Issue 10: One word—plastics. [Sam Bowman, Works in Progress]

Our lead essay explains how France’s fertility shift changed the face of European geopolitics—and explains what caused it.
The issue also includes pieces on: reducing reliance on diesel generators in Africa; building roads out of plastic; why we feel empathy for other species; rolling out green energy and other infrasturcture faster; why plutonium gets a bad rap; and using prediction markets to tax bullshit online.
Our cover art comes from Rav Rieck, an illustrator and story artist based in Tokyo. You can find more of his work here.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the previous thousand years, France was the China of Europe.

For much of that time, it had a quarter of the continent’s population, and even by 1700 had four times the population of England.
How differently world history would have panned out, historian *Guillaume Blanc *writes, if France hadn’t also experienced by far Europe’s earliest and most pervasive demographic transition, with first elites and then everyone else reducing their fertility towards just above replacement levels.
By the 20th century, France had only about as many people as England, and fewer than Germany.
But such a slowdown also meant France could keep pace with a newly-industrialising England, by having fewer mouths to feed.
If France’s birth rate had kept pace with England’s, there would be 250 million Frenchmen alive today.

Many people would struggle to hurt animals that they readily eat.
It turns out this isn’t a modern pathology: hunters around the world, whether in Western societies or living as hunter gatherers, express empathy for their prey.
This is no random coincidence, argues evolutionary biologist* Cody Moser*. Around the world, hunters use mimicry while hunting—something that sets humans apart from practically every other hunting species.
Getting into the heads of our prey made us better hunters. But we caught feelings in the process.
The art for this piece comes from Qianhui Yu, an illustrator based in the UK. You can find more of her work here.

The power is probably out now in Nigeria — according to one data source, the power is only on for about 7 hours every day.

And many sub-Saharan African countries face extremely unreliable power too.
The problem is simple, says Open Philanthropy’s *Lauren Gilbert*: African power suppliers are prevented from charging enough for power to break even.
Because they lose money when they supply power, they try to cut costs by reducing supply, keeping them bumping along until the next state bailout.
To tackle this, Western NGO efforts often focus on building mini-grids off the central network.
These efforts do not hurt, but it would be better to fix the underlying problem, and focus on making it possible to charge higher marginal prices and greater supply without hurting the people the caps are intended to help.

Proposals for major infrastructure projects in the UK require literally thousands of documents, totalling hundreds of thousands of pages.

Published February 24, 2023
Visit Works in Progress to read Sam Bowman’s original post Issue 10: One word—plastics.

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