been that we had 1000 reactors in the US now. **So why should a rational person be optimistic that -- at least in the United States -- we are going to start building a lot of increased nuclear capacity, whether it's big reactors, small reactors, micro-reactors -- what is the realistic optimism there?** It's coming from a lot of different places, as I said. And I think, for people maybe more my age or in my peer group, starting maybe 10 years ago, or more than 10 years ago, climate was really a big motivator for interest in nuclear, and I think that surprises a lot of people because if you look at polling, people that support action on climate change the most are generally quite opposed to nuclear, but there is a group that's looking at it very rationally and saying, how do we fix this problem the fastest, the cheapest? And nuclear, historically, has performed very well in reducing emissions, reducing air pollution at scale, so I think that's been a big driver of renewed interest in nuclear. Certainly at the state level, if you look at big changes in policy, California decided to keep their last nuclear power plant open, that was both for energy security reasons -- they have some capacity issues in the summer -- but also because of climate, because they thought the plant would be replaced by something with higher emissions. Then you look at New York, another very traditionally quite anti-nuclear state that's closed plants recently, and they're looking at now, they just announced building five gigawatts of new nuclear in the state. That's mostly driven by, I would say, an interest in climate, but also an energy security argument, or just energy demand. There's a need to replace aging capacity, nuclear and otherwise. A lot of coal plants are also aging, becoming uneconomic to keep open. Something like a hundred gigawatts of coal has closed in the last 10 years, for economic reasons, for the most part. And so a lot of grids just need a lot more capacity. And then on top of that, you have growth and demand for electricity, which we haven't seen in a long time -- we haven't seen this level of growth -- from data centers, from electric vehicles, from electrifying industry, all sorts of things. And historically around the world, nuclear does really well when you have strong growth in demand for electricity, and that's been lacking in the US and a lot of European countries until recently. ### **The economics of nuclear (14:51)** I think there are reasons it got expensive that are related to safety, but I think really the cost of nuclear -- and the cost of any technology, any energy technology -- is really driven by policy. **I think the final piece of the puzzle is the AI data center issue. In the past you 've had the climate case for nuclear, then the energy security case, but the AI aspect now is pretty massive. But I suppose there's one final piece of the puzzle, which is the economics of it all. Have we figured out the financial side of this?** Here's my argument, and here's what I tell people: A lot of the times, the economics of nuclear get talked about as if it's something intrinsic to nuclear power. Nuclear power is just expensive, because it's complicated, it's dangerous, you have to have all these safety systems. And I don't really think that's the case. I think there are reasons it got expensive that are related to safety, but I think really the cost of nuclear -- and the cost of any technology, any energy technology -- is really driven by policy. It's driven by demand, and that can be demand that's induced by policy, or just market forces. But what we've seen for all sorts of technologies, -- shale gas, solar, wind -- is that it was government incentives that really helped drive down the cost and create the market demand for these technologies, and that led companies to invest in not just deploying the technology, but research and development to help bring down the cost, to improve processes that made it cheaper. And so that's, I think, what's been missing with nuclear in the past. We think of nuclear as being very government-supported, and in a way, it is, but mostly on the security side. A lot of this money that we think of as going towards nuclear and the government is really going towards nuclear weapons, nuclear security. It's not going towards creating incentives for electricity from nuclear power the way that you've seen with solar and wind, or even shale gas over the last 30 years. So that's really what's changed, I would say, in the last 10 years, really starting with 2005 with the Energy Policy Act of 2005, when you see the first production tax credits for new nuclear. Since then, there's been a lot more interest in nuclear -- this is very US-focused -- and then now with different legislation, there's states that have incentives for new nuclear. And then with the Inflation Reduction Act, and then the ADVANCE Act, there's a lot more policy support for those demand policies for nuclear, which has really been missing in terms of the economics. And I think that's what's really needed to drive down costs. And it's not just, "Okay, you get government support and then the cost is going to come down," it's really that intersection of public and private. So the private companies are going to want to take advantage of those incentives. And so they're going to be looking for how can we make our technology cheaper? How can we secure customers so we can get these tax credits? So that's where, right now, it looks like there's kind of this resurgence of interest in nuclear: There's 70-plus companies in the US. There's all these announcements, Meta just made a big announcement on nuclear. Google has a big announcement, a big commitment, Microsoft. That's all coming from not just this AI boom and the data center boom, which you mentioned, but also because of these new government incentives and these new policies to support the deployment, as well. ### **Power projection (18:32)** It's common sense that factory fabrication would bring down costs versus doing a huge infrastructure project, which is like building a new highway or a new metro system -- just notorious for going over budget and over schedule. **Can the US generate a lot more power from nuclear building big nuclear power plants? Can we do it building those plants? Does it have to be a new technology, these small modular reactors? For that to happen, does that have to be a part of the story? What does the successful future look like, both as the share of energy production coming from nuclear and exactly what it looks like as far as the kinds of reactors generating that power?** It's still an open question. I am a big believer in small nuclear. My PhD thesis was focused on microreactors, which are reactors under 10 megawatts, so that's really tiny. That's like shipping container size. The reason I'm very interested in those is because modularity, factory fabrication, that's what we've seen bring down costs in every other energy technology, and also things like aircraft, and electric vehicles. It's common sense that factory fabrication would bring down costs versus doing a huge infrastructure project, which is like building a new highway or a new metro system -- just notorious for going over budget and over schedule. But there's this sense -- and you see this a lot, and I actually have a report coming out on this trade-off between economies of scale and economies of volume, or factory fabrication, in a couple of weeks -- that nuclear just can't do it. It just can't be factory fabricated. It won't work because of how it's regulated, because you need a certain number of orders, it's not safe to have a ton of these tiny reactors all over the place. And so I think the jury's still out, but there are, if you look at the companies that have agreements that are working with the NRC to build their first projects, they tend to be smaller. The projects that just came online in Georgia, Vogtle 3 and 4, those are very big. Those are AP1000s, and there's some people who think the only way we're going to be successful in the US is to just keep building AP1000s. And then there's another group that thinks we're never building another AP1000 again. It's all about SMRs and microreactors because of factory fabrication. And I think it's probably going to come in the middle. I think different sizes for different markets. There's definitely these big regulated utilities, especially in the Southeast of the US that can accommodate large reactors. They're regulated utilities, they have the financial capabilities, they have the demand, they have the experience with nuclear, they can do a big reactor. But for a lot of other places, I think SMRs are going to make a lot more sense, especially if you're a smaller utility that doesn't have the financial resources to finance a huge project like that, and you want to buy something more on a turnkey basis, like how a natural gas turbine is purchased: You place an order and six months later, it gets delivered. I think that's the dream for SMRs, and it's not proven yet because we haven't built one in the US, but there's a lot of companies that are working on that and think that that's where the success is going to be. So we'll see. I think in just the next few years, we'll see if this works or not. **What is a realistic projection for what share of power can come from nuclear?** You could certainly run a country on 100 percent nuclear. I don't think that makes sense. I believe in a portfolio. **If it 's 20 percent now, can we get the 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent?** I'm so hesitant to put a concrete number, but I will say -- **Remember, if you put a number, don 't put a date. Only one!** You've seen countries like France that got up to 80 percent nuclear, but they didn't have domestic fossil fuels, and they don't have good renewables resources in the country, at the time. We have a lot of hydro, we have a lot of fossil fuels. So I think, perhaps, even just keeping the US at 20 percent with aging plants would be good, but I think we could get to 30 or 40 percent, and that could be a really good mix in terms of energy security and transition to clean energy as part of a portfolio with other technologies. **Right now, what is the focus of your research? I 've raised a lot of things that I'm interested in, what are you most interested in right now?** I've been working in the nuclear policy space for over 10 years now, and I've worked at a bunch of different orgs and worn different hats, and I think the theme and the thread that's been consistent is I've been focused on policy to support innovation in nuclear to accelerate deployment of the technology, because I think it's important for a whole bunch of different goals: energy security, climate change, air pollution, just general traditional environmental values like land use, conservation, biodiversity. That's been my focus . . . I would say bringing down the cost of nuclear and accelerating deployment of new nuclear. ### **The new nuclear status quo (24:04)** In the US, there's so much happening right now, and so many projects are actually breaking ground, signing concrete deals. It does feel very real, like a lot's happening. **If you 're old enough, you've seen more than one green shoots of a nuclear renaissance, at least in this country. Will this be the last nuclear renaissance? Is it going to stick, so that the green shoots will flower, and we'll keep the 20 percent, maybe we get up to 30, maybe 40, but that we've entered a new, sustainable . . . status quo for nuclear in the United States? And feel free to take it beyond the US.** Because I am physically located in Europe right now, I'm in Sweden, I will say that there has been a very strong pivot in Europe since 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the gas crisis. A lot of countries rethinking their nuclear policy, and before that, the policy on nuclear was very entrenched, very sort of, "It's been the same for the last 30 years, we are phasing out nuclear, nuclear is bad, antiquated," and now there's all this renewed interest in nuclear. I think that's been a much bigger shift than the US, which has been, "We've always been at 20 percent, we've always had a thriving industry," but now it's growing for the first time in 30 years. So I think Europe's maybe more where that resurgence feels really different, and we'll see. It's going to depend if new plants start to get built in Europe, which a lot of countries are committing to building new plants, but I would say in the next five years, seeing if those plants actually get started, that'll really tell if it's the last Renaissance. In the US, there's so much happening right now, and so many projects are actually breaking ground, signing concrete deals. It does feel very real, like a lot's happening. I think there is a little bit of hesitation with the politics right now that some worry about the independence of the regulator and things like that that could threaten the really strong bipartisan support that there's been for nuclear in the US, which is unique in the US, for sure. So there's some worry about that aspect, but there's just so much happening on the private sector side and some really great policies that have been passed in the last five years to support the industry that I think we're going to see a lot of new stuff get built in the next 10 years in the US. * * * **⚡ America's electrostate inevitability** | | ---|---|--- **It 's Electric (Boogey-Woogey-Woogey): **For a century, US economic power ran on petroleum. Shell's new 2026 Energy Security Scenarios argues that foundation is giving way to electrification -- not as climate ideology, but as economic and industrial logic. Modern systems favor electrons over hydrocarbon molecules. **A Shocking Outcome:** Across all three scenarios outlined by Shell, the outcome is the same: far more electricity doing far more work. Mass-produced energy hardware flips costs, physics favors electric motors over combustion, and electricity's share of final energy is now rising at multiples of its historical pace. **Driven by Demand:** AI data centers, EVs, electrified factories, and industrial processes are driving explosive power demand. Shell envisions a possible future in which fossil fuels stick around mainly because demand grows faster than clean supply can be built: "Even so, the backbone of the system becomes electrical, stitched together by batteries, smart grids, and perhaps eventually factory-built nuclear reactors." **Up Wing Up Shot:** America is becoming an electrostate whether it plans for it or not. The real choice is timing: lead early, build supply chains, and capture growth -- or delay and import the future from competitors later. * * * **📈 Democracy's growth dependence** | | ---|---|--- **Defying the Default:** Growth and democracy are historical anomalies, not humanity's default. For most of history, stagnation and autocracy ruled. Liberal democracy paired with rising living standards is a fairly new phenomenon -- and its long-term durability is still an open question. **Performance Review:** New research shows democracy's legitimacy rests less on shared ideals than on economic performance. A massive study across 166 countries finds that people who experience stronger growth over their lifetimes are significantly more likely to trust government, especially in democracies. Trust, in turn, underwrites compliance, cooperation, and political stability. **Make It or Break It:**Complementary work finds that democratic experience boosts support for democratic norms only when democracy delivers. Time spent in high-performing democracies builds legitimacy; poorly performing ones do not. Recent growth matters more than distant memories, creating a constant feedback loop. **Up Wing Up Shot:** When growth slows, trust erodes, politics turns zero-sum, and populism surges. Democracy's survival depends on renewing innovation-driven growth -- not nostalgia for past prosperity, but policies that restore rising living standards. * * * **On sale everywhere** _**The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised**_ | | ---|---|--- #### Invite your friends and earn rewards If you enjoy Faster, Please!, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. 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