This article is part of The Boyd Institute’s quarterly policy sprint on the debt and deficit. To learn more about them and the work they do, or submit your own article, click here.

The United States carries a public debt that now exceeds $39 trillion and counting; a truly enormous burden, even for the world’s largest economy. This challenge is far from unique to America. Many of the world’s most advanced nations now face similar fiscal pressures, with total public debts now matching or surpassing their annual GDPs. Compounding the problem, economic growth in these countries has slowed markedly, sharply reducing the likelihood that they will ever meet their obligations in full. A superficial budgetary review might suggest that runaway entitlement spending or inadequate revenues are the culprit. These conventional diagnoses, however, miss the deeper issue. To confront this crisis meaningfully, we must set aside surface-level explanations and examine the problem from first principles. We must identify the true root cause, the fundamental driver behind these unsustainable trajectories. Only with that clarity can we hope to design an effective corrective mechanism.

Drowning in Debt

I want to be clear on one issue from the outset: debt is a problem of magnitude. There is no inherent requirement that a sovereign government, one that can print and tax in its own currency, always have a balanced budget. The United States has run a fiscal deficit for most of its existence and zeroed out its Federal debt only once, back in 1835. When productivity is rising, it can be logical to borrow from the future to live better today. Our debt troubles aren’t about the existence thereof, but that it has grown too fast for too long. Many of the world’s most “advanced” nations now carry a debt-to-GDP ratio over 100 percent, levels not seen since the mid-1940s, in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Then, we had a plausible excuse; today, we have no reason to run these kinds of deficits. Equally worrisome is the cost of maintaining this debt; the United States now spends about 15 percent of its budget just making interest payments. This is flatly unsustainable.

It’s not difficult to understand how we got here. If we think 4th dimensionally, the seats of our Congresses and Parliaments are not only filled by representatives who sit in them today but also by those who will sit in them tomorrow. The problem is that we can only count the votes made by representatives sitting in those seats today. Sure, future representatives and voters are out there, playing tag on a playground somewhere, enjoying a video game, doing homework, lying in a bassinet, etc, but they are, for the moment, voiceless. Consequently, representatives seeking votes today have found that the easiest way to “bring home the bacon” is to make the bill tomorrow’s problem. I’ve discussed this immoral, “government myopia” problem before. This “tyranny of the present” means that immediate concerns, preferences, and desires take precedence over long-term challenges.

In the United States, this has created a vicious dynamic. When the Democratic Party is in power, it passes new spending measures designed to satisfy its voters, but then defers the painful tax hikes needed to pay for them. Likewise, when the GOP returns to power, it cuts taxes and defers the spending cuts. Neither party is willing or able to tackle the core drivers of the Federal deficit, namely Medicare, Social Security, and defense spending, line items which account for more than 80 percent of the projected deficit increase through 2032. Instead, all they can do is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, tinkering around the edges, leaving the deeper problem wholly intact. How can we escape this fiscal trap? In the end, the ledger must balance. This leaves us with four options: print more money, raise taxes, cut spending, or outgrow the debt.

Escaping the Fiscal Trap

Let’s begin with the idea that we can just “print” our way out of a debt crisis. This view is primarily advocated by the “Modern Monetary Theory school” of economists. They contend that public debt is not a problem because a sovereign government can always print more currency to pay it. This is wrong. Governments borrow money by selling bonds. These bonds are like “mini loans” that must be repaid. Sovereign leviathans are not magically immune to their debt obligations; they just default differently. There are two ways to default: a “hard default,” where bondholders take formal written losses, and its worse cousin, a “soft default.” In a soft default, the debt is paid by printing worthless currency, literally inflating the obligation away. The government can escape the first by printing money, but it cannot escape the second. Bondholders won’t be fooled; they will stop lending or demand higher interest rates. Printing is not a long-term solution.

Okay, if we cannot print ourselves out of the debt trap without awaking the bond trolls, perhaps all we need to do is raise taxes to bring in more revenue? We won’t need to borrow from the future if we can meet our obligations today. But does raising taxes actually solve the problem? The answer hinges on whether the deficit is a revenue problem or a spending problem. The balance of evidence suggests it’s the latter, not the former. Recall your middle school physics class, where you learned about the nature of an ideal gas and how gases expand to fill any container you place them into. Government spending is a bit like an ideal gas; the amount spent will always expand to use the revenue available to it, and then some. Think about it, why would a politician who seeks to satisfy as many current voters as possible not spend every dollar they can today?

Furthermore, a revenue-side approach to the debt problem is inherently limited, not only because the government will spend every cent it raises, but because continued tax hikes eventually shutter the wealth-creation machine underneath it. Many are probably familiar with the “Laffer Curve,” which suggests there is a maximum amount of tax revenue that the government can raise from a particular tax. The idea is simple: If we tax something at zero percent, we will raise zero dollars in tax revenue. Likewise, if we tax at a rate of 100 percent, we will still raise zero tax dollars. It’s not difficult to understand why; if the government taxed your income at 100 percent, would you still go to work? Therefore, the “optimal” tax rate lies somewhere between zero and one hundred percent, though the rate varies by context and tax type.

The Laffer Curve is primarily driven by “deadweight loss.” Deadweight loss occurs when the imposition of a tax pushes the normal supply/demand equilibrium out of balance, creating lost economic activity that isn’t translated into revenue. If the government taxes the sale of sofas, for instance, the tax raises the price of buying a sofa. Consequently, some people who may have bought one no longer will, and businesses will sell fewer sofas than they otherwise would have. It’s important to understand, however, that deadweight loss does not scale linearly with the tax rate, but rises to the square of the tax rate. This means that doubling a tax from 10 to 20 percent doesn’t double the economic loss; it quadruples it. So, as we raise taxes, deadweight losses rise faster than revenue, and if we go high enough, the tax base collapses entirely.

This is why governments that try to tax their way to fiscal solvency never can; the more they raise, the more they inevitably spend, the higher taxes must be, and the more the tax base erodes. In 1996, American economist Richard Rahn analyzed the growth and spending data of all OECD countries, finding that economic growth was strongest when total government spending was ~25 percent of GDP. When government spending exceeds this threshold, growth begins to slow. He caveated his findings with two qualifiers. First, the quality of spending still mattered; we can spend more without imperilling growth if we do so effectively. Second, his findings were probably biased to the high end; the optimal threshold was probably closer to ~15-20 percent of GDP. With many Western governments today spending well over 30-40 percent of their GDP and attempting to tax their way to solvency, we can see why growth is disappointing.

Indeed, large debt loads appear to imperil growth on their own. When government debt is low, spending a little more can accelerate growth, but past a certain threshold, every new dollar of debt has the opposite effect. A seminal 2010 study by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, for example, found that when public debt exceeds 90% of GDP, the median annual GDP growth falls by about 1 percentage point, and average growth falls even more. Subsequent studies have documented a similar “debt overhang effect,” though the threshold is debated. It’s believed that as debt rises, debt sales soak up capital that would otherwise be directed to more productive uses, stalling growth and forcing ever more distortionary taxes. In sum, while the maximum tax rates, deficit, and debt loads are debated and contextual, we know one thing for certain: high debt, high taxes, and large deficits result in slower growth, which, in turn, makes it even harder to service that debt. The fiscal crisis, therefore, is a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

Cap ‘n Grow

So we have conclusively established that we cannot print or tax our way out of this crisis. This leaves us with two remaining options: either we must cut spending or outgrow the debt. This is, from what we learned above, a bit of a false choice; they are very much the same. If we keep spending and taxes within a reasonable threshold, the economy will grow faster and, over time, make the debt less relevant. Recall that I compared government spending to an ideal gas. I was deliberately echoing Parkinson’s Law, a semi-satirical observation made by British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson who noted that even as the number of ships and naval personnel in the Royal Navy declined, the number of administrators grew about 6% annually. He reasoned that growth was not driven by increased workload but by a bureaucratic tendency for officials to create more work for each other, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Parkinson’s Law holds broadly. If you allot yourself an entire day to clean your home, it will probably take the whole day. But if you allot yourself just three hours, you will probably get it done in about three hours. Parkinson’s Law is also why many people attest to being more productive near the end of a tight deadline. In fact, we can leverage Parkinson’s Law for our benefit. Effective strategies include time boxing and the Pomodoro method; by constraining the time available for a task, paradoxically, more gets done. The government is a massive time-buying machine, hiring millions of staffers to complete administrative tasks, to review permits, conduct interviews, etc. The more revenue we provide it, the more man-hours it can afford, the more it will find work to do—even if that work is completely and wholly unnecessary.

This further bolsters my belief that the only solution to America’s fiscal trap is a spending cap, a metaphorical container that limits scope creep. And I believe the balance of evidence requires that the cap be around 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product. This isn’t unheard of. For much of America’s history, Federal government spending was only about 5 percent of GDP. With a firm spending cap, taxes can fall, and when they do, growth will accelerate. We will probably still have a fiscal deficit, but that's okay; it will be much smaller by virtue of the fact that growth will be stronger. Some might argue that reducing government revenue would endanger public services; I’d wager that it would not. After a painful transition period, the government would find a way to deliver substantially similar services within the new constraints.

Indeed, within constraints, there is beauty. Staffers will find efficiencies they hadn’t considered before. Policymakers will be forced to focus their attention on the highest return actions, discarding wasteful, low-impact distractions. With some patience and creativity, in fact, I suspect we will find that a constrained government delivers better public services. I’ve outlined some ideas for how this can be achieved at Risk & Progress. Abolishing student loans, for instance, and replacing them with ISAs, would save billions every year while cutting tuition inflation. Likewise, delivering welfare via cash assistance would be cheaper and more effective than the current hodgepodge of in-kind transfers, and relying more on nudges like mandatory Health Savings Accounts would go a long way to ensuring that the safety net remains, sans the public debt.

The only real question becomes: how do we reliably enforce a spending cap? Congress controls the purse, and any law they write can be overwritten. What we need is a “Ulysses pact” or “Ulysses contract.” The term comes from Homer’s Odyssey, in particular, the scene where Ulysses wanted to listen to the Sirens’ bewitching songs as he and his men sailed by their island home. Ulysses knew the Siren songs would render him irrational, so he ordered his men to put wax in their ears and, for the duration of the journey past the island, to literally tie him to the mast and ignore his orders and his pleas. We need a mechanism like this, something that ties our legislators to the mast, lest they be beguiled by the Siren song of spending our children’s money.

A law, therefore, won’t be enough; we need a Constitutional Amendment that would be near impossible to override. Perhaps we could even call it the Ulysses Amendment. The Amendment would cap annual government spending to within a range of 20 and 22 percent of the prior year’s Gross Domestic Product. This range leaves some room for countercyclical action; during recessions or major calamities, for instance, a majority vote of Congress would allow additional spending at the upper end of the cap. The amendment, however, would not allow such a vote to take place in more than one consecutive calendar year, forcing spending to automatically snap back to under 20 percent. Not only would this amendment enforce fiscal discipline, but it would also provide an incentive to adopt pro-growth policies; if you want to spend, you first have to grow. When we tie ourselves to the mast, we can stop ourselves from borrowing on the backs of our children, and within these constraints, we will grow and prosper like never before.

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Migration is among the most politically contentious issues facing the world today. A growing number of people around the globe are questioning the logic of allowing immigrants into their nations, asking whether their nations’ doors should be open or closed, or if a balance can be struck between the extremes. As with many of the issues explored at Risk & Progress, there are no easy answers; only imperfect solutions. Still, given this issue’s salience today, it is worth examining the merits of immigration, which approaches work and which do not, and what a pro-progress migration policy might look like.

Immigration Myths

First, it’s important to dispel some common myths surrounding this topic. First among these myths is the zero-sum notion that new arrivals take jobs from native-born people. The belief that immigration results in fewer jobs and lower wages is known as the “Lump of Labor Fallacy,” which presupposes that there is a fixed amount of labor needed in a country. Therefore, when immigrants arrive, they “take” jobs that otherwise would go to the “native” population. On the contrary, the non-zero-sum nature of immigration’s impact on employment was demonstrated in the late 19th century by economist David Frederick Schloss, who noted that the influx of immigrants increases both the supply of and demand for labor. After all, immigrants need places to live, they buy cars, they attend university, and go on vacation, etc. They consume just as the “native” population does.

A famous study, for example, examined the effect of the “Mariel Boatlift,” the mass emigration of Cubans to Miami, Florida, in 1980. This event abruptly increased Miami’s labor supply by 7 percent, yet there was no discernible impact on wages or unemployment. The labor market quickly adapted to the influx of migrants, as the surge in labor supply was accompanied by a surge in labor demand. It’s worth noting that this event occurred amid a severe economic recession in the United States and still didn’t move the needle on unemployment or wages. Similarly, after the collapse of the USSR, mass migration of Jews into Israel swelled the population by 12 percent with no negative impact on local employment.

In fact, the opposite seems true: immigration appears to be positive-sum concerning employment. One study found, for example, that with every one immigrant that arrived in the United States between 1980 and 2000, 1.2 new jobs were created. This is, in part, also because labor isn’t always substitutable. Compared with natives, immigrants have different employment preferences and expectations, including work locations, hours, and the types of occupations they seek out. For this reason, immigration restrictions usually don’t help the “native” population and may, in fact, cause undue harm to them. As wrote when discussing H1B visa restrictions in the US:

The importance of these preferences can be seen in the US doctor market – a significant number of doctors in rural areas are immigrants, which can in large part be attributed to preferences of local doctors who may prefer to live in more urban areas. Banning immigrant doctors will not result in rural areas getting ‘local’ doctors, but rather not having doctors at all.

Historically, attempts to aid the “native” population by restricting immigration do tend to cause more harm. A study examining the effects of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, found that it depressed the economy of Western US states for generations. The act was part of a series of escalating restrictions that were continually amended and extended. It began as a thinly-veiled effort to prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the US and Chinese immigrants from owning land. It eventually morphed into a complete ban on all ethnic Chinese from entering the US, including those who were already legally present, while still barring them from naturalizing as citizens. Imprisoned in their own country, many Chinese immigrants packed up and left. At the time, the Chinese Exclusion Act was broadly popular, justified as a way of protecting the jobs of “real” Americans. Yet, the white American laborers, the intended beneficiaries of the Act, were left worse off: the act(s) reduced the growth of the white labor supply in Western states by 28 percent and lowered their occupational income scores.

Anti-immigrant fever, of course, was left unsatisfied. Soon, immigration restrictions escalated beyond ethnic Chinese. In the early 20th century, law after law, executive order after order, were promulgated, gradually making it harder to immigrate to the US and eventually culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, which created strict immigration quotas based on national origin. The Act was explicitly intended to restrict the immigration of “less favorable” immigrants, which, at that time, meant migrants from the “backward” nations of southern and eastern Europe. One of its architects, Sen. David Reed, wrote in The New York Times that the Act’s passage would allow the United States to become “a more homogeneous nation” and a “vastly better place to live in.” Retrospective analysis estimates that the Act, however, led to a 68% decline in patent applications in industries where affected immigrants specialized and reduced US inventive output by an estimated 30 percent overall.

Speaking of innovation, one study, tracking 130 years of patent activity by US firms and real income growth of native-born workers, found that migration into the US had a positive impact on both economic growth and innovation. In addition, they estimate that liberalization of US immigration law after 1965, which finally undid the draconian 1924 quotas, increased total US innovative output by 8 percent and wages by 5 percent. While comprising just 11 percent of the US population, immigrants account for 23 percent of patent output and 32 percent of overall US innovative output after 1990. Non-Americans account for an astonishing 54% of master’s degrees and 44% of doctorate degrees issued by American universities in science, technology, engineering, or math.

Immigrants are also disproportionately entrepreneurial. Immigrants start 20 percent of all American businesses, and as of 2025, immigrants or their children founded 46 percent (231 of 500) of the companies on the Fortune 500 index. Together, these companies generated $8.6 trillion in revenue in 2024 and employed over 15.4 million people worldwide. Arguably, immigration was a key ingredient that kept the US economy and its hegemony growing while other would-be “superpowers” floundered. Japan, for example, outpaced US economic growth from the 1950s through the 1980s, and many predicted that Japan would overtake the US in the 90s. Instead, Japan sputtered as its population aged, slipping further and further behind ever since. One reason is Japan’s restrictive immigration policies, which reduced its economic and innovative productivity.

Crime and Housing

Even if immigrants do not cause economic harm to the host nation, skeptics might counter, they still bring crime. Associating immigrants with criminal activity is not a new phenomenon; the target groups just change from one generation to the next. In 1891, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge demanded that the US close its borders, claiming that Italian immigrants were all “members of the Mafia…using murder as a means of maintaining its discipline.” Once again, however, the data does not bear out these claims. Comparative studies across multiple countries (e.g., the US, Europe, Canada, Australia) have consistently found no evidence that immigration increases the overall crime rate. In fact, first-generation immigrants are typically less prone to crime than natives. A comprehensive analysis of US incarcerations from 1870 to 2020, for example, found that immigrants were 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives, and this gulf has been widening since the 1960s. In other words, immigration lowers the overall crime rate.

Now, an important caveat is in order. Immigration seems to work best for the host nation when it is legal and orderly. The data, admittedly, are less sanguine when it comes to large-scale disorderly migration. European data, for instance, finds elevated crime rates among refugees who fled their home countries in mass. When millions of refugees/asylum seekers show up at your border, you are getting a broad representative sample of human traits, perhaps even a comparatively worse-than-random sample of traits. In an ordered immigration environment, however, the host nation can cream-skim the best of the best. This means that there are certain, specific instances where immigration can lead to more crime, but this is more the exception rather than the rule.

Now what about housing? Immigration critics are also keen to blame migrants for driving up housing prices. If we “deport them all,” the saying goes, the rent will decline because the demand for housing will fall. There is likely some truth to this. Immigrants need a place to live, and they tend to settle in already densely populated cities. To the extent that new arrivals do raise the cost of housing, however, this says more about domestic policy failures than it does about immigrants. The problem is not the demand for housing; it’s the artificial restrictions that policymakers place on housing supply. This, of course, is a much broader problem and a subject in its own right.

Notably, there is a significant overlap between the most ardent anti-immigrant voices, those who blame immigrants for low wages and high housing prices, for example, and the pronatalists who advocate for large families. It’s difficult, however, for me to square this pronatalist position with simultaneous declarations that “our country is full.” This logical inconsistency bolsters my suspicion that many immigration critics do not raise their concerns about jobs, wages, crime, or housing in good faith, out of genuine concern for the well-being of the nation, but rather use them to conceal xenophobic feelings and intentions. They craft arguments against immigration that sound good, but fall flat with a modicum of inspection.

You may be questioning the research I cited above. Are immigrants superhuman? Are we to believe that immigrants are more likely to file a patent, start a business, get an advanced degree, and are less likely to commit a crime than native-born people? How could that be? The answer is that immigrants are a self-selecting group. The character traits required for success in life, like intellect, adaptability, and perseverance, are the same traits needed to successfully immigrate to another country. But if you still find the research unconvincing, ask yourself how the United States, a country that spent its first century with open borders, welcoming wave after wave of immigrants, from the Irish to Chinese, Greeks and Italians, and Mexicans to Indians, became the richest, most powerful country this planet has ever seen. If immigration from poor nations necessarily made the host country poorer and weaker, the United States would be an utter backwater today. It would not have risen from untamed wilderness to a world power, it would not have led the Second Industrial Revolution, let alone the Third.

Some may concede that while rich countries may benefit from immigration, it comes at the poorer countries’ expense. This is also likely incorrect. Modelling suggests that if every country eliminated migration barriers, growth everywhere would accelerate dramatically, unlocking anywhere from 50 to 150 percent of new economic output, or over 100 trillion dollars in new wealth. This means higher wages, more opportunities, and accelerated technological advancement for all. In fact, we don’t need to erase borders to unlock an unprecedented economic and innovation boost. Even a partial easing of migration barriers would increase global wealth by tens of trillions of dollars. So, while closing borders and further restricting immigration may be a popular policy, it is profoundly short-sighted. It leaves all of humanity, including and especially native-born people in wealthy nations, poorer and worse off. It is a harmful capitulation to those false zero-sum conceptions of where wealth and prosperity come from.

Managing Migration

With the above data in mind, we can say with certainty that closing borders is not a good idea. Orderly migration simply has too many benefits for the host nation and its citizens. Still, completely open borders seem politically unpalatable, so the question we must ask becomes two-fold: 1) How many immigrants should be allowed in, and 2) What character traits should any immigration system try to select for? These questions are much harder to answer, and every country has taken a different route to answering them. Most nations employ a discretionary immigration model in which a prospective immigrant applies, pays a fee, and bureaucrats determine eligibility for an entry visa, which can later be converted into Permanent Residence (a “Green Card”) and, perhaps eventually, citizenship. Countries vary considerably, however, in selection criteria.

The United States’ immigration system, for example, emphasizes family ties, whereby an established immigrant can petition for direct relatives to join them in the US. Some 81 percent of immigrant visas are issued to family members of American citizens, while only 5 percent are for employment or investment. Critics call this “chain migration,” but let’s call it what it really is: family reunification. The “chain” metaphor, I suspect, is used to provide cover for immigration skeptics who wouldn’t want to appear “anti-family,” betting that most Americans wouldn’t know better. Additionally, it’s important to understand that this process isn’t as easy as packing one’s bags and buying a plane ticket. It costs, at a minimum, thousands of dollars in fees and years of waiting (sometimes decades), medical exams, criminal history vetting, and reams of paperwork. Moreover, a large fraction of the people who would like to immigrate to the United States are still legally barred from doing so, a key factor driving illegal migration.

A competing immigration model, however, can be found just north of America’s border, in Canada. Many consider Canada’s immigration system to be a model that Americans should adopt. Canada admits migrants based on perceived “merit” rather than familial relations. In the Canadian system, immigrant character traits are assigned point values that, when added together, determine one’s eligibility for an entry visa. For example, a prospective migrant might receive a certain number of points for English proficiency, work experience, years of education, etc. Many countries, including Australia and New Zealand, employ a selection mechanism similar to Canada's, and notably, they all admit more immigrants per capita than the US does.

Point-based systems work well, but fail in crucial ways. Paradoxically, America’s less selective immigration system produces more disruptive inventors and entrepreneurs. This appears to be a consequence of points-based systems selecting for “safe” characteristics such as education credentials, work experience, and general risk aversion. Disruptive innovators, the kind that drop out of Harvard or leave a good-paying job to start a risky new venture, don’t fit this mold. Under a points-based system, for example, it’s unlikely that Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX), Sergey Brin (Google), or Jensen Huang (Nvidia) would have been able to establish themselves in the United States. This also means, in all probability, that these leading-edge companies wouldn’t exist or would have been founded abroad.

Market-Based Systems

This finding confirms my suspicions that it’s naive to believe that bureaucrats can successfully determine “merit” from a single immigration file. Who is to say, for example, that an uneducated, but skilled immigrant carpenter has less “merit” than one holding a PhD in French Literature? Is “low-skilled” labor any less crucial than “high-skilled” labor? These are subjective judgements that officials sitting at a desk, thousands of miles away, are not equipped to answer. I find it amusing that many of my fellow writers in this space, all of whom wouldn’t trust an official in D.C. to buy their groceries, are somehow willing to entrust them with assessing the future value of a human. No, the best immigration system would take the government out of the driver’s seat and rely more on the collective wisdom of the market.

Visa auctions are an obvious option here. In a visa auction, the government allocates a limited number of annual immigrant visas and allows anyone to bid on them. Subject to standard health and safety vetting, of course, the highest bidders have the right to select the individual to receive the visa. Merit is determined by the market, not by officials. A visa auction system, however, would require the government to accurately set the visa allotment. If the quota is set too low, only the wealthy can afford one. If it is set too high, society might not be able to adapt to the migrant influx. Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker has suggested the inverse approach: an “entry tariff.” Here, the government sets a visa price, allowing demand to set itself. This approach, however, asks that the government accurately and fairly determine the price of an entry visa, still no easy feat.

In their book, Radical Markets Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl propose what they call the Visas Between Individuals Program (VIP visa), which holds that any citizen or permanent resident can sponsor a single immigrant. In exchange, that immigrant would pay a monthly fee to the sponsor. This fee is uniform for all migrants who are also free to live and work as they please; they are not tied to the sponsor, and either party can end the partnership at any time. If the migrant loses their sponsor, however, they will have to find another or return to their country of origin. The fees are paid until a probationary period of perhaps 3-7 years is complete. The government sets the target population growth rate and allows the market to determine the price based on demand. We might think of this approach as a migration “congestion fee,” similar to a visa auction, but allowing for a more personal, human connection between the locals and immigrants. Personally, I find this proposal too complex to be workable.

Age-Scaled Entry Tariff (ASET)

While any market-based approach is likely to be superior to the status quo, I believe we can do better. While there are many traits that we might want to select for in an immigrant, those judgment calls are highly subjective. There is, however, one trait that we can say is fairly objective and measurable: age. The older the migrant, the greater the strain they will probably present on any existing welfare infrastructure, especially on the healthcare and retirement systems of the host nation. Additionally, the older the migrant, the less time they have to contribute productively to the local tax base that funds those systems. Older individuals also tend, as we have seen, to create fewer disruptive innovations, have a harder time learning the local language, adapting to local customs, etc.

For this reason, I propose a novel spin on the entry fee system, which I call the Age-Scaled Entry Tariff, or ASET system. The ASET system charges an entry fee that scales with a migrants age. The fee would begin at or near zero for children, as they have their whole working, innovating, and taxpaying life ahead of them. From that age, however, it would gradually increase, calculated to roughly recapture the tax revenue that would have been paid by that person had they lived in the country their whole lives. In the ASET system, the government isn’t tasked with arbitrarily setting a visa quota or a price. Instead, it only looks at tax data; hard numbers that are easily calculated. With the fees set, demand will vary naturally by age, with a strong preference for young migrants. Older migrants are still welcome, so long as they can pay the higher entry fee, which ensures the welfare system isn’t additionally burdened. This system ensures that all new arrivals are an asset to the host nation. And unlike a “merit-based” system, Musk, Brin, and Huang would still be welcomed. In fact, the ASET system would make it far easier for them to immigrate.

Selling visas in this manner might seem callous, but it’s a vast improvement over the status quo. The ASET system would be far more transparent and fair than any points-based system we could ever devise; the fee schedule would be publicly available, it would not be subject to political manipulation, or require a significant government bureaucracy. Government officials only need to collect fees and undertake health and background checks. Furthermore, broader immigration eligibility would catastrophically damage the human smuggling industry. For migrants, paying a border entry fee of $50,000, for example, is preferable to paying similar sums to human smugglers, only to live a marginalized life upon arrival. Additionally, this flexible and speedy immigration system would not need to build or maintain expensive border walls or armies of border agents.

By no means do I suggest that the ASET system is a panacea for migration woes or political tensions, but I do believe it’s a significant improvement over any plan or proposal I have yet seen. Ultimately, however, this would only be a half-step toward the broader goal of untethering people from their country of birth and unlocking their full potential. Long term, we might even consider adopting Nathan Smith’s “World Migration Organization,” modeled after the World Trade Organization, which works to ease global barriers to human migration. Ultimately, freer global migration is a necessary prerequisite to unlocking the full potential of all humans on Earth; a future where all can aspire to be the best version of themselves, regardless of the geographic location of their birth on the pale blue dot.

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Ever since the earliest humans walked this Earth, they looked up to the heavens and wondered. Where are we? Why are we here? What is our purpose? In this search for meaning, science has lit the way, gradually filling cavities with knowledge and steadily pushing myth and superstition to the fringes. Over the last five centuries, these discoveries have dramatically changed our perceived place in the universe. They pushed us from the center of everything to just beings on another planet, floating in the void. On their face, these discoveries would appear to diminish our importance, but this is only half the story. While science has displaced us from the geometric center of everything, it has also elevated human consciousness closer to a place of central, if metaphorical, significance.

Our Place In the Universe

Our naked eyes can only collect enough photons of light to view a tiny sliver of the universe around us. From our perspective here on Earth, the heavens appear to rotate around us; we lie at the center, the only conscious beings in a vast universe, a recipe for certain hubris. Historically, our conception of the heavens was rooted more in myth and philosophy than in science. Aristotle thought the heavens were perfectly ordered, with the Earth at the center. The Sun and Moon were perfect spheres, orbiting Earth in perfect circles at a constant, unchanging speed. The stars were the white light of the heavens peeking through a dark mask beyond which no material substance could exist. In this perfect universe, however, a problem vexed people for millennia: the planets.

Literally meaning “wanderer,” the position of the planets, unlike the stars, could not be predicted. They often appeared to move forward and backward in the night sky. Aristotle’s model had a fatal flaw. Centuries after Aristotle, Ptolemy suggested that the planets had two orbits: the deferent, rotating around the Earth, and the epicycle, where the planet rotated within the deferent. From our perspective, this would cause a planet to move backward and forward in the night sky at various times. His explanation, however, could not accurately explain the planets’ movements either. For an ordered, predictable universe, this was a problem, but one that was mostly hand-waved away. We still believed that humanity stood at the center of it all, a narcissistic ode to understandable ignorance.

In the 1500s, Nicolaus Copernicus was among the first to challenge Aristotle and Ptolemy. He suggested that if one placed the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the solar system, the odd movement of the planets in the sky could be explained without the need for complex orbits-within-orbits. Earth’s demotion also opened up the possibility that the Sun was one star among many. In 1600, Giordano Bruno was executed for arguing that the universe was infinitely large with many stars, each with their own worlds. Copernican heliocentricity was a parsimonious proposition, but one that still could not accurately explain planetary movement and lacked experimental proof. In the 1600s, Johannes Kepler refined the “Heliocentric” universe and further challenged Aristotle, suggesting that the planets didn’t orbit the Sun in perfect circles, but rather in ellipses. To intellectuals at the time, it must have felt like “cheating,” but by accepting imperfection, Kepler was able to predict planetary movements fairly well. Alas, he also lacked any means of proving his hypothesis.

Around the same time, Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the night sky and saw things no human had seen before. Galileo saw mountains on the Moon and spots on the Sun…objective evidence that the heavens did not conform to Aristotelian perfection. He witnessed the phases of Venus, something predicted by Copernicus, and saw moons orbiting Jupiter. Suddenly, Earth was not necessarily the center of anything. Galileo’s evidence, although irrefutable, drew the wrath of the church as it contradicted over a millennium of Christian teachings, and he spent his final years under house arrest. It’s easy to understand why this truth was uncomfortable; a Heliocentric solar system meant that Earth was just another planet. Why would God govern anything other than the center of the universe?

Regardless, the truth could not be ignored for long. A century later, in the 1700s, standing upon the shoulders of Galileo and Kepler, Sir Issac Newton codified the laws of gravity and motion into mathematics. The same force that brought apples to the ground when they fell from a tree, he realized, also holds the planets around the Sun. And as for the Sun, 19th-century spectroscopy comparing the Sun with the stars confirmed similar chemical composition and temperatures; the Sun was just another star, and an unremarkable one at that. While we were no longer the center of the universe, at least humanity could understand the laws that governed that universe. Or so we thought.

The Missing Planet

By Newton’s time, it was known that the planets orbit in ellipses and that the orbits themselves also rotate around the Sun, in what we call “precession.” Newtonian physics accounted for precession and accurately predicted the movement of the planets, save for one: Mercury, which appeared to get tugged off course. It was thought that there must be another planet near Mercury with gravity disrupting the predicted orbital path. We even gave this mystery planet a name: Vulcan. Yet, observations with increasingly powerful telescopes in the 19th century could not find this mysterious missing planet. Vulcan didn’t exist; it was merely another myth created to explain what we didn’t yet understand. Mercury’s orbit was not distorted by another planet, but rather by space itself.

In 1915, a patent clerk named Albert Einstein published the Theory of General Relativity, suggesting that mass warps space. For planets that are distant from the Sun, such distortions were imperceptible. For Mercury, however, the closest planet to the Sun, the impact was substantial enough to noticeably alter its orbit and render Newtonian physics inaccurate. Einstein’s theory was not proven until 1919 when astronomers traveled to Brazil for a rare solar eclipse. To test the theory, they photographed a star cluster near the Sun at the very moment the Moon blocked its light. The images of the star cluster taken during the eclipse were then compared with images of the same cluster taken on a normal night, absent the Sun’s gravitational influence. Indeed, the apparent position of the stars was slightly distorted during the eclipse, proving Einstein correct; the Sun’s mass literally bends the space around it, altering the path of light waves as they coursed toward Earth.

An Expanding Universe

Throughout all of this discovery, however, we still assumed that we were something of a rarity in the universe. We still believed we were living around the only star that harbored planets, residing in the only galaxy in the cosmos, the Milky Way. But not long after Einstein was vindicated, Edwin Hubble trained a telescope at Andromeda, which was thought to be a dusty galactic nebula. Using a new method to measure the distance to Cepheid variable stars, he came to an astounding discovery: Andromeda was 900,000 light-years away, far more distant than the most distant stars in our galaxy. Andromeda was a galaxy of its own. The paradigm was once again shattered. Today, we know the Milky Way, our galaxy, to be one of countless billions of galaxies.

Hubble went further, discovering that not only was the universe larger than previously believed, but it was also expanding. Hubble drew on data from Vesto Slipher, who had earlier noted that many distant nebulae showed a “Red Shift.” “Red shift” is a phenomenon where light wavelengths stretch toward the longer wavelengths (more red) as the object emitting the light moves away from us at high speed. Hubble showed that the recessional velocity of galaxies is proportional to their distance; Galaxies twice as far away recede twice as fast. This relationship, now called Hubble’s Law, suggests that galaxies are not exploding away from us in a static space (which would put us at a special center), but that space itself is expanding, carrying galaxies along like dots on an inflating balloon. The farther apart two points are, the faster the space between them stretches.

With these observations, the idea of an eternal, static universe was forever put to rest. An expanding universe also meant that, if we were to run the clock backward, the universe would become smaller until it reached a singular point, or singularity. This expansion must have been kicked off by a dramatic event, which we call the Big Bang. This origin story, of course, was theoretical. Confirmation would come a few decades later when physicists using a horn antenna at Bell Labs noticed a persistent “hiss” or buzzing noise coming from all directions in the microwave range. Months of searching did not reveal the signal’s source (even pigeon droppings were considered). Until, that is, they happened across research that predicted that the Big Bang would produce exactly this kind of radiation.

According to the Big Bang model, the universe would be extremely hot and dense in its first moments. As it expanded and cooled, the light (photons) from that hot phase would be stretched into longer wavelengths, eventually into microwave frequencies. This unexplained “hiss” was the “afterglow” of the Big Bang; observational evidence of the universe’s first moments. Still, the Big Bang Theory had some problems. That cosmic microwave radiation was too uniform. In the 1980s, a modification of the Big Bang theory added a prelude, known as cosmic inflation: an extremely brief but explosive period of exponential expansion in the universe’s first moments. It explains how the universe rapidly grew from a tiny singularity smaller than a proton by stretching space itself faster than the speed of light, smoothing out initial irregularities. When inflation ended, energy converted into a hot, dense soup of particles and radiation, marking the beginning of the Big Bang. The cosmic inflation theory is generally accepted today.

Since the 1990s, new, more powerful telescopes and observational methods have also proved that our Sun is not alone in harboring planets, with new worlds being discovered almost weekly. While we still know very little about these distant worlds, one thing is clear: they represent trillions of potential opportunities for life to emerge. Alas, our special place in the universe, it would seem, isn’t all that special after all. In the course of five short centuries, we have been dethroned by discovery. This “Copernican Principle” tells us that we occupy no special place; we are not privileged observers of the universe. As we will see, however, that while these discoveries pushed us to the edges of the map, they elevate the importance of humans as conscious beings in a universe that is discovering itself.

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If you haven’t yet read Part 1, I strongly recommend doing so first. It lays the essential foundation, the why and how behind reusable rocketry, along with the transformative trajectories this technology could open for humanity’s future in space. For brevity in that initial piece, I focused exclusively on systems developed and flown in the United States. In this installment, we turn our attention outward to survey some of the most promising and innovative reusable launch vehicles now under active design, testing, and early flight attempts around the world. These international efforts are accelerating rapidly, poised to drive launch costs even lower by the early 2030s and potentially achieve even greater reductions by 2040. This expanded perspective underscores a key point: reusability is no longer a single-nation story. It is becoming a global engineering race that will reshape the economics and possibilities of space exploration for decades to come.

China

Let’s begin with China because, well, China dominates this list. The Middle Kingdom has no fewer than nine reusable rockets under simultaneous development, either by state-owned contractors or by the private sector. The same forces of government subsidies and preferential policies that drove cutthroat competition, innovation, and cost reductions, which led China to dominate solar energy and electric vehicles, and perhaps soon robotics, are playing out in the country’s space launch industry.

Long March 12A

Let’s begin this list with somewhat of an oddity. Manufactured by the state-owned Shanghai Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (SALT). The LM-12A could be seen as the successor to the already-flying LM-12, but is actually different enough that it probably should be considered a new rocket with its own new designation. The LM-12 is a traditional Kerolox-fueled medium lift rocket, powered by four YF-100K engines on the first stage and two YF-115 engines on the second stage.

The LM-12A, on the other hand, shares the same “hull” but burns completely different fuel and uses different engines. It is equipped with seven reusable methalox-burning Longyun engines developed by a private start-up on its first stage, and a single methalox-fueled YF-209 on the second. The LM-12A rocket is also a medium-lift launch vehicle, carrying up to 12,000kg into LEO. The rocket made a successful maiden flight in December 2025, but like Blue Origin and SpaceX’s first attempts, the rocket failed to stick its first landing, crashing to Earth in a ball of flames. Nonetheless, lessons learned, we can expect them to get closer to nailing the landing the next time around.

Zhuque-3

Built by LandSpace Technology Corporation, Zhuque-3 is perhaps the most anticipated Chinese reusable launcher in the Western world. Zhuque-3 incorporates lessons learned from SpaceX and applies them to a single silver rocket. Like Starship and Nova, the rocket is built from stainless steel, leveraging its unique properties as a cheaper, easier-to-work-with metal. It is powered by 12 Tianque-12B engines on its first stage, also sipping Methalox fuel. Like Falcon 9, it is equipped with grid fins for control within the atmosphere, but couples them with chines near the base of the rocket, something found on Starship and New Glenn. The chines provide additional “lift” allowing the rocket to “fly” to the landing site, reducing the amount of fuel required for landing. The rocket aims to carry 21,300 kg to LEO in expendable mode and 18,300 kg in reusable mode, similar to Falcon 9. Zhuque-3 debuted in December 2025, successfully reaching orbit, but like the others, it failed to stick the first landing. However, of all of the rockets we have explored, it was probably the closest to “success” on its first try, crashing to the ground, albeit almost perfectly on target.

Long March 10

Under development at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), the LM-10 and its several variants are China’s answer to both Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and SLS. The design leverages existing hardware to expedite development; its “hull,” for example, is derived from the Long March-5 rocket, though with weight reductions, and the rocket uses an improved version of the YF-100 engines used on the Long March 5, 6, and 7 series. In its base configuration, seven YF-100K engines, burning kerolox (like Falcon 9), can loft some 14 tons into LEO with partial reuse. Uniquely, the LM-10 will land on a floating platform, caught by a system of cables that eliminates the mass of carrying its own landing legs.

In its single-core configuration, the LM-10 will launch China’s new (also partially reusable) Mengzhou spacecraft to the Tiangong space station. The aim is that the rocket would replace, or at least supplant, the LM-7, LM-2, and LM-3 series in a single design. A triple-core variant of the LM-10, akin to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, with an additional cryogenic third stage, would serve as a partially reusable answer to NASA’s SLS. At some 92.5 m tall, it will be one of the largest rockets in the world, capable of launching some 70,000 kg to LEO or 27,000 kg to trans-lunar injection. Two launches, one carrying the Mengzhou spacecraft and the other a booster and lunar lander, will be used to put Chinese astronauts on the Moon. First flight of the triple-core variant is scheduled for 2027.

Hyperbola-3

Unfortunately, I was unable to find a suitable image for this rocket. Built by i-Space, the first private Chinese company to reach orbit, Hyperbola-3 will be powered by 9 JD-2 engines, also burning methalox fuel. The new rocket, which aims to debut in 2026, will be about 69 m tall and carry a payload of up to 13,400 kg to LEO in an expendable configuration and 8,500 kg with partial reuse. Like some Falcon 9 launches, Hyperbola-3 will land on an autonomous drone ship positioned at sea.

Pallas-1

Pallas-1 is a smaller reusable rocket being built by Galactic Energy. Its seven CQ-50 engines will power the first stage, burning traditional kerolox fuel. In its base configuration, Pallas-1 will be capable of carrying just 5,000 kg to LEO or 3,000 kg to SSO while remaining partially reusable. Like Falcon 9, Pallas-1 uses grid fins and landing legs to execute a landing. A “heavy” configuration of the rocket is also planned, using two Pallas-1 first stages as boosters, thereby increasing the payload capacity to 17,500 kg, though that figure is probably only in “expendable mode.”

Tianlong-3

Under development by Space Pioneer, a private Chinese company that aspires to resupply China’s Tiangong Space Station, Tianlong-3 is powered by nine TH-12 engines, burning traditional Kerolox fuel. The upper stage is powered by a vacuum-optimized variant of the same, called the TH-12V. Like many on this list, it competes in the same medium-lift market currently dominated by SpaceX’s Falcon 9, able to loft 17 tons into LEO, and like Falcon 9, the rocket features four grid fins for control and lands on four landing legs. Unfortunately, Tianlong-3 is best known for its “accidental” launch in June of 2024, where, during a static fire test, the test vehicle broke free from its clamps and launched into the air, landing and exploding in nearby mountains.

Nebula-1

Under development by Deep Blue Aerospace, another private Chinese company, Nebula-1 will be powered by self-developed Leiting-20 engines, burning kerolox on its first stage and a vacuum-optimized variant of the same on the second stage. It is a small reusable launcher with the ability to launch about 2.8 tons into orbit

Kinetica-2

Built by CAS Space, a new commercial arm of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kinetica-2 is a 3.35 m-diameter, 53 m-long medium-lift launcher that uses China’s Kerolox-burning YF-102 engines on its first stage, producing ~766 tons of thrust at liftoff. The rocket aims to make its maiden flight in 2026 and demonstrate booster reuse as soon as the following year. It will be able to launch some 7,800 kg to SSO or 12,000 kg to LEO. Notably, on its maiden flight, it will carry a prototype Qingzhou-1 cargo spacecraft, a cheaper alternative to the Tianzhou spacecraft already used to resupply China’s Tiangong Space Station.

AS-1

Founded in 2024, Astronstone is one of the newest contenders in this space and, like many of the rocket firms on this list, it makes a point of leveraging experience and lessons learned from SpaceX. To that end, they are developing the AS-1, a stainless steel, Methalox-burning rocket similar in size to the Falcon 9, about 70 m tall and 4.2 m in diameter. Like Starship, they plan to land the rocket back at the launch tower, catching it with two “chopsticks” arms.

Europe

Miura-5

Under development by PLD Space in Spain and aiming for a 2026 debut, the Miura 5 launch vehicle will be fairly small, its first stage powered by five 5 TEPREL-C engines and the second stage by a single TEPREL-C Vacuum. Powered by traditional kerolox and just 34 m tall, it aims to deliver a paltry 540 kg to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit in reusable mode. Notably, its small size makes reuse harder to achieve. To that end, the rocket must employ more exotic composite material construction and its first stage will land using a combination of propulsive landing and parachutes. The parachutes provide most of the braking force; the engines are used only for the final touchdown.

Maia

Europe has another small reusable launcher coming online by MaiaSpace, an ArianeGroup subsidiary. Powered by Methalox and 3 Prometheus engines on its first stage and one on its second, Maia will stand approximately 50 m tall, but with payload capacities of just 500 kg to LEO in reusable mode and 1,500 kg in expendable mode. Like Starship, it will be built of stainless steel construction and use SpaceX-style grid fins and landing legs for reentry and landing.

Prime*

One of the more interesting European launch concepts is under development by Orbex in the United Kingdom. Capable of taking just 180 kg to a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit, Prime will be just 19 meters tall and less than 1.5 meters wide, smaller than SpaceX’s Falcon 1. To make reuse possible, the rocket will be built primarily of lightweight carbon fiber, saving roughly 30 percent of inert mass. The vehicle will have six engines on its first stage and one on its second, burning a novel non-toxic bipropellant combination of liquid oxygen and bio-propane (also called bioLPG), a renewable biofuel derived from sustainable sources. This fuel, allegedly, reduces carbon emissions by up to 90% compared to traditional kerosene-based fuels.

Even more novel is the landing mechanism, however, where, after stage separation, the interstage, still attached to the first stage, unfolds outward into four petals. The pedals create drag, passively reorienting the rocket and slowing its descent. The rocket then deploys a parachute to further slow down so that it can safely splash down in the ocean, where it can be recovered for reuse.

*Sadly, Orbex ceased operations while I was writing this article.

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Space isn’t actually that far away; it’s only 100km above our heads. We routinely travel further every time we go on a business trip or on vacation. Why then do we consider space to be the “final frontier?” Well, getting to space has historically been an expensive and perilous endeavor. It demands that we ride a column of fire powerful enough to escape the Earth’s loving grasp. This controlled explosion must be so intense that it pushes the limits of human ingenuity and, yes, physics itself. Every drop of fuel was consumed in the journey, and the rockets themselves, multimillion-dollar engineering marvels, could only fall lifelessly back to the pale blue dot. If your next vacation required that your commercial jet be dumped into the ocean upon landing, you, too, could expect a multimillion-dollar ticket price.

Alas, our industrious species is forever unsatisfied. Human progress, as we have explored, has a knack for making things that were once prohibitively expensive much more affordable. In the early 20th century, the Ford Motor Company devised a way to reduce the cost of the automobile using the moving assembly line. Later in the century, we learned to mass-produce silicon transistors using light, the basis for modern microelectronics. Initially, we could only make a few transistors at a time, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, etc. Today, using machines with mirrors, lenses, and lasers of unimaginable precision, we can etch hundreds of billions of transistors at once. The transistors themselves are now barely larger than atoms, the universe’s fundamental building blocks.

While our artistry in microelectronics now borders on divine, rocketry is a different animal. Only today do our microchips bump up against the limits of what is physically possible; rockets began their journey to space under those extreme constraints. Even the most efficient of designs required that 98 percent of the rocket’s mass be dedicated just to getting into orbit. This leaves only 2 percent for a valuable payload and literally nothing for a return trip. Undeterred, in the early 2000s, a newly-minted millionaire named Elon Musk, determined to make space access affordable, decided to risk it all. In 2002, he founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, dedicated solely to solving the cost problem.

Musk began small. He first examined the total cost of the raw materials that make up a rocket. Then he compared those raw materials’ costs with the price of the final finished product. He quickly realized that this ratio was laughably large, indicating tremendous waste and inefficiency in the production process. Using this data, which Musk called the “idiot index,” SpaceX designed and built the Falcon 1 and later, the Falcon 9 rockets. There was nothing particularly special about these machines; they used traditional fuels and proven engine cycles. The magic, instead, was in the production process, where Musk and has team ruthlessly drove down costs and by 2013, SpaceX was offering spaceflights at about half the price of everyone else. To learn more about SpaceX's history and future, I highly recommend that you check out ’s Substack:

Chris’s Substack

Chris Prophet is a sci-fi and space development writer with an economic and entertaining style. His space related books provide unique perspectives on the NewSpace arena and emerging space economy. https://chrisprophet.substack.com/p/spacex-evolution

By Chris Prophet

Of course, the “idiot index” approach would only get SpaceX so far. To achieve lower costs, SpaceX would have to demonstrate that it could reuse parts of the rocket. When we refly these parts, the cost of building them can be amortized over many launches, and the more, the better. This was well known in the industry, of course, but most believed that reuse was impossible, and even if it were possible, it would never be economical. The video below, where Arianespace’s Richard Bowles disparages the “dream” of reusable rocketry, gives you a sense of the prevailing sentiment at the time. While Bowles confidently forecasts that the market will eventually “wake up” from the reusability dream, history tells us that he, and others like him, were the ones who were actually asleep.

Again, SpaceX started small, initially aiming only to reuse the Falcon 9’s first stage. First stage-reuse is much less challenging than trying to reuse the second stage, because the first stage doesn’t actually reach orbital altitude and velocity. SpaceX tried several different approaches to this problem, including using parachutes, before settling on a radical idea that, in hindsight, made so much more sense: Use the rocket’s own engines for powered landing. This was no easy feat, however. Additional hardware needed to be bolted onto the rocket, including grid fins for control, heat shielding, and landing legs. Moreover, the rocket needed to have some fuel remaining in the tanks after payload delivery. This all added mass, forcing engineers to push the limits of efficiency further than ever before. Indeed, even after cutting the max payload, the Falcon 9 could only slurp fumes by the time of landing. The margins were so narrow that SpaceX encountered repeated failures as it worked to land its first rocket. So many failures, in fact, that SpaceX even created its own “blooper reel” celebrating them.

The failures continued for years until the closing days of 2015, when, finally, the company landed a Falcon 9 first stage back on Earth. Impressive, but not dispositive. Landing a rocket was not enough; SpaceX needed to prove that it could refly a previously-flown rocket. It would be nearly two years before they reflew a Falcon 9, and even then, the rocket required considerable refurbishment that made the economics of those reflights questionable.

What many failed to appreciate, however, is that landing rockets back on Earth had a hidden advantage: for the first time, engineers could examine their monstrous creations after flight. They can see which parts were holding up well, which were overengineered, and which were not. Using this data, they could optimize the design further to make it lighter, more efficient, and easier to reuse. In 2018, this culminated in the “final” version of the Falcon 9, known as “Block V,” and the triple-core Falcon Heavy, both optimized for reflight. Today, a Falcon launches and lands every few days, and some of these Falcons have flown dozens of times each. In fact, the Falcon 9 launches and lands back on Earth with a higher degree of reliability than most rockets achieve just getting off the ground! The impossible has become commonplace. If you would like to learn more about the Falcon 9 and its impact on the launch industry, I recommend checking out ’s Substack, Planetocracy, below:

Planetocracy

The Future of Humanity in Space

By Peter Hague

Yet, while SpaceX has certainly cut the cost of a space launch dramatically, launch prices haven’t fallen commensurately with those declines. Why? The feat achieved by SpaceX has been so difficult to replicate that, as of this writing, more than a decade after SpaceX landed its first rocket stage, only one other company has successfully landed an orbital-class rocket, and it still has yet to prove that it can refly. In short, there is no real competition. Additionally, SpaceX also has an interest in ensuring that its competitors, namely the ULA, remain in business, lest they be considered a “monopoly” and subject to antitrust investigations.

That is all about to change in 2026. Using variations of SpaceX’s now-proven propulsive landing approach, competitors are flooding in from around the world, and many are poised to begin reusing rockets before 2030. This also means that we can expect launch prices to drop rapidly as each new player attempts to grab a piece of the market before it’s too late. In the US alone, there are at least seven new reusable launch systems nearly ready to come online. Here is a look at some of the beautiful beasts we can expect to see flying soon. A special thanks to Flight Atlas and ApoStructura for helping build this list.

New Glenn

Backed by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon fortune, New Glenn, designed and built by Blue Origin, is the closest thing to a rival that SpaceX currently has. At some 7 meters in diameter and 98 meters tall, New Glenn is a monster, and one of the largest rockets ever built. In many respects, NG is advantaged over Falcon 9 because it was designed for reuse from the outset. Its first stage is powered by seven staged-combustion BE-4 engines that run on cleaner and more efficient methalox fuel. The second stage, meanwhile, is powered by two BE-3U engines burning hydrolox. New Glenn successfully flew its maiden flight in January 2025, but it failed to stick its first landing. That didn’t last long, however, for in November 2025, on only its second flight, NG succeeded with both a launch and a landing.

The company hopes to demonstrate that it can refly New Glenn this year and has revealed plans for rapid design upgrades, including improved engines, fairing reuse, reduced mass, and enhanced thermal protection. This will enable the rocket to launch approximately 45 tons into orbit with partial reuse, surpassing the capabilities of both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Blue Origin also revealed plans for a larger version of the rocket, called New Glenn 9x4, with nine BE-4 engines on its first stage and four BE-3U engines on its second. This larger version could take flight as soon as 2027, carrying up to 70 tons to Earth orbit. As you can seein the illustration below, New Glenn 9x4 will even dwarf the historic Saturn V that took humans to the Moon.

Neutron

Hot on Blue Origin’s heels and eagerly anticipated for a 2026 launch, RocketLab’s Neutron rocket aims to build on the success of Electron, their first, much smaller launch vehicle. Neutron is specifically designed for the megaconstellation market and aims to carry up to 13 tons to low Earth orbit, powered by 9 Archimedes engines burning clean methalox fuel. Its claim to fame is its unique design; the rocket is made of lightweight carbon fiber, which tapers along its height. The business end of Neutron is larger, which helps spread out reentry heating and keep plasma from building on the side of the rocket during reentry, improving performance.

This isn’t the only trick up RocketLab’s sleeve, however. The second stage is optimized to be extremely mass-efficient. Instead of resting on top of the first stage like every other rocket, the second stage literally “hangs” inside the fairing, keeping it in tension, instead of compression. Metals and composites tend to be stronger under tension than they are under compression. Think of a soda can; it’s easier to crush than it is to pull it apart. This allows the upper stage, which is to be expended, to be made thinner, lighter, and cheaper. This also allows for “captive” fairings, which are connected directly to the first stage. Instead of being jettisoned, the fairings open up, release their payload, then close, and return with the first stage. No parachutes or separate recovery ships needed.

Terran R

Under development at upstart Relativity Space, the Terran R was originally envisioned as the world's first fully 3D printed rocket. Engineers have since partially backed off that approach, adopting a more conventional design, visually similar to the Falcon 9, though large sections will still be produced using 3D printing. Like most others on this list, Terran R will also burn methalox fuel, feeding 13 Aeon R engines on the first stage. The company hopes Terran R will provide enough power to loft some 23 tons to orbit with partial reuse, considerably more than Falcon 9, but less than Falcon Heavy. Like Falcon 9, the Terran R also relies on grid fins for control and lands on four deployable landing legs.

Eclipse

Less well-known is Eclipse, another two-stage, partially reusable rocket, which is under development at Firefly Aerospace. Firefly is the phoenix that rose from the ashes of now-defunct Firefly Space Systems. The rocket is fairly conventional, but has big backing: Northrop Grumman is co-develeloper and hopes that Eclipse will serve as a successor to their Antares launch vehicle. Fueled by traditional kerolox, the seven Miranda engines are aiming to launch up to 16 tons into low Earth orbit.

Starship

The elephant in the room, of course, is SpaceX’s enormous Starship rocket. Larger than even New Glenn 9x4, Starship is the largest rocket ever built by a significant margin. The rocket’s first stage is powered by 33 Raptor engines, the most engines ever affixed to a single rocket stage. These engines are marvels of engineering themselves; they are the world’s first production rocket engines using a “Full Flow” Staged Combustion Cycle (FFSC). This is important because the FFSC cycle improves efficiency and reduces engine wear: essential if the goal is to fly the rocket many times a day. The first stage lands propulsively back on Earth, but unlike the others on this list, it lands directly back at the launch site, caught by the very same launch tower that it took off from minutes before. Literally, it’s a skyscraper catching another skyscraper. This trick eliminates the need for landing legs, making the rocket simpler, lighter, and much easier to prep for relaunch.

The second stage is currently powered by six more Raptor engines, including three special vacuum-optimized Raptors, but plans call for this to be upgraded to nine total in later versions. The Starship upper stage aims to demonstrate what only the Space Shuttle has done before: land and reuse a rocket returning from orbital velocity. This means, unlike the first stage, Starship must survive the full heat of orbital reentry. The Space Shuttle achieved this with tens of thousands of unique, fragile ceramic tiles glued to its hull. Each tile, as it were, needed to be inspected and tested before every flight, limiting flights to once every few months.

SpaceX has also elected to cover Starship in thousands of ceramic tiles, but with standardized shapes and better materials. Unlike the Shuttle, however, Starship also aims to land propulsively. The spacecraft “belly flops” into the atmosphere, using actuating fins for control, then, once near the ground, fires three sea-level engines and performs a last-second “flip” maneuver to orient the rocket upright for a gentle landing. SpaceX hopes to demonstrate that Starship can refly with minimal refurbishment. That is a tall order, and so far, development and testing have bumpy, but promising, with several ships landing successfully in the Indian Ocean.

In essence, what SpaceX is attempting to do here is build the first “jumbo jet” to space; the world’s first fully and rapidly reusable rocket that flies like an airliner. Should they be successful, there is a real potential for launch prices to collapse to under $100/kg; a true game changer that would alter the course of human history. For the first time, millions of humans living and working in space could become a reality.

Nova

Lastly, I would be remiss if I failed to talk about the “dark horse” of the bunch: Nova. Stoke Space’s Nova is, arguably, next to Starship, the most ambitious design listed here. Like Starship, the rocket’s first stage engines burn methalox in an FFSC engine cycle, and the stage is reusable, landing propulsively. It’s Nova’s upper stage, however, that makes the design worthy of a closer look. As you can see in the concept art below, the upper stage resembles an elongated capsule, and in contrast with the first stage, it’s powered by a single hydrolox-fueled expander-cycle engine. This is a simple and proven design, using the engine’s own heat to vaporize the hydrogen fuel and drive the pumps. Uniquely, however, the engine is embedded within the craft's heat shield; in a sense, it is the heat shield. Instead of a single nozzle protruding from the back of the vehicle, thrust is delivered through many smaller nozzles embedded around the perimeter. The rocket launches like any other; the real magic to this design, however, comes during reentry and landing.

During reentry, the engine, obviously, is switched off, as we don’t want to be generating any thrust, but Stoke’s design allows the hydrogen fuel to continue flowing anyway. Instead of being pumped along by the heat of the engine, however, the fuel is driven by reentry heating. In effect, the hydrogen fuel serves a double purpose as a coolant, replacing the brittle heat-shield tiles used by Starship. The vaporized hydrogen is then vented through a small hole near the center of the heat shield, providing additional cooling. Once the spacecraft nears the ground, the nozzle valves are reopened, and the engine flips on as normal, providing thrust for a soft landing.

In many ways, Stoke’s approach to upper stage landing and reuse is more elegant than Starship's. There is no need for heavy fins, actuators, or the complex seals needed to protect them from reentry plasma. There is no need for thousands of ceramic tiles that will require inspection after every flight; the spacecraft passively cools itself using its own fuel. Further, the rocket is always oriented correctly with the engine pointing downward. There is, therefore, no need to perform a “flip maneuver” near the ground or to worry about fuel sloshing, which could cause the landing burn to fail. Additionally, the upper stage design functions like a quasi-aerospike engine, using the same engine and nozzles for both ascent in a vacuum and descent in the atmosphere, eliminating the need for separate landing engines and hardware.

Accelerate

Even if only two or three of these launch systems come online, we can expect a sea-change in space access, with collapsing launch prices and greater variety and vehicle availability. Remember, this list only features upcoming American launch vehicles. The rest of the world, too, is poised to begin flying reusable rockets, especially the Middle Kingdom. We will examine those launchers next. Please subscribe to Risk & Progress for updates, or, if you enjoyed this list, share it with your friends using the button below.

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When it comes to human progress, the paramount importance of the discovery and dissemination of knowledge cannot be understated. It may not, then, appear befitting for me to attack the education system, which is seen as playing a crucial role in that process. Yet, there is a compelling case to be made that societies are misallocating their young’s time and money, forcing them to spend thousands of hours studying subjects they will never use and/or to take on loans to fund degrees that provide little tangible benefit. Indeed, despite spending almost $1 trillion annually on education, or about 6 percent of the US GDP, we still hand diplomas to high school and college graduates who fail basic literacy and math tests. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, the race to outshine each other with yet more diplomas and certificates continues.

“Human Capital”

In his book, The Case Against Education, author and economist notes that the standard justification for funding education is that it cultivates positive spillovers by expanding our “human capital.” This notion is as intuitive as it is attractive. As our society has become more complex and technology more advanced, we need to raise new generations of humans with the advanced skillsets required for this new age. As compelling as this argument might be, however, it seems little more than just another convenient myth we tell ourselves. There is strikingly thin evidence that the education system is actually an investment in our “human capital.”

To illustrate this problem, Caplan begins with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a “Martian sociologist” studying those industrious little humans on the Blue Planet. To better understand their society from afar, you devise a clever study to examine what humans teach their young in school. It’s only logical, after all, that economically scarce resources would be prudently spent preparing young humans for the real world. To an extent, the education system does exactly that. A considerable amount of time is spent teaching numeracy and literacy, universally beneficial subjects. However, considerably more time is allocated to other subjects, including teaching foreign languages, poetry, classical literature, and geometry. From this, as a clever Martian researcher, you might conclude that human society is filled with well-compensated poets, writers, translators, and that solving quadratic equations was part of a daily experience.

Of course, this is not the case. Much of what is taught in school is unused in adulthood. This education mismatch extends to the higher education system. Caplan notes that in 2008-09, over 94,000 graduates were bestowed a psychology degree. When we consider, however, that there are only 174,000 practicing psychologists in the entire country, and far fewer job openings, it’s clear that the vast majority of them will not find employment as a psychologist. Similarly, in just one year, over 83,000 students graduated with a degree in “communications,” far outnumbering the 54,000 people employed as reporters/news broadcasters, which again far outnumbers job openings in that field.

Yet, while we allocate significant resources to teaching students unnecessary material, we are falling short in our effort to educate them in universally essential subjects. Studies have found, for example, that a majority of Americans fail the very same citizenship exam they require of immigrants. These include basic questions like, “Is the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution?” and “What are the three branches of government?” Scientific illiteracy is equally bad; one in every four Americans doesn’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun, and about one in three doesn’t understand that atoms are larger than electrons.

Defenders of the education system counter that we shouldn’t judge the system’s merits on the mere retention of information; schools teach pupils how to ask the right questions, to “learn how to learn,” and how to apply these skills outside the classroom. Caplan writes, however, that the data does not support this notion either. At best, students learn what they were taught in school, but almost universally fail to apply their knowledge outside the classroom before forgetting much of what they had learned. I believe that we can attribute these low retention and application rates to schools routinely teaching subjects in isolation, without clarifying their relevance to real-world applications. This is difficult to do when the subject has no real-world relevance in the first place!

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According to futurists of yesteryear, by 2025, we should have been zipping through the skies in flying cars, crossing the oceans in supersonic jets, and working just 15 hours a week. What happened to this Jetsons-esque future? While it’s certainly possible that these predictions were simply off the mark, we must consider the possibility that humanity took a wrong turn on the timeline leading to the present. Indeed, there are many indications that this is precisely what happened. Around 1970, a number of societal trends converged, slowing human progress. These trends can be categorized into four main, albeit overlapping, camps: diminishing returns, collapsing fertility rates, harmful risk aversion, and resource misallocation. Together, these trends have put this “forgotten future” out of reach, and if we do not act now, they could imperil progress as a whole.

Diminishing Returns

We have extensively examined how progress and growth have brought wealth and bounty to everyone. The average human today, for example, is 1550 percent wealthier than the average person of the 1800s. We have been freed from the toil of hunting and gathering; progress allows us to live, not merely survive. Economic and labor productivity growth rates, however, are stalling in much of the developed world. Productivity growth, for example, in the US rose 2 percent annually for most of American history. Beginning in the 1970s, however, productivity growth slowed to an average of around 1 percent per year. This may not sound like much, but the effect rapidly compounds; had the growth rate continued at its pre-70s trend, the median American household would be about twice as wealthy as it actually was in the 2020s. This phenomenon is not limited to the US. Growth rates are just as bad, if not worse, in much of the “developed” world.

So what happened? Some are pinning the blame on an energy crisis, of sorts. In the US, total energy availability grew about 7 percent per year from the country’s inception until around 1970. That equates to a roughly two percent annual growth in energy consumption per capita. Coincidentally, this rate roughly matches labor productivity growth in that same period, an observation popularized as the “Henry Adams Curve” by futurist J Storrs Hall. Also beginning around 1970, per capita energy consumption flatlined. While correlation does not imply causation, many believe that the plateau in per capita energy use may contribute to slowing productivity and economic growth, or perhaps is evidence that something fundamentally changed in Western society in the early 1970s.

As we will examine next, a falling Energy Return on Investment (EROI) may be partly to blame. While no “shortage” of energy is imminent, our EROI has been steadily falling as the “low-hanging fruit” of energy resources has been picked. Coal, for instance, once had an EROI of 80:1, meaning one chunk of coal could help you find up to 80 more. Those easy-to-access deposits are gone; we now must expend much more energy to unearth lower-quality, less energetic coal deposits. Similarly, the EROI of oil is falling fast, from roughly 100:1 in the early 20th century to between 11-18:1 in the 2000s. Many American wells now operate under 10:1. Undoubtedly, diminishing returns on our available energy stock are constraining our ability to grow.

It is not only that energy is getting harder to find, but so too are new ideas. It now requires more capital, both financial and human, to make forward scientific advances, and those advances are becoming less and less disruptive. In this book, What We Owe The Future, notes that in 1905, at the age of 26, Albert Einstein overturned Newtonian physics with the special relativity using only his genius, a pencil, and some paper. Just over a century later, it took thousands of scientists and the $5 billion Large Hadron Collider to unearth the Higgs particle. The Higgs particle, to be sure, is an important discovery, but no one would argue that it overturned the very foundations of physics.

The evidence of diminishing returns is all around us. The cost of developing new pharmaceuticals doubles every nine years, and it takes 18 times as many engineers to fulfill one cycle of Moore’s Law as it did in 1971. Bloom et. al. calculate that overall scientific research productivity is declining about 5.3 percent annually. This is a serious problem, for it means that we would need to double our research efforts every 13 years just to maintain the same rate of progress that we have become accustomed to. In other words, we are locked in something of a “Red Queen’s” race, where we must run ever faster to keep the current pace.

Empty Earth

Diminishing returns to energy and knowledge are only part of the story, however. Falling fertility rates also threaten the future of our civilization. Humanity is rapidly greying as each generation has fewer children than the last. Studies have shown that older individuals are less creative and produce fewer disruptive innovations compared to their younger counterparts. Thus, as the population ages, our ability to innovate wanes. But even this worrying state of affairs will deteriorate further after 2050; globally, humanity stands on the edge of a population cliff. The nodes of the global “social supercomputer” will gradually go dark as the number of human deaths exceeds the number of human births and entire nations vanish before the end of this century.

And yet, paradoxically, our societies are directing more and more productive energy toward supporting the elderly at the expense of the young. Welfare programs and entitlement commitments remain stuck in the 20th century, drawn up when fertility rates were much higher. Globally, pensions and healthcare systems are breaking under the strain of billions of retirees. The young are inheriting a less vibrant economy and are expected to donate a larger share of their hard-earned income to support prior generations, with only a thin hope that future generations will have the wherewithal to do the same.

Risk Aversion

Our civilization is also plagued by growing risk aversion. Specifically, blind adherence to the so-called “precautionary principle,” which requires that all novel ideas prove their safety before they are permitted by regulators. All progress, however, requires some risk, and because experience curve effects require scale to improve new technologies, the precautionary principle only serves to stifle innovation itself, often with no benefit to general safety. This is all well and good for the “degrowth” movement, however. This movement takes many forms and operates behind different masks, from safetyism to environmentalism, but the result is always the same. Between 1975 and 2010, the US Code of Federal Regulations ballooned from 70,000 to 170,000 pages in length. While some of this regulation was beneficial, much of it was not; instead born out of irrational fear and motivated by specious claims of protecting Mother Earth or our fellow humans.

Among these regulations was a total ban on supersonic flights over the US, dooming the Concorde and the dream of faster-than-sound travel. The ban was justified to prevent the noise of sonic booms from disturbing people and animals on the ground. While a laudable goal, policymakers erred by regulating aircraft speed, assuming that all supersonic jets must produce a noisy boom, not realizing, or perhaps not caring, that it’s possible to design a quiet supersonic aircraft. Alas, once a regulation is in place, however, it becomes almost impossible to overturn; the error persisted, suffocating innovations that could have brought the continents closer together. Finally, in 2003, the last supersonic jet landed on the runway; supersonic travel died.

Another casualty of regulatory overreach was nuclear energy. While nuclear power has challenges, it is extremely safe, efficient, and environmentally friendly. It was perhaps the one energy source that could have kept the “Henry Adams Curve” going while simultaneously addressing the pollution worries of the mid-20th century. Alas, perhaps because of its association with nuclear weapons, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was formed in 1975, ostensibly intended to ensure nuclear safety. Regulatory burdens delayed new nuclear projects and dramatically increased their cost. Between 1954 and 1978, for example, the United States built 133 civilian nuclear reactors; it has built just 2 more since, both after 2020. As a consequence, the US is running older, less safe reactors for longer, and our skies are more polluted than they otherwise could have been.

Even mundane local regulations, like zoning laws, can impart an immense, albeit hidden, social cost. In America and elsewhere, zoning boards have become captured by local interests, suffocating the supply of housing, limiting the growth of our cities, stifling innovation and economic dynamism. As these well-meaning regulations spread, they not only slow our growth and advancement as a species, but, as we will discuss, they also leave an invisible graveyard in their wake. In the name of safety, for example, millions die or needlessly suffer waiting for regulators to approve the medical drugs and treatments they need to live. It is also poetic irony that just as the first humans walked on the Moon, at the very moment when we took our first steps on the path to becoming a multiplanetary species, social movements back on Earth began working overtime to pull us back to the ground. In many respects, they succeeded; the last human left the Lunar surface in 1972, never to return.

Of course, progress didn’t come to a complete halt after 1970, but it does appear to have shifted. Before 1970, relative energy abundance and “permissionless innovation” led to incredible breakthroughs in the “world of atoms.” We developed new forms of transportation, new kinds of engines, and we built expressways, airports, etc. But in this new energy-restricted and heavily regulated physical world, innovation escaped into the digital realm, the world of bits, where it could safely thrive. While the achievements in the digital world are also impressive, it still feels as if we made a wrong turn on the path to the present, and this detour will be a bumpy one. In this section of Pathways of Progress, we will examine some of the most pressing perils to human progress before discussing ways to address them and how to build a future of abundance in Part 3.

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We produce more energy than ever before. Solar panels paint the countryside, wind turbines reach to the skies, and oil rigs pierce the ocean depths. Yet, beneath this outward display of bountiful energy harvests lies a hidden crisis. Every barrel of oil and every lump of coal that we extract demands a quiet, and rising, energy toll. Declining Energy Returns on Investment is making human civilization increasingly costly to sustain, starving the social supercomputer of precious energy, constraining growth, and limiting technological innovation in the 21st century.

What is EROI?

Ecologist Charles Hall was the first to coin the term Energy Return on Investment, or EROI, in a discussion of fish migration. To survive and reproduce, fish, like all other living things, must take in more energy than they consume, so they seek to gain the most energy (food) from the least energy expense. The same holds for our civilization. In the 1980s, researchers began studying the EROI, not of animals, but of human civilization. In principle, measuring EROI is straightforward: one must simply compare total energy output relative to total energy inputs. Typically, this is expressed as a ratio. An EROI of 20:1, for example, means that for every unit of energy invested, 20 usable units will be produced. The higher the outputs relative to the inputs, the more surplus energy is available. This means that, theoretically, any EROI of 1:1 or less is not socially beneficial.

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We've examined how the "social supercomputer" has very nearly turned our world into a billionaire planet, driven by an unprecedented abundance of goods and services. It's tempting to assume that this flood of material plenty would ultimately ravage the planet, exhausting its resources and poisoning it in the greedy race to material wealth. In truth, though, the picture is far more complex. During the initial phases of prosperity and progress, people undeniably degraded the natural world, clearing vast woodlands, contaminating rivers and lakes, and polluting the skies. Yet as societies progressed, our ecological impact shifted, becoming progressively milder; demands for commodities dematerialized, woodlands reclaimed lost ground, and the pollution shrouding urban centers began to lift.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve

We have already discussed growing material abundance, as evidenced by collapsing time prices, which tells us that commodities and products are becoming more abundant relative to our total population. We did not, however, address the question material abundance of goods might impact the environment. Surely, a growing population that is also becoming wealthier is consuming more and more of the Earth’s resources, right? It follows that, eventually, the growing need for these resources would strip our Earth bare and leave environmental toxification and destruction in its wake.

As it turns out, maybe not. Paradoxically, as it relates to the environment, progress appears to be following a “Kuznets curve.” In the early stages of growth and progress, yes, we do consume, toxify, and pollute, but beyond a certain level of wealth (read knowledge), the opposite appears to happen. Our population and economies continue to grow, but total resource usage begins to fall, and our overall environmental “footprint” recedes. Even as the United States’ population and economy grew in the first two decades of the 21st Century, for example, Americans used less gold, copper, steel, aluminum, fertilizer, paper, etc. In fact, of the 72 resources tracked by the U.S. Geological Service, 66 of them are “post-peak,” meaning annual US consumption is falling. The same story is repeating itself in other wealthy countries as well; our need for commodities is rapidly evaporating.

The knowledge produced by markets, the social supercomputer, makes this possible, perhaps even inevitable, because pricing pressure is always looking for ways to do more with less. For example, when the first aluminum cans were introduced in the late 1950s, they required about 85 grams of aluminum metal each. Fifty years later, the same-sized can needed just 13 grams of metal. For a more tech-heavy example, think about this: a single lightweight fiber optic cable can carry many times more information than a heavier copper cable. Likewise, the smartphone engulfed many consumer goods into a single device; it “dematerialized” the alarm clock, scanner, calculator, pager, phone, camera, music player, calendar, books, radio, flashlight, sticky notes, a dictionary, a thesaurus, an address book, maps, and other products that would have been produced separately.

Return of the Forests

Even as our numbers grow, our demand for agricultural land is also diminishing. As we've explored, from the advent of the scratch plow to the development of dwarf wheat and rice varieties, humanity has continually innovated to extract more food from less land, while conserving water and fertilizer. Time and again, we've outtun Malthus, demonstrating that ingenuity can overcome even the direst resource constraints. Combined with decelerating population growth, these advances suggest that we've likely passed the peak of global agricultural land use—or are on the cusp of it. Though projections differ, the chart below illustrates that farmland dedicated to agriculture crested in the early 21st century. Absent major disruptions, we can anticipate a steady reduction in agricultural land requirements as we approach the 22nd century

With diminishing requirements for farmland, the planet's woodlands and grasslands are rebounding in some regions. Deforestation remains a prominent environmental issue, yet its tempo has notably slowed in modern times, even as worldwide economies have flourished. Per the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), deforestation has decelerated by around one-third since the 1990s. Net forest loss declined from 7.8 million hectares per year in the 90s to 5.2 million per year in the 2000s, and 4.7 million between 2010–2020. Note that we are still razing forests in much of the world; the deceleration in net forest loss comes from an offset. We are adding 5.5 million hectares of new forest cover every year.

Indeed, in about half of the world today, the dominant trend is afforestation or reforestation. Unsurprisingly, the regions where forests are returning include “wealthy” countries, such as those in North America and Europe, which now have more forest coverage than they did before the Industrial Revolution. Even rapidly developing nations, including China, Vietnam, and India, however, are also witnessing net forest growth. A study from the University of Helsinki found that between 1990 and 2015, annual forest coverage increased by 1.31 percent in high-income countries and by 0.5 percent in middle-income countries. Forest coverage, in fact, only decreased in low-income countries. The common denominator, once again, is material wealth and progress.

While we typically think of deforestation as a consequence of economic growth, it might be better thought of as a consequence of relative material poverty. Indeed, the wealth threshold for “turning the corner” on deforestation occurs around a GDP per capita of $4600. There are two mechanisms at play here. First, as countries develop and citizens are lifted out of abject poverty, public pressure can focus more on protecting the environment. Poor nations cannot afford to protect their forests as well as richer ones can. Second, we simply require less wood, paper, and land than we did in the past. Thus, the most direct, if counterintuitive, means of protecting the world’s forests is to accelerate global economic growth and ensure that all nations break through that threshold as quickly as possible.

Clearing Skies

Wealth and progress not only restore our forests but also clear the air we breathe. The above graph from Our World in Data vividly demonstrates this by tracking emissions of major pollutants. In particular, these include nitrogen oxides (NOx), which foster smog and respiratory irritation; sulphur dioxide (SO2), the primary culprit behind acid rain; and black carbon (soot), a key driver of harmful particulates. The pattern is unmistakable—emissions spike in early industrialization phases, then plunge as countries amass wealth and as innovation progresses. Indeed, even as the population and global economy grow, the skies are clearing around the world.

At the same time, our growth is decarbonizing. We have passed through several energy revolutions, each less carbon-intensive than the last. As Steven Pinker notes, preindustrial societies relied on dry wood with a carbon-to-hydrogen ratio of about 10:1. Coal, which fueled the First Industrial Revolution, has a carbon-to-hydrogen ratio of roughly 2:1. At 1:2, petroleum drove the Second Industrial Revolution, and today natural gas leads with an even lower ratio of 1:4. Accordingly, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, reports that coal emits around 100 kilograms of CO2 Per Million BTU, while petroleum emits around 70kg, and natural gas, just 50kg. With each step up the energy ladder, carbon emissions dropped about 30 percent. The “social supercomputer” was decarbonizing and cutting pollution long before the terms “climate change” or “conservationism” entered the public lexicon.

Not only is carbon intensity falling, but some 32 wealthy countries are growing while also reducing their absolute CO2 emissions. This fact should be transformative for those concerned about climate change; we don’t need to choose between wealth and Earth. The environmental Kuznets curve lets us choose both. Meanwhile, developing countries are pivoting earlier; their economies grow with reduced pollution, carbon, and deforestation compared to those that industrialized earlier. This is further evidence that the “degrowth” agenda is fundamentally misplaced. Contrary to the headlines and the pundits, we are heading in the right direction. Stunting growth risks entrenching the status quo, preventing us from sliding back down the Kuznets curve. Once again, growth is not the disease; it is the cure.

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In the humanitarian mission of global prosperity, many begin by asking, “What causes poverty?” They reason that, if they can divine the cause of poverty, they may be able to devise a cure. They treat poverty as if it were a disease, waiting only for medical intervention. When they approach the challenge of poverty in this manner, however, they have already failed because they began with the wrong question, which will invariably lead to the wrong answer. Poverty is not a disease; poverty is the default state in which our species has spent most of its existence. We should not be so naive as to inquire why some are impoverished, but rather, we should ask why some are not. The answer, of course, lies with energy capture and knowledge, which the “social supercomputer” used to lift billions out of material poverty. It did this via two pathways: income inflation and cost compression.

Superabundance

We’ve primarily discussed Malthusianism in the context of food production. Still, the core idea—that growth would inevitably exhaust finite resources—is broadly interpreted, widely accepted, yet profoundly erroneous. There is a long history of well-educated thinkers prophesying resource depletion, all arriving at the same inevitable conclusion: to save ourselves, we must “degrow.” As we have seen, however, Malthusians fail to appreciate the power of knowledge. With knowledge, humans have overcome every material constraint they have encountered thus far. Recall the 20th-century biologist Paul Ehrlich, who famously proclaimed that humanity would face mass famine by the 1980s. His thinking was, and remains, common among biologists who view humans as just another mammal subject to the laws of nature. In biology, it is understood that an environment has a maximum “carrying capacity” for a species; once the population exceeds that capacity, it will inevitably fall back to maintain the proper ecological balance.

Ehrlich's fears, however, were broader than empty stomachs; he also forecast dire shortages of essential commodities as demand stripped the Earth bare. Economists, on the other hand, were much less concerned. They understood that if and when a commodity becomes scarce, pricing signals would drive the “social supercomputer” to resolve those shortages before they become acute. Humans are obviously mammals, but our ability to transmit and accumulate knowledge sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. The only “carrying capacity” for humans, perhaps, is the total computational power available to the social supercomputer itself; the rate at which we can collectively solve problems.

In the ultimate wager between professions, business professor Julian Simon made a bet with Ehrlich in 1980. They both agreed on the premise that the market price of a resource indicates its relative scarcity. If Ehrlich was correct that resources were being depleted by human development, the market price should rapidly climb as the supply dwindles. Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any commodities he liked. If the inflation-adjusted prices rose in the wager period, indicating rising scarcity, Ehlrich could claim victory. Ehrlich chose chromium, copper, nickel, tungsten, and tin. Yet, when the wager drew to a close in 1990, the price of all five key commodities had fallen in inflation-adjusted prices. Paradoxically, they had grown more abundant; Ehrlich was wrong.

It turns out, the wager may have even understated the growing abundance of these commodities. Normally, we measure price trends by tracking nominal prices over time. This is not a good way to measure or track material abundance because prices, expressed in units of a currency, only tell part of the story. Instead, and look to an alternate measure of abundance: “time cost” or “time price.” Instead of subjective currency units, they measure prices using the universal constant of time, the number of labor hours someone must work to purchase a unit of a commodity. For a population, they use the median income, as outliers can skew the average. Time cost better captures abundance trends because innovation reveals itself in both higher incomes and lower prices.

Time Cost = Dollar Cost/Income

When we measure material wealth using time prices, we find that we are all becoming very wealthy indeed. By 2021, for example, the time prices of wheat, corn, and rice, staples that account for most of the calories humans consume, had collapsed since 1960, dropping 78 percent in the United States, 81 percent in India, and 96 percent in China. Between 1980 and 2020, the time cost of 50 key commodities, including food, energy, metals, and minerals, collapsed by over 75 percent, even as the population ballooned. This aligns with our computational understanding of growth, which suggests that abundance increased because of, not despite, population growth. More people mean more nodes on the “social supercomputer,” accelerating the accumulation of knowledge, enabling us to use atoms more efficiently, and to discover new supplies. In fact, during this period, a one percent growth in population resulted in a four percent increase in personal resource abundance of key commodities. In a book of the same name, Pooley and Tupy term this phenomenon “Superabundance.” As Allison Ryan writes at HumanProgress.org:

Every additional human being born on our planet appears to make resources proportionally more plentiful for the rest of us.

Superabundance isn’t limited to commodities; it is also happening to the manufactured goods we buy. In the US, the time price of refrigerators, for example, has collapsed by 92 percent since 1956. This means that the median American worker in 2022 could purchase 13 refrigerators for the same hours worked in 1956. In the same period, the time price of air conditioning units fell 97 percent; the median American could buy 36 AC units for the price of one in the 1950s. Perhaps no physical good today, however, is more abundant than the TV, where time prices have collapsed 99 percent since the year 2000. Remember, however, time prices still do not fully do progress justice; not only are these products more affordable, they are better. New refrigerators and AC units are more energy efficient, while TVs are larger, produce more vivid colors, and have higher resolution.

Superabundant Knowledge

Even knowledge itself has become superabundant. The printed book offers an information-dense means of transmitting highly granular knowledge from one person to many. Until innovation in printing technology, however, books were an extreme luxury reserved for the elite. Every book had to be copied by hand, each letter of every word painstakingly penned by a scribe. A single book of typical length took 135 days of human labor to create, making them prohibitively expensive. If we asked the median wage American blue-collar worker in 2020 to copy a manuscript like this, the average book would cost about $35,000.

Movable type technology, where printing panels were replaced with movable and reusable individual letters/characters, was first invented in China around 1000 A.D. The technology arrived in Europe centuries later, when Johannes Gutenberg, a German political exile living in France, began experimenting with printing around 1440. He returned to Germany several years later, and by 1450, the Gutenberg Press was on the market. The printing press dramatically lowered the cost of reproducing books, and by extension, the cost of storing and transmitting knowledge. In the 100 years after the arrival of the Gutenberg press in Europe, the price of books fell an average of 2.4 percent per year. As prices fell, books were increasingly printed in local vernaculars instead of Latin, increasing their accessibility to laypeople and raising the utility of literacy for the common man. It bestowed upon him an advantage over his ancestors whereby he could acquire knowledge directly from experts, bypassing the costly trial and error of those who came before him.

The price of the printed book continued its gradual decline throughout the Industrial Revolution; then the floor fell out from underneath it. With the Information Technology revolution after 1960, we developed digital media, like PDFs, ebooks, and the internet. In this new digital realm, the marginal cost of the production and distribution of knowledge has approached zero. This has made books and other forms of knowledge more abundant than ever before, if intangible. Today, armed with only a smartphone or a nearby library, everyone has access to billions of dollars of knowledge, a luxury that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

Let There Be Light

Perhaps nothing is more abundant, however, than light. Just a few generations ago, a candle at one’s bedside was a mark of luxury; today, we don’t give it a second thought. William Nordhaus tracked the progress of lighting technology from prehistory to modernity, from the open fire to the lightbulb. This history tells a dual story: one of dramatically improving efficiency and another of collapsing costs. The social supercomputer learned to light the darkness, producing more photons using less and less energy over time. The vast leaps in efficiency, in fact, are so dramatic that they cannot properly be represented on a chart.

Humans created our first simple animal-fat-burning stone “lamps” 40,000 years ago. They produced just 0.015 lumens per watt (a measure of light per unit of energy). Even so, they were roughly 7x more efficient at producing light than an open fire (0.00235 lumens per watt). By the First Industrial Revolution, candles and oil lamps had reached about 0.10 lumens per watt, or roughly 7x the efficiency of those early stone lamps. The Industrial Revolution gave us the incandescent lightbulb, which was ~37x more efficient, producing 3.7 lumens per watt. By the end of the 20th century, the efficiency of the incandescent lightbulb had quadrupled to 14.2 lumens per watt. Today, with LED lighting, a product of the Information Technology revolution, we’ve gone even further, achieving 100 lumens per watt by 2020, another 7x improvement.

Even more dramatic, however, is the collapse in the “time price” of light. The chart below tracks the median labor hours required to purchase 1,000 lumen-hours of light. Our prehistoric ancestors, with their crude stone lamps, needed to work about 50 hours to buy 1,000 lumen-hours. By 1800, due to rising incomes and the ~7x efficiency improvement of candles, the labor required to buy the same 1,000 lumen-hours was cut by almost 90%, to 5.4 hours. During the Industrial Revolution after 1750, incomes rose faster, while lighting efficiency advancements accelerated. By 1900, 1000 lumen-hours could be purchased with about 13 minutes of labor, and by 2000, just a fraction of a second of labor. Today, with the 7x improvement of LED lighting, the time cost of 1000 lumen-hours is hardly worth measuring at all.

Abundance For All

Now, we return to the mission of global prosperity and the challenge of poverty. It is here that many focus their attention on wealth inequality, contrasting the net worth of billionaires with everyone else. They reason that if only we expropriated the surplus wealth from the former and diverted it to the latter, everyone could enjoy a good life. But when we understand that material abundance, what we call wealth, is more than just a bank account or dollars earned, our perspective changes. It is correct that, on paper, the wealthy have a larger share of the economic pie than they did in the past, but the pie itself has grown larger; the “slices” owned by the middle class and the poor are also larger.

Yet, cost compression tells us that what really matters is not the number of dollars you have or earn, but what you can do with them. Here, economic growth becomes the great equalizer. In Enlightenment Now, author Steven Pinker writes that when we define poverty by what we can do with dollars, rather than the raw dollars earned, the poverty rate in America plunged 90 percent from 1960 to 2018, to a mere 3 percent of the population. The reason is that a dollar today, even when adjusted for inflation, buys a much greater quality of life compared to a dollar 60 years ago. Even the poorest live like kings compared to the wealthy of generations past. Progress may widen inequality when expressed in dollars, but it appears to narrow inequality in everything that matters. You may not have as much money as Jeff Bezos, but the phone in his pocket, the clothes on his back, and the TV he watches aren’t much different from yours.

This chart, created by economist Mark J. Perry, highlights this startling collapse in prices for manufactured goods and food. We aren’t just earning more dollars; our dollars are stretching further, able to buy more and better products. The net effect is that humans are getting wealthier, even when their incomes might not be rising very much. That said, this graph also illustrates that some items, mostly services, are indeed getting more difficult to afford relative to incomes. Many of these are items that are afflicted by cost disease, a phenomenon that we will discuss later on.

Many will remain unconvinced by the arguments above, genuinely concerned that inequality creates inherent unfairness in the economic system that must be addressed through taxation. I agree in one sense. To the extent that wealth is “unearned” or achieved through “rent-seeking,” in economic parlance, inequality is a problem. Much of this comes from privately-captured land and mineral resources, which are not the fruits of human physical or intellectual labor. We will discuss how to address this challenge later on with policy suggestions that target extractive rent-seeking, but the economic engine, the productive forces that produce wealth, best remain untouched. The history of progress is clear: the quickest path to greater abundance and less poverty is to accelerate global energy capture and knowledge accumulation. This means getting out of our own way, and if we do, a world of unimaginable abundance awaits.

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