On every continent, food supplies have grown faster than the population

By Pablo Rosado & Max Roser. 

"We just lived through the period with the fastest population growth in human history. Six decades ago, there were three billion people on our planet. Since 2022, there have been more than eight billion people — an increase of five billion over this period.

It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace with population growth. But as the chart above shows, they grew even faster. On every continent, food supplies — measured by calories — grew faster than the population. This rise in food production per person was a major reason for the decline of extreme poverty and hunger.

To us, this chart documents one of humanity’s most extraordinary achievements."

 

 

If 2025 was not the best year in human history it was still very good.

See In Which I Try Valiantly to Cheer You Up by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. Excerpts:

"While 2025 wasn’t the best year in human history, measured by child mortality, it was one of the five best years ever. Fewer than half as many children died in 2025 as in 2000."

"Until around 1970, a majority of adults had always been illiterate. Now we’re at 88 percent adult literacy, in part because of increasing numbers of girls going to school"

"roughly 30 percent fewer Americans will have died of overdoses in 2025 than in 2023" 

"A drug called lenacapavir is emerging as a more potent weapon to prevent H.I.V./AIDS; it can be taken by injection once every six months and virtually eliminates the risk of getting H.I.V."

"measured by child mortality, education, nutrition or women’s rights, we humans are probably in the best decade in the past 300,000 years"

Related posts:

Even This Year (2024) Is the Best Time Ever to Be Alive (2025) 

Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History (2018)

The World Is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better (2019)

The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it (2018)

How Much Has Life Expectancy Improved?  (2018)

This Has Been the Best Year Ever (2019)

Some Good Economic News (2013)

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2020) 

We are privileged to live in an age of medical miracles that increase human welfare (as the share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty has fallen) (2023) 

Buyer Beware: Star Ratings Actually Steer Us Away From the Best Shopping Deals

When reviewers consider prices while rating products, there’s a tendency to downgrade the highest-quality yet pricier items

By Christopher Mims of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"People are harsher critics of more expensive items."

"the high price tag alone drags down the rating." 

"The less we pay for an item, the more generous our assessment of it tends to be."

"Ying Zeng . . . assistant professor of marketing at the Leeds School of Business at University of Colorado, Boulder . . . says when we read reviews online, we succumb to what psychologists call “shallow thinking”—that is, we aren’t considering the biases of those who write online reviews."

Ben Donovan's [of Marketplace Pulse] "research suggests that Amazon’s algorithm bumps up cheaper items that are selling in higher volumes, as opposed to more expensive ones that sell more slowly."

"Our penchant for shopping on our phones is accelerating our impulse buying."

"Limited-time discounts and livestreaming sales also push us toward impulse purchases, says Zeng. Tactics like these trigger “System 1” thinking, she adds, the fast, emotional, intuitive thinking that usually handles everyday tasks, first described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman."

"Slow down, take your time. Then the more deliberative System 2 thinking will kick in, where we consider more variables, including our own biases and those of others."

"Groceries and other items are purchased more automatically, while shoppers use AI chatbots and other new tools to go deeper when researching other, bigger-ticket items," says Adobe’s director of digital insights, Vivek Pandya.

Related post:

How Does Caffeine Shape the Way We Spend Money? (2023) 

Creative destruction and mysterious new types of occupations & professions

See You Say You’re a Knowledge Architect? Why Modern Careers Are So Hard to Explain: More Americans have jobs that didn’t exist a generation ago, and even well-known professions are changing by Callum Borchers of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"LinkedIn estimates one in five Americans has a job that didn’t exist in 2000. Many of the new titles aren’t exactly self-explanatory.

Knowledge architects don’t draw blueprints, conversation designers don’t foster dialogue between people, and orchestration engineers don’t work with musical instruments. 

What do these people do? Their jobs all involve work with artificial-intelligence models."

"Jobs are getting more niche, and the fruits of our labor more abstract."

"“Roles may get more specialized as companies continue to invest in AI,” says Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor in chief. “We’re already seeing new specialized leadership roles emerge, like workforce development manager and chief growth officer.”"

An "AI toxicology analyst . . . uses artificial intelligence to help assess threat levels after chemical spills and advises on cleanup efforts."

Related posts: 

Who wrote your potential love's online dating profile? (maybe they outsourced it to a professional who specializes in that) (2016)

New Profession Of "Wedding Hashtag Helper" Might Be An Example Of Creative Destruction At Work (2022)

Are dating coaches who help you with texting modern Cyrano de Bergeracs? (2023)

Do You Need a Fixer for Your Disney Vacation? Third-party companies tout advanced knowledge for private tours of complex amusement parks that can cost $1,000 and up (2023)

Parents Hire $4,000 Sorority Consultants to Help Daughters Dress and Impress During Rush (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

Prompt engineers chat with generative-AI chatbots (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

"Wedding content creators" curate the perfect social-media-ready images of the nuptials and celebration (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

 

"Independent education consultants" help high school students and their parents navigate the competitive college-admissions process (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

"Robot Wranglers" help lost and confused automatons (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

Professional Bridesmaids (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

 

Handbag authenticators (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

 

App reviewers (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2025)

 

Video Clippers (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2025)  

 

Creative Destruction

See Creative Destruction by Richard Alm and W. Michael Cox. Excerpt:

"Joseph Schumpeter
(1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the Austrian economist wrote:

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. (p. 83)

Although Schumpeter devoted a mere six-page chapter to “The Process of Creative Destruction,” in which he described capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” it has become the centerpiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve."

But also see this link which suggests that the idea goes back even before Schumpeter to other scholars: Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter by Hugo Reinert and Erik S. Reinert.

"Abstract

This paper argues that the idea of ‘creative destruction’ enters the social sciences by way of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term itself is first used by German economist Werner Sombart, who openly acknowledges the influence of Nietzsche on his own economic theory. The roots of creative destruction are traced back to Indian philosophy, from where the idea entered the German literary and philosophical tradition. Understanding the origins and evolution of this key concept in evolutionary economics helps clarifying the contrasts between today’s standard mainstream economics and the Schumpeterian and evolutionary alternative."  

The student bodies of selective universities end up including more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than would happen if the schools just admitted students purely by SAT scores

From Timothy Taylor. Excerpts:

"Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores"

"The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (i) preferences for children of alumni, (ii) weight placed on nonacademic credentials, and (iii) athletic recruitment." (these "three factors . . . are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with postcollege outcomes") 

"attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%"

Using only test scores "would increase the share of students attending Ivy-Plus colleges from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution by 8.8 percentage points"

"when these selective schools tell potential applicants that they don’t just look at test scores, but instead use a variety of nonacademic criteria like being “well-rounded” or “authentic” for admissions, the actual result of their process is that applicants from families in the top 1% of the income distribution are admitted at a higher rate than others with the same test scores."

Related posts:

As more people choose to marry someone with a similar income, inequality increases (2020) 

The preference for partners of the same education has significantly increased for white individuals (2017)

"Among students in the bottom socioeconomic quartile, 15 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree within eight years of their expected high school graduation, compared with 22 percent in the second quartile, 37 percent in the third quartile, and 60 percent in the top quartile."

Do we exchange gifts because we desire, as Adam Smith said, not only to be loved, but to be lovely?

See Adam Smith and Loveliness from Liberty Fund, Inc. Here is the full quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and on the Origins of Languages (Stewart ed.): 

"Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blame-worthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame." 

I thought of Adam Smith's theory on this while reading A Perfect Christmas Is Suboptimal: Gift giving is inefficient from an economic point of view. It’s an example of ‘expensive signaling’ by Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer. It seems that the aim of this "expensive signaling" might be not only to be loved, but to be lovely. Excerpts:

"In buying gifts, Americans also spend time—hours browsing, guessing, wrapping and returning. Valued at something like the average hourly wage and added to typical holiday spending, the implied resource cost of Christmas gift-giving, by my estimate, is roughly $1,500 to $2,300 per shopper."

"Gifts aren’t primarily about consumption. They are about relationships. A gift is a signal: evidence that someone noticed you, thought of you, took time and tried."

"Economists call this “costly signaling.” When signals are cheap, they are easy to fake and quickly lose informational content. “I care about you” is cheap talk. Cash can be cheap talk too: It requires little information and little effort. It is efficient, yes—but efficiency isn’t always what the recipient wants to maximize. Often the real question is simpler and more human: Do you know me? Did you try?"

"A slightly “wasteful” gift can be a more credible signal than cash precisely because it reveals effort."

"The worst gifts aren’t the ones that miss; they are the ones that reveal no attempt at all—generic, last-minute, indistinguishable from what you would give a coworker in an office Secret Santa."

"We are purchasing something other than objects: reassurance, attention, belonging—a ritualized way of saying you matter to me and I am willing to incur a cost to prove it."

Incurring a cost might be a clear and believable signal that you love someone. And you might be able to tell yourself that you are lovely because you did so.

Related post:

Adam Smith said that people want not only to be loved, but to be lovely (but how much does it cost to achieve that?) (2025) 

This post is featured in an economics textbook

The post is below. It is featured in Introduction to Microeconomics by Luís Cabral. He is chair of the economics department at New York University.

Here is an excerpt from the book followed by the post from May 27, 2019:

"Once you get into the mechanics of comparative statics, it should come naturally to interpret real-world events as shocks to demand and supply curves, which in turn lead to adjustments in price and transaction volumes. Consider some recent events in the honey industry, as described in Box 7.1 (source: Cyril Morong). The left column includes a series of quotes from a Wall Street Journal article on the honey industry. The right column, in turn, includes a series of comments on how to interpret these events in terms of the model of supply and demand." (see pages 274-75 of Dr. Cabral's book) 

Why honey prices have climbed about 25% since 2013

See You’ll Need a Lot More Money to Buy That Jar of Honey: Beekeepers are in a sweet spot as consumer trends shift away from cane sugar and high-fructose corn syrup by Lucy Craymer of The WSJ. Excerpts, with my comments in brackets:

"Honey prices are starting to sting.

Global honey prices are at their highest levels in years, due to a new wave of consumer demand for natural sweeteners [demand increases because tastes or preferences increased with the opposite happening for sugar] and declining bee populations that are hampering mass production [supply decreases]."

"In addition, it is being used more as an ingredient in shampoos, moisturizers and other personal-care products that companies market as naturally made [another increase in demand due to tastes]."

"Retail honey prices world-wide recently averaged $4.69 a pound, according to market research firm Euromonitor International. Prices have climbed about 25% since 2013, while the cost of sugar has fallen around 30% over the same time frame."

"U.S. retail prices averaged $7.66 a pound in May, up 9% from a year earlier"

"Those prices have risen by about two-thirds in the last decade"

"Americans consumed 596 million pounds of honey in 2017, or an average of nearly two pounds per person—up 65% since 2009 [if demand shifts right, we expect both price and quantity to increase]."

"It has been touted by celebrities—including tennis star Novak Djokovic—for its health benefits and numerous scientific studies have shown it can help heal wounds, ulcers and burns [maybe this is part of the reason tastes increased]."

"Global honey production has been relatively stable over the past five years [but if supply shifted left that could cancel out the demand increase and leave quantity the same]."

"In the U.S., honey production peaked in 2014 and has fallen 15% since then [if supply shifted more to the left than demand shifted to the right, total Q falls-maybe the increased American quantity means less for consumers elsewhere]."

Is house flipping a perfectly competitive industry?

One of the characteristics of perfect competition is free entry. If firms make an above average rate of return, new firms will enter. This increase in supply will lower price and the rate of return starts to fall. This might be happening in house flipping.

See Why It’s a Tough Time for House-Flippers by Lori Ioannou of The WSJ. Excerpt:

"Heightening the problems, “there is increasing competition from institutional and foreign buyers, and it’s becoming harder to find good deals,” says Anthony Youngs, a real-estate consultant and house flipper in Marietta, Ga., who helps investors find properties to flip."

The Secret of Latino Teens’ Better Mental Health

Despite greater economic challenges, children in Latino immigrant families have a key advantage for personal flourishing: strong families and communities.

By Ann Dunning. She is co-author of the book Radical Señora Era: Ancestral Latin American Secrets for a Healthier Happier Life. Excerpts:

"The “Hispanic paradox,” first identified by the sociologist Kyriakos Markides in 1986, found that despite greater economic challenges, Latinos have some health advantages over non-Hispanics." 

"among immigrants who came from Mexico to the U.S. as teenagers, just 2.3% reported suicidal ideation, compared with 8.9% of their American-born peers." 

"“immigrant youth have a lower risk of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use relative to U.S.-born youth.”"

"One explanation for the difference lies in family structure. Recent Latino immigrants are more likely to live near or with their family, sometimes even purchasing a larger home or additional living unit to accommodate grandparents. This brings practical benefits: After school, there’s always someone around. A large body of research shows that a strong connection to family is linked to higher prosocial behavior, stronger self-esteem and lower rates of substance use and delinquency among Latino youth."

"Sociologists describe the Latino family as organized around familismo, or “family-ism”—a cultural value that emphasizes prioritizing the family’s needs, often extending beyond the nuclear family to include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents and even friends and neighbors. The importance of godparenthood, known as compadrazgo (literally “co-parenting”), means that other adults, who are often aunts and uncles, help guide young people well into adulthood."

"Familismo “teaches children that they’re accountable to something larger than themselves"

"It’s a buffer against the loneliness and detachment so many kids feel today."

"For Latino youth, being bien educado—well-educated or well-raised—“isn’t about getting a formal education; it is about moral formation”"

"decades of research show that Latino youth with high social responsibility and social intelligence show higher empathy and lower rates of risky behavior."

"Other cultural elements like religious faith, spiritual rituals or even holiday traditions may also provide broader meaning that help ground young people."

"Sociologist Herbert Gans saw something similar in Boston’s Italian-American neighborhoods of the 1960s. In his classic book “The Urban Villagers,” he argued that Italian areas usually considered “slums” were actually made up of interconnected sets of families who shared child care, discipline and moral responsibility. Crime was low, work ethic was high, and kids had a strong network. When urban renewal bulldozed those communities, the benefits vanished."

Related posts:

The “Hispanic paradox” could offer a model for civil society (2020)

For Americans, Family Comes First—or Does It? A new survey finds that for most of us, especially the young, personal well-being matters more (2025) 

Data Centers Are a ‘Gold Rush’ for Construction Workers

Surging demand means six-figure pay and more perks

By Te-Ping Chen of The WSJ. 

I have posted about how AI is or will affect the economy and jobs. But in this case non-computer workers are benefiting. Excerpts:

"Since April, [DeMond] Chambliss has worked the night shift overseeing a team of 200 welders, plumbers and electricians at a local data-center construction site. He makes more than $100,000 a year"

"Data centers don’t employ many workers once they are actually built. During construction, though, they are a hive of workers pouring concrete walls and foundations, wiring electric panels and installing equipment such as power generators and chillers to ensure servers are cooled to a precise temperature at all times."

"Given such complexity and high demand, workers who move into the data-center industry—in roles ranging from electricians to project managers—often earn 25% to 30% more than they did before"

"Data centers are ballooning in size, and a single project can take years to construct and require thousands of workers."

"Marc Benner, . . . spends the day making the rounds ensuring electrical safety. These are lucrative skills at the electricity-gobbling sites, and Benner makes $225,000 a year"

"“In this industry, stability is a really big thing,” said Michael Damme, 43, who makes $200,000 a year overseeing concrete construction at three data-center sites"

"Shawn Jones . . . makes around $100,000 as a general foreman for DPR Construction at a data center in Abilene, Texas"

Related posts:

The AI Revolution Will Bring Prosperity: The growth of industry disrupted old economic patterns but produced undreamed-of wealth (2025) 

ChatGPT Should Make Retailers Nervous: Retail companies risk losing control of the online shopping experience (2025) 

The Coasean Singularity? Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents (2025) 

AI startups are literally paying people to fold their laundry (or perform similar chores) (2025)

There Is Now Clearer Evidence AI Is Wrecking Young Americans’ Job Prospects (but the news is not all bad): Young workers face rising AI competition in fields like software development, but some also benefit from AI as a helper, new research shows (2025)

AI Is Forcing the Return of the In-Person Job Interview: More companies are returning to face-to-face meetings to counter cheating by candidates—and more ominous digital threats (2025) 

AI’s Overlooked $97 Billion Contribution to the Economy: The AI ‘dividend’ may not be evident yet in estimates of gross domestic product but it’s making life better and more productive (2025) 

AI Is Wrecking an Already Fragile Job Market for College Graduates (is the problem structural Unemployment & the case of a skills mismatch?) Companies have long leaned on entry-level workers to do grunt work that doubles as on-the-job training. Now ChatGPT and other bots can do many of those chores (2025) 

No, AI Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs: Instead, they will boost productivity, lower prices and spur the evolution of the labor market (2025) 

IBM CEO Says AI Has Replaced Hundreds of Workers but Created New Programming, Sales Jobs: The tech company promises higher total employment as it reinvests resources toward roles like software development (2025)

Technological Disruption in the Labor Market (2025)

Why AI Might Not Take All Our Jobs—if We Act Quickly (2025)

Some good news on productivity (2025) (AI is mentioned)

Some economics of A.I. (2025) 

The AI-Generated Population Is Here, and They’re Ready to Work (2024)

Robots writing science fiction (2024)

Will technology cost artists their job? (2023)

“Why did the human stare at the glass of orange juice?” “They were trying to concentrate.” (2023) (Partly about AI being used to tell jokes)

The $900,000 AI Job Is Here (2023) 

Prompt engineers chat with generative-AI chatbots (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

Are robots writing fake product reviews? (2022)

What if companies can't afford real models for their ads? Use AI generated fake pictures (2020) 

An AI Breaks the Writing Barrier (2020) 

What Econ 101 Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence: Here's why advancing technology often leads to more jobs for humans, not fewer (2017)