The Progress Report: Positive Innovation

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Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network, and this is our adjunct to our longer form podcast, also called, conveniently or inconveniently enough, What Could Go Right?, This is our progress report where we look at the news of the week, news that you may have missed in the fray of negativity, news of things that are going right in the world.

Now, whenever you are listening to this, whether it is the week that this came out or subsequent weeks, we are recording this in a time where the headlines are particularly grim with news. escalating violence in the Middle East, and of course, stories of other problems around the world from civil war in Sudan to turmoil in Myanmar to our own delightfully chaotic and divisive presidential election in the United States.

So we all may be forgiven for not noticing that in the midst of all of that, there are also things that are going right, things that are going well. And one of the challenges of our lives in the contemporary world, and one of the things we try to do here at The Progress Network, is deal with dichotomy.

How do we hold two truths to be simultaneously true? One truth being there is a lot in the world that is going terribly wrong, and there is a lot in the world that is going wonderfully right. They can both be true simultaneously, and our issue is not that we are over emphasizing necessarily things that are terrible, but rather that we are under emphasizing things that are not.

So, our team, our ever vigilant, globally aware team at The Progress Network. scour the world for news of things that are going well, and every week we bring you a couple of choice vignettes that hopefully point to a better world. So Emma Varvaloucas, who is the keeper of all good news, she has a very large storage facility, digital, that compiles all of the good news in the world somewhere in the cloud, accessible only to a select few, and every now and then dips into that. growing archive and pulls out a few choice nuggets. So what do you have for us today?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, so the archive is actually Gmail, but

Zachary Karabell: Well,

Emma Varvaloucas: I did appreciate the epic description,

Zachary Karabell: way to demystify.

Emma Varvaloucas: So, okay, pulling out of the Gmail archive today. This is very cool. Not necessarily new, But still very cool and more extensive than it’s been used more extensively than it has in the past. So basically, people may or may not know that every time a subway or a metro train car, whatever you want to call it in the city of your choice, every time those brakes get applied, the friction from the brakes generate electricity, right?

Like you might have seen the sparks apply. And the question is, why can’t we use that electricity to power other things? And Barcelona looked at this idea and said, actually, we are going to take that electricity from our trains, not only power the subway system itself, so the actual trains going around, but also, you know, the electricity of the lights and the stations, the escalators, and now on top of that electric vehicle chargers that are within a nearby radius of the stations.

So they are going on an installation spree of what’s called regenerative braking. Not break dancing as we have also talked about in the past on this podcast. Braking as a normal brakes that we know. And they expect that once they’ve installed all of these systems, which they were supposed to have done by the end of September, that the electricity will.

provide 41 percent of the energy needed to power the trains. So, Very cool. This article is in the Grist, by the way. I’d love to give a shout out to the Grist because they have really great climate oriented stuff. And like I said in the beginning, Barcelona is not the only city to do this. Vienna does, Sao Paulo, and Philadelphia.

So that’s exciting. But they’re the first to kind of expand the system and use electricity to power EV chargers and, and just have it be a larger percent of the energy production of the system.

Zachary Karabell: That is a lot of energy being captured from breaking. That’s actually a much higher figure than I would have thought. I thought it would have been in like the low teens at the most in terms of, you know, how much energy you could generate relative to needs. I live in New York City. I think we’re a ways away from, we’re still trying to get our breaks to work.

I think that’s probably

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, jeez.

Zachary Karabell: runaway trains, but. We’re nowhere near the infrastructure for just replacing 80 year old switches, let alone 21st century recapture technologies, but it’s good that other cities are doing it, and I didn’t realize it was such a large percentage, so.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, yeah, and actually the Grace article does talk about, could this one day come to New York City? And it seems like the MTA is sort of interested, but there’s no, definitely no plan.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, so the answer is yes, yes, it could, yes, it could one day come to New York City.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. No information besides that. We don’t count on it, but you never know

Zachary Karabell: Next on your

Emma Varvaloucas: next.

Next we love a good science innovation around here and the latest is that a team in China has taken stem cells from within a woman’s own body, re injected them into her and cured, maybe cured, her diabetes. This is the first time this has happened with a type 1 diabetes patient and it’s too early to say for sure that the diabetes is cured because Normally they want a five year span to go by before they say like, okay, yes, like we’re going to count you as cured.

She just reached the one year mark and the team is not sure if these results are going to be applicable to other people. So they would like to, you know, expand this to another small trial soon to 10 or 20 patients. But so far so good. The woman is enjoying eating things. She’s saying that she’s really excited that she can eat hot pot now. So,

Zachary Karabell: everything’s slightly regionally and culturally determined,

Emma Varvaloucas: yes, Chinese. She is Chinese.

Zachary Karabell: Given the roiling debate in the United States around IVF, I can imagine that there will be people who will oppose this sort of on principle, but I guess that’s an American issue about the moralities of stem cells. You know, we have all these issues about stem cell usage,

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, it’s her own stem cells. Like it’s not stems, like that was what’s so, so you can quote unquote cure diabetes from other people’s stem cells. But given the debate that you just referenced and also the fact that most people don’t want to donate their stem cells. That, as a generally applicable cure, is not really going anywhere.

But if you could take the patient’s own stem cells and reinject them back into them after reprogramming the cells, like that’s what the the big possibility is here. So they’ve done it on one type 1 diabetes patient, one type 2 diabetes patient, and they want to see if this is going to be applicable beyond that.

Zachary Karabell: Huh. So you’re basically tweaking your own system.

Emma Varvaloucas: For now, they did succeed with this woman. She’s been a year now without any symptoms from from diabetes and she can eat sugar just like anyone else. So, success so far.

Zachary Karabell: All right. Well, onward.

Emma Varvaloucas: Last but not least, some news from the World Bank, they have released revised estimates for extreme global poverty worldwide, so that’s defined as living under 2.

15 per day, so it’s quite a, quite a low bar, and there was a lot of worry around the COVID 19 pandemic because it was the first time since COVID 19. The 90s, that there was an increase in global poverty for obvious reasons due to the pandemic. And, you know, people weren’t really sure, like, this is going to reverse a bunch of progress and, you know, poverty is just going to keep on climbing up.

Are we going to bounce back? How fast are we going to bounce back? Et cetera. So, They have released data through 2022 and their projections through 2024, and they believe that we are back on the right track, that extreme global poverty is starting to decline again, and that it’s going to drop from about 713 million people to 692 million in 2024.

It’s hardly news that it’s saying like, hey, there are no more people living in extreme poverty. global poverty. However, it is good news because we’re back to the levels that we were at pre pandemic and hopefully we can keep pushing the numbers down and keep global poverty and structural decline the way that it has been since the 90s.

Zachary Karabell: You know, there was an economist report a few weeks ago that the rate of poverty amelioration had slowed and plateaued over the past decade, even, even removing the negative headwinds of the pandemic, which was clearly a massive setback for a lot of the, you know, sub Saharan Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, where there’s somewhat higher rates of the poverty that we’re talking about.

And, and some of that is like stalling in sub Saharan Africa. bunch of civil wars, bunch of governments that don’t do a good job collecting tax revenue, therefore can’t really provide services, a lot of that. One thing that, you know, we could maybe talk about in another episode, but it’s worth bearing in mind is that all these things measure quality of life by income and GDP growth.

And There’s certainly a huge amount of evidence that income and GDP growth, particularly when you’re starting from a very, very low base, is indicative of a quality of life going up. The reason why I raise this is it doesn’t factor in The cost of living going down, meaning, you know, with digitization, even in places like Sub Saharan Africa, if they’re going to more solar paneling, which has much less capital intensive installation costs, and then of course, doesn’t cost as much to maintain.

In many ways, you get more energy for less GDP and more energy for less income, right? Because you don’t spend the money that you would to build a power plant or maintain transmission lines. The quality of living obviously goes up because you have electricity via solar power, but the GDP and the income may not.

And people are beginning to grapple with these issues of income has stood for and poverty has stood for quality of life, i. e. extreme poverty, extremely bad quality of life. But increasingly, if some of the stuff that we’re providing is of less cost or even free, then some of that correlation breaks down.

But that’s a observation that raises a whole other set of questions about, are we actually measuring these things appropriately?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean, I’m curious how much that argument applies to somebody that is on the, like, extreme end of things. Like, I can see that applying for somebody who, let’s say, is in kind of like the mid poverty level, they’re in a home, they might have a TV, and I’m not talking about people in the States, by the way.

Obviously, I’m talking about people internationally. But people that are living on, I think, 2. 15 a day. It’s such a dire situation that in that case, like, I’m not, I’m not sure how much is going to be applicable. I mean, most of these people were talking about like rural, small livestock owners, I think like really small farmers, that kind of thing.

And a lot of this stuff too, I mean, we should say as well, there’s so much data missing. So the point you’re making and the point I’m making, it’s almost like, People don’t even know really how many people there are living on what. So the sort of like forward argument that both is like not even standing on quicksand a little bit.

So we don’t

Zachary Karabell: I mean, there’s that issue of

Emma Varvaloucas: state of the world.

Zachary Karabell: if you’re not even in a monetized. exchange system, which some of, you know, X hundreds of millions of people essentially exist invisibly, like their, their output and their spending doesn’t really exist statistically, either because it’s barter or because it’s cash or something.

So yes, these are hard They’re hard numbers to find and it’s, it’s difficult to assess. I think the overall reality is we certainly know there’s been massive poverty alleviation over the past 20 years and there’s been some stalling of that in the past five and it would appear that maybe that stalling was a pause and not an end.

Of course, we’ll only know that in the future, but I think what you’re pointing to is it seems like it will have been a pause and not a halt, but we’ll find out,

Emma Varvaloucas: The stuff from the pandemic, certainly. I think the question other than that, that most people don’t realize that you mentioned in the beginning when we were talking about this topic, is that a lot of extreme poverty now is less so because a country might be poor and more so that there’s extreme, extreme rates of poverty in conflict between Laden areas, so like DRC, places like that, Sedan those rates are so high and intractable at the moment because of the conflict.

And that, my understanding is that why the, that’s why the, the rate of improvement has slowed down because it’s, that has something less to do with getting aid and, you know, getting GDP up and things like that.

Zachary Karabell: Indeed. All right. So that is it for us today. We will be back next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. Please sign up for The Progress Network newsletter at theprogressnetwork.org. It’s called What Could Go Right. It’s free. It goes into your mailbox and it festoons you with similar stories and more on a weekly basis, all neatly packaged into some quirky thesis of the week by Emma.

And send us your ideas, send us your thoughts, send us your critiques. We will listen to all of them and respond to some of them. Thank you to the Podglomerate for producing and to our team at The Progress Network. And we’ll talk to you next week.