Works in Progress

Learn more about this breakthrough on our website (link in bio).

Guy Suits, General Electric’s director of research, overruled them and approved the funds. Shortly after, Project Superpressure would make its breakthrough.

On the third occasion that the project manager asked for more money, General Electric’s research managers, having seen no tangible results and skeptical of future success, almost unanimously voted to discontinue their support.

Four years of intense experimentation followed, during which Project Superpressure exhausted all of its original research budget and two additional funding allocations.

In 1950, the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, assembled a consortium of chemists, physicists, and engineers to form Project Superpressure, an effort to synthesize diamonds in the lab.

Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds.

It benefits us all for there to be enough new people in each generation to sustain our way of life. Learn more about parenting as a public good on our website (link in bio).

It is assumed that when individuals decide to reproduce, they are the ones who benefit, and they are the ones responsible for the costs. But this way of looking at things neglects that the private decision to have a child has an important positive externality.

Smaller populations are linked to slower technological development, and ageing populations seem to distort countries’ balance of political power and turn priorities away from the ambitious investments in infrastructure and innovation that we will need to face the challenges of climate change.

Low birth rates may be bad rather than good news for our ability to deal with climate change.

Learn more about through running in our latest issue (link in bio).

Through running is one of the most important themes in modern transport policy. Within ten kilometers of the center of Munich, there are 1.6 million people who are served by 284 stations and 194 tram stops, all of which receive a fast, frequent service.

In Germany, the response to this problem was the Munich S-Bahn, which linked together 12 pre-existing suburban branch lines with a 4.3-kilometer-long tunnel. Using tunnels to link pre-existing lines in this manner is known as through running.

Across the world, many cities now puzzle over how they can pay for the vast costs of developing an all-new metro system to provide easy inner city access.

In the nineteenth century, the societies of Europe and North America were profoundly transformed by the vast railway networks they built. When these railway networks entered cities, however, they faced a crucial problem: they had to stop.

However, unlike the Orphan Drug Act, the accelerated approval pathway in the MUMS Act far surpassed what existed before.

Head to our website (link in bio) to learn how the MUMS Act radically altered the future of drug safety not only for animals, but also for humans.

Like the Orphan Drug Act, the MUMS Act created an accelerated approval pathway for drugs targeting neglected conditions or neglected species, offered grants and tax credits to offset the costs of the trials necessary to get the drugs approved, and extended marketing exclusivity rights.

Recognizing the obstacles to releasing drugs for animals (the inexperience of the FDA and small monetary rewards), the animal health industry started working from the 1990s on creating an animal equivalent to the Orphan Drug Act.

The Orphan Drug Act was intended to fix this. First, it created regulatory fast tracks, including an accelerated approval pathway. Second, it sought to minimize low revenue potential by offering tax credits and a greater length of time for market exclusivity.

When FDA standards for drug safety and efficacy became stricter in the 1960s, drug developers almost abandoned rare diseases due to regulator unfamiliarity and low revenue potential.

570 million Frenchmen France's decline coincided with a collapse in its birth rate – now we know why.

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But even though it is no longer a superpower, the demographic decline didn’t hold back France’s economy. It is still a major economic power.

Demographic decline does not inevitably lead to the death of civilisation.

If the fertility transition had come a century later, there would be 250 million Frenchmen – more than Russia or Japan or Brazil. There would also be 320 million people of French ancestry abroad.

We know this from language used in wills: did testators refer to God and Paradise and ask for perpetual Masses? Or did they use secular language?

Ideas, not Napoleon, were what caused France to stop being a superpower.

What happened? The Catholic Church started to hold less sway over the population.

This was not restricted to intellectuals or the bourgeoisie. Ordinary Frenchmen paid less attention to the teachings of the Church.

In England, fertility started declining in about 1850.

In France, the decline started in about 1750.

What happened? Birth rates declined.

Specifically, even though every European country’s birth rates went down in the nineteenth century, France’s started declining a century before anywhere else.

Between 1792 and 1815, France fought most European countries at once, fielding over a million soldiers. Even though it was outnumbered, it took 23 years before France was finally defeated.

But 55 years later, it was defeated in one battle by one country – Germany.

In the eighteenth century, France was a superpower. It had the world’s second-largest empire, after the Spanish.

One in 25 people worldwide was French.

570 million Frenchmen France's decline coincided with a collapse in its birth rate – now we know why.

1760:
🇫🇷25 million people
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿5.5 million

2025
🇫🇷68 million
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿56 million

If France’s population growth had kept pace with England’s, there would be 250 million Frenchmen and another 320 million abroad.

What happened? 🧵

www.worksinprogress.news/p/570-millio...