The people building a more perfect future

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Hi everyone,

Dylan Scott, senior correspondent, back in your inbox. Have a subject area or a storyline you think we should be covering here at Sentences? Give me a shout: dylan.scott@vox.com. 

Here’s the agenda today:

UP FIRST: The Future Perfect 50

CATCH UP: US life expectancy’s slow recovery from the pandemic

The Future Perfect 50

Lauren Tamaki and Paige Vickers/Vox

Meet 50 of the researchers, thinkers, and activists whose work aspires to build a better future. 

Every year, Vox’s Future Perfect team — our group of writers focused on the world’s big but oft-neglected problems and the best ideas for solving them — puts a spotlight on some of the most notable people working on issues critical to our planet’s future, from artificial intelligence and global poverty to animal welfare and climate change. We call it the Future Perfect 50.

These lists — your 30 under 30s, etc. — can often feel arbitrary. And in her explanation of the list’s methodology, deputy editor Izzie Ramirez acknowledges that the team considered many more people than ultimately ended up making the final cut. It’s a big world, and there are a lot of people working to make it better.

The Future Perfect crew solicited candidates from sources, from subscribers to the Future Perfect newsletter, and from their own reading and reporting. They sought to identify the people whose work may prove influential, but who may not have the same stature as more established people in their field. They strived for diversity in the topics they covered, adding AI to this year’s categories, and in the theories of change these people propose to build a more perfect future.

The team debated the criteria and candidates for months, Izzie told me. In the end, they wanted to ensure they were not over-indexing on any age, subject, identity, or geography. In that spirit, you should check out their entire list for yourself. But I wanted to flag a few entrants whose work caught my eye as I perused the project:

• Crystal Heath wants veterinary medicine to live up to its values. The veterinary profession has too often lent moral legitimacy to factory farming practices, even though they lead to suffering for the animals subjected to it. But Heath is leading an insurgent movement to challenge those norms, advocating for policy changes within the American Veterinary Medical Association and filing public-records requests to reveal the ways in which vets cover for the meat industry’s most abhorrent practices.
• Paul Christiano and Beth Barnes are trying to make advanced AI honest and safe. The pair has experience at some of the leading AI outfits (Christiano at OpenAI, Barnes at Google’s Deep Mind) but they have now co-founded the Alignment Research Center to make sure that the AIs under development remain attached to recognizably human values. 
• Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is building a theory of justice for a warming world. Táíwò, a philosophy professor at Georgetown, seeks to understand humanity’s vulnerabilities to climate change in the context of colonial history. The material value of reparations, for example, could quickly be neutralized by the costs of a changing climate. He seeks to remake institutions — or to build new ones — to grapple with humanity’s past while preparing for its future.

Read all the Future Perfect 50 profiles here.

US life expectancy’s slow recovery from Covid-19

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Life expectancy in the United States increased by more than a year from 2021 to 2022, according to new data from the CDC. But almost all of that increase can be attributed to fewer deaths from Covid-19. The longer-term drivers of America’s flatlining life expectancy — suicides, drug overdoses, and chronic health conditions — remain stubbornly high. So while the top-line number might look like an improvement, experts still see plenty of cause for concern.

• US life expectancy is still down from pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, the average life expectancy in the US was 78.8 years. Then it crashed to 76.4 years in 2021, in the thick of a pandemic that would ultimately kill more than 1 million Americans. Now it sits at 77.5, still far from where it was in 2019 (when the numbers were already dismal in comparison to the world’s other wealthy countries).
• The US is starting from a lower baseline than its economic peers. “We’re starting from a lower spot, and we sunk faster than other countries, and now we’re trying to crawl our way out,” Joshua Sharfstein, a physician and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told Vox’s Keren Landman. And we’re not doing ourselves any favors: The new abortion restrictions enabled by Roe v. Wade’s demise likely contributed to an increase in infant mortality.
• Suicides reached a record high in 2022. Nearly 50,000 people died by suicide in the US last year; the suicide rate of 14.3 deaths per 100,000 people was the highest share on record since the beginning of World War II, according to the Wall Street Journal. Though there was a promising drop in suicides among children and young adults, older men are seeing suicide rates spike.
• A plague of chronic conditions is also holding back US life expectancy. As the Washington Post explored in an in-depth investigation earlier this year, people are dying younger from preventable and treatable chronic conditions, an indictment of the country’s scattershot approach to population health.

• Maybe the Internet isn’t the supervillain of our mental health crisis. A new study calls into question the oft-cited connection between the proliferation of the internet and the deterioration of people’s mental health. However, the authors note they lacked data from tech companies themselves that might allow them to firmly answer this longstanding question. [Financial Times]
• Environmentalists are suing the National Park Service to block ... planting trees. Planting more trees is often seen as a promising solution to reinvigorating the world’s ecosystems. Some conservation groups, though, argue that tree planting represents unwarranted and unnecessary human intervention in the natural world. [CNN]
• Federal agents secretly investigate forced labor in the sugar industry. Agents were on the ground in Haiti earlier this year to probe accusations of working conditions akin to modern slavery at the cane plantations that supply Central Romana Corp., one of the US’s major sources of sugar. If criminal charges were to result, it would be an “unprecedented” development. [Reveal]

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Today’s crossword

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