vox--2020-12-22--The pandemic could have crushed WeWork. It may have saved it instead.

The pandemic could have crushed WeWork .
It may have saved it instead .
Share All sharing options for : The pandemic could have crushed WeWork .
It may have saved it instead .
Last year , WeWork failed to become a public company after a high-profile implosion full of intrigue , excess , and downright stupidity .
Miraculously , one year and one global pandemic later , the coworking company is not only still kicking , but it stands to ride post-Covid-19 office trends to profitability and an IPO — if it can hold on long enough .
A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ private office space , WeWork has made a number of critical changes that have helped it hold on while facing a pandemic that kept people home and away from offices .
Some of the most important changes , however , happened before the coronavirus took hold .
Last year , the company ditched its founder , Adam Neumann , who had created a company culture that was more in line with the most outrageous tech company than something as quotidian as real estate .
As he sought a tech company valuation for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hard partying , profligate spending , and poor judgment derailed that goal and nearly destroyed the company .
A new CEO , Sandeep Mathrani , took over in February of this year and was charged with righting the company ’ s mission , cutting costs , and excising a destructive company culture in order to bring the once highly valued unicorn back from the brink .
WeWork ’ s upheaval meant that the company was already forced to be agile in order to avoid destruction before the pandemic .
But the company ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the strength of the flexible office market , a real estate sector that focuses on short leases and move-in ready space , in addition to coworking .
Indeed , so-called flexible office space has proved surprisingly hardy during the pandemic , given that its business had been predicated , in part , on the idea of squeezing as many people into as little square footage as possible .
With the arrival of a vaccine , those issues are seeming less important .
Meanwhile , flexible space ’ s value proposition is looking more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the uncertainty of a more dispersed workforce spending more of their days at home .
“ We believe , based on our data and history , that flex is going to be a very viable alternative when interest in office space rebounds , ” Julie Whelan , Global Head of Occupier Research at commercial real estate firm CBRE , said in a recent briefing about flexible office space .
“ It will come out of this stronger than it went in.
” So to comprehend WeWork ’ s remarkable recovery , you need @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and its prospects .
There ’ s no getting around the fact that the pandemic has been rough on owners and operators of office space , including flexible space , which people can get rid of more easily .
Only a small portion of people have returned to the office .
In Manhattan , the biggest office market , just 10 percent of office workers have come back , and some may never do so .
But while new leases are down , few are relinquishing flexible office space .
The amount of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 23 US markets was 67.1 million square feet at the end of the third quarter this year , according to the commercial real estate services giant Cushman & Wakefield , up 2.5 percent from where it was at the end of 2019 .
WeWork and its competitors like Knotel and Industrious — all of which lease ready-to-use office space to individuals and companies — have slowed their rapid growth but haven ’ t had to downsize much .
They ’ ve retained enough business to keep them afloat during the pandemic and are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flexible space is more attractive than regular long-term office leases .
Industrious says it thinks it will max out on fitting new customers into its existing space next year .
The attraction to flexible office space is that businesses can more easily adjust to trends like the hybrid office , in which people go into the office less often and for different reasons than they used to .
They also provide a stopover for companies still trying to figure out what the future will bring .
Real estate experts say that rather than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — especially big ones — are planning on increasing their flexible space footprints and making it a bigger part of their portfolio in the future .
Some 86 percent of companies plan to use flexible space as a key part of their real estate strategies in the future , according to a report by CBRE that surveyed about 80 companies around the globe .
They ’ re also highly likely to favor leasing in buildings that have flexible space offerings .
JLL , a commercial real estate services company , predicts that 30 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flexible by 2030 .
Jonathan Wasserstrum , CEO of digital commercial real estate brokerage SquareFoot , thinks it could happen sooner .
Demand for flexible options on his platform increased 15 percent in 2020 .
The reasons for the move to flexible space are myriad , and in general , they represent an acceleration of trends apparent before the pandemic .
Surprisingly , real estate experts don ’ t think that shared space will be as scary in the future as it ’ s been during the pandemic , thanks to widespread adoption @ @ @ @ @ @ @ importantly , a vaccine on the way .
“ Anyone who manages an office environment , including flexible space providers , has been tasked with putting protocols in place to increase safety at work , such as air filtration , social distancing , enhanced cleaning , mask usage , etc.
, ” CBRE ’ s Whelan said .
“ As long as safety protocols are in place and followed , we don ’ t see flexible space being different than other types of office space.
” In fact , the pandemic has made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ corporate occupiers considering spacing needs , having flexibility is exactly what they would want because of things like this pandemic , ” Paul Leonard , a managing consultant at CoStar Advisory Services , told Recode .
That is , if something bad happens , companies want to be able to more quickly relinquish their rental expenses than if they signed a traditional office lease .
They ’ re willing to pay a premium to mitigate uncertainty .
But the main reason for wanting more flexible space , according to the CBRE survey , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ increasingly mobile workforce to work .
Going forward , most companies plan on adopting a so-called hybrid model where some of their employees work from home some of the time .
The rest of the time , they ’ ll need office space .
Flexible space helps accommodate office space in a wider variety of locations to reflect a dispersed workforce .
It can also more easily be acquired and relinquished than traditional office space .
Flexible space is ascendant as businesses are reconsidering the purpose of the office , according to David @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at Cushman & Wakefield .
“ Instead of having just an office space , we ’ ll have a workplace ecosystem , ” Smith told Recode .
That means people may not go to a main office every day by default , but instead go there “ more for learning development , collaborating , mentoring , socializing.
” In other words , businesses still need office space , but they need it for different reasons than they used to .
Offices for many will function as a welcome reprieve from working from home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ children or too-small apartments .
And companies like WeWork are uniquely positioned to provide office space for people and companies not quite sure what the future will hold .
No one could ’ ve predicted that WeWork would still be at the forefront of office trends in 2020 .
Its new path to profitability and perhaps even a public listing is especially extraordinary considering how bad things were and how far it fell in the last few years .
Though it ’ s a tech company in name only , WeWork had once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lofty valuation of $ 47 billion and the biggest banks tripping over themselves to help make it a public company .
But the process of going public brought to light the company ’ s shocking financial mishaps and cultural ethos .
The year before it intended to go public , the company was losing $ 1.6 billion on $ 1.8 billion in revenue .
Losing money is nothing new for tech startups , but those losses were the product of even larger issues about corporate governance and bad behavior .
As the company @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public shareholders , its co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann surfed , missed meetings , and enriched himself and his family with company money .
There were drugs , alleged sexual assault , and a “ spa and ice bath ” attached to Neumann ’ s office .
He also spent insane amounts of money on investments that had nothing to do with WeWork — which he needlessly renamed the We Company — including a school and a wave pool .
It turned out that the public markets were less amenable to this behavior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In late 2019 , the company canceled its public offering and fired Neumann , who got a giant $ 1.7 billion exit package to leave the company he drove into the ground .
SoftBank , its main investor , lost billions on the company and set about trying to rescue it .
That included cutting spending , slowing its new real estate investments , and reconsidering the ones it already had .
It fired thousands of employees and divested from non-core businesses , including the wave pool .
It hired also hired Mathrani @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turning companies around .
And finally , the We Company changed its name back to WeWork .
While the company isn ’ t out of the woods , it has managed to get back on the right path .
WeWork has already halved the amount of money it ’ s losing from $ 1.2 billion in the third quarter of last year to a still large but more manageable $ 500 million this year .
Its membership and revenue are down , but they ’ re down less than 15 percent from last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bad when you consider that many of WeWork ’ s members have monthly subscriptions and can cancel any time .
Additionally , a growing share of its memberships — 54 percent versus 43 percent last year — is coming from enterprise companies that have 500 or more employees .
These companies sometimes lease whole floors or buildings and are more valuable and stable than individual memberships .
The company has also added some revenue lines that actually make sense .
In October , the company launched Business Solutions to help small and medium-sized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ human resources and payroll .
Businesses will pay a monthly subscription fee for access to these services , in addition to what they pay for rent .
“ This is really moving [ WeWork ] from not just a space company but really offering end-to-end business solutions , ” Prabhdeep Singh , WeWork ’ s global head of marketplace , told Yahoo Finance in October .
“ I wouldn ’ t say this is the final grand vision and plan , but this is the first step.
” It also added in-office advertising @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clientele through the thousands of screens within WeWork offices .
WeWork has fixed some major flaws and is in a promising industry , but that doesn ’ t mean it ’ s assured success .
The company is going to face some severe challenges before the pandemic is over .
WeWork generally operates by leasing space in buildings or entire buildings from landlords , and retrofitting that space to make it look like a hip startup office .
It then subleases desks , offices , or even entire floors or buildings to individuals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than WeWork pays for it .
One challenge is that WeWork signed many of those leases with landlords at the top of the market before the pandemic , when rents were at their highest .
But the company is subleasing them now when people expect to pay less for office rent since there is more available and we ’ re in a recession .
Newer locations are also less likely to be fully occupied , since it takes a while to fill them with tenants , so they ’ re bringing in less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In other words , for its newer locations , WeWork is paying more and bringing in less .
One of WeWork ’ s biggest competitors , Industrious , has forsworn leases in exchange for revenue shares with building owners .
That means instead of paying rent , it gives landlords a share of its revenue for about 80 percent of its portfolio .
That arrangement allowed it to actually expand into new locations during the pandemic .
It also let it minimize losses , since bringing in less revenue meant it had to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ says to expect more of these types of arrangements in the future .
Additionally , building owners themselves are getting into the coworking and flexible office space , meaning they could knock out middlemen like WeWork .
Finally , a large portion of WeWork ’ s business does come from traditional coworking , with many people using shared workspaces .
It remains to be seen if people prefer private offices within flexible space after the pandemic is over .
For now , WeWork has to make it through the rest of the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be a major contender in the flexible office space .
As CoStar ’ s Leonard put it , “ If you can survive it , the concept is still good .
The survivors of this period will probably do well and thrive again .
”

The pandemic could have crushed WeWork. It may have saved it instead.
Share All sharing options for: The pandemic could have crushed WeWork. It may have saved it instead.
Last year, WeWork failed to become a public company after a high-profile implosion full of intrigue, excess, and downright foolishness. Miraculously, one year and one pandemic later, the coworking company is not only still kicking, but it stands to ride post-Covid-19 office trends to profitability and an IPO — if it can hold on long enough.
A company that rents out trendy shared and private office space, WeWork has made a number of critical changes that have helped it hold on while facing a pandemic that kept people home and away from offices. Some of the most important changes, however, happened before the coronavirus took hold.
Last year, the company ditched its founder, Adam Neumann, who had created a company culture that was more in line with the most outrageous tech company than something as quotidian as real estate. As he sought a tech company valuation for the office subleasing company, Neumann’s hard partying, profligate spending, and poor judgment derailed that goal and nearly destroyed the company. A new CEO, Sandeep Mathrani, took over this February and was charged with righting the company’s mission, cutting costs, and excising a destructive company culture in order to bring the once highly valued unicorn back from the brink.
WeWork’s upheaval meant that the company was already forced to be agile in order to avoid destruction before the pandemic. But the company’s perseverance is also a testament to the strength of the flexible office market, a real estate sector that focuses on short leases and move-in-ready space, in addition to coworking. Indeed, so-called flexible office space has proved surprisingly hardy during the pandemic, given that its business had been predicated, in part, on the idea of squeezing as many people into as little square footage as possible.
With the arrival of a vaccine, those issues are seeming less important. Meanwhile, flexible space’s value proposition is looking more attractive for companies trying to contend with the uncertainty of a more dispersed workforce spending more of their days at home.
“We believe, based on our data and history, that flex is going to be a very viable alternative when interest in office space rebounds,” Julie Whelan, global head of occupier research at the commercial real estate firm CBRE, said in a recent briefing about flexible office space. “It will come out of this stronger than it went in.”
So to comprehend WeWork’s remarkable recovery, you need to know more about flexible office space and its prospects.
Why flexible office space has a future
There’s no getting around the fact that the pandemic has been rough on owners and operators of office space, including flexible space, which people can get rid of more easily. Only a small portion of people have returned to the office. In Manhattan, the biggest office market, just 10 percent of office workers have come back, and some may never do so.
But while new leases are down, few are relinquishing flexible office space. The amount of leased flexible office space in the top 23 US markets was 67.1 million square feet at the end of the third quarter this year, according to the commercial real estate services giant Cushman & Wakefield, up 2.5 percent from where it was at the end of 2019.
WeWork and its competitors like Knotel and Industrious — all of which lease ready-to-use office space to individuals and companies — have slowed their rapid growth but haven’t had to downsize much. They’ve retained enough business to keep them afloat during the pandemic and are looking forward to a time when their flexible space is more attractive than regular long-term office leases. Industrious says it thinks it will max out on fitting new customers into its existing space next year.
The attraction to flexible office space is that businesses can more easily adjust to trends like the hybrid office, in which people go into the office less often and for different reasons than they used to. They also provide a stopover for companies still trying to figure out what the future will bring.
Real estate experts say that rather than shying away from the space, companies — especially big ones — are planning to increase their flexible space footprints and making it a bigger part of their portfolio in the future. Some 86 percent of companies plan to use flexible space as a key part of their real estate strategies in the future, according to a report by CBRE that surveyed about 80 companies around the globe. They’re also highly likely to favor leasing in buildings that have flexible space offerings.
JLL, a commercial real estate services company, predicts that 30 percent of all office space will be flexible by 2030.
Jonathan Wasserstrum, CEO of the digital commercial real estate brokerage SquareFoot, thinks it could happen sooner. Demand for flexible options on his platform increased 15 percent in 2020. The reasons for the move to flexible space are myriad, and in general, they represent an acceleration of trends apparent before the pandemic.
Surprisingly, real estate experts don’t think that shared space will be as scary in the future as it’s been during the pandemic, thanks to widespread adoption of safety measures and, perhaps more importantly, a vaccine on the way.
“Anyone who manages an office environment, including flexible space providers, has been tasked with putting protocols in place to increase safety at work, such as air filtration, social distancing, enhanced cleaning, mask usage, etc.,” CBRE’s Whelan said. “As long as safety protocols are in place and followed, we don’t see flexible space being different than other types of office space.”
In fact, the pandemic has made such space more attractive.
“For corporate occupiers considering spacing needs, having flexibility is exactly what they would want because of things like this pandemic,” Paul Leonard, a managing consultant at CoStar Advisory Services, told Recode.
That is, if something bad happens, companies want to be able to relinquish their rental expenses more quickly than if they signed a traditional office lease. They’re willing to pay a premium to mitigate uncertainty.
But the main reason for wanting more flexible space, according to the CBRE survey, is to provide places for companies’ increasingly mobile workforce to work. Going forward, most companies plan on adopting a so-called hybrid model where some of their employees work from home some of the time. The rest of the time, they’ll need office space. Flexible space helps accommodate office space in a wider variety of locations to reflect a dispersed workforce. It can also more easily be acquired and relinquished than traditional office space.
Flexible space is ascendant as businesses are reconsidering the purpose of the office, according to David Smith, Americas head of occupier research at Cushman & Wakefield.
“Instead of having just an office space, we’ll have a workplace ecosystem,” Smith told Recode. That means people may not go to a main office every day by default, but instead go there “more for learning development, collaborating, mentoring, socializing.”
In other words, businesses still need office space, but they need it for different reasons than they used to. Offices for many will function as a welcome reprieve from working from home, especially for people with roommates or children or too-small apartments. And companies like WeWork are uniquely positioned to provide office space for people and companies not quite sure what the future will hold.
WeWork’s miraculous turnaround
No one could’ve predicted that WeWork would still be at the forefront of office trends in 2020. Its new path to profitability and perhaps even a public listing is especially extraordinary considering how bad things were and how far it fell in the past few years.
Though it’s a tech company in name only, WeWork had once been a Silicon Valley darling with a lofty valuation of $47 billion and the biggest banks tripping over themselves to help make it a public company. But the process of going public brought to light the company’s shocking financial mishaps and cultural ethos.
The year before it intended to go public, the company was losing $1.6 billion on $1.8 billion in revenue. Losing money is nothing new for tech startups, but those losses were the product of even larger issues about corporate governance and bad behavior.
As the company struggled to prove its value to potential public shareholders, its co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann surfed, missed meetings, and enriched himself and his family with company money. There were drugs, alleged sexual assault, and a “spa and ice bath” attached to Neumann’s office. He also spent ridiculous amounts of money on investments that had nothing to do with WeWork — which he needlessly renamed the We Company — including a school and a wave pool.
It turned out that the public markets were less amenable to this behavior than the private investors had been.
In late 2019, the company canceled its public offering and fired Neumann, who got a giant $1.7 billion exit package to leave the company he drove into the ground. SoftBank, its main investor, lost billions on the company and set about trying to rescue it. That included cutting spending, slowing its new real estate investments, and reconsidering the ones it already had. It fired thousands of employees and divested from non-core businesses, including the wave pool. It also hired Mathrani, a more moderate executive known for turning companies around. And finally, the We Company changed its name back to WeWork.
While the company isn’t out of the woods, it has managed to get back on the right path. WeWork has already halved the amount of money it’s losing from $1.2 billion in the third quarter of last year to a still large but more manageable $500 million this year. Its membership and revenue are down, but they’re down less than 15 percent from last year. That’s not so bad when you consider that many of WeWork’s members have monthly subscriptions and can cancel any time.
Additionally, a growing share of its memberships — 54 percent versus 43 percent last year — is coming from enterprise companies that have 500 or more employees. These companies sometimes lease whole floors or buildings and are more valuable and stable than individual memberships.
The company has also added some revenue lines that actually make sense. In October, the company launched Business Solutions to help small and medium businesses in its spaces handle things like human resources and payroll. Businesses will pay a monthly subscription fee for access to these services, in addition to what they pay for rent.
“This is really moving [WeWork] from not just a space company but really offering end-to-end business solutions,” Prabhdeep Singh, WeWork’s global head of marketplace, told Yahoo Finance in October. “I wouldn’t say this is the final grand vision and plan, but this is the first step.”
It also added in-office advertising to allow advertisers to reach its business clientele through the thousands of screens within WeWork offices.
The challenges ahead
WeWork has fixed some major flaws and is in a promising industry, but that doesn’t mean it’s assured success. The company is going to face some severe challenges before the pandemic is over.
WeWork generally operates by leasing space in buildings or entire buildings from landlords, and retrofitting that space to make it look like a hip startup office. It then subleases desks, offices, or even entire floors or buildings to individuals and companies, who pay much more than WeWork pays for it. One challenge is that WeWork signed many of those leases with landlords at the top of the market before the pandemic, when rents were at their highest. But the company is subleasing them now when people expect to pay less for office rent since there is more available and we’re in a recession. Newer locations are also less likely to be fully occupied, since it takes a while to fill them with tenants, so they’re bringing in less total rent than mature locations do. In other words, for its newer locations, WeWork is paying more and bringing in less.
One of WeWork’s biggest competitors, Industrious, has foresworn leases in exchange for revenue shares with building owners. That means instead of paying rent, it gives landlords a share of its revenue for about 80 percent of its portfolio. That arrangement allowed it to actually expand into new locations during the pandemic. It also let it minimize losses, since bringing in less revenue meant it had to pay out less as well. CBRE says to expect more of these types of arrangements in the future.
Additionally, building owners themselves are getting into the coworking and flexible office space, meaning they could knock out intermediaries like WeWork.
Finally, a large portion of WeWork’s business does come from traditional coworking, with many people using shared workspaces. It remains to be seen if people prefer private offices within flexible space after the pandemic is over. For now, WeWork has to make it through the rest of the pandemic if it’s going to continue to be a major contender in the flexible office space.
As CoStar’s Leonard put it, “If you can survive it, the concept is still good. The survivors of this period will probably do well and thrive again.”


vox--2020-12-22--2020 had some significant silver linings. Here are 7 of them.

2020 has been a lousy year .
Time magazine ’ s cover story declared it the “ worst year ever ” ( or at least “ in living memory for most Americans ” ) .
And it is finishing on a miserable note , with coronavirus deaths reaching horrifying new heights — worse than a 9/11 every single day — while public health experts beg us to celebrate the winter holidays alone .
But 2020 wasn ’ t all bad news .
In fact , I ’ ll go further than that : 2020 had good news that would stand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in any other year .
In areas ranging from public health to medicine , from poverty alleviation to food technology , there were some tremendous leaps .
To highlight them — as I ’ d like to do here — isn ’ t to deny the misery and grief that were visited upon so many around the world in 2020 .
Rather , it ’ s to remind us that there ’ s so much to fight for , and to honor the work of the many people who , under adverse conditions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made tremendous progress on key problems .
The world will start 2021 having lost many things we shouldn ’ t have lost .
More than 1.5 million preventable deaths have occurred so far .
Hundreds of millions have been pushed into a spiral of poverty .
In the US , the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden promises to be ugly as Trump and his allies refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of any election that their opponent won .
But beneath all that , there is still real work going on in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lives , helps people , treats disease , and makes the future brighter .
That work deserves a spotlight .
Here are seven things that give me optimism about the future .
1 ) The record speed of the vaccine rollout won ’ t just end this pandemic soon .
It ’ s also a reminder that humanity is still capable of astonishing leaps .
The first vaccines for the coronavirus have begun , 11 months after the existence of the virus started to become widely known .
Impressive results have been published @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vaccines publishing results in the upcoming weeks as well .
Overall , things look very good .
The vaccines are safe , with a very low rate of adverse effects , and several of the vaccines are more than 90 percent effective at preventing serious coronavirus symptoms .
When they are widely distributed , they should cut deaths dramatically .
Public health experts have cautioned that people should continue to wear masks until everyone ’ s vaccinated .
And it remains to be seen how much the vaccines will prevent transmission of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But likely by mid-year , high-risk people and essential workers will be vaccinated .
The worst horrors of the pandemic will soon be under control : Health care workers will have a vaccine and their lives will be less in danger while they work long hours to protect us .
Hospitals will be less overwhelmed as enough at-risk people have vaccines to keep ICU beds open .
And by late 2021 , a vaccine will likely be available to everyone who wants one , and it will be safe to return to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during the pandemic .
This crisis has dragged on long enough that it seems endless .
It isn ’ t .
The vaccines —produced and distributed with astonishing speed — change everything .
In a time when it seemed like so much around us broke down , the vaccine success story is a reminder that humanity is still capable of groundbreaking achievements .
2 ) The coronavirus vaccine is also a good sign for new vaccine technologies In the past , vaccines have taken years or even decades to develop .
It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ones now hitting the market were developed in the space of days or weeks ( the time since then has been for safety testing ) .
That sped-up process took a long time to develop .
For the past several years , researchers have been working on new ways to develop vaccines .
The success of the coronavirus vaccines is a major vindication of that work and a really good sign of how well it could work for other diseases .
One breakthrough here is something called “ mRNA vaccines.
” The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of this kind of vaccine .
Unlike most vaccines , mRNA vaccines don ’ t use a dead or inactivated version of the virus .
Instead , the vaccine uses mRNA : a single-strand RNA molecule that the ribosomes inside your cells use as a template or instruction set to learn what proteins they should build next .
The vaccine injects the mRNA into your body , telling it to produce a “ spike protein ” present on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus ; your cells will follow the instructions , producing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to make antibodies .
Researchers have hoped for years that mRNA vaccines will make it possible to vaccinate against diseases we otherwise struggle to vaccinate for and to do so on a much faster timeline than usual .
“ mRNA vaccines represent a promising alternative to conventional vaccine approaches because of their high potency , capacity for rapid development and potential for low-cost manufacture and safe administration , ” a 2018 paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery by University of Pennsylvania medical researchers argued .
Even before the pandemic hit , there was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on to make mRNA vaccines possible .
But 2020 put that work to the test as vaccine researchers the world over tried to rapidly retool to fight Covid-19 .
Now , with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines , the technology has been tested and it has succeeded .
That success is likely to drive development of tons more mRNA vaccines targeting other diseases .
Meanwhile , the Oxford research institute that produced the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is also moving into late-stage clinical trials with another major achievement : a vaccine for malaria , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the past century .
If the malaria vaccine works , it could put one of the world ’ s biggest killers to rest for good .
And even if it ’ s only moderately effective , it can save a lot of lives .
Other good news to look forward to on the vaccine front : Moderna is reportedly working on a flu vaccine that lasts for life instead of requiring a yearly update .
And mRNA vaccines might also be used to train the body to — one day — fight cancer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be ready for the next pandemic Scientists and policy experts have been warning for years that the United States was unready for the next pandemic .
No one could have predicted that it would happen this year , of course , but we knew it would happen someday — and the US wasn ’ t ready .
In February and March , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ) made mistakes with testing that hampered the US ’ s ability to stop the spread of the coronavirus into the country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in low adoption , a problem that persists today .
There were personal protective equipment ( PPE ) shortages despite stockpiles intended to solve that exact problem .
Many institutional weaknesses were suddenly and humiliatingly laid bare .
But there ’ s a silver lining .
The coronavirus pandemic has been awful , but it ’ s nowhere near as bad as it could have been .
“ The coronavirus appears not to be deadly enough to kill tens of millions of people , as was initially feared , ” I wrote on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more or less a matter of luck .
The virus could easily have been deadlier , and the world would currently be in the grip of a horrifying mass casualty event.
” Perhaps 2020 ’ s single biggest stroke of luck — one that , as a parent of young kids , I appreciate every single day — is that the disease largely isn ’ t deadly to children .
Other pandemic diseases might be different .
It is possible for a disease to spread like Covid-19 while being deadlier to younger people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as influenzas typically are .
One thing the country can take a small measure of comfort in is that its unreadiness was exposed and its lessons were learned now , with this virus , instead of something much , much worse .
Countries that faced SARS in the mid-2000s handled Covid-19 better , and hopefully having faced Covid-19 will help the US be ready for the next pandemic .
“ I think we ’ ve learned an enormous amount in the course of this year , ” Steve Morrison , who studies pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ International Studies , told me .
“ Health security prior to this was a kind of niche domain .
It was one prone to these cycles of crisis and complacency .
It was underfinanced , underprioritized.
” That came back to bite the US — but hopefully , having learned its lesson , it can do better .
Post-pandemic accountability will make a big difference in determining how much America lets its mistakes this time around make it stronger for the next time .
Morrison , for his part , believes the country @ @ @ @ @ @ @ around because of what it went through in 2020 .
It ’ s the thinnest of silver linings , but I ’ ll take it .
4 ) Our digital infrastructure for remote work was tested — and passed As rough as 2020 was , it would have been much worse without remote communications tech .
After a decade of asking , “ What is tech even getting us ?
” we saw an answer : the ability for fully 40 percent of the labor force to stay home during a pandemic .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ we complain about them , enabled companies to switch to remote meetings more or less overnight .
The amount of traffic online jumped dramatically , and the internet mostly handled it without visible strain .
That ’ s easy to take for granted , since we mostly experience it as an absence — websites that load when we expect them to , devices that work .
But it ’ s really pretty remarkable , and it points at one of our modern world ’ s greatest strengths , a strength that has survived @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by AT & T , one of the nation ’ s largest internet providers , rose almost immediately by 20 percent starting in mid-March , ” Charles Fishman pointed out in an Atlantic article : AT & T also told the Atlantic it experienced even more dramatic spikes in time spent on the phone and in text messages sent .
As the pandemic made it unsafe to connect with one another in person , we connected digitally .
If we ’ d suffered a pandemic like this only a few decades ago , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ basically impossible .
The infrastructure simply didn ’ t exist to allow most white-collar workers to safely work from home .
In 2020 , it did — and where it didn ’ t , we built it .
“ At one point in March , for instance , ” Fishman writes , “ traffic was rising so fast in Chicago and Atlanta that dozens of technicians and engineers in those cities worked all night , adding fresh fiber connections and routers.
” There are , of course , still galling inequities in access @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the country , kids were switched to “ remote school ” despite not having reliable internet access at home .
The CARES Act contained money for expanding broadband access in poorly served communities , though there have been challenges in ensuring the money is spent usefully by the end-of-year deadline .
And most people don ’ t have the luxury of doing their jobs from home , and they didn ’ t reap this benefit as much as knowledge economy workers .
That said , the resilience of the home internet infrastructure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it might only get better : Over the course of the year , innovative engineers worked to make online meeting tools better and more reliable , and to mimic many of the missing bits of regular life .
In the past few months , I ’ ve attended online parties where people get louder or quieter as you walk toward them , to imitate how normal parties work ; I ’ ve tested out special technology to enable group singing , which usually doesn ’ t work over video calls because of lag @ @ @ @ @ @ @ problems .
But it can also be innovative , flexible , and fast-moving , and in 2020 it lived up to its promise as a source not just of shiny distractions but of critical tools .
The engineers who made working and connecting from home possible saved lives , and it should be an opportunity to reflect on how much technology can do when it ’ s directed at important problems .
5 ) Biotech is making huge leaps in other sectors If you ’ ve ever seen a three-dimensional model of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the way the atoms twist and fold up into a shape looks kind of random .
For a long time , scientists have tried to identify principles that explain what shape proteins will take when they fold .
They ’ ve had only moderate success .
There are more than a googol possibilities for any given protein , and which form a protein will take depends on incredibly complex interactions among its thousands of amino acids .
Researchers have kept at it , though , because the “ protein-folding problem ” is one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Successfully predicting how proteins fold will make it possible to design new drugs with a particular desired structure .
It opens the door to breakthroughs in everything from new cancer treatments to new antidepressants .
2020 saw a big leap in these efforts , thanks to AI .
Every two years at an annual competition called the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction ( CASP ) , biologists compete to design systems that predict how unfamiliar proteins will fold .
Their predictors are judged by how far their best guess at a protein @ @ @ @ @ @ @ determined structure — the one the protein has when it is built out of amino acids and measured how it folds .
Last CASP , in 2018 , the leader of the pack was Alphabet ’ s DeepMind , an AI research organization .
At this year ’ s CASP , DeepMind didn ’ t just win again — it improved on its previous performance by an enormous margin , producing results almost as good as those you would get if you laboriously built and laboratory-imaged all of the proteins .
“ This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ co-founder John Moult told Nature .
“ In some sense the problem is solved.
” DeepMind ’ s results are good enough that researchers should be able to use them for all kinds of biomedical research , custom-designing drugs that have desired receptors .
It would also let researchers quickly scan every existing drug to learn which ones will work against some novel disease .
And there ’ s no reason to think that the progress will stop here .
“ It ’ s a breakthrough of the first order , certainly one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my lifetime , ” Columbia computational biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi told Nature .
Skeptics have protested that while DeepMind has made progress , they haven ’ t “ solved ” protein folding , and there are many other steps before this work will produce new drugs .
But there ’ s no arguing that this has been a major goal in biology and in pharmaceutical research for a long time .
DeepMind made its name in the AI field with its work beating top players at Go , chess , and Starcraft .
Those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they were easy for some to dismiss as being novelties — an AI that can play video games better than a human won ’ t change the world .
This achievement makes it clear that AI breakthroughs are also coming to scientific fields and are poised to be hugely consequential .
While many of the implications of highly advanced AI systems give me pause , there ’ s lots of cause for optimism here .
If we get AI right , we can use it to tackle many of the thorniest problems we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learned more about what works to fight poverty This year is ending with a poverty crisis .
But during April , May , and June — as the economy ground to a halt because of the pandemic — poverty in the US actually fell .
Why ?
The CARES Act , the landmark $ 2 trillion pandemic relief bill that Congress passed last March , briefly left many Americans better off .
Transferring $ 1,200 to most taxpayers and padding out unemployment benefits with an extra $ 600 a week caused poverty rates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the depth of the crisis , as you can see on the chart below ( the March decline is due to tax refunds ) .
Poverty doesn ’ t usually fall in the middle of an economic crisis .
But the US had never tried anything on the scale of CARES before .
The CARES Act ’ s provisions for unemployment insurance eventually expired , the act wasn ’ t renewed , and now poverty is spiking to record levels .
That ’ s awful news .
But it also provides some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long time , there have been claims that America doesn ’ t really know how to tackle poverty , or that it requires solving lots of complex problems all at once .
The CARES Act made it pretty clear that the country does know .
A bill doesn ’ t have to be perfectly targeted , ideally designed , or incredibly clever to reduce poverty .
It just has to send money to people who are struggling .
This lesson has been reflected in the ways macroeconomists think about policy , economist and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ At least as far as policy debates go , arguments about optimal fiscal policy based in formal macroeconomic models seem to be out , replaced by a consensus that giving people money is necessary and good ( at least , for the foreseeable future ) , ” Smith wrote recently .
Since the new consensus seems to reflect the empirical evidence a lot better than the old one — and presents policymakers with a lot more options to fight poverty — that ’ s great news .
7 ) The meat of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , farms around the world produce chicken for sale by raising fast-growing chicken breeds in batches of tens of thousands , tightly packed in warehouses that are a public health hazard , a fire hazard , a worker safety hazard , and a hazard to the well-being of the chickens themselves .
What if , instead , we could grow the meat without the chickens ?
Researchers all over the world have been chasing that dream , of “ lab-grown ” or “ cultured ” meat , for years .
This year , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reality as the Singapore Food Agency approved the sale of cultured chicken meat grown in bioreactors , becoming the first agency in the world to issue such an approval .
Its sign-off means that chicken bites from the US company Eat Just will be available to consumers in Singapore .
( There are a few other places in the world where you can try lab-grown meat , such as an experimental restaurant in Israel . )
While the US isn ’ t close to commercial approval , the government is interested in figuring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stateside , as well : The US government gave out its first university research grant for lab-grown meat this winter .
While meat consumption is still rising , these steps have the potential to grow into much more than a novelty .
If scale and cost concerns can be resolved , this can be a path to ending our reliance on barbaric factory farming practices , and building a food system that meets the world demand for meat ethically .
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter .
Twice a week , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges : improving public health , decreasing human and animal suffering , easing catastrophic risks , and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good .

2020 has been a lousy year. Time magazine’s cover story declared it the “worst year ever” (or at least “in living memory for most Americans”). And it is finishing on a miserable note, with coronavirus deaths reaching horrifying new heights — worse than a 9/11 every single day — while public health experts beg us to celebrate the winter holidays alone.
But 2020 wasn’t all bad news. In fact, I’ll go further than that: 2020 had good news that would stand out as astonishing triumphs of human achievement in any other year. In areas ranging from public health to medicine, from poverty alleviation to food technology, there were some tremendous leaps. To highlight them — as I’d like to do here — isn’t to deny the misery and grief that were visited upon so many around the world in 2020. Rather, it’s to remind us that there’s so much to fight for, and to honor the work of the many people who, under adverse conditions in an extraordinarily difficult time, still made tremendous progress on key problems.
The world will start 2021 having lost many things we shouldn’t have lost. More than 1.5 million preventable deaths have occurred so far. Hundreds of millions have been pushed into a spiral of poverty. In the US, the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden promises to be ugly as Trump and his allies refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of any election that their opponent won.
But beneath all that, there is still real work going on in the world, work that transforms our lives, helps people, treats disease, and makes the future brighter. That work deserves a spotlight. Here are seven things that give me optimism about the future.
1) The record speed of the vaccine rollout won’t just end this pandemic soon. It’s also a reminder that humanity is still capable of astonishing leaps.
The first vaccines for the coronavirus have begun, 11 months after the existence of the virus started to become widely known. Impressive results have been published from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, with other vaccines publishing results in the upcoming weeks as well. Overall, things look very good. The vaccines are safe, with a very low rate of adverse effects, and several of the vaccines are more than 90 percent effective at preventing serious coronavirus symptoms. When they are widely distributed, they should cut deaths dramatically.
Public health experts have cautioned that people should continue to wear masks until everyone’s vaccinated. And it remains to be seen how much the vaccines will prevent transmission of the virus (if at all).
But likely by mid-year, high-risk people and essential workers will be vaccinated. The worst horrors of the pandemic will soon be under control: Health care workers will have a vaccine and their lives will be less in danger while they work long hours to protect us. Hospitals will be less overwhelmed as enough at-risk people have vaccines to keep ICU beds open. And by late 2021, a vaccine will likely be available to everyone who wants one, and it will be safe to return to the activities we’ve put on hold during the pandemic.
This crisis has dragged on long enough that it seems endless. It isn’t. The vaccines —produced and distributed with astonishing speed — change everything. In a time when it seemed like so much around us broke down, the vaccine success story is a reminder that humanity is still capable of groundbreaking achievements.
2) The coronavirus vaccine is also a good sign for new vaccine technologies
In the past, vaccines have taken years or even decades to develop. It’s striking to learn that some of the ones now hitting the market were developed in the space of days or weeks (the time since then has been for safety testing).
That sped-up process took a long time to develop. For the past several years, researchers have been working on new ways to develop vaccines. The success of the coronavirus vaccines is a major vindication of that work and a really good sign of how well it could work for other diseases.
One breakthrough here is something called “mRNA vaccines.” The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus shots are examples of this kind of vaccine. Unlike most vaccines, mRNA vaccines don’t use a dead or inactivated version of the virus. Instead, the vaccine uses mRNA: a single-strand RNA molecule that the ribosomes inside your cells use as a template or instruction set to learn what proteins they should build next. The vaccine injects the mRNA into your body, telling it to produce a “spike protein” present on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; your cells will follow the instructions, producing the unfamiliar protein and spurring the body to make antibodies.
Researchers have hoped for years that mRNA vaccines will make it possible to vaccinate against diseases we otherwise struggle to vaccinate for and to do so on a much faster timeline than usual. “mRNA vaccines represent a promising alternative to conventional vaccine approaches because of their high potency, capacity for rapid development and potential for low-cost manufacture and safe administration,” a 2018 paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery by University of Pennsylvania medical researchers argued.
Even before the pandemic hit, there was already a lot of exciting work going on to make mRNA vaccines possible. But 2020 put that work to the test as vaccine researchers the world over tried to rapidly retool to fight Covid-19. Now, with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, the technology has been tested and it has succeeded. That success is likely to drive development of tons more mRNA vaccines targeting other diseases.
Meanwhile, the Oxford research institute that produced the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is also moving into late-stage clinical trials with another major achievement: a vaccine for malaria, which has stubbornly resisted research efforts over the past century. If the malaria vaccine works, it could put one of the world’s biggest killers to rest for good. And even if it’s only moderately effective, it can save a lot of lives.
Other good news to look forward to on the vaccine front: Moderna is reportedly working on a flu vaccine that lasts for life instead of requiring a yearly update. And mRNA vaccines might also be used to train the body to — one day — fight cancer.
3) America is likelier to be ready for the next pandemic
Scientists and policy experts have been warning for years that the United States was unready for the next pandemic. No one could have predicted that it would happen this year, of course, but we knew it would happen someday — and the US wasn’t ready.
In February and March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made mistakes with testing that hampered the US’s ability to stop the spread of the coronavirus into the country. Confusing public messaging around masks resulted in low adoption, a problem that persists today. There were personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages despite stockpiles intended to solve that exact problem. Many institutional weaknesses were suddenly and humiliatingly laid bare.
But there’s a silver lining. The coronavirus pandemic has been awful, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been. “The coronavirus appears not to be deadly enough to kill tens of millions of people, as was initially feared,” I wrote on February 6, “but this is more or less a matter of luck. The virus could easily have been deadlier, and the world would currently be in the grip of a horrifying mass casualty event.” Perhaps 2020’s single biggest stroke of luck — one that, as a parent of young kids, I appreciate every single day — is that the disease largely isn’t deadly to children.
Other pandemic diseases might be different. It is possible for a disease to spread like Covid-19 while being deadlier to younger people, and particularly deadly to young children as influenzas typically are. One thing the country can take a small measure of comfort in is that its unreadiness was exposed and its lessons were learned now, with this virus, instead of something much, much worse. Countries that faced SARS in the mid-2000s handled Covid-19 better, and hopefully having faced Covid-19 will help the US be ready for the next pandemic.
“I think we’ve learned an enormous amount in the course of this year,” Steve Morrison, who studies pandemic preparedness at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Health security prior to this was a kind of niche domain. It was one prone to these cycles of crisis and complacency. It was underfinanced, underprioritized.” That came back to bite the US — but hopefully, having learned its lesson, it can do better.
Post-pandemic accountability will make a big difference in determining how much America lets its mistakes this time around make it stronger for the next time. Morrison, for his part, believes the country will have a better response next time around because of what it went through in 2020. It’s the thinnest of silver linings, but I’ll take it.
4) Our digital infrastructure for remote work was tested — and passed
As rough as 2020 was, it would have been much worse without remote communications tech. After a decade of asking, “What is tech even getting us?” we saw an answer: the ability for fully 40 percent of the labor force to stay home during a pandemic. Zoom and similar tools, for all we complain about them, enabled companies to switch to remote meetings more or less overnight. The amount of traffic online jumped dramatically, and the internet mostly handled it without visible strain.
That’s easy to take for granted, since we mostly experience it as an absence — websites that load when we expect them to, devices that work. But it’s really pretty remarkable, and it points at one of our modern world’s greatest strengths, a strength that has survived the pandemic.
“Internet traffic carried by AT&T, one of the nation’s largest internet providers, rose almost immediately by 20 percent starting in mid-March,” Charles Fishman pointed out in an Atlantic article:
By the end of April, network traffic during the workweek was up 25 percent from typical Monday-to-Friday periods in January and February, and showed no signs of fading. That may not sound like much, but imagine suddenly needing to add 20 percent more long-haul trucks to U.S. highways instantly, or 20 percent more freight trains, or 20 percent more flights every day out of every airport in the country. In fact, none of those infrastructure systems could have provided 20 percent more capacity instantly — or sustained it day after day for months.
AT&T also told the Atlantic it experienced even more dramatic spikes in time spent on the phone and in text messages sent. As the pandemic made it unsafe to connect with one another in person, we connected digitally.
If we’d suffered a pandemic like this only a few decades ago, the way we responded would have been basically impossible. The infrastructure simply didn’t exist to allow most white-collar workers to safely work from home. In 2020, it did — and where it didn’t, we built it. “At one point in March, for instance,” Fishman writes, “traffic was rising so fast in Chicago and Atlanta that dozens of technicians and engineers in those cities worked all night, adding fresh fiber connections and routers.”
There are, of course, still galling inequities in access to the internet. In some parts of the country, kids were switched to “remote school” despite not having reliable internet access at home. The CARES Act contained money for expanding broadband access in poorly served communities, though there have been challenges in ensuring the money is spent usefully by the end-of-year deadline. And most people don’t have the luxury of doing their jobs from home, and they didn’t reap this benefit as much as knowledge economy workers.
That said, the resilience of the home internet infrastructure was an undeniably good thing. And it might only get better: Over the course of the year, innovative engineers worked to make online meeting tools better and more reliable, and to mimic many of the missing bits of regular life. In the past few months, I’ve attended online parties where people get louder or quieter as you walk toward them, to imitate how normal parties work; I’ve tested out special technology to enable group singing, which usually doesn’t work over video calls because of lag.
The tech industry has lots of problems. But it can also be innovative, flexible, and fast-moving, and in 2020 it lived up to its promise as a source not just of shiny distractions but of critical tools. The engineers who made working and connecting from home possible saved lives, and it should be an opportunity to reflect on how much technology can do when it’s directed at important problems.
5) Biotech is making huge leaps in other sectors
If you’ve ever seen a three-dimensional model of a protein, you might have noticed that the way the atoms twist and fold up into a shape looks kind of random. For a long time, scientists have tried to identify principles that explain what shape proteins will take when they fold. They’ve had only moderate success. There are more than a googol possibilities for any given protein, and which form a protein will take depends on incredibly complex interactions among its thousands of amino acids.
Researchers have kept at it, though, because the “protein-folding problem” is one of the most critical ones in biology. Successfully predicting how proteins fold will make it possible to design new drugs with a particular desired structure. It opens the door to breakthroughs in everything from new cancer treatments to new antidepressants.
2020 saw a big leap in these efforts, thanks to AI. Every two years at an annual competition called the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP), biologists compete to design systems that predict how unfamiliar proteins will fold. Their predictors are judged by how far their best guess at a protein’s structure is from the experimentally determined structure — the one the protein has when it is built out of amino acids and measured how it folds.
Last CASP, in 2018, the leader of the pack was Alphabet’s DeepMind, an AI research organization. At this year’s CASP, DeepMind didn’t just win again — it improved on its previous performance by an enormous margin, producing results almost as good as those you would get if you laboriously built and laboratory-imaged all of the proteins.
“This is a big deal,” CASP co-founder John Moult told Nature. “In some sense the problem is solved.”
DeepMind’s results are good enough that researchers should be able to use them for all kinds of biomedical research, custom-designing drugs that have desired receptors. It would also let researchers quickly scan every existing drug to learn which ones will work against some novel disease. And there’s no reason to think that the progress will stop here.
“It’s a breakthrough of the first order, certainly one of the most significant scientific results of my lifetime,” Columbia computational biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi told Nature. Skeptics have protested that while DeepMind has made progress, they haven’t “solved” protein folding, and there are many other steps before this work will produce new drugs. But there’s no arguing that this has been a major goal in biology and in pharmaceutical research for a long time.
DeepMind made its name in the AI field with its work beating top players at Go, chess, and Starcraft. Those triumphs involved impressive technical achievements, but they were easy for some to dismiss as being novelties — an AI that can play video games better than a human won’t change the world. This achievement makes it clear that AI breakthroughs are also coming to scientific fields and are poised to be hugely consequential.
While many of the implications of highly advanced AI systems give me pause, there’s lots of cause for optimism here. If we get AI right, we can use it to tackle many of the thorniest problems we face.
6) We’ve learned more about what works to fight poverty
This year is ending with a poverty crisis. But during April, May, and June — as the economy ground to a halt because of the pandemic — poverty in the US actually fell.
Why? The CARES Act, the landmark $2 trillion pandemic relief bill that Congress passed last March, briefly left many Americans better off. Transferring $1,200 to most taxpayers and padding out unemployment benefits with an extra $600 a week caused poverty rates to fall in April and May, at the depth of the crisis, as you can see on the chart below (the March decline is due to tax refunds). Poverty doesn’t usually fall in the middle of an economic crisis. But the US had never tried anything on the scale of CARES before.
The CARES Act’s provisions for unemployment insurance eventually expired, the act wasn’t renewed, and now poverty is spiking to record levels.
That’s awful news. But it also provides some useful perspective for policymakers. For a long time, there have been claims that America doesn’t really know how to tackle poverty, or that it requires solving lots of complex problems all at once. The CARES Act made it pretty clear that the country does know. A bill doesn’t have to be perfectly targeted, ideally designed, or incredibly clever to reduce poverty. It just has to send money to people who are struggling.
This lesson has been reflected in the ways macroeconomists think about policy, economist and finance commentator Noah Smith argues. “At least as far as policy debates go, arguments about optimal fiscal policy based in formal macroeconomic models seem to be out, replaced by a consensus that giving people money is necessary and good (at least, for the foreseeable future),” Smith wrote recently. Since the new consensus seems to reflect the empirical evidence a lot better than the old one — and presents policymakers with a lot more options to fight poverty — that’s great news.
7) The meat of the future is closer to the present
Currently, farms around the world produce chicken for sale by raising fast-growing chicken breeds in batches of tens of thousands, tightly packed in warehouses that are a public health hazard, a fire hazard, a worker safety hazard, and a hazard to the well-being of the chickens themselves.
What if, instead, we could grow the meat without the chickens?
Researchers all over the world have been chasing that dream, of “lab-grown” or “cultured” meat, for years. This year, lab-grown meat took one step closer to reality as the Singapore Food Agency approved the sale of cultured chicken meat grown in bioreactors, becoming the first agency in the world to issue such an approval. Its sign-off means that chicken bites from the US company Eat Just will be available to consumers in Singapore. (There are a few other places in the world where you can try lab-grown meat, such as an experimental restaurant in Israel.)
While the US isn’t close to commercial approval, the government is interested in figuring out how to foster lab-grown meat work stateside, as well: The US government gave out its first university research grant for lab-grown meat this winter.
While meat consumption is still rising, these steps have the potential to grow into much more than a novelty. If scale and cost concerns can be resolved, this can be a path to ending our reliance on barbaric factory farming practices, and building a food system that meets the world demand for meat ethically.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.


vox--2020-12-21--Congress has officially passed a $900 billion Covid-19 relief package

Days before the holidays , Congress has passed a $ 900 billion bill to extend unemployment insurance , pay out additional stimulus checks to Americans and provide more loans for small businesses .
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the relief bill Monday night on a vote of 359-53 , just hours after the final legislative text was released to members .
A few hours later , the Republican-controlled US Senate did the same with a vote of 92-6 .
“ It is a good bipartisan bill , ” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the House floor Monday morning , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assistance and a temporary extension of an eviction moratorium .
Pelosi also nodded to the $ 600 direct payments that will be going out to Americans .
“ I would have liked them to have been bigger , but they are significant and they will be going out soon , ” she said .
The bill is designed to be a short-term bridge to get financial relief to Americans as the country enters a particularly difficult stretch of the coronavirus pandemic , with about 200,000 new confirmed cases per day .
At the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in sight , with the first vaccines going out to health care workers and more on the way .
“ We can finally report what our nation has needed to hear for a long time : More help is on the way , ” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday night .
Pelosi and McConnell themselves received a first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine last week , and President-elect Joe Biden also received his on Monday .
There are still a number of big things that didn ’ t make it into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aid to state and local governments that Democrats wanted , and liability protections for companies that were a top priority for Republicans .
Addressing the Senate Sunday night , Schumer admitted while states and cities would receive some funding specifically for education , Covid-19 testing , and public transit , “ the agreement we reached is far from perfect.
” Democratic leaders and President-elect Joe Biden have said they want Congress to pass additional stimulus when Biden takes office .
“ Immediately , starting in the new year , Congress will need to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ COVID-19 plan , for support to struggling families , and investments in jobs and economic recovery , ” Biden said in a statement Sunday .
“ There will be no time to waste.
” But additional federal stimulus may well hinge on a pair of undecided Senate races in Georgia that will decide which party controls the Senate .
Passing another deal may not be easy .
What the stimulus deal contains While there ’ s a lot that the stimulus agreement omits , it is expected to offer much-needed aid on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we know so far on the details .
Stimulus checks : There is a second round of stimulus checks , though they are smaller than those distributed earlier this year .
These direct payments include $ 600 for individuals who made $ 75,000 a year or less in adjusted gross income in 2019 , and $ 1,200 for couples who made $ 150,000 or less .
Individuals and couples with children who qualify for the stimulus checks would also receive an additional $ 600 per child .
Payments will be incrementally reduced for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , much like they were in the spring .
Unemployment insurance ( UI ) : The plan includes an additional $ 300 in weekly federal UI payments through March 14 , 2021 .
This supplemental payment is set to bolster the weekly payment that recipients would get from their state unemployment programs , much like a prior provision did in the CARES Act .
The bill would also extend the pandemic unemployment insurance programs that are expiring at the end of December .
These pandemic-specific programs currently provide roughly 12 million Americans with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 325 billion is dedicated to small-business aid including repurposed funding for the Paycheck Protection Program , a forgivable loan program that business owners can apply for to cover payroll and operational costs .
These loans are aimed at businesses that have seen revenue declines this year .
For many , however , this aid comes too late — according to a Fortune report , almost 100,000 small businesses have already closed permanently during the pandemic .
Rental assistance and eviction moratorium : $ 25 billion in rental assistance is included as well as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As Vox ’ s Jerusalem Demsas previously reported , tenant advocates have argued that at least $ 100 billion in rental aid is needed to cover current shortfalls .
Additional action would be required to ensure that millions of Americans would not be evicted at the end of January .
Food aid : $ 13 billion for food aid to help fund a monthly 15 percent increase in individual SNAP benefits , aid for children who received food support at school , and money for other programs including Meals on Wheels and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Women , Infants , and Children ) .
Demand for such aid has spiked dramatically during the pandemic , with food banks across the country facing overwhelming need in recent months .
Paid sick leave : There are tax credits for businesses that voluntarily provide paid leave , which continues a policy established in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act , but companies are not mandated to offer such benefits .
Previously , workers who had coronavirus or those caring for children dealing with school closures were guaranteed paid leave if their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ legislation contains a number of other provisions : The bill includes $ 82 billion to help schools reopen ; $ 45 billion for public transit systems ; $ 27 billion to help states ramp up Covid-19 testing ; and $ 15 billion in small business loans specifically targeted to theaters and small venues that have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic .
The bill also includes $ 15 billion in aid for airlines — which would be required to bring furloughed employees back — according to Reuters .
It also includes language @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care , the product of months of bipartisan negotiations to end the practice that contributes to some patients getting steep medical bills from out-of-network providers .
Finally , the bill also has new guidelines for the Federal Reserve after Republicans — led by Sen. Pat Toomey ( R-PA ) — demanded recent emergency lending programs at the Fed be canceled in any final version of the bill .
As Vox ’ s Emily Stewart has explained , the Fed will be forced to eliminate several emergency lending programs created with CARES Act funding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ barred from restarting them without congressional approval .
It will also return the unused portion of the $ 454 billion Congress allotted it under the CARES Act to the Treasury Department , something the Fed had agreed to do in November .
The bill doesn ’ t provide direct aid for state and local governments , a Democratic priority , or the liability protections that shield businesses from coronavirus-related lawsuits Republicans had advocated for .
Additional deferment of federal student loan payments is also not included in the agreement , Politico ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will take people to receive help Speaking on CNBC Monday morning , US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin laid out an optimistic timeline for when Americans will see relief in the form of stimulus checks .
“ The good news is this is a very , very fast way of getting money into the economy , ” Mnuchin said .
“ Let me emphasize : People are going to see this money at the beginning of next week.
” But based on the timing of aid from the CARES Act , it could be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relief from the legislation .
Earlier this year , the first round of direct payments was deposited in people ’ s bank accounts around mid-April : “ Within two weeks of the CARES Act going into effect in March , more than 81 million payments were disbursed , totaling more than $ 147 billion , all through electronic transfers to recipients ’ bank accounts , according to the Government Accountability Office , ” CNBC recently reported .
People who do not have bank accounts , or whose information is not on file with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more delayed distribution of the payments .
For more information on what to expect with stimulus payments in the coming weeks , you can read Vox ’ s explainer here .
The timing of the implementation of enhanced unemployment insurance payments will also depend on the state .
States began distributing $ 600 in supplemental UI roughly two weeks after the CARES Act was approved this past spring , which means the weekly $ 300 addition could begin in early January .
And when it comes to the Paycheck Protection Program , banks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about a week after the funds were approved by Congress in March .
That could set up applications for a new round of loans to kick off at the end of December or early January .
This lag time could be costly for those waiting on assistance ; by the time much of this money gets to those who need it , the programs they are meant to extend will have been expired for weeks .
Nevertheless , such aid comes at a crucial time : According to the latest Labor Department report @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unemployment insurance .
In November , job growth slowed significantly compared to the prior month , suggesting that the unemployed are facing limited opportunities for new work .
And this winter , coronavirus cases are projected to soar — forcing thousands of businesses to shutter or slow their operations to prevent the spread of the illness .

Days before the holidays, Congress has passed a $900 billion bill to extend unemployment insurance, pay out additional stimulus checks to Americans and provide more loans for small businesses.
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the relief bill Monday night on a vote of 359-53, just hours after the final legislative text was released to members. A few hours later, the Republican-controlled US Senate did the same with a vote of 92-6.
“It is a good bipartisan bill,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the House floor Monday morning, mentioning provisions Democrats secured like additional food assistance and a temporary extension of an eviction moratorium. Pelosi also nodded to the $600 direct payments that will be going out to Americans. “I would have liked them to have been bigger, but they are significant and they will be going out soon,” she said.
The bill is designed to be a short-term bridge to get financial relief to Americans as the country enters a particularly difficult stretch of the coronavirus pandemic, with about 200,000 new confirmed cases per day. At the same time, an end may be in sight, with the first vaccines going out to health care workers and more on the way.
“We can finally report what our nation has needed to hear for a long time: More help is on the way,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday night. Pelosi and McConnell themselves received a first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine last week, and President-elect Joe Biden also received his on Monday.
There are still a number of big things that didn’t make it into the final relief bill, including broad aid to state and local governments that Democrats wanted, and liability protections for companies that were a top priority for Republicans. Addressing the Senate Sunday night, Schumer admitted while states and cities would receive some funding specifically for education, Covid-19 testing, and public transit, “the agreement we reached is far from perfect.”
Democratic leaders and President-elect Joe Biden have said they want Congress to pass additional stimulus when Biden takes office.
“Immediately, starting in the new year, Congress will need to get to work on support for our COVID-19 plan, for support to struggling families, and investments in jobs and economic recovery,” Biden said in a statement Sunday. “There will be no time to waste.”
But additional federal stimulus may well hinge on a pair of undecided Senate races in Georgia that will decide which party controls the Senate. Passing another deal may not be easy.
What the stimulus deal contains
While there’s a lot that the stimulus agreement omits, it is expected to offer much-needed aid on a few fronts. Here’s what we know so far on the details.
Stimulus checks: There is a second round of stimulus checks, though they are smaller than those distributed earlier this year. These direct payments include $600 for individuals who made $75,000 a year or less in adjusted gross income in 2019, and $1,200 for couples who made $150,000 or less. Individuals and couples with children who qualify for the stimulus checks would also receive an additional $600 per child. Payments will be incrementally reduced for people who make more in annual income, much like they were in the spring.
Unemployment insurance (UI): The plan includes an additional $300 in weekly federal UI payments through March 14, 2021. This supplemental payment is set to bolster the weekly payment that recipients would get from their state unemployment programs, much like a prior provision did in the CARES Act. The bill would also extend the pandemic unemployment insurance programs that are expiring at the end of December. These pandemic-specific programs currently provide roughly 12 million Americans with UI benefits.
Small-business support: $325 billion is dedicated to small-business aid including repurposed funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, a forgivable loan program that business owners can apply for to cover payroll and operational costs. These loans are aimed at businesses that have seen revenue declines this year. For many, however, this aid comes too late — according to a Fortune report, almost 100,000 small businesses have already closed permanently during the pandemic.
Rental assistance and eviction moratorium: $25 billion in rental assistance is included as well as the establishment of a federal eviction moratorium. As Vox’s Jerusalem Demsas previously reported, tenant advocates have argued that at least $100 billion in rental aid is needed to cover current shortfalls. Additional action would be required to ensure that millions of Americans would not be evicted at the end of January.
Food aid: $13 billion for food aid to help fund a monthly 15 percent increase in individual SNAP benefits, aid for children who received food support at school, and money for other programs including Meals on Wheels and WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children). Demand for such aid has spiked dramatically during the pandemic, with food banks across the country facing overwhelming need in recent months.
Paid sick leave: There are tax credits for businesses that voluntarily provide paid leave, which continues a policy established in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, but companies are not mandated to offer such benefits. Previously, workers who had coronavirus or those caring for children dealing with school closures were guaranteed paid leave if their workplaces were covered by FFCRA.
The legislation contains a number of other provisions: The bill includes $82 billion to help schools reopen; $45 billion for public transit systems; $27 billion to help states ramp up Covid-19 testing; and $15 billion in small business loans specifically targeted to theaters and small venues that have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. The bill also includes $15 billion in aid for airlines — which would be required to bring furloughed employees back — according to Reuters.
It also includes language to ban surprise medical bills for emergency care, the product of months of bipartisan negotiations to end the practice that contributes to some patients getting steep medical bills from out-of-network providers.
Finally, the bill also has new guidelines for the Federal Reserve after Republicans — led by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) — demanded recent emergency lending programs at the Fed be canceled in any final version of the bill.
As Vox’s Emily Stewart has explained, the Fed will be forced to eliminate several emergency lending programs created with CARES Act funding in the spring, and will be barred from restarting them without congressional approval. It will also return the unused portion of the $454 billion Congress allotted it under the CARES Act to the Treasury Department, something the Fed had agreed to do in November.
The bill doesn’t provide direct aid for state and local governments, a Democratic priority, or the liability protections that shield businesses from coronavirus-related lawsuits Republicans had advocated for. Additional deferment of federal student loan payments is also not included in the agreement, Politico’s Michael Stratford reports.
How long it will take people to receive help
Speaking on CNBC Monday morning, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin laid out an optimistic timeline for when Americans will see relief in the form of stimulus checks.
“The good news is this is a very, very fast way of getting money into the economy,” Mnuchin said. “Let me emphasize: People are going to see this money at the beginning of next week.”
But based on the timing of aid from the CARES Act, it could be a few weeks before people see direct relief from the legislation.
Earlier this year, the first round of direct payments was deposited in people’s bank accounts around mid-April: “Within two weeks of the CARES Act going into effect in March, more than 81 million payments were disbursed, totaling more than $147 billion, all through electronic transfers to recipients’ bank accounts, according to the Government Accountability Office,” CNBC recently reported.
People who do not have bank accounts, or whose information is not on file with the IRS, will likely see a more delayed distribution of the payments. For more information on what to expect with stimulus payments in the coming weeks, you can read Vox’s explainer here.
The timing of the implementation of enhanced unemployment insurance payments will also depend on the state. States began distributing $600 in supplemental UI roughly two weeks after the CARES Act was approved this past spring, which means the weekly $300 addition could begin in early January.
And when it comes to the Paycheck Protection Program, banks and other financial institutions began taking applications about a week after the funds were approved by Congress in March. That could set up applications for a new round of loans to kick off at the end of December or early January.
This lag time could be costly for those waiting on assistance; by the time much of this money gets to those who need it, the programs they are meant to extend will have been expired for weeks.
Nevertheless, such aid comes at a crucial time: According to the latest Labor Department report, 19 million people are currently receiving unemployment insurance. In November, job growth slowed significantly compared to the prior month, suggesting that the unemployed are facing limited opportunities for new work. And this winter, coronavirus cases are projected to soar — forcing thousands of businesses to shutter or slow their operations to prevent the spread of the illness.