Fair Warning: There Won't Be Fair Warnings

Perhaps you are the kind of person who acts as though that the food in the grocery store somehow magically appears, with no supply chain vulnerabilities along the way. You trust that the water that you drink and the air you breathe are just fine, with no worries about what might have gotten into them before getting to you. You figure that the odds of a tornado or a hurricane hitting your location are low, so there’s no need for any early warning systems. You believe that you are healthy and don’t have to worry about any pesky outbreaks or outright epidemics.

Don't count on anything like that for our health & safety. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Well, I worry about all those, and more. Say what you will about the federal government – and there’s plenty of things it doesn’t do well – it has, historically, served as the monitoring and warning system for these and other potential calamities. Now, under DOGE and the Trump Administration, many of those have been gutted or at least are at risk.

But, at the end of the day, the thing at risk is us.

Credit: Global Finance

Here is a not exhaustive list of examples:

FDA: Although HHS Secretary Kennedy has vowed he will keep the thousands of inspectors who oversee food and drug safety, it has already suspended a quality control program for its food testing laboratories, and has cut support staff that, among other things, make arrangements for those inspectors to, you know, go inspect.  Even before recent cuts, a 2024 GAO report warned that the FDA was already critically short on inspectors.

The FDA has already laid off key personnel responsible for tracking bird flu, including virtually all of the leadership team in the Center for Veterinary Medicine's office of the director. Plus: "The food compliance officers and animal drug reviewers survived, but they have no one at the comms office to put out a safety alert, no admin staff to pay external labs to test products," one FDA official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told CBS News.

Even worse, drafts of the Trump budget proposal would further slash FDA budget, in part by moving “routine” food inspections to states.  

CDC: Oh, gosh, where to start? Cuts have shut down the labs that help track things like outbreaks of hepatis and antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. We’re having a hard time tracking the current measles outbreak that started in Texas and has now spread to over half the states.

The White House wants to encourage more people to have babies, but has cut back on a national surveillance program that collects detailed information about maternal behaviors and experiences to help states improve outcomes for mothers and babies. It helped, among other things, compare IVF clinics. “We’ve been tracking this information for 38 years, and it’s improved mothers’ health and understanding of mothers’ experiences,” one of the statisticians let go told The Washington Post.

The Office on Smoking and Health was effectively shuttered, in what one expert called “the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century.”  CDC cuts will force the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to stop collecting data on injuries that result from motor vehicle crashes, alcohol, adverse drug effects, aircraft incidents and work-related injuries.

And if you’re thinking of taking a cruise, you should know that the CDC’s cruise ship inspections have all been laid off – even though those positions are paid for by the cruise ship companies, not the federal government.

EPA: Even though EPA head Lee Zeldin “absolutely” guarantees Trump cuts won’t hurt either people or the environment, the EPA has already announced it will stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions, is shutting down all environmental justice offices and is ending related initiatives, “a move that will impact how waste and recycling industries measure and track their environmental impact on neighboring communities.”

The EPA has proposed rolling back 31 key regulations, including ones that limit limiting harmful air pollution from cars and power plants; restrictions on the emission of mercury, a neurotoxin; and clean water protections for rivers and streams. Mr. Zeldin called it the “greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen” and declared it a “dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”  But, sure, it won’t hurt anything.

The EPA is also proposing to loosen rules about coal ash storage and disposal. Most of us don’t know much about coal ash but Environmental Health News warns: “Coal ash is one of the largest industrial waste streams in the United States, containing toxic elements such as arsenic, mercury, and lead.” Meanwhile, sister agency NIOSH has laid off two-thirds of the staff who do black lung screening for coal miners, despite President Trump’s purported love of coal miners.

NIH: what’s happening to the NIH deserves and article on its own, some of which I’ve covered before. The Trump Administration has frozen much research in its track, laid off a generation of young scientists, is severely cutting the amount of overhead funding that research universities have come to rely on, and is now using NIH grants for political extortion (take that, Columbia ad Harvard!).

Its proposed budget would cut NIH’s budget nearly in half and consolidate its 27 agencies into eight. “This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science.

I could go on with other agencies, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that cuts at the National Weather Service and NOAA will mean “degraded operations” that, mark my words, will come back to haunt us.

Credit: University of Maryland

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ProPublica calls the Administration’s efforts as a “war on measurement”:

In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

It goes on to assert: “Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy.”

The efforts are also a war on science. Climate change deniers and vaccine deniers are examples of how we’ve entrusted our lives and health to people who reject well-established science in favor of their own personal beliefs, especially when that will make more money for big donors.

This is a crisis. This is a catastrophe. This is our future, and we won’t know some of it is happening until it is far too late to do anything about it.  

Saving U.S. Manufacturing: Think Biotech, Not Cars

Amidst all the drama last week with tariffs, trade wars, and market upheavals, you may have missed that the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) issued its report: Charting the Future of Biotechnology. Indeed, you may have missed when the Commission was created by Congress in 2022; I know I did.

Credit: NSCEB

Biotechnology is a big deal and it is going to get much bigger. John Cumbers, founder and CEO of SynBiobeta, writes that the U.S. bioeconomy is now already worth $950b, and quotes McKinsey Global Institute as predicting that by 2040, biology could generate up to 60% of the world’s physical inputs, representing a $30 trillion global opportunity. Not an opportunity the U.S. can afford to miss out on – yet that is exactly what may be happening.

The NSCEB report sets the stakes:

We stand at the edge of a new industrial revolution, one that depends on our ability to engineer biology. Emerging biotechnology, coupled with artificial intelligence, will transform everything from the way we defend and build our nation to how we nourish and provide care for Americans.

Unfortunately, the report continues: “We now believe the United States is falling behind in key areas of emerging biotechnology as China surges ahead.”

Their core conclusion: “China is quickly ascending to biotechnology dominance, having made biotechnology a strategic priority for 20 years.¹ To remain competitive, the United States must take swift action in the next three years. Otherwise, we risk falling behind, a setback from which we may never recover.”

Credit: NSCEB

NSCEB Chair Senator Todd Young elaborated:

The United States is locked in a competition with China that will define the coming century. Biotechnology is the next phase in that competition. It is no longer constrained to the realm of scientific achievement. It is now an imperative for national security, economic power, and global influence. Biotechnology can ensure our warfighters continue to be the strongest fighting force on tomorrow's battlefields, and reshore supply chains while revitalizing our manufacturing sector, creating jobs here at home.

“We are about to see decades of breakthrough happen, seemingly, overnight…touching nearly every aspect of our lives—agriculture, industry, energy, defense, and national security,” Michelle Rozo, PhD, molecular biologist and vice chair of NSCEB, said while testifying before the April 8 House Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation. Yet, she continued, “America’s biotechnology strengths are atrophying—dangerously.”

Paul Zhang, a partner at Bluestar BioAdvisors, which advises drugmakers on commercial strategies, including seeking business in China, explained to The Wall Street Journal how China’s manufacturing aims have evolved: “Initially it was how to do shoes and sneakers faster and cheaper and better. Then it was how to build iPhones faster and better. Now it’s how to build biotech and AI faster and better,” 

If you think NSCEB is being alarmist, Julie Heng, writing for the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), notes:

Over the past decade, China has dramatically increased its biotech investments, with biopharma R&D growing 400-fold and the market value of biotech firms surging 100-fold between 2016 to 2021, now reaching a collective value of $300 billion…Notably, 79 percent of U.S. pharmaceutical companies now depend on Chinese contract firms for manufacturing. Furthermore, China is continuing a whole-of-government effort to support its domestic industry with financing, regulatory streamlining, and diplomatic support, building out over 100 biotech research parks and 17 industrial clusters.

It's worse than just being out manufactured. The Commission “has every reason to believe that the CCP will weaponize biotechnology,” and describes some scary scenarios, including genetically enhanced “super soldiers,” using microbes to degrade wood and concrete in our buildings and infrastructure, or developing pathogens to only attack crops grown in the U.S. If those don’t scare you, I don’t know what does.

Thus, the Commission says, “if the United States fails to act, the future of biotechnology could be catastrophic.”

The Commission does suggest a plan. The report lays out six “pillars” and makes 49 recommendations. The six pillars are:

• Pillar 1: Prioritize biotechnology at the national level
• Pillar 2: Mobilize the private sector to get U.S. products to scale
• Pillar 3: Maximize the benefits of biotechnology for defense
• Pillar 4: Out-innovate our strategic competitors
• Pillar 5: Build the biotechnology workforce of the future
• Pillar 6: Mobilize the collective strengths of our allies and partners

The Commission’s goal is not to “out-China China,” but to “lean into our inherent strengths.” Their key recommendation is to invest a minimum of $15b over the next five years, in hopes of attracting even more private capital into the field. It also calls for a National Biotechnology Coordination Office to help drive government strategy.

With all that is at stake, $15b hardly seems like enough. Let’s hope DOGE doesn’t find out.

I should probably note that David Wainer, writing in WSJ, points out: “The U.S. biotech sector had already been through a brutal few years before the latest market crash… More investors are even wondering if the whole model—risky science, costly funding, political uncertainty and long waits for payoffs—is simply broken. For many of the nearly 200 companies trading below their cash value, it probably is.” Not a market that is inspiring a flood of new investment – at least, not in the U.S.

Dr. Cumbers urges:

We have the Rust Belt and the Bible Belt—now let’s build a Bio Belt: a nationwide network of regional biomanufacturing hubs. These hubs wouldn’t just drive innovation—they’d power economic renewal, especially in rural and industrial regions. While some jobs will go to scientists and engineers, many more will go to tradespeople, factory workers, and high school graduates trained to run and maintain next-gen biofacilities.

And he warns: “If we fail to build the capacity to make what we invent, we’ll watch the returns on American innovation.” We’ve seen that movie too many times, in other sectors, and it doesn’t end well for us.

We definitely do need to make biotechnology a priority,. The federal investment and national coordinating office seem like sound recommendations. The problem is, we need the same in A.I. and in robotics, just to name two other key emerging industries. The current Administration is so focused on bringing back 20^th century industries like coal mining and auto manufacturing that I have to wonder: who is looking ahead, not behind?   

Go Read a Book. You Probably Won't

Let’s not talk about tariffs.

That's what I want to see more of. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Let’s not talk about the stock market, either. Both topics are way too depressing these days, for related reasons. Let’s talk instead about one of my favorite things, reading. Alas, though, I have to warn you: the news here is not all good either.

A new NPR/Ipsos poll had some intriguing insights into how Americans feel about reading. Two-thirds of us claim we’ve read or listened to a book in the past month (half had read a book, physical or electronic, and the rest had listened to audiobook). Ninety-eight percent of us want our children to develop a love of reading. About two-thirds of us say we have a collection of books in our homes, and want to be better readers.

All encouraging stuff.

But: forty-three of us say reading is low on our priority list. Slightly less than forty percent think they read more now than they did a few years ago, or when they were kids. We like reading in principle, but many of us spend our time doing other things.

Interestingly enough, readers reported slightly more time streaming, being on social media, or watching short-form videos like on YouTube or TikTok, so those activities don’t necessarily need to keep non-readers from reading. Similarly, readers were more likely to say they didn’t read more because of work or other life activities, including kids’ activities. Readers were less likely to say they just preferred other forms of entertainment, but the difference was not large. So it’s really not quite clear why more don’t read.

Here's a clue: a 2023 survey from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that 28% of U.S. adults read at the lowest literacy level. In 2017, that comparable statistic was 17%.  And, oh-by-the-way, our scores on numeracy were even worse (34%). When asked about the reasons for the decline, then NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said: “It’s difficult to say.” She has, of course, been let go by President Trump, who is not particularly known for any love of reading.

Many of us may not read because, well, we’re not very good at it.

Percentage of U.S. adults aged 16-65 at selected proficiency levels. Credit: NCES

Similarly, new statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that 33% of eighth graders were reading at “below basic” levels, the lowest it has been in the thirty year history of the survey. For fourth graders, it was even worse, with 40% at “below basic” levels, the lowest in twenty years. “Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Commission Carr.

Evidently all those people who claimed to want their children to develop a love of reading are not succeeding.

Writing last fall in Vox, Anna North highlighted what she thinks the problem with kids’ reading is:

What has plummeted, however, is how much kids read, especially outside of school. In 1984, the first year for which data is available, 35 percent of 13-year-olds reported reading for fun “almost every day,” according to NAEP. By 2023, that figure was down to 14 percent, and 31 percent of respondents said they never read for fun at all.

By the way, the NPR/Ipsos survey found that, among those with K-12 children, 82% think their child reads at or above their grade level, 79% think their child is interested in reading, and 69% thinks their child reads for pleasure. A lot of parents are kidding themselves.

In the NPR/Ipsos poll, 82% of us think reading is a way to learn about the world (which, of course, it is). Unfortunately, our children may not be learning how to learn that way. Catherine Snow, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Ms. North (referring to children): “they’re not reading in the ways that they need to read in order to be prepared for the tasks of learning and critical thinking.”

Christina Cover, who leads the Project for Adolescent Literacy at the nonprofit Seek Common Ground, added: “These are our voters. These are people that are really going to be taking us into what’s next for our country and for our world.”

Their not reading does not bode well for our future.

Let’s track back to that seemingly encouraging statistic that two-thirds of us have read or listened to a book in the last month. A 2023 YouGov survey found that 46% of us didn’t finish any books in the last year. Another five percent read only one book, so just over half of us read one or fewer books in the entire year.

If you read five books – five books! – you’re in the upper third of all Americans. While I’m at it, half of us rarely or never visit a library, with those over 45 least likely to (even though they are most likely to be readers). Don’t even get me started at the increasing efforts to ban books.

Our literacy is very much at risk…which put our society at risk.

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There’s significant research that indicate our attention span is getting shorter, even when just online, so it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that reading an actual book is a commitment that many of us won’t undertake; heck, reading to the end of this article is probably a stretch.  

Maybe reading books is just old-fashioned, like printing presses in a e-book world. Maybe short form content, be it YouTube videos or X posts, is how we like to get our information. On the other hand, (print) book sales rose 6.5% in 2024, according to Publishers Weekly, so maybe not all hope is lost.

I grew up in a family of readers. I grew up with weekly trips to the library. There was never a time in my life when I wasn’t a voracious reader. My wife teases (I think) me about how many books we have in our house. So I am very much prejudiced about the importance of reading and of reading books in particular.

I fear that it’s not just children who aren’t reading in ways that help them learn about the world and to think critically about information. Reading at most one book a year is not going to do it. And I fear that is leading us to a society where ignorance triumphs, truth loses meaning, and progress stalls or even reverses.

So pick up a book – preferably one that challenges you to learn something new– or, better yet, read one with your kids.  

Learning How to Say "Robot" in Chinese

Perhaps you were one of the people who were alarmed when Chinese firm DeepSink released its powerful AI R1 a couple months ago, rivaling U.S. AI efforts but supposedly developed much cheaper and much faster. It was a reminder that, when it comes to AI, China is not to be taken lightly; the battle for AI supremacy is far, far from over.

They're coming. Credit: Unitree Robotics

Well, when it comes to robots – especially AI-powered, humanoid ones -- the battle may be closer to being over…and the U.S. is not winning.

China’s robotics version of DeepSink may be Unitree Robotics. Or UBTech. Or maybe Agibot or Pudu Robotics.  You get the point.

Speaking specifically about Unitree Robotics, Kyle Chan, an expert on Chinese industrial policy at Princeton University, told The Washington Post:  “They are almost the symbol of China’s ability to operate at the cutting edge of robotics. They’ve become kind of like the DeepSeek of the robotics world for China.”

WaPo reports that there are almost half a million smart-robot firms registered in China, with a combined market cap of almost a trillion dollars. Morgan Stanley recently noted that China had 5,688 patents containing the word “humanoid” over the past five years; by comparison, the U.S. had 1,483.

Yeah, they take smart robots seriously in China.  

The Morgan Stanley report commented: “Our research suggests China continues to show the most impressive progress in humanoid robotics where startups are benefitting from established supply chains, local adoption opportunities, and strong degrees of national government support.”

China has to take AI and robotics seriously, not only because they are seen as key technologies of the future but also because it is facing a marked labor shortage. Its labor force peaked in the mid-2010’s, and is forecast to shrink by 20% over the next 25 years. China has plenty of automation and even robots in those factories already, but they’re mostly limited to specific tasks. The AI humanoid robots would allow them to do jobs that only humans can do now.

“You won’t have to retrofit your factory, warehouse or home to accommodate a humanoid—that’s the future promise,” Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), a trade group in Ann Arbor, Mich, told The Wall Street Journal.

It won’t stop just at factories. Ming Hsun Lee, head of Greater China automotive and industrials research at BofA Global Research, told CNBC: ““I think in the short-term, three to four years, we will see humanoid robots initially applied in production lines to compare some workers, and in the midterm, we will see them gradually spread into the service industry.”

Unitech CEO Wang Xingxing  told TMTPost: “Within our lifetime, humanoid robots will be able to revolutionize every industry, from industrial and service sectors to agriculture and manufacturing, On an even grander scale, governments could deploy 100,000 humanoid robots to build an entire city.” Mr. Wang is clear about the reason for the progress: “The reason we’ve progressed so quickly is simple: the rapid advancement of AI technology.”

Similarly, Reyk Knuhtsen, analyst at SemiAnalysis, an independent research and analysis company specializing in semiconductors and AI, told CNBC: “China has the potential to replicate its disruptive impact from the EV industry in the humanoid space. However, this time the disruption could extend far beyond a single industry, potentially transforming the labor force itself.”

 AI and robotics leaders in the U.S. are paying attention – and are worried. “They have more companies developing humanoids and more government support than anyone else. So, right now, they may have an edge,” said Mr. Burnstein in WSJ.

A recent “call to action” from SemiAnalysis was blunt:  

Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries…The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities.

SemiAnalysis notes China has already captured the markets for batteries, solar, and EV, and warns that the economies of scale allowed by robotics “will be exponential compared to their last strategic industry captures.”

WaPo notes how Chinese robotics companies are already driving costs down (again, similar to what they’ve done with batteries, solar, and EVs):

Unitree has built its business model on competitive pricing. The company’s cheapest robot dog goes for $1,600, according to its website, while a humanoid robot costs $16,000. A robot dog from Boston Dynamics, by contrast, goes for around $75,000.

 Liu Gang, a professor at Nankai University in Tianjin who researches China’s innovation economy, explained the strategy to WaPo: “We are picking a path where we lower the costs for innovation and industrialization, When many can do things with a comparable quality, whoever makes it more cheaply will have a bigger chance to win.”

That’s going to make it increasingly harder for the U.S. to compete. And that’s a huge problem. When President Trump and others talk about bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., in large part what they want are all those well paying (human) jobs, but, to use the Wayne Gretsky metaphor, they may be skating to where the puck used to be.

Recently U.S. robotics leaders Agility Robitics, Boston Dynamics, Tesla (think Optimus robots, not Cybertrucks), along with A3, have called for a national strategy for AI-powered robots, much as China has developed (and funded). “The United States is at a critical moment in shaping the future of automation,” said Mr. Burnstein. “While AI is a major focus, we cannot afford to fall behind in robotics.” The strategy includes dedicated federal office to coordinate robotics policy, innovation, and industry collaboration, tax incentives, and funding public-private research partnerships to spur innovation.

According to Jeff Cardenas, co-founder of Austin-based humanoid startup Apptronik: “The next robotics race is powered by AI and is up for grabs.” 

Let’s hope so, anyway. The U.S. is terrible at industrial policy – just ask our steel, shipbuilding, or even chips industries. We still haven’t figured out what we should do about/for AI, other than to hope American ingenuity will save the day.

The U.S. shouldn’t be looking at how to strengthen our oil, gas, or coal industries; we shouldn’t worry so much about gasoline-powered automobiles; we shouldn’t be building multi-million dollar fighters or billion dollar aircraft carriers. Those were all important 20^th century industries/technologies, but, hey, this is the 21st century.

The 21^st century – and the 22^nd – will belong to the countries and industries that best adopt to/innovate in 21^st century technologies. Like AI and robotics.

Home, Alone

News flash: America is not a very happy place these days.

This is too many of us. Credit: Microsoft Designer

No, I’m not talking about the current political divide (which is probably more accurately described as a chasm), at least not directly. I’m referring to the latest results from the World Happiness Report, which found that the U.S. has slid to 24^th place in the world, its lowest position ever. We were 11^th in 2011, the first such report.

Nordic countries scored the highest yet again, taking half of the top ten counties, with Finland repeating for the eighth year in a row as the happiest country. America’s nearest neighbors Mexico (10^th) and Canada (18^th) are happier places, tariffs or not.

The researchers declare: “Belief in the kindness of others is much more closely tied to happiness than previously thought.” They specifically cite the belief that others would return a lost wallet is a strong predictor of a country’s happiness, while noting that such returns are twice as likely as people believe them to be.

John F. Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia, a founding editor of the World Happiness Report, said:

The wallet data are so convincing because they confirm that people are much happier living where they think people care about each other. The wallet dropping experiments confirm the reality of these perceptions, even if they are everywhere too pessimistic.

The U.S., as it turned out, ranked only 52^nd in believing a stranger would return a lost wallet, and even only 25^th that the police would. We were slightly more optimistic (17^th) that our neighbors would.  

Sharing meals with others is also strongly linked to happiness. “The extent to which you share meals is predictive of the social support you have, the pro-social behaviors you exhibit and the trust you have in others,” Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a University of Oxford professor and an author of the report, told The New York Times.

Unfortunately, the number of people dining alone in the U.S. has increased 53% over the past two decades. According to the Ajinomoto Group, among American adults under 25, it has jumped 80%.

Young Americans are helped drive our dismal results generally. “The decline in the U.S. in 2024 was at least partly attributable to Americans younger than age 30 feeling worse about their lives,” Ilana Ron-Levey, managing director at Gallup, told CNN. “Today’s young people report feeling less supported by friends and family, less free to make life choices and less optimistic about their living standards.”

Eighteen percent (18%) of young U.S. adults (18-29) report not having anyone they feel close to, the highest of all the U.S. age groups, and those same young adults also have lower quality of connections than older U.S. respondents. The report speculates: “Although not definitive, this provides intriguing preliminary evidence that relatively low connection among young people might factor into low wellbeing among young Americans.”

In fact, if the U.S. was measured just by the happiness of our young adults, we wouldn’t even rank in the top 60 countries. “It is really disheartening to see this, and it links perfectly with the fact that it’s the well-being of youth in America that’s off a cliff, which is driving the drop in the rankings to a large extent,” Professor De Neve said.

Researchers also point to inequality as an important factor. “In these Nordic Scandinavian countries, a rising tide lifts all boats, so the levels of economic inequality are much less, and that reflects in well-being as well,” Professor De Neve said. “In Finland, most people will rate [their happiness] as seven or an eight, whereas if you look at the distribution of well-being in the States, there’s a lot of 10s out there, but there’s a lot of ones as well.”

No wonder. According to The Urban Institute:

Wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country and has risen for much of the past 60 years. Racial wealth inequities have persisted for generations, reflecting the long-standing effects of racist policies, not individual intentions or deficits.

So, no, we’re not all in this together, especially with the bottom 50% having a mere 2.4% of all household wealth, one of the lowest points we’ve seen. Americans also say we’re deeply divided both politically and on values (which, of course, are not unrelated).

Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve summarized some key takeaways from their report::

This year’s report pushes us to look beyond traditional determinants like health and wealth. It turns out that sharing meals and trusting others are even stronger predictors of wellbeing than expected. In this era of social isolation and political polarisation we need to find ways to bring people around the table again — doing so is critical for our individual and collective wellbeing.

“The fact that we’re increasingly socially isolated means also that we’re not testing our ideas about the world with other people,” Dr. De Neve explained to the NYT. “And the more you sit around the table with other people who might have somewhat different views, the more you start moderating your own views. And the increasing lack of social interaction and social isolation as a result, for a lot of people — amplified by echo chambers — makes people more radical.”

If you’ve read Robert Putman’s classic Bowling Alone (2000) – and, if you haven’t, stop reading this, go buy a copy, and read it – then none of this will be a surprise. Professor Putnam described how, even before the advent of social media, the U.S. went from a society that did a wide variety of things together into one that tended to be more insular, at the cost of much of our social capital.  We could sure use that social capital now.

Sure, there’s a lot to be unhappy about in today’s America. Most Americans don’t think the country is on the right track. We don’t trust our various institutions. We use social media, but we’re very worried about its impact – much moreso than the rest of the world. Eight percent of us have no close friends. 

Look, I can understand being behind Finland, Denmark, even New Zealand in overall happiness, but Slovenia or the U.A.E.? Seriously. We need to put our phones down, stop arguing about politics, go out to eat with friends, and, for goodness’ sake, if you find a wallet, be sure to return it to its owner.

A New Way to Internet

If you live in, say, Ukraine, you probably think about Starlink a lot. Since Russia invaded three years ago, it has been heavily dependent on Starlink for internet connectivity – especially its military. Rural areas around the world that had never developed cable connectivity similarly rely on Starlink. It has been a boon to millions of people.

Taara in action. Credit: Taara

But its CEO/founder Elon Musk has proved, shall we say, unpredictable lately. He’s taken to politics with a passion, supporting President Trump and wielding unknown influence in that Administration. Many worry that Mr. Musk could, on a whim or as a way of strategically applying pressure, simply could turn the service off in selected areas, which would be crippling (he denies that he would). There are not a lot of other great satellite internet options available.  The best of the bunch is OneWeb, which is owned by Eutelsat. It has had a rocky history, is much smaller, and would struggle to scale.

Europe is planning IRIS² as a way to achieve satellite independence, but it is several years away from being a viable option. Similar, there’s Amazon’s Project Kuiper, but let’s put it this way: it’s Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin versus Mr. Musk’s SpaceX. I.e., some good promise there, but nowhere near delivering at anywhere near the same scale.  

It seems like we’d need a moonshot to catch, much less surpass, Starlink. Fortunately, Alphabet has X, its moonshot factory, and it has just spun off a project that it thinks could rival Starlink and perhaps change how we access the internet.

The company is called Taara, and it uses light to deliver connectivity. Fiber optic uses light as well, but it needs those pesky cables to transmit it. Taara skips the cable. It’s like ditching your landline for mobile phone service.

Mahesh Krishnaswamy, CEO of Taara, says:

Taara Lightbridge brings fast, fiber-like internet access to areas where it’s too difficult or expensive to install traditional fiber, like in dense city neighborhoods, over rivers and seas, or across rugged terrains and national parks. In the same way fiber optic cables in the ground use light to carry data, Taara uses narrow, invisible light beams to transmit information through the air, at speeds as high as 20 gigabits per second and across distances up to 20 kilometers. Taara’s Lightbridge units deliver high speed, high quality internet and require only a few hours to set up, without the time and cost associated with digging trenches or stringing cables.

Taara is an outgrowth of Alphabet’s Loon project, which used ballons (instead of satellite or cable) to establish the connectivity. That effort ran into a number of regulatory and practical problems, and was shut down in 2021. X was still sold on using light – lasers! – as a mechanism, and so continued its work. Earlier efforts were somewhat clunky, involving traffic light-sized devices and a series of mirrors, but two weeks ago X announced a new chip that addressed many of these issues.

Mr. Krishnaswamy said: “…this new chip uses software to steer, track, and correct the beam of light without bulky moving parts. We've taken most of the core functionality of the Taara Lightbridge—which is the size of a traffic light—and shrunken it down to the size of a fingernail.” He told Steven Levy in Wired: “We can offer 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it for a fraction of the cost.”

The Taara chip. Credit: Taara

Even better, no need to launch a bunch of rockets to put thousands of satellites in orbit or installing new fiber optic cables. “Installation is completed in hours, not days —all without digging, spectrum licensing or right-of-way permitting,” Taara said over its new website.

While Mr. Krishnaswamy acknowledges that currently fiber is high-speed connectivity’s “gold standard,” he sees a different future:

Our team imagines a future where connectivity isn’t bound by cables or constrained by cost. By dramatically reducing the size and complexity of our systems, our aim is to eventually drastically reduce the cost of connectivity, creating a network effect within the industry.

Right now, the company only has a dozen employees, but is trying to rapidly at least double that count. Taara is “delivering commercial service in partnership with Airtel, Liquid Intelligent Technologies and Liberty Networks, as well as pioneering new approaches to wireless optical communications deployments with the likes of T-Mobile and Vodafone.” Taara already claims to operate in 12 countries, such as parts of Africa and India.

The spin-off was intentional to help spur growth. “We’ve realized over time that for a good number of the things we create, there’s a lot of benefit to landing just outside of the Alphabet membrane,” said Eric (Astro) Teller, X’s captain of moonshots. “They’re going to be able to get connected quickly to market capital, bring in strategic investors, and generally be able to scale faster this way.”

Mr. Teller adds: “If you can figure out how to be the first business that starts moving data via light, once the whole world moves to that part of the spectrum, we think Taara is going to be in a really nice place.” I.e., “skating to where the puck is going to be.”

Taara expects the new chip to be more widely available in 2026, but don’t expect a direct-to-consumer approach anytime soon. Think more like serving autonomous vehicles.

Both Mr. Teller and Mr. Krishnaswamy told Mr. Levy that 6G may be the last iteration to be based on radio waves; 7G, they believe, may be based on optics – which would be great for Taara. “We have an enormous worldwide industry that's about to go through a very complex change,” Mr. Teller said. “So to the extent that you buy this, it’s going to be a very big deal.”

Hey, my cable provider still hasn’t upgraded to fiber optics. I had been intrigued by Starlink, but having so much of the world dependent on one company – especially a company run by someone like Elon Musk – makes me very uneasy. I hope OneWeb, Project Kuiper, IRIS² and others are successful. But I’m really rooting for big breakthroughs like Taara promises. 

Health Care in Abundance

A recent report from Moody’s Analytics, by chief economist Mark Zandi, had an eye-opening fact: the top 10% of earners in the U.S. – those who make $250,000 or more – now account for just shy (49.7%) of half of consumer spending. If that strikes you as unusual, you’re right. It is a record since at least 1989. Thirty years ago the comparable percentage was 36%.

This too often describes our healthcare system. Credit: Council on Europe

“The finances of the well-to-do have never been better, their spending never stronger and the economy never more dependent on that group,” wrote Dr. Zandi. He added: "Wealthier households are financially more secure and thus more able and willing to spend their income. That is, they save less than they would otherwise.”

The rest of us are struggling to hold our own against inflation, not always successfully. It’s why companies like Costco and Walmart are trying to target upscale shoppers, while “value” oriented firms like Big Lots, Family Dollar, or Kohl’s are closing stores or even declaring bankruptcy.

This extreme bifurcation, of course, made me think of healthcare, where – as is famously known – half of all spending is attributable to only 5% of patients. In case you’d forgotten, in healthcare, half the population accounts for 97% of all spending, so the other half accounts for a measly 3%.

Now, you might say, neither of those is surprising: rich people spend more, and sicker people cost more. But somehow neither of those seems right to me.

I started thinking more about this after reading a recent New York Times op-ed from Ezra Klein. In it he makes the following assertion:

The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it.

Mr. Klein didn’t coin the phrase “politics of abundance,” but he and Derek Thompson did just write a book on the topic (Abundance) that discusses their thoughts at more length. I have not read the book, but I saw a quote from it that I quite liked: “What is scarce that should be abundant? What is hard to build that should be easy?”

And so we’re back to healthcare.

We seem to live in a country where healthcare is too scarce. A new analysis suggests that we have a looming shortage of hospital beds, and if you live in a rural area, it’s already here. If you believe the Association of American Medical Colleges, we have a looming physician shortage, and if you’re looking for primary care, it’s already here. We’re facing nursing storages, pharmacist shortages, nursing home worker shortages, home health worker shortages, to name a few. We even have shortages of many critical prescriptions, including some needed for cancer treatments.         

Despite all these shortages or would-be shortages, of course, we manage to spend way more than other countries on healthcare. One can only imagine how much we might be spending if there were no shortages. I take that back: I’m not sure I can imagine.   

In the category of things that are scarce that should be abundant, and/or things that are hard to build that should be easy, I’d probably put housing at the top but healthcare as a close second. The trouble is, when we pour more money into healthcare, as we are wont to do, we don’t seem to fill any of our many shortages, much less improve the quality of care or outcomes.

In his article, Mr. Klein recounts the long saga of California’s Prop 1A, which called for a high speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Other countries have high speed rail lines, most notably Japan, so certainly the richest state in the richest country should be able to build such a line. But, nope, 15 years later the predicted cost of the line has ballooned 300%, not much of the line is actually complete, and there is no end in sight, much less money available to complete it.

It reminds me of ACA: important goals, lots of money spent towards achieving them, some key accomplishments to show, but oh-so-far from achieving what we actually need.

We can’t keep going on the way we’ve been going on. We need to make scarce health care abundant, and to make things that are hard to build in healthcare easy to build.  Finally, we may be approaching technologies that would allow those.

It starts with A.I., as everything seems to these days. Healthcare, to my surprise, has started to embrace the use of A.I. Whether it is to assist physicians, to handle the too-many administrative tasks, to develop new drugs, it’s clear there will be a role for A.I. in healthcare.

Credit: PwC

My worry is that our healthcare system will absorb A.I. the way it did digital, making use of it but not using it to drive costs lower or to increase access. My worry is that it will be used to make more money for the people already making money in the system. My worry is that it be used to put a shiny new coat on our healthcare system, not to revamp or to reinvent it.

Here’s my plea: let’s use A.I. to make health care abundant – and cheap. Let’s make A.I. make building resources used in healthcare – be they people, devices, drugs, or buildings – easy to build. Simply adding A.I. into our existing system won’t do those. We have to design it towards those ends.

And let’s not stop at A.I. I’ve long been a fan of robots – be they full-sized, nano, or anything in-between – in healthcare. We know we have people shortages, especially for caregiving, and we should be planning for how robots can help fill those. But we need to use them with the abundance mentality: make them cheaply, use them ubiquitously, make them readily available. I think of how Ukraine has reinvented drones for its war efforts, because American drones were too expensive, too few, and too uncertain. We need that mentality for building healthcare robots.

Same for 3D printing. Medical devices, supplies, even prescription drugs: we should be ramping up use of 3D printing to make them – you guessed it – more abundant and easier to build, not to mention much cheaper. The companies currently making them won’t like it, of course, but our healthcare system doesn’t exist to make them money.  Or, at least, it shouldn’t.

The people and companies currently profiting from healthcare thrive on scarcity – perceived or real—and on making things hard to build. We need healthcare leaders that want us to thrive on abundance.