Posts by The What Works Initiative

Those of us who consult Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT — which by now is almost all of us — know that our artificial consultants and coaches are tirelessly agreeable. They’re programmed sycophants, trained to please and take our cues as they answer our questions and respond to our prompts. Is this a setup for digging…

Philadelphia was the biggest city, at 30,000. New York City had about 25,000. Today those would be towns just big enough to support one medium-size high school. Most Americans were self-employed farmers, and their world was powered by muscle – human and animal – with some added boost from firewood and water power. Today, one…

Just since 2024, electrical service has reached the homes of 50 million more Africans across 40 countries. Electricity is fundamental to every aspect of modern life from refrigerating food to reading after dark to running drip irrigation systems to connecting to the whole information age economy. Not to mention living in smoke-free houses. It’s the…

A little over a week ago, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. That’s a net worth equal to about 3 percent of the current US GDP. For comparison, the leading figure of the Gilded Age, John D. Rockefeller, was worth about 1.5 percent of total national output. So Musk has become an avatar, a…

The world’s forests are increasingly holding their own these days. Forests matter. They shelter wildlife, cool the air, protect watersheds, provide lumber, offer beauty and natural settings, and – not least – extract carbon from the atmosphere. Deforestation in Brazil has dropped to the lowest levels since 2012–2014, its previous low and a small fraction…

Bit by bit, men are remodeling their role in the family. Women continue to shoulder most of the labor on the home front. But since the pandemic, men have markedly shifted their behavior in ways that appear to be enduring. College-educated fathers in the US have cut an average of six hours per week at paid…

As recently as 2023, 77 percent of Americans told Gallup that violent crime had gone up over the previous year. In fact, the murder rate had just had its largest single-year drop in history. The following year was an even steeper drop. 2025 numbers are not fully compiled, but that drop looks still steeper. And…

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific between California and Hawaii – and twice the size of Texas – is more like a soup of plastic debris than an island. And it keeps getting thicker. A huge part of it is cast-off commercial fishing nets, lines, and buckets gradually deteriorating into microplastics. Not…

Few tragedies have been more commonplace and universal through human history than the deaths of small children. By the year 2000, much progress had been made all over the world in raising the survival rates of babies and toddlers. That progress has continued. Since 2000 the number of children dying by age five has been…