Vox: All Posts by Oshan Jarowhttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2024-03-16T08:00:00-04:00https://www.vox.com/authors/oshan-jarow/rss2024-03-16T08:00:00-04:002024-03-16T08:00:00-04:00Psychedelics are about to become a casualty of Oregon’s opioid crisis
<figure>
<img alt="Oregon Governor Tina Kotek speaks from behind a podium during a signing ceremony in Washington, February 23, 2024." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Y_IkxQqb7D63mA3GS05M9AXNSTQ=/61x0:6540x4859/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73211361/AP24062114153683.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek speaks during a signing ceremony for HB 4002, recriminalizing personal possession of controlled substances, including psychedelics. | Susan Walsh/AP</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Four years ago, the state decriminalized all drugs. Now it’s trying to course-correct — and might make a mistake in the process.</p> <p id="jGpT4O">In 2020, it looked as though the <a href="https://www.vox.com/drug-war" data-source="encore">war on drugs</a> would begin to end in Oregon. </p>
<p id="zneDb6">After <a href="https://www.courts.oregon.gov/about/Documents/BM110Statistics.pdf">Measure 110</a> was passed that year, Oregon became the first state in the US to decriminalize personal possession of all drugs that had been outlawed by the <a href="https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/csa#:~:text=The%20Controlled%20Substances%20Act%20(CSA,and%20safety%20or%20dependence%20liability.">Controlled Substances Act</a> in 1970, ranging from heroin and cocaine to LSD and psychedelic mushrooms. When it went into effect in early 2021, the move was <a href="https://drugpolicy.org/news/drug-decriminalization-oregon-one-year-later-thousands-lives-not-ruined/">celebrated</a> by drug reform advocates who had long been calling for decriminalization in the wake of President Nixon’s <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1006495476/after-50-years-of-the-war-on-drugs-what-good-is-it-doing-for-us">failed war on drugs.</a> </p>
<p id="B8QfAS">Now, amid a spike in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html">public</a> drug use and <a href="https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/fentanyl-deaths-highest-increase-in-country/">overdoses</a>, Oregon is in the process of reeling back its progressive drug laws, with a <a href="https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2024R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/HB4002">new bill</a> that aims to reinstate lighter criminal penalties for personal drug possession. And while the target is deadly drugs like fentanyl, the law would also result in banning non-clinical use of psychedelics like MDMA, DMT, or psilocybin — drugs that are unconnected to the current overdose epidemic and the public displays of drug use. </p>
<p id="eH5Evt">By treating all drugs as an undifferentiated category, Oregon is set to deliver a major blow to advocates of psychedelic use who don’t want to see expensive clinics and tightly controlled environments be the only legal point of access. While regulated and supervised models for using psychedelics are showing growing promise for <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9553847/">treating mental illness</a>, decriminalized use allows for a much wider spectrum of user motivations — many of which have occurred <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8412860/">for millennia</a> — no less deserving of legal protection, from recreational and spiritual to the simple pleasure of spicing up a museum visit with a small handful of mushrooms. </p>
<p id="FHPZZT">“The biggest threat to psychedelics is from people who would claim to be for them in extremely limited contexts and against them in all others,” said Jon Dennis, a lawyer specializing in psychedelics at Sagebrush Law in Ontario, Oregon. </p>
<p id="Tt4omq">It would be one thing if arguments against the decriminalization of psychedelics were being made. But that’s not the case. Instead, the lumping together of psychedelics and opioids seems to have gone largely unnoticed, setting up personal use of psychedelics to become an unintended casualty of Oregon’s opioid crisis.</p>
<h3 id="Kvrtbh">How Oregon decriminalized drugs</h3>
<p id="MDrbud">The idea behind drug decriminalization was that investing in health services and harm reduction are more effective and humane responses to substance abuse than incarceration. The hope was for Oregon to serve as inspiration for other states, and eventually the nation, to follow suit.</p>
<p id="H8chQW">But in the years that followed, Oregon fell deeper into an opioid and drug overdose crisis that has been <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02252-2/abstract">surging across the nation</a>. In 2021, the US had <a href="https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates">over 80,000</a> opioid-related overdose deaths. Beyond the death toll, critics — <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/opinion/oregon-decriminalization-drugs-reversal.html">fairly or unfairly</a> — connected decriminalization to the rising <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/with-oregon-facing-rampant-public-drug-use-lawmakers-backpedal-on-pioneering-decriminalization-law">visibility of drug use</a> and <a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2023/12/oregon-has-highest-rate-of-homeless-families-in-the-country.html#:~:text=The%20state's%20homeless%20population%20increased,the%20worst%20of%20it%20yet.">homelessness in Oregon towns and cities,</a> including open-air fentanyl markets <a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/04/alarming-spate-of-overdoses-draws-scrutiny-to-open-air-fentanyl-market-in-downtown-portland.html">popping up</a> in downtown Portland. That put increasing pressure on Oregon legislators to do something to change the state’s drug policy.</p>
<p id="dEZZGt">The new solution crafted by state Sen. Kate Lieber and state Rep. Jason Kropf — <a href="https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2024R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/HB4002">House Bill 4002</a> — is intended as a compromise between the full decriminalization of Measure 110 and the previous status quo that leaned heavily on incarceration for drug possession. While improving access to substance abuse treatments — like reducing barriers to receiving medication and encouraging counties to direct offenders to treatment programs rather than court — the bill recriminalizes personal possession of all controlled substances (except for cannabis), bringing back the possibility of jail time for possession of even relatively small amounts.</p>
<p id="AwStLG">Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek last week <a href="https://www.oregon.gov/newsroom/pages/newsdetail.aspx?newsid=215409">announced</a> that she intends to sign the bill within 30 days of it clearing both state legislatures with bipartisan support. It’s been <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/08/politics/oregon-drug-laws-recriminalization/index.html">widely</a> described as “this very precise <a href="https://www.opb.org/article/2024/03/08/oregon-governor-tina-kotek-bill-ending-drug-decriminalization-expand-treatment/">amendment</a> that’s only going to address the problems with Measure 110, which were thought to be opioids and meth,” said Dennis. </p>
<p id="wcgxpY">But the bill turns out to be much larger in scope than advertised. Instead of specifically targeting the opioids and methamphetamine that have been behind most overdose deaths, HB 4002 also recriminalizes personal possession of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, and LSD. Unlike the concern around <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/opinion/oregon-drug-failure.html">opioids</a> (including synthetic ones like fentanyl, which are responsible for the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html#:~:text=Drug%20Overdose%20Deaths%20Remained%20High%20in%202021&text=Opioids%E2%80%94mainly%20synthetic%20opioids%20(other,of%20all%20drug%20overdose%20deaths).">majority of overdoses</a>) or meth, neither the public nor experts have reported significant negative effects from the decriminalization of psychedelics. </p>
<p id="Dc5fF9">“All of the conversations around the legislature didn’t think to distinguish between these different classes of drugs,” Dennis said. “I think this was just a broad oversight on their part, rather than nuanced policy discussions.”</p>
<p id="RfRXVB">There are no op-eds being written about tripping hippies filling public spaces in grand displays of love and cosmic beatitude. The streets are not littered with acid blotter paper or mushroom caps. Psychonauts aren’t seeking out <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/169525/psychonauts-training-psychedelics-dmt-extended-state">encounters with DMT entities</a> in public parks. No argument for recriminalizing psychedelics has been made, and yet, they’re being swept into a recriminalization bill by the debate around opioids.</p>
<p id="wlqEu8">Psychedelics have <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032723000915?via%3Dihub">uncommon</a> but potentially serious <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23954347/psychedelics-bad-trips-ketamine-mdma-psilocybin-lsd-risks">risks of their own</a>, including short-term encounters with intense anxiety and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10597511/">long-term battles</a> with destabilizing <a href="https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/a-theological-reckoning-with-bad-trips/">experiences</a>. Access to safety information and <a href="https://challengingpsychedelicexperiences.com/help-for-difficult-trips">support</a> is crucial for their use. On the whole, psychedelics are <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/43gey3/mushrooms-are-the-safest-drug-you-can-take">far safer</a> than many other legally accessible substances, and the list of therapeutic, spiritual, and creative benefits seems to grow each month, from alleviating <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/10/9/21506664/psychedelics-mental-health-depression-ptsd-psilocybin-mdma">depression</a> and addiction to combating <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02455-9">eating disorders</a> and helping <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23972716/psychedelics-meaning-science-psychedelic-mushrooms-ketamine-psilocybin-mysticism">find meaning in life</a>. Expanding access through decriminalization (together with public education and clinical resources for those in need) could help make the most of these benefits.</p>
<h3 id="dfny1D">What HB 4002 will do</h3>
<p id="0B5LSh">Before Measure 110, possession of a controlled substance like LSD or heroin in Oregon could be charged as a Class A misdemeanor, carrying a maximum of one year in jail and fines up to <a href="https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_161.635">$6,250</a>. </p>
<p id="Kz0cAm">Measure 110, which passed November 2020 with <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Measure_110,_Drug_Decriminalization_and_Addiction_Treatment_Initiative_(2020)">58 percent</a> of the vote, was intended to treat substance abuse as a <a href="https://www.vox.com/public-health" data-source="encore">public health</a> issue, rather than a criminal one. It created a new category for possession of small amounts of controlled substances — Class E violations — that came with no jail time and a maximum of a $100 fine that could be waived if the individual chose to complete a health assessment. Effectively, it meant that getting caught with illegal drugs could, at worst, get you the equivalent of a traffic ticket.</p>
<p id="jMERkq">The new bill, HB 4002, scraps the Class E category altogether. If it goes into effect on September 1, possession of small amounts of controlled substances will once again be punishable with criminal offenses, though less severe than the way things worked prior to Measure 110.</p>
<p id="v4DnKB">Instead of Class E violations, personal possession of controlled substances will be considered a “drug enforcement misdemeanor,” which carries a maximum of 180 days in jail, though with a series of intervening steps designed to “deflect” individuals toward treatment rather than incarceration.</p>
<p id="6NpOId">Even after HB 4002 goes into effect, “Oregon will be in a better position than it was prior to Measure 110,” said <a href="https://drugpolicy.org/person/kellen-russoniello/">Kellen Russoniello</a>, senior policy counsel at the <a href="https://drugpolicy.org/">Drug Policy Alliance</a>. The new criminal penalties are designed to try to get people into treatment, rather than prison. “But it’s still a step backward from decriminalization.” </p>
<p id="U2gChU">Sen. Lieber’s office provided me with a diagram Thursday to show all the steps meant to reduce the odds that someone charged with a drug enforcement misdemeanor will wind up in jail:</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Zq_zJ5ZFucC18Itp2O1s3yHxFUY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25338553/Oregon_Drug_Intervention_Plan_PCS_U_Flow_Chart.png">
<cite>Courtesy of Sen. Kate Lieber’s office</cite>
</figure>
<p id="8E79A7">The bill does not affect <a href="https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/bills_laws/ors/ors475A.html">Measure 109</a>, which implemented Oregon’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/health/psychedelic-drugs-mushrooms-oregon.html">regulated access to psilocybin mushrooms</a>. Under that model, adults can sign up for a supervised psilocybin session at a licensed facility, which can cost anywhere from about $1,000 to $3,000. Regulated <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/30/1227630630/ketamine-infusion-clinic-mental-health-depression-anxiety-fda-off-label">ketamine clinics</a>, where people can receive ketamine under supervision to treat conditions like depression or anxiety, are also unaffected.</p>
<p id="P368lj">But it does ensure that regulated access is the only way to legally use psychedelics, walking back the decriminalization that allowed for more affordable and unconstrained personal consumption on one’s own terms. </p>
<h3 id="ggl6QB">The opioid crisis created support for quickly passing HB 4002</h3>
<p id="HwMaPg">While decriminalization has become a focal point in the debate over drugs, Oregon’s opioid crisis was escalating before 2020. From 2019 to 2020, unintentional opioid deaths in Oregon rose by <a href="https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PREVENTIONWELLNESS/SUBSTANCEUSE/OPIOIDS/Documents/quarterly_opioid_overdose_related_data_report.pdf">about 70 percent</a>. After Measure 110 took effect in February 2021, the surge continued. In 2021, deaths rose another 56 percent, and another 30 percent in 2022.</p>
<p id="BJtHaN">Despite the trends predating decriminalization, critics <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/opinion/oregon-drug-failure.html">felt</a> that the rise in overdose deaths, public displays of drug use, and crime were attributable to Measure 110. That provided a strong base of support for HB 4002. An <a href="https://www.dhmresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/DHM-Panel-Oregon_Measure110_May-2023.pdf">April 2023 survey</a> of 500 Oregon voters found that 63 percent supported bringing back criminal penalties for drug possession while continuing to use cannabis tax revenue for drug treatment programs. The bill was sold as a compromise that would stem the chaos that Measure 110 had allegedly unleashed.</p>
<p id="rXlQPX">But during the post-decriminalization years that saw Oregon’s opioid crisis continue to worsen, the same trends were taking place <a href="https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates">across the country</a>, including in <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.cfsecosystem.com/m110/Presentations/Panel1_Kral_Final.pdf">neighboring states</a> that hadn’t decriminalized opioids, like California and Nevada. A <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2809867">study</a> led by the New York University Grossman School of Medicine and published in <em>JAMA Psychiatry</em> found that in Oregon and Washington, both states that had drug decriminalization policies in 2021, there was no evidence for an association between decriminalization and drug overdose rates.</p>
<p id="QBXksl">A <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.cfsecosystem.com/m110/Presentations/Panel+1_Del+Pozo.pdf">second study</a>, led by public health researcher <a href="https://vivo.brown.edu/display/bdelpozo">Brandon del Pozo</a> of Brown University and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, replicated the findings for Oregon: no link between decriminalization and drug overdoses. Instead, most of the spike was attributed to the introduction of fentanyl into the general drug supply. Fentanyl is up to <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/stopoverdose/fentanyl/index.html">50 times stronger</a> than heroin, and is often laced into unregulated drugs like heroin or cocaine, making it far more likely than other drugs to lead to fatal overdoses. <strong> </strong></p>
<p id="QnzTQm">Much of the public sentiment’s <a href="https://www.dhmresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/DHM-Panel-Oregon_Measure110_May-2023.pdf">swing</a> against decriminalization centers around the visibility of drug use, rather than the numerical impact on overdose deaths. So it’s worth noting that the same year that decriminalization was passed, Covid-era eviction protections also expired. After plummeting in 2020 and 2021, the eviction rate shot back up in 2022 <a href="https://drugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/DPA-WhatReallyHappenedM110.pdf">by nearly 25 percent</a>. Between 2022 and 2023, the state’s homeless population rose by 12 percent.</p>
<p id="FnEgcC">None of this is to definitively say that Oregon’s decriminalization did nothing to worsen the opioid crisis, but their <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/oregon-leaders-hampered-drug-decriminalization-effort#:~:text=This%20is%20the%20day%2Dto,for%20law%20enforcement%20in%20Oregon.">less-than-ideal</a> implementation certainly seemed to amplify the visibility and social disorder associated with it. By failing to fund programs that would have trained law enforcement (who were <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/oregon-drug-war-decriminalization-1234982783/">generally skeptical of decriminalization</a> to begin with) on how to direct drug users toward rehabilitation or designing a ticketing system that emphasized treatment information, even advocates of Measure 110 were dismayed with the form it took through implementation.</p>
<p id="arIXMY">“Certainly, there’s a sense among Oregon voters that what’s going on isn’t working,” said Russoniello. But blaming Measure 110 has been called political <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/opinion/oregon-decriminalization-drugs-reversal.html">fearmongering</a>, rather than evidence-based policy. “The opposition was able to take the frustration with all of these social issues that Oregonians are facing and direct people’s frustration and anger at the big red herring of Measure 110, even though it isn’t backed by any sort of evidence.”</p>
<p id="IuLZMr">And wherever the debate falls on what’s fueling the opioid crisis, psychedelics are another matter entirely.</p>
<h3 id="pEAf3T">Why are we punishing psychedelics for an ongoing debate about opioids?</h3>
<p id="CZAkAP">There’s reasonable and urgent debate to be had over the best way to regulate opioids and support users. <a href="https://drugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/DPA-WhatReallyHappenedM110.pdf">Advocates maintain</a> that a well-implemented decriminalization approach is both more effective and equitable (minority groups are <a href="https://www.oregon.gov/cjc/CJC%20Document%20Library/AdultCJSystemRacialandEthnicStatementBackground.pdf">significantly overrepresented</a> in Oregon’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/criminal-justice" data-source="encore">criminal justice</a> system) than returning to criminal penalties, even if recriminalization comes with “<a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2024/02/multnomah-county-signs-on-to-measure-110-diversion-approach-seeks-25-million-for-deflection-center.html">deflection</a>” programs in place designed to make incarceration the sanction of last resort. </p>
<p id="FM5s4O">And yet, when it comes to psychedelics, the same questions, concerns, and sense of urgency present in the opioid crisis are notably absent. </p>
<p id="IeNosT">The therapeutic value of psychedelics in regulated settings is well on its way to federal recognition, with the FDA <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/07/26/mdma-psilocybin-fda-ptsd/">expected</a> to approve MDMA for treating PTSD as soon as <a href="https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/fda-accepts-grants-priority-review-of-nda-for-mdma-assisted-therapy-for-ptsd">this August</a>, and psilocybin for depression to follow suit. But decriminalization can serve as a <a href="https://eujournalfuturesresearch.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40309-022-00199-2">complement to the shortcomings</a> of <a href="https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/4/1/article-p34.xml">medicalized psychedelics</a>, helping to mitigate concerns around access, affordability, and preserving the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23721486/ketamine-dmt-lsd-psychedelics-magic-mushrooms-legalization-recreation-psilocybin">diversity of purposes</a> for which psychedelics have long been used.</p>
<p id="RudEj4">Critics of what has been called “<a href="https://psychedelicstoday.com/2020/02/18/psychedelic-exceptionalism-and-reframing-drug-narratives-an-interview-with-dr-carl-hart/">psychedelic exceptionalism</a>” argue that the law should not encode moral judgments that label some drugs as better or worse than others. The logic of decriminalization applies to all drugs, not only those that are more politically or culturally palatable. In fact, “The impact of decriminalization of heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine will be greater than for psychedelics,” said Russoniello, “because more people are incarcerated for those drugs than for psychedelics.” Even so, that shouldn’t mean that progress on decriminalizing psychedelics should get stymied by the ongoing debate over opioids. </p>
<p id="YkPRx9">So far, experts I spoke with who were concerned about criminalizing psychedelics despite the lack of evidence or argument for it could point to no public efforts to change the bill or clarify its effects. “I don’t think most legislators even really knew that this [HB 4002] was recriminalizing all drugs,” said Dennis. HB 4002 now awaits Gov. Kotek’s signature.</p>
<p id="00RDeQ"><em><strong>Correction, March 19, 2:50 pm:</strong></em><em> This story, originally published March 16, misstated the location of Sagebrush Law; it is in Ontario, Oregon.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24102102/psychedelics-oregon-opioid-crisis-decriminalization-war-drugs-fentanyl-house-bill-4002Oshan Jarow2024-03-11T09:19:19-04:002024-03-11T09:19:19-04:00A utopian strand of economic thought is making a surprising comeback
<figure>
<img alt="A photo illustration shows bountiful flowers bursting through an office calendar." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/l8-omDb7laLS3J-DR9wHfP6RNZc=/226x0:1666x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73132310/JuanjoGasull_Vox.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Juanjo Gasull for Vox</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was once normal for economists to imagine a world with less work. What happened?</p> <p id="qYCjLd">As the Allies advanced through German territories in the last year of World War II, they found millions of famine victims. They could free them from Nazi subjugation, but they didn’t know how best to walk them back from the brink of starvation. Would immediate feasts do the trick? Or would that shock their systems? Would a more controlled, gradual reintroduction of calories better ease their bodies back to health? To find out, scientists designed the <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-great-starvation-experiment">Minnesota Starvation Experiment</a>.</p>
<p id="f8KMp6">Thirty-six conscientious objectors, selected from more than 200 volunteers, lived in a dorm under observation for a year, 24 weeks of which they <a href="https://archive.org/details/greatstarvatione00tuck">spent on a starvation diet</a>. The researchers saw what you might expect: enough fat loss that even sitting became painful, slowed metabolisms, and fatigue. What they did not anticipate, however, was how their subjects’ minds also began to change.</p>
<p id="n0jXaf">As science writer Sharman Apt Russell recounts in her book, <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/sharman-apt-russell/hunger/9780786722396/?lens=basic-books"><em>Hunger: An Unnatural History</em></a>, obsessions emerged around cookbooks and local restaurant menus. Some subjects started spending hours comparing fruit and vegetable prices across newspapers. Others began reconsidering their professions, contemplating pivots into agriculture or restaurants. Their minds, ambitions, and attention began to focus obsessively on precisely that which they lacked. </p>
<p id="vahniB">But extreme hunger is only one form of lack. In their 2013 book, <a href="https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/publications/books/scarcity-why-having-too-little-means-so-much"><em>Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much</em></a>, behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir wondered if different types of scarcities — like those of money, time, and relationships — transformed the mind in similar ways. </p>
<p id="XRDXYE">“Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it,” they found. “The mind orients automatically, powerfully, toward unfulfilled needs.”</p>
<p id="wgendQ">This scarcity mentality can offer benefits, like elevating focus on an urgent task at hand. But the <a href="https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/02/scarcity">costs are significant</a>. In concrete terms, Mullainathan and Shafir found that scarcity reduces both fluid intelligence and executive control, two aspects of what they call mental bandwidth. “Because we are preoccupied by scarcity, we have less mind to give the rest of life,” they wrote. “It makes us less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled.”</p>
<p id="bVBvda">For centuries, a lineage of thinkers ranging from <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2130/2130-h/2130-h.htm"><em>Utopia</em></a><em> </em>author Thomas More in 1516 to economists like John Maynard Keynes in 1930 homed in on scarcity as both a force and a cultural logic that distorts not only mental bandwidth in the present, but also the potential futures of individuals and society at large. Sociologist <a href="https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/directory/aaron-benanav">Aaron Benanav</a>, author of <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/2682-automation-and-the-future-of-work"><em>Automation and the Future of Work</em></a>, sees these thinkers as part of the “post-scarcity tradition,” where they imagine what human development would be when liberated from the gravitational, detrimental pull of scarcity. If everyone’s basic needs were unconditionally met, people would be more free to choose how to spend their time and, as a result, new forms of post-scarcity mentalities could flourish.</p>
<p id="PHMJGd">In one sense, scarcity is a universal condition. If, like Shafir and Mullainathan, you define scarcity as “having less than you feel you need,” there will probably always be something humans want more of. Existentially, our mortality guarantees that, at a minimum, we all face a scarcity of time.</p>
<p id="Jcl8rJ">In a historical sense, however, scarcity is not a simple and universal fact, but a <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987081">social and political construct</a> that shapes the course of history as it changes. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, scarcity was <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/free-time">widely understood</a> as a temporary condition that new technologies and organized workers would soon overcome. But toward the end of the 20th century, a new economic framework recast scarcity as a permanent feature of the human condition. Visions of a world without work gave way to more modest utopias: 40-hour workweeks and rising wages for all.</p>
<p id="T6m0qy">Today, as economic frameworks are <a href="https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/sea-change/">shifting</a> once again, the idea of post-scarcity is traveling back from the fringes. Across academic <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1198424/full#:~:text=A%20post%2Dscarcity%20society%20refers,enough%20to%20shape%20daily%20choices">papers</a>, progressive <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/476-fully-automated-luxury-communism">movements</a>, and even Silicon Valley <a href="https://moores.samaltman.com/">titans</a> like Sam Altman, we’re once again grappling with the real possibility of a post-scarcity society. Those thinkers differ over what the cause might be: revolutionary politics, perhaps, or all-knowing <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/4/28/23702644/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-technology" data-source="encore">artificial intelligence</a>. The decisive questions, however, are what “post-scarcity” actually means and how to get there.</p>
<p id="R2yKNn">For some technologists, post-scarcity means a world of full automation. Whatever your desire — a new car, a modernized beach hut, or a slice of maple-walnut baklava — advanced technologies could produce them so cheaply they’d basically be free. This is the future as <em>Star Trek </em>fanfiction, and sure, it would be nice to press a button on your replicator and get <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2IJdfxWtPM">tea, Earl Grey, hot</a>. But we’re <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/the-second-machine-age/">nowhere near</a> that kind of productive capacity, and the prophecies of AI proponents notwithstanding, there’s no guarantee we’ll get there. </p>
<p id="PjhlMy">In contrast, there’s another, more modest interpretation of post-scarcity that doesn’t require any new technologies, just a shift in politics and power. “A literal cornucopia is not required,” Benanav writes. “It is only necessary that scarcity and its accompanying mentality be overcome.” </p>
<p id="dGlM1k">The key to overcoming that scarcity mentality — which unites Thomas More’s vision 500 years ago with the flurry of new <a href="https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/sea-change/">progressive</a> <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo195791875.html">visions</a> today — is unconditionally meeting everyone’s basic needs: not just enough calories to survive and shelter from the heavens, but whatever is required to live a dignified life according to prevailing cultural norms. This understanding of post-scarcity grounds it as an option in the present, rather than a futuristic vision based on technological abilities we still don’t have.</p>
<p id="1w0HZk">If automation enthusiasts seize the idea of post-scarcity, it will remain pegged to the horizon, forever suspended just beyond the here and now. Returning to the post-scarcity tradition, though, with a focus on unconditionally meeting basic needs, could help turn the idea of post-scarcity into a powerful vision for present-day progress.<em> </em></p>
<h3 id="uW7v4E">Where did scarcity come from?</h3>
<p id="AY4lpC">Scarcity, particularly as most economics students know it today, is a relatively modern construction. </p>
<p id="5FgBYF">Most undergraduates still encounter a definition of economics based on Paul Samuelson’s 1948 <a href="https://www.mheducation.com/highered/product/economics-samuelson-nordhaus/M9780073511290.html">textbook</a>, which goes something like this: Economics is the study of how societies allocate scarce resources among competing ends. (I had a business economics professor who told us that definition was the most important thing he could teach us, and also we’d fail if we didn’t memorize it.)</p>
<p id="vf66Sw">“Ours is a world of scarcity,” Samuelson writes. “All your life — from cradle to grave and beyond — you will run up against the brutal truths of economics.” </p>
<p id="XWD8ms">This vision of inescapable scarcity comes from the body of theory known as neoclassical economics, But its matter-of-fact presentation conceals a long history of radically different views. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="ByLxkB"><q>Scarcity, particularly as most economics students know it today, is a relatively modern construction. </q></aside></div>
<p id="wCMufR">Before neoclassical scarcity rose to dominate the textbooks, what historians Carl Wennerlind and Fredrik Jonsson call the competing vision of “socialist scarcity” was <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-new-scarcity-studies/">widely held</a>. It arose in the early 1800s as a response to the first stirrings of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/6/1/23138463/how-the-world-became-rich-industrial-revolution-koyama-rubin">Industrial Revolution</a>. Though it was brutal in its early days — with children <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23787024/power-progress-book-ai-history-future-economy-daron-acemoglu-simon-johnson">pushing coal carts</a> deep underground for 18-hour shifts and adults crowded into windowless textile mills, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf">coughing up blood</a> while breathing in fibrous dust — the Industrial Revolution also stimulated the hope that technology would one day make production so powerful that it could easily meet all human needs. In this view, scarcity was a temporary condition that enough progress would soon overcome.</p>
<p id="JdAGge">Confusingly, socialist scarcity was not confined to socialists. Capitalists, communists, business owners, and even conservative politicians all <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/free-time">saw scarcity as temporary</a>. Keynes captured the optimistic view shared by many in a short, speculative piece written in 1930, titled <a href="http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf"><em>Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren</em></a>. Workweeks would slope down to around 15 hours, less for need than to keep us occupied and engaged in our communities. What Keynes called the “economic problem,” the struggle for subsistence, would become a relic of history.</p>
<p id="SeAkhr">But shortly after Keynes’s prediction, the average workweek <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/work-hours-per-week?country=~USA">stopped declining</a>. The remarkable growth and stability of post-World War II conditions across the US and Europe diminished the appeal of anything that smelled like socialism. In 1948, Samuelson consolidated neoclassical ideas into his textbook that quickly became the standard, paving the way for the free-market era that followed. </p>
<p id="BJ8nEV">In the worldview conjured by neoclassical equations, the crucial change that crowded out the possibility for post-scarcity was getting rid of the distinction between needs and wants. It didn’t matter what we must<em> </em>have and what we felt<em> </em>we must have. Instead, the two were combined into a single category: desire. In the socialist schema of temporary scarcity, basic needs could be satisfied, while human wants or desires could extend infinitely. </p>
<p id="S9NfTI">Neoclassicals interpreted needs and wants as cut from the same cloth of desire, both representative of the rational individual’s decision-making process that seeks to maximize utility, which is the economists’ understanding of happiness. In doing away with the category of basic needs that could be satisfied, they built a new worldview where the idea of post-scarcity just didn’t fit (unless you have those <em>Star Trek</em> holodecks). Insatiable desire inevitably meant infinite scarcity.</p>
<h3 id="QF6tdo">The new post-scarcity debate</h3>
<p id="jCvxJB">Settling the clash between socialist and neoclassical versions of scarcity fixed the social agenda for the decades that followed. Rather than focusing on meeting everyone’s basic needs and <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2023/10/10/23895776/four-day-workweek-leisure-progress-labor-economy-utopia-capitalism-burnout-worker-satisfaction">reducing the workweek</a>, the American economy <a href="https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/a-new-dawn-a-new-day-a-new-life?r=iprz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web">set course</a> to free the markets with a laissez-faire approach to competition, privatizing public services in the name of efficiency, lowering taxes, avoiding <a href="https://www.vox.com/money/2023/12/18/24001984/us-budget-deficit-2023-debt-tax-revenue-interest-rates">deficits</a>, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23965898/child-poverty-expanded-child-tax-credit-economy-welfare-phase-ins">fastening work requirements to welfare programs</a>. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="ahr1LN"><q>Half a century later, forecasts of an abundant future with economic security for all are once again breaking through the politics of scarcity.</q></aside></div>
<p id="pHPIEk">While neoclassical became what the economics profession would treat as common sense, socialist scarcity stayed alive in critiques of capitalism, albeit at the fringes of economic discourse. Murray Bookchin, author of the 1971 book <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book"><em>Post-Scarcity Anarchism</em></a>, argued that capitalism, despite the astounding increases in human living standards, had been turned around to sustain the very scarcity it once hoped to overcome: “A century ago, scarcity had to be endured; today, it has to be enforced.”</p>
<p id="kk4K6q">Half a century later, forecasts of an abundant future with economic security for all are once again breaking through the politics of scarcity. But there’s no coherent vision for what the return of post-scarcity means. Instead, there’s a scattered landscape of competing interpretations, each offering a different vision for the future and political roadmaps for how to get there.</p>
<p id="bkqr92">Broadly, there are two main versions of post-scarcity today. First, there’s technological post-scarcity. This view focuses on innovation and automation as critical for reaching any sort of utopian future. Even before the rapid AI progress of recent years revved up <a href="https://www.axios.com/2019/01/10/artificial-intelligence-automation-jobs-robots">automation forecasts</a>, technologists saw worlds of abundance quickly approaching — as soon <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Peter-H-Diamandis/Exponential-Technology-Series/9781451616842">as 2035</a>, as one futurist foresaw, even the world’s poorest would be able to meet their desires.</p>
<p id="5b4JSN">Technological post-scarcity may be associated with the lords of Silicon Valley, but it runs across the political spectrum. On the anti-capitalist left, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ book <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/148-inventing-the-future"><em>Inventing the Future</em></a> and Aaron Bastani’s <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/476-fully-automated-luxury-communism"><em>Fully Automated Luxury Communism</em></a><em> </em>position technology and automation as key catalysts — if steered by a resurgent leftist political movement — for post-scarcity futures. </p>
<p id="qcigey">But technological post-scarcity, like neoclassical economics, generally avoids defining a boundary between needs and wants. Instead, technology and automation will allow us to satisfy them both, making the distinction irrelevant.</p>
<p id="J53DZi">While any form of post-scarcity’s return signals a welcome revival in utopian thinking, hitching it to technology has important consequences. First, it frames radical improvements in our economic lives as prospects for the future that rely on new technologies we may hope will come to be, rather than options for the present that can be won through social movements and different policy choices. That worsens the progressive left’s ongoing <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/148-inventing-the-future">lack of inspiring visions</a> for the future that have any semblance of feasibility in the present.</p>
<p id="CU0rT8">Progressive economists today like Mark Paul argue that wealthy <a href="https://www.vox.com/economy">economies</a> such as the US have already amassed enough resources to achieve post-scarcity, echoing Bookchin (if all US household wealth were distributed evenly across the population, everyone would have about $450,000). The barrier isn’t new technologies or freer markets; it’s politics and power. “I would argue that since the ’60s, we’ve lived in this post-scarcity world, meaning that we can eradicate poverty and economic insecurity. They’re choices, and yet we choose to perpetuate them,” Paul told Vox.</p>
<p id="1jVv14">The second consequence of pinning post-scarcity on technology is that it betrays the longstanding tradition of post-scarcity theorists. From Thomas More’s <em>Utopia</em> in 1516 through to Keynes, Bookchin, and Benanav today, post-scarcity has been more modestly focused on unconditionally meeting everyone’s basic needs, which excludes the more expansive, infinite range of human desires.</p>
<p id="vP8MQH">When the label of post-scarcity is invoked today, it’s usually in the context of technology. But this second flavor — a post-scarcity of needs — has been undergoing its own <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/1/31/24055562/economy-bill-of-rights-vibecession-progressives-freedom-fdr">revival of interest</a>, even if under different labels. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="nGJBXK"><q>By definition, a post-scarcity of needs implies that everyone should have access to the basics, no matter what.</q></aside></div>
<p id="mzG0CJ">The 2008 financial crash shook confidence in the neoclassical logic that failed to predict or prevent it. In 2011, the Occupy movement pried the crack in its dominance open, galvanizing what had been a dormant progressive movement. In the years since, a reappraisal of the economy’s failure to provide for everyone’s basic needs has launched a series of movements that each, in their own ways, aims to provide economic security for all. Whether the growing support for <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-policy-and-society/article/abs/towards-a-sustainable-welfare-state-the-role-of-universal-basic-services/0D94B6408FA1507732F909871D0CB649">universal basic services</a>, the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text">Green New Deal’s</a> inclusion of economic rights, or the national experiment with <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23965898/child-poverty-expanded-child-tax-credit-economy-welfare-phase-ins">unconditional cash transfers for poor children</a>, elements of a post-scarcity agenda are increasingly in play. </p>
<p id="n743wg">“You already have these demands,” Benanav said. “Part of the issue is that these are often presented as piecemeal reforms on the way to a better world. There isn’t a clear sense of how they all fit together. Post-scarcity gives us a positive vision of the future and shows how it all fits together into a coherent program.”</p>
<h3 id="1MFjXk">But will we still need to work in a post-scarcity society?</h3>
<p id="tu9XS6">A fully automated post-scarcity society would make most employment obsolete, since no one would be compelled by the force of economic necessity to take a job. It’s like the <em>Star Trek</em> universe, where essentially infinite energy — thanks, I guess, to <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Dilithium">dilithium crystals</a> — can be transformed into whatever people need. But without that powerful technology or abundant energy to power it, it’s unclear to what degree the more attainable scenarios of post-scarcity of needs would still require that everyone have jobs.</p>
<p id="Z6Aplk">By definition, a post-scarcity of needs implies that everyone should have access to the basics, no matter what. So long as we choose to work 40 hours (or more) a week primarily because we need those wages in order to live a dignified life, we aren’t living in any sort of post-scarcity. As Keynes <a href="http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf">envisioned</a> back in 1930, the decisive shift occurs as the governing logic of daily life shifts away from making decisions or taking jobs based on necessity.</p>
<p id="wMCIoa">That said, even among experts I spoke to who hold the ideal of post-scarcity in high regard, no one thought that we’re currently in a position where we can just abolish employment altogether and still meet everyone’s basic needs. That sort of freedom, if it were to gather momentum, would still be a long-term political project.</p>
<p id="kdB3y0">But neither did they believe that today’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2023/10/10/23895776/four-day-workweek-leisure-progress-labor-economy-utopia-capitalism-burnout-worker-satisfaction">standard of the 40-hour workweek</a> is the best compromise between freedom and necessity that we can muster. “I don’t think we can all be working 15-hour weeks right now,” Paul said. “But is the right number 25? 35? I’m not sure, but I would contend it’s somewhere in that realm.”</p>
<p id="LX0KZU">Benanav feels that one part of the equation is to “raise the minimum of benefits that people have access to just for being human,” which would make it easier for people to choose to work less. But another important aspect is a push to <a href="https://democratizingwork.org/">democratize work</a>, too. That would make it easier to share “the work that remains to be done in a way that restores dignity, autonomy, and purpose to working life without making work the center of our shared, social existence,” he writes.</p>
<p id="95Qv8I">Free from the <a href="https://www.biblestudytools.com/2-thessalonians/3-10.html#:~:text=10%20For%20even%20when%20we%20were%20with%20you%2C%20this%20we,work%2C%20let%20him%20not%20eat.">biblical command</a> that “if any would not work, neither should he eat,” everyone would have more bandwidth to give toward what Thomas More saw way back in 1516 as the true wealth of a post-scarcity society: the mindset that arises from unconditionally meeting everyone’s basic needs, allowing them “to live with a joyful and tranquil frame of mind, with no worries about making a living.”</p>
<p id="CF1SQ5">Wennerlind pointed out that this focus on enabling new mindsets is a common thread running through the post-scarcity tradition. He explained when socialist scarcity was the common understanding, the point of economic progress wasn’t just about improving material conditions. It was about how doing so would free the human mind from scarcity’s grip: “If you look at people like Keynes or Marx, they believe that technology can continue to expand the amount of material goods produced. But they also talked about a new mindset, a mindset that would help people to engage with life in a more artful, creative, and convivial way.”</p>
<p id="eivheG">If we successfully moved beyond the scarcity of basic needs, new expressions of scarcity would rise to fill the void. Whether status, desire, time, or our own mortality, there’s always some form of scarcity at hand. This strikes me as good news; there are more interesting scarcities to organize ourselves, our minds, and our aspirations around than lack of basic needs or the jobs we must work to meet them. “The idea that we should content ourselves with the struggle for survival is such a horrifying vision for our species,” Benanav told me.</p>
<p id="SR8rKL">With that age-old economic problem settled, we could orient around richer scarcities, like human connection or the ultimate scarcity: time. What kinds of utopias and political agendas would a society preoccupied with the finitude of life imagine? </p>
<p id="DbvPVj">As a long-term project, post-scarcity is more of a question than an answer, widening the scope of what sorts of human beings we might wish to become, and organizing our resources so that everyone can participate in the eternal work of figuring it out.</p>
<p id="kMmhBi"></p>
<p id="KPEN3J"></p>
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24065976/economists-post-scarcity-abundance-industrial-revolution-socialism-capitalismOshan Jarow2024-03-08T07:00:00-05:002024-03-08T07:00:00-05:00The world’s mental health is in rough shape — and not getting any better, a new report finds
<figure>
<img alt="An illustration of a person’s head with the top opened on a hinge. A globe hovers over the opening." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/z8UKVdxKj5i0QOnBCw_Hr2YEdUE=/0x1266:7000x6516/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73191124/GettyImages_1308460514.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Guess where the US ranks?</p> <p id="N6Dlxm">While running a microfinance company working across rural India in 2014, neuroscientist Tara Thiagarajan had a free Sunday, a portable EEG headset, and a question: What is modernization doing to our brains?</p>
<p id="07BTFl">In a DIY experiment using herself and colleagues as baselines, they <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/about-us/#:~:text=Our%20Founding%20Story,and%20small%20towns%20in%20India">found striking differences</a> in brain activity between their urban brains with lifelong exposure to modernity, and those who’ve spent their lives in small Indian villages. At the time, a criticism of studies on <a href="https://www.vox.com/mental-health" data-source="encore">mental health</a> was that they were mostly based on findings from <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/weirdest-people-in-the-world/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17">small samples of Western college students</a> — a poor experimental design to figure out how differential exposure to modernization and technology affects mental well-being across the world.</p>
<p id="xUFbks">By 2020, she had founded a nonprofit called <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/">Sapien Labs</a>, built a survey that reached 49,000 people across eight English-speaking countries, and published Sapien’s first <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Mental-State-of-the-World-Report-2020-1.pdf">Mental State of the World (MSW) report</a>, which measures what they call the “<a href="https://sapienlabs.org/mhq/">mental health quotient</a>,” or mental well-being score, of respondents. The findings weren’t great. Compared to responses from 2019, the 2020 mental well-being score (which notably captured the pandemic onset) dropped 8 percent. Forty-four percent of young adults reported clinical level risk, compared with only 6 percent of adults 65 and over. </p>
<p id="4IXH2y">Monday, Sapien released its fourth annual <a href="https://mentalstateoftheworld.report/">Mental State of the World report</a> with data from more than 400,000 respondents in 13 languages across 71 countries. The bottom line: Our modern minds do not appear to be recovering from that drop in the early pandemic years.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Ranking of the top six and bottom six countries from the fourth annual mental state of the world report. Countries like the Dominican Republic an Tanzania are on top, while the UK, Australia, And Uzbekistan are at the bottom." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ubdXysnMWAcGud3SU2LuRxlWeTM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25323557/Final_2.png">
</figure>
<p id="uI2XUl">The mental well-being report is part of a larger effort, the <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/global-mind-project/">Global Mind Project</a>, where Sapien Labs uses its survey data — which runs continuously throughout the year (you can fill out the <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/mhq/">assessment here</a>; it takes about 15 minutes to complete) — to gauge not only the mental state of affairs but to look for causal factors.</p>
<p id="mBBOBy">If “modernization” is harming our minds as Thiagarajan suspects, what exactly is doing the damage? “The Global Mind Project allows for very quick understanding at a very large scale, which has not been possible before,” said Thiagarajan.</p>
<p id="Z1OQhG">Along with their annual overview of mental well-being, the project publishes more targeted reports that home in on different possible scourges of modernity, like <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Sapien-Labs-Age-of-First-Smartphone-and-Mental-Wellbeing-Outcomes.pdf">access to smartphones</a> at younger and younger ages, <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Sapien_Processed-Food-Rapid-Report_2023-2.pdf">ultra-processed foods</a>, and the <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Family-Relationships-and-Mental-Wellbeing.pdf">breakdown of family relationships</a>.</p>
<p id="UwJ0ld">“Greater wealth and economic development does not necessarily lead to greater mental wellbeing, but instead can lead to consumption patterns and a fraying of social bonds that are detrimental to our ability to thrive,” the report cautions. </p>
<p id="ZI0Sca">A number of <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/">Our World in Data</a> graphs show how economic growth <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-economic-growth">still tracks really well with human prosperity</a> in the long run. The evidence that economic growth tracks with goods and services that enable human prosperity is compelling, but as my colleague <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23862090/subjective-wellbeing-wealth-philanthropy-gdp-happiness-givewell">Sigal Samuel reports</a>, figuring out how best to approximate human well-being is still an ongoing and lively discourse. </p>
<p id="f2EE5g">Thiagarajan takes a nuanced approach, arguing against a simple binary choice between growth or <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22408556/save-planet-shrink-economy-degrowth">degrowth</a>. Instead, she argues that what matters is how wealth is created and toward what ends it’s used. Or, as the economist Mariana Mazzucato often puts it, what matters is the “<a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/bartlett_public_purpose/files/mazzucato_perez_2022_redirecting_growth-inclusive_sustainable_and_innovation-led.pdf">direction</a>” of growth and whether it’s angled at the <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/oct/governing-economics-common-good">common good</a>.</p>
<p id="Mlu5Iq">“At the moment, growth is causing harm,” Thiagarajan said. “But there are different types of growth.” </p>
<h3 id="iqVk2M">How to measure mental well-being</h3>
<p id="yhdVlG">There is, as of yet, no exact science of mental well-being, let alone a perfect cross-cultural survey. “People commonly conflate things like mental well-being with happiness,” said Thiagarajan. But if you compare the findings from their mental well-being survey to the <a href="https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-and-social-connections-in-times-of-crisis/#ranking-of-happiness-2020-2022">World Happiness Report</a> (WHR), a publication by Oxford’s <a href="https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/">Wellbeing Research Centre</a>, much of the results are inverted.</p>
<p id="6OPYiL">The Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka have the highest average mental well-being scores on the Mental State of the World list. On the World Happiness Report, they rank 73rd and 112th, respectively. Tanzania is third on the MSW and 128th on the WRH. What’s going on?</p>
<p id="5Bciv7">The World Happiness Report <a href="https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-and-social-connections-in-times-of-crisis/#ranking-of-happiness-2020-2022">leans on</a> capturing what Thiagarajan described as “feeling.” That includes respondents rating their life satisfaction on a scale from one to 10 and daily measures of whether they felt laughter, enjoyment, or interest the day before. But you could feel<em> </em>great and still be functioning poorly in the world. Following the World Health Organization’s <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response">definition of mental health</a>, which includes the capacity to function productively and contribute to society, Thiagarajan wanted the Global Mind Project to capture functioning, too. </p>
<p id="bY0DOY">To build their measure, the mental health quotient, Thiagarajan and her team found 126 different kinds of assessments used across academia and clinical environments, and then boiled those down to 47 aspects of mental health. Then, rather than asking about frequency, like “How many times did you feel sad yesterday,” the MHQ sets its questions along a life impact scale, based on the idea that it’s easier to report how impactful something is to your life than how many times you drank water or laughed the day before (I couldn’t tell you either of those for yesterday). </p>
<p id="xUqloS">Their results produce a number along a 300-point scale that ranges from “distressed” at the low end to “thriving” at the high end. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="A 300 point scale that runs from “distressed” to “thriving,” showing the average score from 71 countries in 2023 at 65, in the territory marked “managing.”" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/4-D57pFlBXaoxURuPyAP1dG2KDQ=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25323545/report_graphs_02.jpg">
<cite>Global Mind Project / 4th Annual Mental State of the World Report</cite>
<figcaption>The average mental health quotient score measured in 2023, which was nearly identical to the previous year.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="xU5nU2">For 2023, across the 71 countries they received data from, the global average was 65, indicating that we’re all “managing,” and doing so just a few hairs above “enduring.”</p>
<h3 id="JV5Tiz">The problems: Smartphones, ultra-processed foods, and crumbling families</h3>
<p id="2cUtgA">There’s a theory going around that, as former neuroscientist and author Erik Hoel <a href="https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/what-the-heck-happened-in-2012">put it</a>, the modern world was invented in 2012. For social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, 2012 also <a href="https://www.persuasion.community/p/haidt-the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic">marks the beginning</a> of the teen mental illness epidemic. </p>
<p id="A4jzdZ">Findings across the four years of the MHQ agree. Prior to 2010, young people <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1003744107">tended to top</a> surveys of happiness, mood, and outlook. But from 2019 until this year’s report, the most persistent trend observed has been declining mental well-being across the “internet-enabled” youth (because the survey requires internet access) of every country measured, from Africa to Asia, Europe to the Americas.</p>
<p id="zAqRAa">The youth, once the peak of reported happiness, have dropped to the absolute bottom, while others, like those 65 or older, have remained basically the same.</p>
<p id="UbKuKi">To be more precise: For the eight English-speaking countries with data collected since 2019, those aged 18–24 and 25–34 dropped by 14–17 percent. That decline gradually flattens out as you move up the age brackets.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Trends in mental well-being by age group. 18 – 24 and 25 – 34 had the steepest declines, while the decrease flattens out at older age groups." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/faPxSkrC8Kg6KZZBMXu7oDb5jXg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25323585/report_graphs_04.jpg">
<cite>Global Mind Project / 4th Annual Mental State of the World Report.</cite>
</figure>
<p id="cGXj8t">According to the Global Mind Project’s <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Sapien-Labs-Age-of-First-Smartphone-and-Mental-Wellbeing-Outcomes.pdf">report on smartphone use</a> in May, the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/">smartphone hypothesis</a> — which has been advocated for by psychologists like <a href="https://psychology.sdsu.edu/people/jean-twenge/">Jean Twenge</a> — holds up. “The younger you get your smartphone, the worse off you are as an adult,” said Thiagarajan. </p>
<p id="8F5kBq">The more you break down the demographics, the more you find that the consequences of smartphone use are concentrated on young females. But looking at another potential causal factor they recently published on, the <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Sapien_Processed-Food-Rapid-Report_2023-2.pdf">consumption of ultra-processed foods</a>, those effects are universal across all demographics. “It affects everything, every aspect of mental functioning,” said Thiagarajan.</p>
<p id="GONlKg">Their report notes the complexities involved in defining ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and provides a simple rule of thumb: food with substances you would rarely find in a home kitchen (it’s worth noting that the entire category of UPFs is still under scrutiny, particularly for targeting plant-based foods). Even after trying to control for the indirect effects of exercise frequency or income, they found that those who eat UPFs several times a day have a threefold increased risk for serious mental health issues. </p>
<p id="bWLdCg">There are plenty of other possible confounding variables, like frequency of cooking or sharing meals, but their findings are large: “We’re looking at when you rule out all the other 100 things that we can capture data on,” Thiagarajan said, “and ultra-processed foods seem to account for at least a third of the global burden of mental health that we see.” </p>
<p id="UkPRE9">The last culprit she singled out was family relationships. And yes, <a href="https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Family-Relationships-and-Mental-Wellbeing.pdf">there’s a report</a> for that too, which finds the breakdown of family relationships across the modern world as a major factor in the decline of youth mental well-being. Families with less exposure to the institutions and technologies of modernity, the report argues, tend to have stronger and more numerous family bonds, which tracks closely with better mental well-being.</p>
<p id="7ob1uV">Thiagarajan explained how when they got their first MHQ results, they wondered why countries like Venezuela and Tanzania came out on top. “But it’s these factors,” she said. “They can’t afford all the westernized ultra-processed foods so they don’t import them. They don’t give smartphones to their kids so young. And they have large families that stay together.” </p>
<p id="p8Fpxi">She noted that given the speed and scale of “the issue” — that issue being, well, modernity — we’re forced to take action on imperfect knowledge. Part of the goal of the Global Mind Project, across the MHQ and its more targeted reports, is to help figure out the most effective places to aim policy efforts, particularly regulations. </p>
<p id="4I4kH5">“If it’s a free-for-all,” she said, “people will take the easiest shortcut to short-term profits at the expense of mental health.”</p>
<p id="KZhgJK"><em>A version of this story originally appeared in the </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect"><em><strong>Future Perfect</strong></em></a><em> newsletter. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup"><em><strong>Sign up here!</strong></em></a></p>
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/3/8/24093650/mental-health-report-happiness-growth-well-being-smartphonesOshan Jarow2024-03-06T08:30:00-05:002024-03-06T08:30:00-05:00China’s emerging psychedelic scene looks a lot like Silicon Valley
<figure>
<img alt="Aerial view of Hong Kong with the districts of Tsim Sha Tsui and Tai Ping Shan." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/N4sqdvpgfC6DFtCJSlGGMPi755k=/306x0:5159x3640/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73185885/GettyImages_1453607830.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Anthropologists are now showing how culture impacts psychedelic experiences.</p> <p id="tSlm8D">Not everything that affects a psychedelic experience can be controlled in clinical trials. Psychedelic researchers are paying more and more attention to the idea that the “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050324516683325">set and setting</a>” of a trip can impact the experience, like asking <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00187">what genre of music</a> is most conducive to helping psilocybin therapy participants quit smoking. </p>
<p id="ioPK7M">But a full accounting of a psychedelic experience’s set and setting extends far beyond immediate stimuli like playlists and a room’s ambiance. Researchers have yet to isolate and explore one of the most impactful ingredients in constructing a psychedelic experience: culture. </p>
<p id="7pnGRt">If tripping indoors is a different experience than tripping outdoors — and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7724423/">it is</a> — so is having a psychedelic experience as a person who’s grown up in 21st-century America, versus elsewhere in the world. Culture shapes the subterranean worlds of the mind, instilling the deep-seated frameworks we use to make sense of our subjective experiences, especially those <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23972716/psychedelics-meaning-science-psychedelic-mushrooms-ketamine-psilocybin-mysticism">as strange and powerful</a> as psychedelic ones. Through the emerging psychedelic scene in <a href="https://www.vox.com/china" data-source="encore">China</a>, for example, anthropologists are beginning to study how cultures can shape experiences.</p>
<p id="bKgbuY">Take the trip experienced by Zhang, a young writer from mainland China who relayed his trip to <a href="https://mehu.hku.hk/alex-gearin/">Alex Gearin</a>, an anthropologist who studies the emerging psychedelic subculture in China today. In the comfort of his living room and company of a few friends, Zhang inhaled vaporized DMT, a naturally occurring substance that’s also the active ingredient in ayahuasca. </p>
<p id="jg00tW">He then described passing through a wondrous realm of pink Chinese goddesses, and landing in a courtroom where hundreds of floating eyes were watching him, part of a cosmic livestream “of his moral flaws to a court of judges, spirits, and millions of internet users,” <a href="https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12849">writes</a> Gearin. The specificity of Zhang’s visions also reflects the way that psychedelic experiences are profoundly structured by cultural contexts, such as China’s pervasive <a href="https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/23/chinas-enormous-surveillance-state-is-still-growing">surveillance system</a> and widespread <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01607/full#B8">livestreaming subculture</a>.</p>
<p id="ZeOGcZ">During the recent swell of psychedelic research, all of the clinical trial participants having minds shaped by Western culture is a hidden constant that invisibly biases experimental findings. Psychedelic investigators have long been aware of this conundrum. Back in 1959, the anthropologist Anthony Wallace <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/487615">suggested</a> “culture-controlled trials,” as opposed to placebo controls, that would test the same drug dose in different cultural contexts to try and isolate the cultural influences. </p>
<p id="kiWJpm">In the absence of a cultural corollary to placebo controls in the advancement of scientific knowledge, studying psychedelic experiences in various places around the world, and especially outside modernity’s cultural constructs, can help make these invisible influences more apparent. It may not help totally demystify the psychedelic experience. But we may gain a better understanding of how our culture is influencing our minds.</p>
<h3 id="sbun1X">The new psychedelic scene in modern China resembles … Silicon Valley?</h3>
<p id="28QzqM">In a 2021 <a href="https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp318_hallucinogens_china.pdf">paper</a>, professor of Chinese Studies <a href="https://www.albany.edu/eastasianstudies/faculty/fan-pen-li-chen-chenfanping">Fan Pen Li Chen</a> writes that the history of Chinese psychedelic use “is a conspicuous blank” in contemporary English language accounts. In modern times, too, China has rarely been included in talks of the psychedelic renaissance. </p>
<p id="ANvdX3">Gearin, in his <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/5697/chapter/4411954/Becoming-Modern-in-China-with-an-Indigenous">ethnography of Chinese ayahuasca</a> use, notes that ayahuasca’s introduction into modern China is similarly tough to pin down, though accounts of Indigenous ayahuasca shamans traveling in Beijing begin in the early 21st century. Part of the difficulty, he adds, is that China’s <a href="http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zggs/202307/t20230706_11108971.htm">strict drug laws</a> and threats of punishment have created a culture of secrecy among users. </p>
<p id="8nCLOs">Starting in 2019, Gearin spent years embedded in a network of hundreds of ayahuasca users across mainland China. He <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/5697/chapter/4411954/Becoming-Modern-in-China-with-an-Indigenous">chronicled the experiences</a> of people like “Ting Ting,” a Chinese woman in her early 30s who manages a large technology firm and hopes that drinking ayahuasca will help advance her career, and “Wang,” a 34-year-old executive manager at a fast-food franchise who drinks ayahuasca to become more successful at his job. (Note: these stories are anonymized to protect them from legal harm.) </p>
<p id="9wQlHW">In their experiences, a strange comparison emerged, a cultural reference point that should be quite familiar to people in the West: Silicon Valley. </p>
<p id="u751iB">Among those who use psychedelics as part of a spiritual practice, the culture of psychedelic use <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-microdosing-ketamine-lsd-magic-mushrooms-d381e214">associated with Silicon Valley</a> — microdosing for a productivity boost, or blasting off on LSD to search kaleidoscopic mind spaces for the next billion-dollar innovation — usually gets treated with a pretty aggressive sneer (roping psychedelics into utilitarian agendas of productivity and competitive edges can be seen as reductive, especially in contrast to the stereotypical portrayal of more spiritual Indigenous uses). </p>
<p id="RAlui0">But Gearin <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/5697/chapter/4411954/Becoming-Modern-in-China-with-an-Indigenous">notes</a> that using psychedelic experiences and rituals for secular gains is not actually a modern twist, nor is it unique to the US. Indigenous Amazonian groups in South America have long used psychedelic rituals to boost their hunting performance, decipher the schemes of their enemies, and discover the locations of things they have misplaced. </p>
<p id="OSd5Ih">The Chinese ayahuasca network Gearin studied is led by a young European man named Luke. He had previously spent time learning about ayahuasca practices from Indigenous South American traditions like the Peruvian <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.623923/full">Shipibo</a> and Brazilian <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.651037/full">Santo Daime</a>. Yet over Luke’s six years conducting weekly ayahuasca retreats across Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, he’s adapted the language to fit the more secular context and clientele. </p>
<p id="4MGRvm">“I talk more in terms of anxiety, depression, purpose, mission, conflict,” Luke told Gearin. “When they don’t see you wearing feathers, when you speak in a language they understand, the outcome is better.”</p>
<h3 id="FE7zMb">Chinese psychedelia suggests an enchanted capitalism</h3>
<p id="5u4lAZ">The primary narrative within biomedical cultures like the US for psychedelics’ surge in popularity generally <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/health/psychedelics-mdma-psilocybin-molly-mental-health.html">focuses</a> on the unmet need for therapeutic interventions, but social theorists offer <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Re_Enchantment_of_the_West_Vol_2/DsknAAAAYAAJ?hl=en">a different explanation</a>. </p>
<p id="8i0T4q">Following the German sociologist Max Weber, who chronicled the disenchantment of modernity in <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_C/4MmligHndssC?hl=en"><em>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</em></a><em>,</em> Gearin summarizes the thesis that living through industrial capitalism transforms subjects “into cogs in the machinery of rational pursuits,” and posits that psychedelics help return that lost sense of <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23972716/psychedelics-meaning-science-psychedelic-mushrooms-ketamine-psilocybin-mysticism">spirituality, meaning, and significance to people’s lives</a>.</p>
<p id="dt3Vjd">Accordingly, after China’s rapid modernization and secularization during the 20th century, the changing cultural context should have deeply charged Chinese people’s psychedelic experiences with an unmet need for spirituality that transcends the iron cage of industrialized efficiency, and speaks to the forms of religion that Maoist “<a href="https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/introduction_to_the_cultural_revolution">cultural reforms</a>” tried to stamp out. That doesn’t seem to be the case. The “<a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6854">disenchantment thesis</a>” doesn’t quite fit Chinese psychedelia, Gearin has found.</p>
<p id="LhPunb">In other words, the Chinese example leaves anthropologists with new questions to answer. Business practices and psychedelia are not set against each other. It’s possible to view this reality as the flourishing of psychedelic capitalism, where the motivating force of capitalist pursuits absorbs and transforms the psychedelic experience into its own image.</p>
<p id="NpcsAW">It’s also possible to read these early reports from the Chinese psychedelic scene as suggesting an innate cultural understanding that the <a href="https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9780156792011">sacred and profane</a> are not two separate realms of life to be set against each other. Instead, as described by the process of “<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9386447/">integration</a>” in psychedelic therapy, the decisive question becomes how to weave these powerful, spiritually charged experiences into the mundane, bureaucratic, and worldly fabric of everyday life.</p>
<h3 id="1qqHIG">Psychedelics are a window into culture</h3>
<p id="8Ot9wj">In the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23721486/ketamine-dmt-lsd-psychedelics-magic-mushrooms-legalization-recreation-psilocybin">resurgence of American psychedelia</a>, particularly in the therapeutic context, psychedelic trips are interpreted as opportunities to allow the deeper currents of an individual’s mind to <a href="https://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/71/3/316">rise to the surface</a> of conscious experience. However, individual experience draws from deeper wells of cultural contexts, which are not easy to isolate or control in clinical research.</p>
<p id="78h4vc">Psychedelic experience “raises questions that cannot be answered by laboratory experiments and clinical trials alone,” <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9892049/">writes</a> anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz, director of the <a href="https://psychedelichumanities.newschool.org/">Psychedelic Humanities Lab</a> at the New School. “Among these are questions pertaining to the conceptual and practical frameworks that render experimental and clinical findings meaningful.”</p>
<p id="QcSNxi">In Gearin’s account of the Chinese ayahuasca scene, we see how government surveillance and widespread secularization provide the material and context for individual psychedelic experiences. But it’s always easier to see someone else’s bias than our own. </p>
<p id="qu96lg">As legal access to psychedelics scales up in the US, both as a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/health/psychedelic-drugs-mushrooms-oregon.html">regulated service</a> and a <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/future-pulse/2024/02/14/psychedelic-medicine-gets-a-boost-00141344">therapeutic treatment</a>, we’ll have more opportunities to peer through the lenses of our individual experiences with an anthropological eye, asking how American culture is shaping our own minds. I’m not sure we’ll like what we find, but as most therapists will tell you, the first step toward changing deep patterns of experience is becoming aware of them. </p>
<p id="APrCW2"><em>A version of this story originally appeared in the </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect"><em><strong>Future Perfect</strong></em></a><em> newsletter. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup"><em><strong>Sign up here!</strong></em></a></p>
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24091676/psychedelics-china-capitalism-silicon-valley-ayahuascaOshan Jarow2024-01-31T08:00:00-05:002024-01-31T08:00:00-05:00We can still make a good economy much better
<figure>
<img alt="President Franklin D. Roosevelt broadcasts his annual message to Congress, Jan. 11, 1944, in Washington." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yERGekg4ZVTq3fvsSs4FvpJ-wqg=/0x45:3000x2295/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73099821/AP440111013.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>President Franklin D. Roosevelt broadcasts his annual message to Congress in 1944, where he called for an economic bill of rights. | AP Photo/George R. Skadding</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The end of the “vibecession” doesn’t mean we should stop questioning the economy.</p> <p id="jd3Yuy">After a confusing few months of surveys suggesting that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/11/20/23964535/labor-market-employment-inflation-sentiment-economy-bad-polls">Americans are unhappy</a> with the <a href="https://www.vox.com/economy" data-source="encore">economy</a> despite positive signs like low unemployment and rising real wages, the vibes are <a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-consumer-sentiment-rises-solidly-january-2024-01-19/#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20Jan%2019%20(Reuters),the%20economy's%20prospects%20this%20year.">now improving</a>. Preliminary results from the University of Michigan’s <a href="http://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/">survey of consumer sentiments</a> found that in January, Americans’ regard for the economy reached its highest level in two and a half years.</p>
<p id="R66yIJ">Even low-income Americans are seeing some of the best labor market conditions in decades, with the rollback of <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010">an estimated 40 percent</a> of the wage inequality that built up over the last 40 years. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon the main question raised by the mysterious “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/opinion/biden-trump-vibecession-economy.html">vibecession</a>”: Why weren’t people happy about the economy? </p>
<div id="rLJmwg">
<div id="datawrapper-YaQ3u" data-analytics-viewport="datawrapper" data-iframe-fallback="https://img.datawrapper.de/YaQ3u/full.png" data-iframe-fallback-width="600" data-iframe-fallback-height="400" data-iframe-fallback-alt="Consumer sentiment reached a 2.5-year high in January, according to preliminary results from a University of Michigan survey." data-iframe="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/YaQ3u/3/" data-iframe-width="600" data-iframe-height="400" data-iframe-layout="responsive" data-iframe-title="Economic optimism is on the rise" data-iframe-resizable=""></div>
<script type="text/javascript">!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}});window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded',function(){var i=document.createElement("iframe");var e=document.getElementById("datawrapper-YaQ3u");var t=e.dataset.iframeTitle||'Interactive graphic';i.setAttribute("src",e.dataset.iframe);i.setAttribute("title",t);i.setAttribute("frameborder","0");i.setAttribute("scrolling","no");i.setAttribute("aria-label",e.dataset.iframeFallbackAlt||t);i.setAttribute("title",t);i.setAttribute("height","400");i.setAttribute("id","datawrapper-chart-YaQ3u");i.style.minWidth="100%";i.style.border="none";e.appendChild(i)})}()</script>
</div>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YhwQeWE-QEv2dqotdTSs5nZdl_0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25257593/YaQ3u_economic_optimism_is_on_the_rise.png">
</figure>
<p id="fmIHz3">Here are some other facts that even a very good economy cannot seem to wipe away: More than <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf">6 million</a> Americans are unemployed; <a href="https://blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2023/08/03/7434/#:~:text=7%25%20or%2025.3%20million%20Americans,the%20same%20period%20in%202022.">25.3 million</a> Americans lacked health insurance in the first quarter of 2023 (which is actually a record low); and more than 650,000 Americans <a href="https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-AHAR-Part-1.pdf">experienced homelessness</a> in 2023. And more than 40 million Americans, or 12.4 percent of the population, <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-280.html">lived in poverty</a> in 2022, and that’s according to a poverty line that just about everyone agrees is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/16/official-us-poverty-rate-is-based-hopelessly-out-of-date-metric/">ridiculously outdated and low</a>. Not captured in those statistics are <a href="https://www.policylink.org/resources-tools/100-million#:~:text=Overview,emergency%20expense%20can%20be%20insurmountable.">tens of millions</a> of Americans who are living too close to economic deprivation for comfort. </p>
<p id="XwBa2Q">I repeat: The economy <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/us-economy-labor-market-inflation-housing/674790/">is good</a>, and full of things to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/us-median-rents-fall-for-eighth-month-on-boom-in-new-apartments?sref=R8NfLgwS">celebrate</a>. But a good economy and tight labor markets still won’t give us freedom from poverty, homelessness, or insecurity. To achieve those goals, progressives have long advocated for strong direct government action. “There’s this missing economic history around the very idea of freedom,” said economist Mark Paul, author of <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo195791875.html"><em>The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights</em></a><em>.</em> “We’ve had this long struggle around fighting for economic security, or economic rights, here in the US.” </p>
<p id="4NMEBl">One way to understand what’s still wrong with the economy is to probe the history of one of its unrealized ambitions: an economic bill of rights. </p>
<h3 id="Kx11f0">President Roosevelt proposed an economic bill of rights in 1944</h3>
<p id="ANj0iF">“The one supreme objective for the future … can be summed up in one word: security,” announced President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1944 state of the union <a href="https://www.fdrlibrary.org/address-text">address</a>. “And that means not only physical security … It means also economic security.” </p>
<p id="mGzHYd">Roosevelt went on to propose a second bill of rights — this one economic — that would enshrine every American’s entitlement to the basics, such as housing, health care, education, and welfare. He’d already made big strides in that direction, however piecemeal, including the 1935 <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/history/fdrsignstate.html">Social Security Act</a> that created Social Security as well as unemployment and welfare benefits. But Roosevelt died in office just over a year after his 1944 speech, leaving his vision for an economic bill of rights unfulfilled. </p>
<p id="O1UKUX">Even before his death, however, Roosevelt had already <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/free-time">withdrawn his support for</a> <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2023/10/10/23895776/four-day-workweek-leisure-progress-labor-economy-utopia-capitalism-burnout-worker-satisfaction">reducing the work week</a>, instead focusing on full-time employment for all with rising wages. That shift helped cement the framework we still use today to evaluate what makes a “good economy,” which boils down to improvements in the unemployment rate, wages, GDP, and inflation.</p>
<p id="3xWjtq">Decades after Roosevelt, the civil rights movement picked up the idea of economic rights. In a 1967 <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/where-do-we-go-here">address</a>, Martin Luther King Jr. described the bond between civil and economic rights. “No matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty,” he said. The solution embraced by the movement was a 1966 proposal drafted by the activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin: <a href="https://www.prrac.org/pdf/FreedomBudget.pdf"><em>A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans</em></a>. </p>
<p id="YqpStH">The Freedom Budget was a revival of Roosevelt’s economic bill of rights, outlining seven core objectives that covered most of the same terrain, with additional emphasis on reducing pollution, to be achieved within 10 years. By the end of his life, such a program had become a core priority for King — his last written work before his assassination in 1968 was the posthumously published “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/04/martin-luther-king-jr--economic-bill-of-rights">We Need an Economic Bill of Rights</a>.”</p>
<p id="GxbzEg">But the economy was already heading in a much different direction. The idea for an economic bill of rights faded as economic policy entered its <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/the-rise-and-fall-of-neoliberalism">neoliberal period</a> in the 1970s. Rather than enshrining access to basic needs and economic rights for all, free markets and full-time employment were touted as the road to achieving economic security. </p>
<p id="ydAUzX">Now, half a century later, the economic consensus is shifting yet again.</p>
<h3 id="LWHtLz">Economic rights, today</h3>
<p id="JnhnOz">From Oxford’s <a href="https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/videos/the-death-of-neoliberalism">Institute for New Economic Thinking</a> to the conservative think tank <a href="https://americancompass.org/2020-founders-letter/">American Compass</a>, a bipartisan slate of organizations have been <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/neoliberalism-is-dying-now-we-must-replace-it/">announcing</a> the end of neoliberalism for years now. But no one is really sure what comes next.</p>
<p id="kS6ImF">The president’s “Bidenomics” plans do suggest a new direction, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/28/bidenomics-is-working-the-presidents-plan-grows-the-economy-from-the-middle-out-and-bottom-up-not-the-top-down/">embracing</a> the pillars of public investment, empowering workers, and promoting competition. But a <a href="https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/sea-change/">recent report</a> from the progressive Roosevelt Institute argued that “these pillars will be insufficient to move us toward a truly progressive, post-neoliberal economy.” Securing that transition, it asserts, would benefit from “direct public provision” of goods and services, like health care, rather than relying on stimulating market mechanisms with tax credits. In addition, the authors call for more progressive taxation, and more democratic governance structures that can tilt the economy’s direction <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/bartlett_public_purpose/files/mazzucato_m._2023._governing_the_economics_of_the_common_good_from_correcting_market_failures_to_shaping_collective_goals.pdf">toward the public good</a>.</p>
<p id="YKftaf">Roosevelt’s vision of economic security for all could help bridge the gap between Bidenomics and progressive proposals. The idea has already been seeing a revival: When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced their <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text">Green New Deal</a> in 2019, they included economic rights, stating that achieving the legislation’s goals would require providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care, a job guarantee, housing, economic security, clean water and air, and healthy and affordable food. </p>
<p id="Y5P1tv">A few months later, Bernie Sanders invoked Roosevelt’s speech directly in one of his own, calling for a 21st-century economic bill of rights. “We must take the next step forward and guarantee every man, woman, and child in our country basic economic rights,” he <a href="https://youtu.be/nbN9OD83f5I?si=x9AFpylEbxQ22POq&t=1534">said</a>.</p>
<p id="AGNSw0">But the clearest articulation yet is in Mark Paul’s book, which, after naming what might be included in an economic bill of rights — including the rights to work, housing, education, health care, basic income and banking, and a healthy environment — devotes a chapter to each on the question of “How?”</p>
<h3 id="icavkK">The path to a fairer economy</h3>
<p id="J51Z79">Some of these goals could be implemented as a single policy. Medicare-for-all bills, which would effectively create a right to health care, are already plentiful thanks to being <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18103087/medicare-for-all-explained-single-payer-health-care-sanders-jayapal">a spotlight issue</a> in the 2020 Democratic primary. <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/10/13/23914745/basic-income-radical-economy-poverty-capitalism-taxes">Basic income policies</a> could also help establish the right to a guaranteed minimum income. </p>
<p id="i2aHBh">Other goals lack a single flagship policy. Paul explains that the right to a healthy environment, for example, depends on the trio of green investment, smart regulations, and carbon pricing. Or consider the task of guaranteeing housing for all, which Paul argues needs six separate policies. Of the six, he emphasizes a huge, green buildout of social housing — similar to what exists in Vienna, where social housing has created <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-housing.html">something of a “renters’ utopia</a>” — and rent control. </p>
<p id="cR7m4V">“Progressives do not have the power — at least not yet — to win an economic bill of rights,” he concedes. “To see poverty eradicated, progressives will have to continue pressing their case — via mass movements and grassroots organizing, over the dinner table, and in the public sphere.” </p>
<p id="VGE7Gc">But the history of the pursuit of economic rights suggests that what may look like bold progressive demands today are, in fact, quite old. And what’s more, they’re deeply rooted in what historian Eric Foner has <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393319620">called</a> the “master narrative” of American history: freedom. “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” Roosevelt said in his 1944 address. “Necessitous men are not free men.” </p>
<p id="1l3OoP"><em>A version of this story originally appeared in the </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect"><em><strong>Future Perfect</strong></em></a><em> newsletter. </em><a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup"><em><strong>Sign up here!</strong></em></a></p>
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/1/31/24055562/economy-bill-of-rights-vibecession-progressives-freedom-fdrOshan Jarow2023-12-15T07:00:00-05:002023-12-15T07:00:00-05:00A new approach to measuring what’s going on in our minds
<figure>
<img alt="Santiago Ramón y Cajal working at his desk with a microscope and medicinal bottles, writing on paper." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TNK1daUQuXbAdowaleGb0vQaPFY=/22x0:5295x3955/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72965618/GettyImages_152195326.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Santiago Ramón y Cajal, neuroscientist and artist who shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in medicine with Camillo Golgi. | Universal Images Group via Getty</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Quantifying the “complexity” of consciousness can tell us how rich our experiences are.</p> <p id="TQOdgi">Sometimes when I’m looking out across the northern meadow of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, or even the concrete parking lot outside my office window, I wonder if someone like Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson could have taken in the same view and seen <em>more. </em>I don’t mean making out blurry details or more objects in the scene. But through the lens of their minds, could they encounter the exact same world as me and yet have a richer experience?</p>
<p id="ojicVK">One way to answer that question, at least as a thought experiment, could be to compare the electrical activity inside our brains while gazing out upon the same scene, and running some statistical analysis designed to actually tell us whose brain activity indicates more richness. But that’s just a loopy thought experiment, right? </p>
<p id="UnHFsf">Not exactly. One of the newest frontiers in the science of the mind is the <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.05.570101v1">attempt to measure</a> consciousness’s “complexity,” or how diverse and integrated electrical activity is across the brain. Philosophers and neuroscientists alike <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10325487/">hypothesize</a> that more complex brain activity signifies “richer” experiences.</p>
<p id="wUwIJX">The idea of measuring complexity stems from <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-claude-shannons-information-theory-invented-the-future-20201222/">information theory</a> — a mathematical approach to understanding how information is stored, communicated, and processed —which doesn’t provide wonderfully intuitive examples of what more richness actually means. Unless you’re a computer person. “If you tried to upload the content onto a hard drive, it’s how much memory you’d need to be able to store the experience you’re having,” <a href="https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p156234-adam-barrett">Adam Barrett</a>, a professor of machine learning and data science at the University of Sussex, told me. </p>
<p id="NIQiHA">Another approach to understanding richness is to look at how it changes in different mental states. Recent studies have found that <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-04474-1">measures of complexity</a> are lowest in patients under general anesthesia, higher in ordinary wakefulness, and higher still in psychedelic trips, which can notoriously turn even the most mundane experiences — say, my view of the parking lot outside my office window — into <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23972716/psychedelics-meaning-science-psychedelic-mushrooms-ketamine-psilocybin-mysticism">profound and meaningful encounters</a>. </p>
<p id="3K34js">Increasing richness isn’t just like cranking up the color saturation of a picture or getting a bigger hard drive. It seems to imply an increase in the depth of how we experience the world. Complexity is what you see in the equations, richness is what that feels like in the mind.</p>
<p id="00gM5e">Although measuring brain complexity is still in relative infancy, the nascent ability to gauge something like richness is a pretty incredible development — not only for <a href="https://www.vox.com/neuroscience" data-source="encore">neuroscience</a> but for how we think about well-being more broadly. With innovations like these, we can go beyond the <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23862090/subjective-wellbeing-wealth-philanthropy-gdp-happiness-givewell">blurry question of happiness</a>, which doesn’t have an accepted neurological measure that can translate across social and cultural differences, and ask more targeted questions, like whether our experiences are richer. As these approaches mature, scientists might develop a deeper understanding of all the different, tractable ways that consciousness can change for the better. </p>
<h3 id="2bavvt">From staining neurons black to measuring the brain’s complexity</h3>
<p id="spZBZp">In the 1800s, scientists studying the mind didn’t yet know what a neuron looked like, let alone how they worked. That breakthrough came in <a href="https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/neuron-doctrine-1860-1895">1873</a>, when physician Camillo Golgi discovered that by immersing brain tissue in a potassium dichromate solution and then dunking it in a bath of silver nitrate, the neuron would turn black, making it visible under a microscope.</p>
<p id="N5rHCD">The Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, when observing newly stained neural tissue in 1887, discovered that contrary to the reigning reticular theory (which held that the nervous system was a continuous network of cells smushed together with no gaps), neurons were indeed separated from each other. Sprouting from the neuron’s edges were spindly little axons and dendrites, but they didn’t seem to create permanent bridges between the neurons, leading him to conclude that communication between neurons likely wasn’t all that important in explaining their main functions. Instead, individual neurons were taken as the nervous system’s fundamental units, or building blocks, an idea that solidified into “the <a href="https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/neuron-doctrine-1860-1895">neuron doctrine</a>.” </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="An ink illustration of a root- or vein-like structure of connected tendrils. spreading upward." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/grgMXPbGUE9GaAt3GLxonLSRuyQ=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25162910/GettyImages_1404548943.jpg">
<cite>VW Pics/Universal Images Group</cite>
<figcaption>Neuroscientist and artist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s drawings of neuroanatomy were collected into a book, <em>The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ram</em>ó<em>n y Cajal.</em>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="MpuP7i">Through the 20th century, developments in electrophysiology led to a sharper understanding of the connections between neurons, and the importance of the little electrical impulses that travel across synapses. But the basic perspective of focusing on neurons themselves, rather than the holistic electrical processes that they’re conduits for, remained dominant. This approach has gotten quite good at breaking the brain into distinct parts and explaining how they contribute to specific functions, like vision or controlling your fingers. The downside is that many theories of consciousness struggle with what’s called the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/">binding problem</a> — the question of how all the separate parts fit back together to generate a unified conscious experience. </p>
<p id="2lnBUs">Recent improvements to electroencephalography (EEG, those skull caps with a bunch of electrodes that measure the brain’s electrical activity) made it possible to look deeper inside the workings of the brain, opening the way for neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and biologist Gerald Edelman’s 1998 paper: <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.282.5395.1846">Consciousness and Complexity</a>.</p>
<p id="2vizX9">Their publication was the first to propose a direct measure of the complexity of brain activity, an idea that matured into <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44">Integrated Information Theory</a>, or IIT. According to IIT, consciousness arises where the underlying neural activity is both “integrated” and “differentiated.” Integration refers, roughly, to how synchronized electrical activity is across the brain. Differentiation is the diversity of that activity. You can think of them in terms of weaving a tapestry. Integration is how many different threads are woven in, while differentiation is the variety of colors used. Together, these two determine the complexity of a given state of consciousness. That, in turn, approximates its richness. </p>
<p id="1qOHaw">In theory, anyway. At the time, the idea ran ahead of technology. “It became apparent over the years that it’s quite hard to measure those two things simultaneously,” Barrett told me, “and it turned out that the differentiation aspect alone, without thinking about integration, did quite well at being able to distinguish between different states of consciousness.”</p>
<p id="iMsZ7k">That said, our measures are improving quickly. Barrett co-authored <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.05.570101v1">a study</a> released as a pre-print last week that compared a new measure of complexity — what they call “statistical complexity” — to Lempel-Ziv complexity, which was first <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1055501">proposed</a> in 1976 and is still the field’s leading measure. While Lempel-Ziv captures only the differentiation aspect, their findings suggest that the new measure successfully brings integration back into the mix, affording greater precision. </p>
<p id="Qtp7Nr">As progress continues, IIT may creep closer to its grand ambition: constructing an equation that can measure and describe the richness of conscious experience in any physical system, whether human, animal, or machine. “That fails at the moment,” said Barrett, “but I’m very interested in seeing if we could come up with a plausible equation. That’s sort of the holy grail for me.”</p>
<h3 id="VbRIOy">So what do we make of richness?</h3>
<p id="niyx1w">If a plausible equation isn’t the kind of thing that occupies your dreams, a concrete measure for something like richness could bring some sorely needed innovation to our ideas around <a href="https://www.vox.com/mental-health" data-source="encore">mental health</a>. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM-5) contains <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810039/#B27-behavsci-06-00005">298</a> diagnoses to help clinicians classify just about every shade of mental disorder they might encounter. When it comes to the positive dimensions of mental health, however, our language is comparatively sparse. </p>
<p id="m5w5kP">“Happiness” is a very nebulous idea, especially when you <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23862090/subjective-wellbeing-wealth-philanthropy-gdp-happiness-givewell">try to measure it</a>. We in the West, unlike the Buddhists, have not developed rigorous taxonomies for all the rungs on the mental ladder — from our default modes to the ecstasies, grades of zest, or senses of “<a href="https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/how-i-attained-persistent-self-love#footnote-1-47192004">deep okayness</a>” that lurk in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23836358/meditation-mindfulness-enlightenment-science-contemplative-buddhism-spirituality">upper realms of well-being</a> (reportedly, anyway). If we can quantify the richness of our minds, maybe it could jumpstart the process of finding other tractable dimensions we can add to our conceptions of well-being. </p>
<p id="pSuR36">Of course, quantifying something important always <a href="https://philpapers.org/go.pl?aid=NGUVCH">carries risks</a> (à la <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095859655">Goodhart’s law</a>: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure), and being wise about how to make sense of these new ideas will be bumpy. It’s tempting, for example, to simply think that when it comes to richness, more is always better. But researchers, like <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect" data-source="encore">Future Perfect</a> 50 honoree <a href="https://www.vox.com/23896208/robin-carhart-harris-professor-neurology-psychedelics-ucsf-future-perfect-50-2023">Robin Carhart-Harris</a>, believe that the brain evolved to hold levels of complexity below a threshold called “criticality,” rather than just maximize it.</p>
<p id="k5jnAv">In information theory, criticality marks the optimal balance of complexity for processing information, a perch between order and chaos. Or in terms of the mind, between the rigidity and flexibility of mental habits. Too much complex activity pushes the brain over the edge. That might offer a temporarily exciting state of mind (as psychedelic trips can), but in terms of efficiently processing information to be successful creatures in the world, a never-ending acid trip is probably not the ideal state. “A brain at criticality may be a ‘happier’ brain,” Carhart-Harris <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020/full#h12">writes</a>.</p>
<p id="jvP96B">If criticality means greater well-being calls for a particular balance of complexity, not just as much as we can muster, that doesn’t mean that we’re all, by default, naturally tuned to that balance. As our measures and technologies improve, maybe we’ll get better at identifying when someone’s ordinary brain activity is below criticality, and a burst of complexity could serve as a boon to well-being. Maybe we’ll develop new ways of growing richer, not just in our bank accounts (though that may help), but in the ways that we experience the world.</p>
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/12/15/24001424/consciousness-complexity-neuroscience-mental-healthOshan Jarow2023-12-01T07:00:00-05:002023-12-01T07:00:00-05:00Why psychedelics produce some of the most meaningful experiences in people’s lives
<figure>
<img alt="A portrait of two overlapping outlines of human heads, colored in with hues of purple and pink, with an open door in the middle leading into floating planets and larger galactic vistas." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_82lMfXmLgIVzivUbHiXXW6acH0=/771x0:7439x5001/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72919724/GettyImages_1475150659.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Everything seems profound on psychedelics. Scientists are starting to ask why.</p> <p id="3A4eS4">In 1882, sitting at his desk with a pen and open notebook, Harvard philosopher William James inhaled a thick cloud of nitrous oxide — better known today as laughing gas, the stuff your dentist uses to numb your mouth. </p>
<p id="KPylIj">As the fumes took effect, they bathed his mind in what <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ehn/release/nitrous.html">James called</a> “the tremendously exciting sense of ... metaphysical illumination.” What stuck with him after the drugs wore off, though, was not any particular thought — which he soberly conceded as “meaningless drivel” — but the intense feeling of meaning they came packaged in. He called that sense of significance the “<a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/12/1058">noetic quality</a>” of mystical experience.</p>
<p id="vPfi6b">The noetic quality describes a sensation of encountering revelations of the highest order, where the secret workings of your mind and the world are unfolded before you. But as James also described, these encounters have an elusive quality that makes them difficult to communicate. And through the 20th century, mainstream <a href="https://www.vox.com/psychology" data-source="encore">psychology</a> <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695119874009#body-ref-bibr30-0952695119874009-1">moved away</a> from nebulous ideas like noeticism and meaning, in favor of variables that were more objective and observable. </p>
<p id="CS9Z4t">Until 2006, when <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-006-0457-5">a landmark paper</a> led by the late Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University signaled that research on the profound sense of meaning that accompanies noetic insights was making its way back into mainstream psychology — this time by way of psychedelic drugs.</p>
<p id="PiOchK">Griffiths’s study found that, two months after taking <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/10/9/21506664/psychedelics-mental-health-depression-ptsd-psilocybin-mdma">psilocybin</a>, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, two-thirds out of 30 volunteers rated their subsequent trip as one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives. Further studies that ask the same question have pushed that number to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5641975/">as high as 87 percent</a> of participants, <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00194#">confirming the curious fact</a> that a group of molecules can reliably deliver on demand what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Man_s_Search_for_Meaning/F-Q_xGjWBi8C?hl=en">called</a> <a href="https://ia601809.us.archive.org/19/items/mans-search-for-meaning_202104/Man%27s%20Search%20For%20Meaning.pdf"></a>the central human motivation: the search for meaning.</p>
<p id="AFKcZO">Despite the past two decades of research documenting the tight relationship between psychedelics and meaningful experiences, we still know surprisingly little about what’s actually going on in the brain when psychedelic-assisted meaning sets in. In <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1125780/full">a paper</a> published earlier this year in the journal <em>Frontiers in Psychology,</em> psychologists Patric Plesa and Rotem Petranker pointed out that even “the best minds in psychedelic research … consistently report that psychedelics enhance a subjective sense of meaning without an explicit theory of meaning.” It’s strange that we lack a mechanical understanding of something so central to a life well lived. If we understood more about the neural mechanics of these bursts of revelation, could we learn anything about how to coax them into our sober lives more often?</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="P47ABt"><q>On psychedelics ... it seems like it’s not particular things that are imbued with meaning, but the whole of perception itself</q></aside></div>
<p id="pIbxmd">The project of developing a mechanical theory of meaning is beginning to take shape. In the past, scientists couldn’t readily observe a nervous system feeling deep meaning. People aren’t generally hooked up to <a href="https://www.vox.com/neuroscience" data-source="encore">neuroscience</a> gizmos when the noetic experience strikes. But the return of clinical research into psychedelics is making it easier to provoke these elusive states in the lab, and over the past few years, scientists have begun to develop hypotheses on what these drugs could teach us about the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2451902223002410?via%3Dihub">neurobiology of meaningfulness</a>.</p>
<p id="bzV1E1">However, confining the study of psychedelic experience to neurobiology would be repeating an all-too-common oversight in neuroscience of separating the mind from its social and cultural environments, shrinking the study of psychedelic meaningfulness to only what’s happening inside the skull. Subjective experiences — meaningful or otherwise — are shaped by their wider contexts, an insight around which many Indigenous cultures have designed their <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.651037/full">psychedelic rituals</a>.</p>
<p id="mQBZKY">And even if we mapped out the precise brain regions that are active during psychedelic boosts of meaning — so what? It’s unclear how much pinpointing the neural correlates of psychedelic meaning will contribute to what matters: learning how to craft more meaningful lives, which is the broader project that has gripped humans since a handful of great religions and philosophies <a href="https://www.noemamag.com/religious-imagination-as-the-future-unfolds/">emerged over 2 millennia ago</a> <a href="https://www.noemamag.com/religious-imagination-as-the-future-unfolds/"></a>to grapple with questions of meaning, purpose, and significance. </p>
<p id="ue1FRO">You can’t just trip your way to a meaningful life; that requires more than the mere accumulation of disparate meaningful experiences. In addition, experts<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439760.2015.1137623"> suggest</a> that you need a wider architecture, a through line of goals and values that provides coherence and purpose to the narrative arc of your life on the whole. But studying psychedelics to learn more about the biological underpinnings of meaningful experiences could hold any number of fascinating lessons. Instead of providing conclusive answers, psychedelic meaning may reveal profound questions that change the course of action we take in the world.</p>
<p id="IWEWdc">“Meaning,” <a href="https://www.sts-biu.org/ido-hartogsohn">Ido Hartogsohn</a>, author of <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539142/american-trip/"><em>American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century</em></a>, told me, “is valuable not only for therapeutic breakthroughs. It’s helpful wherever we are looking for a way out of our ordinary ways of perceiving and thinking, since it helps us detect hidden paths and possibilities.” Put differently, meaningful experiences, like well-crafted psychedelic trips, can expand our search for how to live meaningful lives. </p>
<h3 id="cxO36u">Serotonin receptors are gateways to psychedelic meaning</h3>
<p id="PmiNab">Any explanation of how psychedelics are so good at conjuring meaning should include the brain’s serotonin 2A receptors, small proteins dusted across your central nervous system that play a vital <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2015.00225/full">role</a> in cognition. Each contains a small pocket, like a landing zone, where molecules of the correct shape can dock. Per the name, these receptors typically receive serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in a wide <a href="https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22572-serotonin">range of functions</a>, from mood to sleep. But psychedelics mimic the structure of serotonin, granting them access to the receptor.</p>
<p id="sb9BXY">In 2017, <a href="https://www.uzh.ch/cmsssl/dppp/en/cfpr/researchgroups/external-research-groups/pharmaco-neuroimaging-and-cognitive-emotional-processing/team/preller.html">Katrin Preller</a>, a neuropsychologist at the University of Zurich, <a href="https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)31510-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS096098221631510X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue">published the first experiment</a> to test the specific contribution of these serotonin receptors in the subjective effects of LSD in humans. Participants listened to three kinds of music: music that they found meaningless (often free jazz — no disrespect, Sun Ra fans), music they had preselected as highly meaningful to them, and “neutral” music that was similar to their preselected songs but that they had never heard before.</p>
<p id="q4TNPh">They listened to each set on three different occasions: once while sober; once on LSD, which, they reported, made all three pieces of music more meaningful; and once on a combination of LSD and ketanserin, a drug that blocks the serotonin receptor so psychedelic molecules can’t dock there. The idea was to see if LSD still produces elevated levels of meaningfulness even when it can’t interact with the serotonin receptor.</p>
<p id="FgBYdk">The result? Blocking that receptor completely canceled the subjective effects of LSD; participants might as well have been sober. Preller’s findings helped establish that these receptors are critical to the noetic quality. No receptor activation, no extra meaningfulness. </p>
<p id="MTihDX">But explaining psychedelic meaningfulness via the activation of serotonin receptors is like saying that turning the keys in the ignition explains what makes a car go. Once the receptors are activated, there’s a whole lot of under-the-hood activity that’s important to understand the mechanisms of meaning.</p>
<h3 id="RbTu9m">The brain network that matters</h3>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Two circles comparing brain connections from a placebo condition (left circle) to being on psychedelics (right circle), the latter showing significantly more connections." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/L6WW1ws1BluRvUDC5zrnYRqHDxw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25106353/brain_network_large_1.jpg">
<cite><a class="ql-link" href="http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/101/20140873" target="_blank"><em>Journal of the Royal Society Interface</em></a></cite>
<figcaption>From a 2014 study in the <a class="ql-link" href="http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/101/20140873" target="_blank"><em>Journal of the Royal Society Interface</em></a> comparing a brain on a placebo (left) to one on psilocybin.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="NoL2Mk">In psychosis research, when people find meaning in what we believe is meaningless happenstance, experts call it “<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34253268/">aberrant salience</a>.” It’s a concept that may also <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-psychedelic-science-teach-psychiatry-about-psychosis">shed some light</a> on the psychedelic experience.</p>
<p id="cBBwGS">Like in bouts of psychosis, psychedelic-induced meaning can be found <em>everywhere and anywhere. </em>It’s no longer dependent on an external trigger that the sober mind would also find meaningful, like the birth of a child. On psychedelics, I could stare at tree bark for three hours, or dirt, or the back of my eyelids, and feel that I’ve discovered the hidden order behind all phenomena. It seems like it’s not particular things that are imbued with meaning, but the whole of perception itself.</p>
<p id="U9uUm1">“I might call it a misattribution of meaning, where everything gets imbued with a sense of meaningfulness,” <a href="https://dellmed.utexas.edu/directory/manoj-doss">Manoj Doss</a>, a research fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “A lot of times I can attribute the noeticism I’m getting to a memory. We’re usually good at aiming these feelings of knowing. But sometimes they get cut loose. Under psychedelics, I think there’s this misattribution process, where the prefrontal cortex is sending that off in all kinds of different directions where they don’t make sense.”</p>
<p id="RSg9ls">The psychedelic misattribution of meaning can lead to finding meaning where we ordinarily wouldn’t — like in tree bark. And that noetic feeling can make <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgkkn/the-insights-psychedelics-give-you-arent-always-true">objectively false insights feel true</a>, as researchers are cleverly <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/97gjw/">finding in the lab</a>. The upshot is clear enough: Psychedelic insights should be treated with a good dose of critical reflection.</p>
<p id="bZM9X5">Still, looking past whether psychedelic insights are true or not, there remains the question of why they feel so meaningful in the first place. While we don’t know of a brain network specifically responsible for meaningfulness, we do have one that’s pretty close: the <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/inside-the-brains-salience-network-the-will-to-press-on-20131205/">salience network</a>, which helps prepare us to take action by prioritizing what stimuli from our environments stick out to us. In other words, the salience network helps determine what matters to us in our perceptual landscape among the flood of information we take in at any given moment.</p>
<p id="XuZ0YT">As Plesa and Petranker <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1125780/full">explain in their <em>Frontiers </em>study on meaning</a>, we know that psychedelics <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269881120909409">recalibrate</a> the salience network, altering what appears important to us. In other research on altered states of consciousness, like <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23836358/meditation-mindfulness-enlightenment-science-contemplative-buddhism-spirituality">mindfulness meditation</a>, shifts in the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342100261X">salience landscape</a> are thought to be one of the <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-019-01258-9">main mechanisms</a> <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10445489/#ref56"></a>behind increasing a sense of meaning in life.</p>
<p id="YYkB9f">It’s possible that a riled-up salience network could explain why anything that falls into psychedelic perception may seem to hold the secrets of the cosmos. Activating the 2A receptor and disrupting the salience network could make everything seem to matter more, functioning as the neural key that opens what the philosopher Aldous Huxley called “<a href="https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerception.pdf">the doors of perception</a>.” But Plesa and Petranker argue that the picture is incomplete. There’s another step to get us from the brain mechanisms of mattering to the feeling of meaning: connection.</p>
<h3 id="yjAw4a">To get meaning from salience, you need connections</h3>
<p id="GHW5Fo">Psychedelics are known to disrupt another major cluster of brain regions: the default-mode network (DMN). The DMN is associated with self-referential thought, like daydreaming about the moment you win the Olympics, or recalling autobiographical memories, like winning the Olympics if you’d actually won the Olympics. It’s the brain’s hub for the narrative self.</p>
<p id="yXw2Pn">Psychedelics <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/26/3/155/6770039?login=false">reduce activity within the DMN</a>, while <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/26/3/155/6770039?login=false">increasing activity</a> between the DMN and other brain regions. <a href="https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/c.timmermann-slater15">Christopher Timmermann</a>, a neuroscientist who leads the DMT Research Group at Imperial College London (DMT is a psychedelic drug, like LSD or psilocybin), explained to me earlier this year that “parts of the DMN become hyper-connected with the rest of the brain.”</p>
<p id="hSFmyn">During interviews after their <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/169525/psychonauts-training-psychedelics-dmt-extended-state">DMT trips</a>, he said that participants report things like “I was observing the experience, but at the same time I <em>was</em> everything. I <em>was</em> every possible concept in my mind.” Trippy, yes, but it “resonates with this idea of hyperconnectivity,” he said. “These resources we have when it comes to the sense of self become more promiscuous, and become attached to larger systems of meaning.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="ti4sxW"><q>If connection is a crucial part of psychedelic meaning, we may want to reconsider cutting it out of the formal containers in which we legalize access</q></aside></div>
<p id="8xAJY8">Other ways to describe what that hyperconnectivity feels like could be the “<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28795211/">connectedness</a>,” “unity,” or “oceanic boundlessness” that <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.917199/full">often accompanies</a> high-dose psychedelic experiences. Plesa and Petranker believe that the synergy between changes in our salience network and the increased connectedness of DMN disruption could offer the formula that underlies meaning, or an explanation of what happens in the engine after you turn the key.</p>
<p id="kaEg0O">This is where, as they acknowledge, the car metaphor breaks down. The mind is <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1030861/is-human-brain-computer/">not a machine</a>. No explanation of conscious states should ignore the social, cultural, and political threads that weave into the tapestry of experience. “It may be that a larger societal prism is required to reconstruct these parts into a coherent narrative,” they write, one that widens its view to include not only the brain but the environments they’re enmeshed in.</p>
<h3 id="m0UaTD">Don’t forget the set, setting, and matrix of psychedelic meaning</h3>
<p id="2uLYBM">If you were to jet over to Oregon, the first state to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/us/oregon-psychedelic-mushrooms.html#:~:text=Far%20from%20the%20days%20of,guidance%20of%20a%20certified%20facilitator.">offer legal psychedelic services</a>, the experience would be very different from most Indigenous cultures’ formats of psychedelic use, like the <a href="https://www.santodaime.org/site-antigo/doctrine/whatis.htm">Santo Daime</a>, a Brazilian religion founded in 1930 that uses ayahuasca (a psychoactive brew containing DMT) as a sacrament in psychedelic rituals.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/3tsnvwCh-Ac2m8xJtfc4c2sR5kE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25106198/GettyImages_1298456754.jpg">
<cite>Giulio Paletta/Universal Images</cite>
<figcaption>A Santo Daime ayahuasca ceremony, which can last up to 12 hours.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="7Pl3jL">In Oregon’s nascent regulated-use model, you have a preparatory session or two, trip alone (though under the supervision of a facilitator) and indoors, to a playlist while mostly sitting still or lying down, wearing eyeshades. In <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.651037/full">the Santo Daime tradition</a>, you begin with days of diets, abstinence, and prayer before you touch the drug. The ceremony itself is a group affair with sacred hymns and dancing performed throughout, and can go for eight hours or more. </p>
<p id="wGZ52E">There’s a huge variety of practices across Indigenous cultures, but each has a very particular “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050324516683325">set and setting</a>” that frames the experience. Even in the 1960s American go-round with psychedelics, set and setting were <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Psychedelic_Experience/44dvPwAACAAJ?hl=en">understood</a> <a href="https://www.leathersmithe.com/politicshandcraftsenvironme/the-psychedelic-experience.pdf"></a>as primary parts of the equation for what kind of experience one has. </p>
<aside id="6oslpd"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The psychedelic renaissance is at risk of missing the bigger picture ","url":"https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23721486/ketamine-dmt-lsd-psychedelics-magic-mushrooms-legalization-recreation-psilocybin"}]}'></div></aside><p id="y7euHr">Even set and setting fail to offer a full account of all the factors that shape psychedelic experiences. The American psychologist Betty Eisner suggested that we think in terms of set, setting, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.1997.10400190">and matrix</a>. The matrix accounts for the everyday environments we’ve grown up in — how our families, societies, economies, and culture have <a href="https://www.musingmind.org/podcasts/barnaby-raine">shaped our ideas</a>, expectations, and ways of thinking, all of which play a role in directing psychedelic experience. </p>
<p id="UQNQNr">By fixing its gaze upon the brain alone, the neuroscience of psychedelic meaning can miss how these wider influences, from a room’s ambiance to a culture’s ideals, can play a direct role in the meaning-making process. “There is always hidden machinery and circuitry that is going on, and we’re not describing it,” the neuropharmacologist Suresh Muthukumaraswamy <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/psychedelics-study-design-research-rcts/">told Wired’s Shayla Love</a>. “There are all these hidden interactions that, frankly, we’re brushing under the carpet.” </p>
<p id="B5e2so">Plesa and Petranker see the past few decades of Western industrialized societies as a troubling context for psychedelic experience — and not just because the prohibition has left us without clear ways of supporting those who experience <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23954347/psychedelics-bad-trips-ketamine-mdma-psilocybin-lsd-risks">rare but significant adverse effects</a>. They note the long line of philosophers and sociologists who’ve “warned that life in industrialized, technological societies is undergoing a process of impoverishment of meaning,” and the confluence of rising stress, <a href="https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/512618/almost-quarter-world-feels-lonely.aspx">loneliness</a>, and depression together with the decline of civil society — from religions to <a href="https://www.vox.com/a/books-to-read-to-understand-the-world#Bowling-Alone">bowling leagues</a>. </p>
<p id="ohWhD7">No matter how strong a psychedelic trip can be, connection remains a critical aspect of meaning-making. Psychedelics may help us forge new connections more easily — but the rest, like designing a society that does the same, is up to us. </p>
<h3 id="598cLK">Stockpiling psychedelic meaning won’t make for a meaningful life</h3>
<p id="pWYwfg">Let’s say scientists succeeded in mapping the precise neural correlates of psychedelic meaning, and went further, mapping all possible experiences, as the philosopher Robert Nozick <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/robert-nozick/anarchy-state-and-utopia/9780465051007/?lens=basic-books">imagines</a> <a href="https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/anarchy-state-utopia.pdf"></a>in his thought experiment known as the “experience machine.” </p>
<p id="sXGZMl">The machine could make you feel anything you want. All the while, however, you’d be floating in a womb-like tank with electrodes stuck to your skull, engineering your experience through targeted bursts of electricity.</p>
<p id="HXs4aI">The experience machine could make you feel untold quantities of meaning — a seamless cascade of one meaningful experience after another. While plugged into the machine, you wouldn’t know it. But every two years or so, Nozick imagined, you’d come out, like briefly waking from a dream, to select your next two years of experiences from a menu.</p>
<p id="kwM1Oe">He saw three main reasons that would drive people to generally choose against plugging into the machine. For one, “we want to <em>do</em> certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.” Second, we want to <em>be</em> certain kinds of people, not just stagnant bodies floating in a tank. “Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob,” as he put it. And third, the machine limits our experiences only to what human minds, with some added electrical stimulation, can conjure, closing us off to encounters with deeper or wider realities, whether of the natural world, other people, or extradimensional beings.</p>
<p id="JuUb1g">Whatever the reason, his point is that if you imagine such an experience machine and yet decide you would not want to pass your life plugged into it, you’re proving that something matters to you above and beyond just experience itself. Experience machines are meant as a cautionary tale, and yet already, legal <a href="https://www.curbed.com/2021/12/ketamine-clinic-nyc.html">ketamine clinics are halfway</a> to realizing them. Walk into any of the centers scattered around a place like New York City and you’ll find people floating, womb-like, in zero-gravity recliners, wearing eyeshades and earphones that cut them off from other people and the outside world, a ketamine IV pricked into their arms.</p>
<aside id="69lPHv"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"future_perfect"}'></div></aside><p id="o6OSij">The conclusion that something more than <em>just</em> experience matters applies to how we think about the role of psychedelic-assisted meaning, too. It shows that we want to live in ways that generate meaning, not just pump our brains full of molecules that make all experiences meaningful. Researchers <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439760.2015.1137623">have valiantly tried to pin down</a> the multiplicities of meaning, where in addition to experiences of significance and mattering, things like particular aspirations and values that “direct our efforts toward desired futures” factor in. </p>
<p id="WADfzZ">Working toward particular desired futures calls for taking action in the world, not just modulating brain activity. That means that more skillfully grappling with the crisis of meaning so many of us suffer may call for efforts that change the matrix of everyday life — like, for example, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2023/10/10/23895776/four-day-workweek-leisure-progress-labor-economy-utopia-capitalism-burnout-worker-satisfaction">empowering workers to bargain for shorter work weeks</a>, so that they have more of a say in the kinds of lives they may lead, and through them, the kinds of meaning they generate.</p>
<p id="q7rHGb">To be clear, I think legal access to psychedelic therapy, even within the strictures of a medical model, is good news. But if connection is a crucial part of psychedelic meaning, we may want to <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23721486/ketamine-dmt-lsd-psychedelics-magic-mushrooms-legalization-recreation-psilocybin">reconsider cutting it out of the formal containers in which we legalize access</a>. Focusing only on fostering more connections within the boundaries of a single, atomized brain may undermine the scope of meaning that can be produced.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="A woman rests on a reclining chair. She wears headphones and an eye mask and has a blanket over her lap. The room is dimly lit." data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_TOaNVXjc8eHsPNpfnMcv5-cEks=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25106190/GettyImages_1230122600__1_.jpg">
<cite>Cole Burston/AFP via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>A woman demonstrates what a patient would experience in a therapy room at Field Trip, a psychedelic therapy clinic in Canada, in 2020.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="K5NqrE">One implication could be to introduce <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33150319/">psychedelic group therapy</a> as a standard practice alongside individual sessions. Or to pursue <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3438542">decriminalization</a> efforts together with <a href="https://transformdrugs.org/assets/files/How-to-regulate-psychedelics.pdf">regulated access</a>, allowing communities to decide for themselves how they’d like to structure their experiences. “Group therapy should be the norm because it dovetails with the psychedelic mechanism of action,” Plesa and Petranker <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10445489/#ref56">argue</a>. Allowing for more connectedness — literally, between people — in psychedelic settings could lay the foundation for stronger experiences of meaning, solidarity, and heck, maybe even collective action to emerge.</p>
<p id="zbpUoz">Another implication is to study psychedelic meaning not just as an ingredient toward therapeutic outcomes but as its own variable of interest. While the so-called psychedelic renaissance has mostly been a matter of therapeutic research, the humanities are starting to <a href="https://www.musingmind.org/podcasts/psychedelic-therapy-politics-humanities-renaissance-oliver-davis">formalize their involvement</a>. UC Berkeley’s Center for the Science of Psychedelics and Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center recently <a href="https://psychedelics.berkeley.edu/research-art-history-culture/">announced a joint program</a> to study the “humanistic and societal significance of psychedelics.” Christiana Musk, who directs the <a href="https://www.flourishtrust.org/">trust</a> funding the project, added that the value of psychedelics isn’t “limited to their biological effects” but extends into their deep past, as well as potential future, of “cultural development and meaning-making.”</p>
<p id="vVsyur">Given the centrality of meaning in human life, psychedelics offer an exciting opportunity to ask new questions, or revitalize ancient ones, of one of humanity’s most enduring and alluring dimensions. But no matter how meaningful a trip, we come down from all highs. What remains as the drugs fade is the everyday world, the set, setting, and matrix for ordinary consciousness, the trip that lasts the longest and matters the most.</p>
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23972716/psychedelics-meaning-science-psychedelic-mushrooms-ketamine-psilocybin-mysticismOshan Jarow2023-11-29T06:00:00-05:002023-11-29T06:00:00-05:00Jesse Jenkins is figuring out how to electrify America’s power grid
<figure>
<img alt="Illustrated portrait of Jesse Jenkins." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bf8rvhdYXViAOdZ68lNjAnjcncI=/240x0:1680x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72885553/48_Jesse_Jenkins_Final_Dims.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Lauren Tamaki for Vox</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Reaching net-zero emissions requires a historic overhaul of America’s infrastructure. Jenkins is mapping the way. </p> <p id="0JMpm0"></p>
<p id="lq4Ffp">One thing <a href="https://mae.princeton.edu/people/faculty/jenkins">Jesse Jenkins</a> likes to tell his undergraduate students at Princeton: It took about <a href="https://x.com/JesseJenkins/status/1648718536158904327?s=20">140 years to build</a> America’s current <a href="https://www.vox.com/energy" data-source="encore">power grid</a>.</p>
<p id="ErmG7O">Now, we need to triple the grid’s output and shift electricity from 40 percent carbon-free to 100 percent in the next 30 years to stay on track with the <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/04/20/fact-sheet-president-biden-to-catalyze-global-climate-action-through-the-major-economies-forum-on-energy-and-climate/#:~:text=Putting%20the%20Power%20Sector%20on%20a%20Path%20to%20Net%20Zero%20Emissions&text=President%20Biden%20has%20set%20an,by%20no%20later%20than%202050.">US pledge</a> to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. </p>
<p id="pya39p">As Jenkins <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-jesse-jenkins.html">points out</a>, net-zero is just “the point where we stop digging a deeper hole.” Overhauling the power grid is necessary, but not sufficient to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/faq/faq-chapter-1/#:~:text=The%20first%20instrument%20of%20its,1.5%C2%B0C%20above%20pre%2D">recommends</a>. </p>
<p id="nuvjdO">Jenkins is an assistant professor of engineering at Princeton University, where he leads the <a href="https://acee.princeton.edu/24-7/">ZERO Lab</a> — short for “Zero-carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization” — and is a faculty member of the <a href="https://acee.princeton.edu/">Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment</a>. The ZERO Lab focuses on low-carbon energy modeling to help guide investment and research for new energy technologies, and is behind work like <a href="https://repeatproject.org/">the REPEAT Project</a>, a toolkit that provides ongoing evaluations of federal energy and climate policies, marking the progress (or lack thereof) toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.</p>
<p id="eJxMJr">Jenkins also co-authored the 2022 <a href="https://netzeroamerica.princeton.edu/?explorer=year&state=national&table=2020&limit=200">Net-Zero America Project</a> report, one of the most ambitious and granular guides to how the US could decarbonize the entire economy. </p>
<p id="BLM7uT">The Net-Zero America Project lays out five different pathways — each using distinct but already known technologies, like solar and wind energy, or biomass supply that repurposes some agricultural land for energy crops — to rebuild and decarbonize the power grid. Each scenario turns the knobs a little differently, showing what would happen if we achieve rapid electrification but sluggish renewable energy growth, or slow electrification but a strong shift toward biomass supply.</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><div id="jiwm7f"><div data-anthem-component="aside:12147451"></div></div></div>
<p id="u7jvsz">However we approach it, the task ahead is gargantuan, but Jenkins is digging in. “Get ready for a US building spree not seen in generations,” he <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/04/electrify-everything-scope-data/">wrote in Mother Jones</a> this spring.</p>
<p id="cl7I25">The good news is three key bills — the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — have allocated more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade to get it done. Jenkins and the rest of the ZERO Lab team were deeply involved in sculpting that legislation, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-professor-helping-guide-billions-in-climate-spending-96d3d17c">he told the Wall Street Journal</a>, and “helped Senate staff target their most bang-for-the-buck provisions.”</p>
<p id="G9k5x3">The work of Jenkins and his colleagues has also helped to dispel the attractive but misguided belief that we can simply spend our way out of global warming. <a href="https://repeatproject.org/docs/REPEAT_IRA_Transmission_2022-09-22.pdf">One report</a> detailed the central role that electricity transmission will play in making the most of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/7/28/23282217/climate-bill-health-care-drugs-inflation-reduction-act">Inflation Reduction Act’s</a> potential climate benefits. Without overhauling the grid, the report finds that the US would see only about 20 percent of the potential emissions reductions. </p>
<p id="PTVX78">And getting the most out of those climate benefits is a big deal: “Every tenth of a degree of warming matters in terms of the impacts and damages and suffering that can be avoided in the future,” Jenkins <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-jesse-jenkins.html">told the New York Times’s Ezra Klein</a>. </p>
<p id="Y83NjS">To that end, Jenkins and the rest of his team at Princeton’s Andlinger Center are adapting their work globally, helping to incubate and support initiatives like <a href="https://www.netzeroaustralia.net.au/">Net-Zero Australia</a>. They’re also building <a href="https://acee.princeton.edu/rapidswitch/">Rapid Switch</a>, an international research effort to outline ambitious but realistic pathways toward decarbonizing the world. </p>
<p id="ERVke0">“We now have the potential to rebuild a better America,” Jenkins <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/04/electrify-everything-scope-data/">writes</a>. “It is time to roll up our sleeves and build that future.”</p>
https://www.vox.com/23925676/jesse-jenkins-engineering-professor-princeton-climate-future-perfect-50-2023Oshan Jarow2023-11-29T06:00:00-05:002023-11-29T06:00:00-05:00Sasha Gallant is making US foreign aid spending smarter
<figure>
<img alt="Illustrated portrait of Sasha Gallant." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/puw732ZXUBICKbM8TMbQW0z3wCI=/240x0:1680x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72885551/18_Sasha_Gallant_Final_Dims.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Lauren Tamaki for Vox</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Leading USAID’s small social innovation fund, Gallant prioritizes evidence and evaluation.</p> <p id="w4Asup"></p>
<p id="Z2XuI8">Last year, the US spent about <a href="https://www.foreignassistance.gov/">$69 billion</a> in foreign aid trying to make the world outside its borders a better place. While that’s just above 1 percent of the US government’s budget, it makes the US the <a href="https://world101.cfr.org/global-era-issues/development/brief-history-us-foreign-aid">single largest provider</a> of foreign aid in the world by total dollars spent, focusing on areas like poverty reduction, humanitarian assistance, and investments in health and education.</p>
<p id="FJobYi">The main steward of that giving is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which manages about <a href="https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10261">$42 billion</a> in aid spending annually. But most of that budget is spent <a href="https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/23274306/usaid-foreign-aid-effectiveness-evidence-grants">without collecting</a> the necessary evidence to say whether it’s doing much good.</p>
<p id="GuFD43">That is, except for a small program within USAID called <a href="https://www.usaid.gov/div">Development Innovation Ventures</a> (DIV). Led by Sasha Gallant, DIV is something of a cross between federal grantmaker and venture capital firm. It injects money into fledgling ideas with the potential for big upside, but instead of making decisions based solely on financial returns, its targets are development outcomes — a category that ranges from governance innovations to basic sanitation. Despite accounting for just a small fraction of USAID’s overall budget (0.1 percent as of 2022), DIV is well on its way to shifting how the entire agency works. </p>
<p id="pgvrPP">DIV was founded in 2010 by economist Michael Kremer and former USAID chief innovation officer Maura O’Neill; Gallant joined the program in 2015 (as a consultant at first, though she’s now division chief). Gallant’s background is in evidence-informed policy across public and social sectors, and her work has helped advance ideas like <a href="https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-16-818">tiered funding</a> and cost-effectiveness, which have come to define <a href="https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2022-12/DIV_Fact%20Sheet_cleared_accessible_Oct%202022.pdf">DIV’s approach</a>. Gallant has also spent time at <a href="https://www.evidenceaction.org/">Evidence Action</a>, a nonprofit working on effective ways to alleviate poverty. There, she helped prototype and scale low-cost interventions for millions across Africa and Asia. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><div id="DZyqgQ"><div data-anthem-component="aside:12147451"></div></div></div>
<p id="egRl6z">When Gallant joined<strong> </strong>DIV, it was already capturing the core indicators and outcome metrics that allowed the organization a deeper understanding of what works and what doesn’t. “But we weren’t really standardizing those,” she said. “It was hard to have a portfolio-level view of what DIV was doing as a fund.” In her time at DIV — Gallant spent three years as a portfolio manager from 2015 to 2018 and has led the program since 2021 — she has focused on continuing its core mission as effectively as possible, while also building a blueprint that can spread the best ideas and practices incubated by DIV across government agencies.</p>
<p id="8fXJGh">So far, its portfolio includes things like road safety stickers, water treatment dispensers, and one of the <a href="https://teachingattherightlevel.org/">highest-impact learning interventions</a> globally. Another example is <a href="https://apopo.org/?v=7516fd43adaa">Apopo</a>, a DIV-funded organization whose trained rats can sniff out tuberculosis and have prevented 154,000 cases through early detection (tuberculosis is the <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis">13th leading cause of death</a> worldwide). Its rats can also be trained to smell the explosive chemicals inside landmines and have been helping to detect and <a href="https://time.com/6138994/magawa-dies-landmines-cambodia/">remove landmines for decades</a> (rats are too light to set off the mines). </p>
<p id="vdXdHQ">Since its inception, DIV <a href="https://www.usaid.gov/div">has given</a> 277 grants across 49 countries, reaching 100 million people. “There’s both experience and evidence that suggests social innovation funds can deliver tremendous returns on investment,” Gallant said.</p>
<p id="kkYsR6">Earlier this year, DIV received a <a href="https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/jan-12-2023-usaids-development-innovation-ventures-awarded-45-million-gift-identify-and-help-scale-cost-effective-development-innovations">$45 million donation</a> from Open Philanthropy, allowing it to launch a new tier of grantmaking intended to scale up the most promising programs across DIV’s portfolio. Beyond investing more in promising ideas, Gallant told me that the funding will help internal efforts to diffuse what DIV is learning across USAID. </p>
<p id="BEnyrO">Any shift toward greater effectiveness in US foreign aid will go a long, long way. On its present course, USAID will spend over $300 billion by 2030. Even small shifts in the efficacy of that much development spending can make a huge difference in millions of lives. But making evidence and evaluation the pillars of how the US government invests in development? That stands to make worlds of difference.</p>
<p id="qhFaaV">“It’s not enough to do it big, we have to do it well,” said Gallant. “And the demand is outstripping the capacity right now, which is a really cool place to be.”</p>
https://www.vox.com/23921629/sasha-gallant-chief-development-innovation-ventures-usaid-future-perfect-50-2023Oshan Jarow2023-11-29T06:00:00-05:002023-11-29T06:00:00-05:00Heidi Williams is steering the science of innovation toward progress
<figure>
<img alt="Illustrated portrait of Heidi Williams" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5AlM_BWpdSSUjWa-43rU0rjRRbg=/240x0:1680x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72885525/07_Heidi_Williams_Final_Dims.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Lauren Tamaki for Vox</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The economist aims to kickstart the slumping rate of progress by reforming the science of science.</p> <p id="v9nPmR"></p>
<p id="xXjIFs">From afar, scientific innovation may look like something that just happens. Mix inquisitive humans with research grants, and you get an endless stream of innovation. To some degree, maybe. But there’s nothing inevitable about the <em>rate</em> of scientific progress, which can ebb and flow depending on the institutions humans build around it.</p>
<p id="EvSLDS">Looking at the recent landscape of scientific progress, two observations stick out. First, decades of institutional proliferation have produced a thicket of regulatory oversight — elsewhere <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build-government-coronavirus">called a “vetocracy”</a> — that is increasingly <a href="https://progress.institute/no-nepa-really-is-a-problem-for-clean-energy/">blocking the very progress</a> it was made to support. Second, the overall rate of scientific progress <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3822691">seems to be slowing down</a>. That isn’t necessarily a problem — the more knowledge we acquire, the <a href="https://www.newthingsunderthesun.com/pub/zsc23qxz/release/17">more research and development</a> may be needed <a href="https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/science-is-getting-harder#:~:text=Other%20papers%20that%20look%20into,to%20keep%20up%20the%20pace.">to maintain the rate of innovation</a>. </p>
<p id="s83sLq">But given the outsize potential technology has to spur everything from economic growth to more democratic modes of collective governance, anything we can do to speed the process up may pay serious dividends. </p>
<p id="C7HMP7"><a href="https://sites.google.com/view/heidi-l-williams/home?authuser=0">Heidi Williams</a>, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, is at the forefront of a growing movement aiming to kickstart the slumping rate of progress by reforming the science of science. Whether under the banner of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/">progress studies</a>, <a href="https://metasciencepolicy.org/">metascience</a>, or the economics of innovation, the goal is to scrutinize the logistics of how science gets done to smooth the way for innovations to go from idea to implementation.</p>
<p id="WWwF0g">In June 2022, Williams joined the <a href="https://progress.institute/">Institute for Progress</a> think tank as director of science policy to develop a metascience policy agenda. She’s written on why we should launch a <a href="https://progress.institute/drug-pricing-reforms-can-hurt-innovation/">biomedical innovation</a> fund, how to build <a href="https://progress.institute/building-a-better-nih/">a better National Institutes of Health</a> (NIH), and how <a href="https://progress.institute/to-speed-scientific-progress-do-away-with-funding-delays/">doing away with funding delays</a> can speed up science. If these sound a little wonky, that’s the point. Improving logistics doesn’t<strong> </strong>usually make for the best headlines, career accelerators, or grant proposals, which makes the infrastructure that produces science easy to neglect.</p>
<p id="LEIFtL">“New scientific discoveries are the basis of long-term economic growth and social progress,” Williams <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/heidi-l-williams/science-for-progress?authuser=0">writes</a><strong> </strong>on her website. “The simple insight that incentives may affect which scientific discoveries are made as well as which discoveries successfully develop and diffuse into technologies with real-world impact opens the possibility that the design of public <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy" data-source="encore">policies</a> can have important effects on innovation, economic growth, and social progress.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right"><div id="pdwiH3"><div data-anthem-component="aside:12147451"></div></div></div>
<p id="PhOzBi">In November 2022, Williams and economist <a href="https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~pniehaus/">Paul Niehaus</a> launched the <a href="https://www.povertyactionlab.org/initiative/science-progress-initiative">Science for Progress Initiative</a> at the <a href="https://www.povertyactionlab.org/">Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab</a> (J-PAL). Building on J-PAL’s <a href="https://www.povertyactionlab.org/updates/j-pal-co-founders-abhijit-banerjee-and-esther-duflo-awarded-nobel-memorial-prize-1">impressive</a> track record since its founding in 2003, the initiative works with organizations that both fund and design new approaches to science policy that seek out the most effective methods.</p>
<p id="d36H7C">But reforming institutions takes time. Complementing her more patient work, Williams co-leads <a href="https://digitalharbor.org/fast/">a fast grants program</a> in collaboration with the Digital Harbor Foundation. While the globe is strewn with scientific talent, the opportunities and resources to develop it<strong> </strong>are <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8d9dba28-ae17-11e9-b3e2-4fdf846f48f5">unevenly distributed</a>. Fast grants aim to “send more individuals from more communities to the frontiers of science and technology” by cutting a grant process that ordinarily <a href="https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/timelines-funding-decisions">takes up to 20 months</a> down to 14 days.</p>
<p id="798mXi">“Quick funding for promising projects, along with the ability to course-correct, could accelerate scientific progress and generate enormous benefits for society,” Williams wrote in an August <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/14/heidi-williams-science-research-funding/">opinion piece for the Washington Post</a>.</p>
<p id="Z6alCu">Of course, it’s possible that fast grants may turn out to be an ineffective idea. Or that a biomedical innovation fund won’t actually spur new discoveries. The idea behind metascience reform is not any particular proposal. It’s about cultivating both a spirit and an institutional landscape that fosters experimentation, rigorously analyzes the results, and updates methods based on new evidence. In other words, turning the cherished methods of science upon science itself. </p>
<p id="2H1LAl">“Science is a key driver of economic growth and social progress. If science can be accelerated,” Williams <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02602-9">writes</a>, “so can growth.” </p>
https://www.vox.com/23906767/heidi-williams-professor-economics-innovation-dartmouth-future-perfect-50-2023Oshan Jarow