Last summer, I had written on this lack of Global Science Equity. It is problematic for at least two reasons. The first is moral: some of the global inequities are so stark that they stand in blatant contrast to the meritocratic rhetoric still widely used within academia. When being situated in favorable circumstances gets framed as “talent” or “excellence,” and being from a disadvantaged country as “lacking quality,” this is an unjust distortion of the facts, which leads to misguided distributions of respect and recognition across academics worldwide.* The second is epistemic: academic research works best if diverse perspectives and approaches are taken into account, not if there are steep status hierarchies and historically grown centres of gravity that determine what research gets done and under which paradigms. 

Of course, knowing that some things are unjust is not the same as knowing what would be ideally just – a point that Amartya Sen has famously made, arguing that we can move away from injustice even though we may not have a blueprint of a perfectly just world. Some inequalities in the situation of researchers across the globe are probably unavoidable, given the manifold differences between countries (if only something like being in the “wrong” time zone, which makes participation in online events difficult). Hence, the term “Global Science Equity” (instead of “Global Science Justice”) is meant as a way of capturing the imperative of reducing the most massive imbalances and unfair disadvantages and moving in the right direction. 

These are some of the considerations that led us – Amal Amin, Flavia Maximo, Darlene Demandante, and me – in 2025 to start a survey among researchers about their working conditions and experiences. We had hoped to complement some of the existing research on related topics, for example the reports by the Global Young Academy on the state of young scholars in different parts of the world (on Africa here; on Latin America and the Caribbean here), or various reports about the experiences of women in science (e.g. here) and in science organizations (e.g. recently here on national academies). 

Methodology

We had hoped to reach sufficient numbers of participants to do sophisticated statistical analyses about, say, how much travel money for international conferences doctoral students in Latin America vs. Sub-Saharan Africa get. Alas, the numbers of responses were not large enough for that level of detail, despite our efforts to circulate the survey on social media and in various science organizations (e.g. Women in Science Without Borders, Societies for Women in Philosophy, Global Young Academy, Rede Brasileira de Mulheres Cientistas). We were probably too ambitious, wanting to cover a broad variety of issues and leaving many open-ended questions in order to get a good grasp of the different social experiences. 

Nonetheless, we got 146 answers, enough for some statistics – and certainly for some qualitative analysis. We are extremely grateful to everyone who took the time to share their experiences. We here present some of the results, in full awareness that the sample is small and we thus cannot claim statistical significance.** We start with some descriptive statistics, and then move on to the more qualitative parts of the survey. Originally, the survey was in English; on request from colleagues in Brazil, Flavia produced a Brazilian translation as well. 

64 participants were from OECD countries and 82 from non-OECD countries. Female academics were 115 of the respondents, 29 were male and 2 identify with another gender; this probably reflects our dissemination efforts in several organizations for women researchers. Regarding race/ethnicity, 49 identify themselves as White; 26 as Black; 21 as Asian; 11 as from Middle East and North Africa; 10 as Latinx/Hispanic and 5 as multiracial; 17 persons did not declare their race/ethnicity. 

Some quantitative data

The data show striking asymmetry between OECD and non-OECD respondents regarding geographic mobility. While OECD-based researchers are almost evenly split between those who remained in their country of origin (31) and those who did not (32), non-OECD respondents show a strong tendency toward working in their country of origin (75 out of 82). This pattern – if representative – suggests that geographic mobility in academic careers might operate differently across geopolitical contexts. In OECD systems, international mobility is both structurally incentivized and often institutionally required for career advancement. In non-OECD contexts, by contrast, the concentration of researchers working in their countries of origin may reflect constrained mobility for economic reasons.

This economic interpretation suggests itself because in our data, mobility resources were sharply unequal. Among parsable answers to our question about annual travel funding, non-OECD respondents cluster at $0, while OECD respondents cluster around $2,000, reaching up to $6,000. 44% of Non-OECD participants reported having no funding at all for traveling. This is an inequality with direct implications for participation in international networks, invitations, and collaboration ecosystems that shape grant and publishing outcomes.

These outcomes are also shaped by language barriers. English dominance is system-wide, with most participants reporting that they are expected to publish in English. But compliance burdens differ: overall, Non-OECD respondents are more likely to report needing language editing before submission, which takes time and money – though of course, there are also Non-OECD countries, e.g. India, in which English is the dominant academic language. Non-OECD respondents more frequently face the extra step of language editing, and also show a higher overall rate of personal payments for such language services. Some, however, expressed the hope that with affordable AI language editing options, these unequal burdens may become smaller. 

Across the full sample, 60 respondents (41%) reported career interruptions due to family duties, against 80 who did not; 6 for reasons that they did not want to disclose. The majority career interruptions were with female academics (52) and mostly due to maternity leave (but note that we had a high number of female respondents, as reported above). The OECD subsample shows a near-equal distribution (32 yes, 30 no), while non-OECD respondents report fewer interruptions in relative terms (28 yes, 50 no). 

These figures must be read with caution, because lower reported interruption rates among non-OECD respondents do not necessarily indicate more favorable conditions. They may, instead, reflect the absence of institutional policies such as parental leave policies, which means that the data – if representative – risk underrepresenting the actual burden of care (and note that we were not able to control for rates of parenthood among researchers at all, another potentially confounding factor). Yet another factor might be different cultural understandings of parenthood (and in particular motherhood) and the social acceptability and affordability of outsourcing care work. More research is needed to illuminate these differences. 

That 60 out of 146 respondents (41%) reported needing supplementary employment to sustain themselves financially represents a significant indicator of structural precarity within academia. The disproportion between OECD (23 yes) and non-OECD (37 yes) contexts is notable, though not as sharp as might be expected. This means that precarity, while more pronounced outside OECD countries, is by no means absent within them, especially in earlier career stages. These findings complicate the assumption that academic labor would always mean stable professional employment (maybe especially for women). Labour precarity appears across different career levels, but especially among doctoral students, independent scholars, and researchers without permanent contracts. 

Another datapoint may be related to the need to earn an additional income. In our responses, OECD affiliation correlates with earlier academic timing in this dataset: the clearest marker is age at PhD completion (median 30 in OECD countries vs. 34 in Non-OECD countries ), coupled with much younger OECD doctoral/postdoctoral ages. This points to different structurings of academic pathways, with people from non-OECD countries taking longer to get academic degrees and academic positions, maybe because of the need to also pursue other endeavors to maintain oneself, in academic systems with less structural funding for young researchers. 

Some qualitative data

On many other issues, we asked qualitative questions. Let us emphasize once more that we cannot claim statistical representativeness here (nor, obviously, verify the claims made by participants). 

Concerning experiences of discrimination, there were many entries in which women or people of color reported being a minority in their field, which made them feel not at home at academic events, but there were also reports of direct discrimination by academic managers, and of sexual harassment of the form that one can, sadly, call “classic.” One participant claimed to experience discrimination as a man because women were given preference in his field; while we cannot judge this specific case, it raises the problem of how to morally and practically deal with the disappointment of men in previously male-dominated fields that are being opened up to women (or along other lines), and about how to win them as allies in the fight against discrimination. One person pointed out that when “voices from the South” are invited, those might exclusively be those of Indigenous peoples and local communities (which are undeniably also of great importance), not those of scholars from these countries. 

When it comes to journals, many respondents focused on the theme of substance over formalities. For example, papers should not be rejected (by editors or reviewers) because of small linguistic issues that are difficult to avoid for non-native speakers; instead, there would, ideally, be help with linguistic issues at the stage of acceptance. 

Many respondents also reacted to the question about “token representation”: researchers from disadvantaged groups being included because this makes projects look better, without being taken fully seriously. At least 30 provided answers that directly reported such experiences. Some expressed great anger about it, others saw it as an unavoidable consequence of affirmative action programs and were therefore more ambivalent about it. 

Overall, a key insight from these qualitative data is that inequity in science is multidimensional, runs across different dimensions, and sometimes takes unexpected forms. For example, when it comes to languages, researchers from English-speaking non-OECD countries may experience fewer problems than those from non-English-speaking OECD countries. There are invisible obstacles such as chronic illnesses which lead to very different forms of exclusion, than, say, being visibly radicalized. For some scholars, time zones are a great challenge when it comes to international academic events or digital calls, for others, different academic calendars, for some, both.

To give some concrete examples: Young scholars at conferences on other continents may suddenly find themselves in unsafe situations because their phones do not work there and they cannot afford to pay for phone data, and they get lost on the way back from the conference dinner because no printed maps were provided. A form of exclusion that is probably relatively new is that international scholars from certain countries who work in the US cannot travel outside the country because they fear that they might not be allowed back in. 

Let us also note that several participants pointed out that we should have paid more attention to class as a category of inequity, e.g. when researchers come from very high class-positions in non-OECDs countries compared to people from disadvantaged class backgrounds in OECD countries – a point very well taken. 

Towards global science equity

One respondent from the Global North wrote: “I would like […] to hear voices from the Global South telling rich universities from the Global North what we can do that will be useful to and welcomed by them. I don’t know whether the voices are speaking and I’m not hearing them, but I think a lot of Global North academics would be enthusiastic about being involved with initiatives that help to equalise things, but nobody has any idea what to do – and they don’t want to make suggestions that might come across as (or indeed unwittingly be) patronising or racist”  

By combining the responses to the open-ended questions in our survey regarding best practices in international projects, cooperations, or scientific associations, we can provide some answers to this question. 

Diversity as a default aspect of science

Whether in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, nationality, language, or models of scientific knowledge, diversity was seen by many respondents as a key element for a global science equity. Inclusiveness along all these dimensions should not be something one has to argue for and justify, but be accepted as a mandatory dimension of academic work, whether it is in organizing conferences, running research teams, or reviewing for and editing journals. Participants highlighted the need for more diverse collaborations, respecting local realities, with knowledge transfer between different countries.

Including early-career academic researchers was repeatedly suggested as a way to reduce power imbalances: offering mentorship, funding and training opportunities, and thinking about capacity building as a core goal.  Also, providing support for childcare was often raised, as well as sensitivity to the needs of people with special medical needs or disabilities.

Simple suggestions that can be easily adopted into daily academic life were mentioned, such as more flexibility when it comes to the use of English; providing translation and language editing support or even allow submission in other languages, with the possibility of a later translation; awareness of the academic calendar in the Global South when scheduling conferences or meetings; moving meeting hours around to make it easier for participants in different time zones.

Quite some participants who had either little travel funds, or care responsibilities, or both, pointed out the advantages of online conferences and regretted the fact that after the end of the Covid-Pandemic, far fewer opportunities for online participation in international academic events remained intact. This raises the question of how in-person conferences might do more to keep open channels for those who cannot easily attend, whether as part of conferences or in the form of, say, digital reading groups or seminar series.  

Geopolitical redistribution of funding 

The unequal distribution of research, publication, and conference participation funds is one of the driving factors of the lack of Global Science Equity. As a solution, respondents suggested specific funds for including researchers from poorer countries in international events; hybrid options in conferences for participants for whom international travel is difficult; conference or membership fees that are differentiated according to GDP of the country of residence; or research funding opportunities where emerging countries compete with each other, not with better-resourced countries from the Global North. Transparent funding structures, with clear guidelines on fund allocation, disbursement, and reimbursement to avoid inequities or delays were also pointed out as best practices.

In addition to the lack of visibility for researchers from the Global South, who cannot obtain funding for publications, conferences, or projects, the concentration of resources in countries of the Global North has been experienced by some respondents as a form of control over scientific knowledge. One participant wrote that “collaborations should be equal, not the one who brings the money calls the shots. They can have the money as bait but they cannot do the research without the local partner, especially in the Global South.” Another respondent pointed out that countries of the Global South often continue to be treated as case studies for research from countries of the Global North, without being granted a leading role in theoretical production.

Horizontal academic relationships

Many respondents called for fair and transparent procedures in all aspects of scientific knowledge production. Some expressed the hope that it would be possible to achieve more equity when younger researchers get more of a say. As one participant wrote: “I think getting younger generations more involved is key to changes – and part of the struggles as scientific associations are often dominated by older academics with rather stubborn views”.

The generational difference in positions of power (often intersecting with a lack of female representation) has often been identified as problematic. Therefore, a broader distribution of decision-making power is essential for working towards more equity in science, with strategies that allow all researchers, and not only those with insider knowledge or a powerful mentor at their side, to participate equally. Such strategies include simplifying bureaucratic processes for accessing resources; standardizing reporting formats; using open science practices, sharing data, protocols, and outcomes for  the benefit of all partners, and eliminating the “friend-factor” in scientific relationships. An implicit theme in many answers was the endogamy of access to funds, networks, and visibility among researchers from the same institutions and the same countries, typically higher GDP and situated in the Global North. As long as the right to define what counts as “good science” remains exclusively in these circles, without attention to different local circumstances and different epistemic opportunities, the inequities of the global science landscape will be difficult to overcome. 

One final thought: A structural problem that might arise from the multiplicity of discriminatory experiences that we have described is that many academics may feel disadvantaged one way or another. While true in some sense, this may make us overlook the really drastic differences on a global level that matter far more, morally speaking. It reinforces an attention economy that is all too often dominated by old path dependencies (what were the “leading” centers in a certain field half a century ago?). The practical steps described above may help, in concrete ways, to overcome these unjust and epistemically harmful hierarchies, and to move towards more Global Science Equity.

This post has been written by Flavia Souza Maximo and Lisa Herzog. We would like to thank Amal Amin and Darlene Demandante for their support in the phase of setting up and distributing the survey, and Paulo Savaget for his help in analysing the data and commenting on a draft version. AI was used for summarizing some of the data, with manual doublechecking. All remaining errors are ore own. 

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 * If you’re skeptical of this claim, have a look at the distribution of Nobel prizes and other international science prices – looking at those, one might think that vast parts of the world do not even have academic research… 

 ** Also, it may be the case that our survey has been filled in mostly by people who feel that they have been treated inequitably in some way or another by the academic system. We had been open about the framing, which is preferable in terms of research ethics, but this might have biased the sample by not appealing to those think that there are no issues with equity in the scientific system. 

[how it started]

[how it’s going]

This in turn led to Cromwell, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Toleration, the Bill of Rights, and… yeah, just a whole lot of history.  

Now: if there’s one big question about the last 500 years of world history, it’s probably “Why Europe”.  Why did Europe (and not Qing China or the Ottomans or whoever) get the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment?  And why did Europe end up conquering or colonizing — at least for a while — pretty much the entire world outside of China, Japan, Iran and Anatolia?

I’m not going to go into all that today.  But consider this: if King Charles had been just a bit less stupid, or the Scots just a bit less ticked off, the rebellion might have been avoided. 

And in that case the most likely outcome is that Charles continues to bumble along for another 20 or 30 years until he dies peacefully in bed.  (Most monarchs did, after all, including many who were far more odious and incompetent than Charles.)  And in that case, we probably don’t get a United Kingdom, and we definitely don’t get a constitutional monarchy or a British fiscal-military state system.  Stuart Britain gets the worst of both worlds: a strong King with pretensions to absolutism, at the head of a very weak and perpetually cash-strapped state.  England remains, as it was in 1637, a second-rate power, pursuing a policy of isolationism because they can’t afford anything else.

Do we still get a Scientific Revolution?  Sure — all the pieces were in place by 1637.  We already have Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Harvey, and Bacon.  Leibniz and Newton, Hooke and Boyle were already born.  This was a pan-European project from day one.  So while the details will be different, the general pattern should be much the same.

Do we still get an Industrial Revolution?  Probably, but I suspect it’ll be delayed by a generation or so.  And when it happens, its epicenter will be on the Continent, not Great Britain.  Unlike the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution was disproportionately British in origin.  And within Britain it was disproportionately — not entirely, but very disproportionately — driven by religious nonconformists.  Absolutist Stuart England is going to have a lot fewer of those.  Also, without the massive economic disruptions and land transfers of the Commonwealth period, England’s economy is going to be more agrarian, more conservative, more dominated by a handful of noble families.  So the train still leaves the station — again, the pieces were in place — but it will move a bit slower.

Does Europe still end up conquering pretty much everything by 1900?  Probably yes.  But in this timeline the great colonizing power will be France, not the United Kingdom.  The map still gets painted, but blue instead of red.  The French get India (they almost did anyway), and they keep Canada and the North American interior, penning England’s American colonies east of the Appalachians.  Eventually France gobbles up Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and most of Africa, because they can.  We still get European colonialism everywhere, but now most of it is under the Bourbon fleur-de-lys.


[wider still, and wider, shall thy bounds be set]

There’s no French Revolution, or anything like it.  Why would there be?  No William of Orange, no Marlborough, no Blenheim or Ramillies.  Louis XIV sweeps the pot.  No British-led alliances of containment, no Royal Navy cheerfully devastating French trade again and again.  Stuart England won’t have the money for those things (and will probably be pro-French anyway).  So, no constant wars, ever more global in scope, loading the state with impossible debt.  And, of course, no English or American Revolutions as inspiration.

Do we still get an Enlightenment?  Okay, here’s where history really jumps the tracks.  Without Jenny Geddes and her friends, I don’t think we get an Enlightenment. 

There are no works by Hobbes or Locke in this timeline (Hobbes will still be around, but he won’t have much to say).  There’s no Commonwealth to serve as a test bed for all sorts of wild religious and political ideas, from putting a King on trial to letting the Jews come back.  There’s no Glorious Revolution, no Act of Toleration, no lifting of formal press censorship, no constitutional monarchy, no Bill of Rights.  Intellectual and political freedoms will still exist in a few places, most notably the Netherlands.  But there won’t be a large, powerful European country that is both little-l liberal and also an obvious economic and military success story. 

When we think of the Enlightenment, we probably first think of ancien regime France.  But most of the French philosophes were inspired by Britain as a proof of concept. In the universe where Jenny never throws her stool?  That won’t happen.  Montesquieu won’t spend years in England as a guest of Lord Chesterfield collecting material for _Spirit of the Laws_.  Voltaire won’t publish a book of essays admiring the advanced and progressive systems of government and political thought in Britain, because Still Stuart England won’t have those things. 

Europe’s dominant political model will be Bourbon / Hapsburg bureaucratic absolutism.  There will be odd exceptions like the Dutch and Swiss.  There will be internal critics and rebels.  But without the British examples in play, it’s hard to see what could seriously challenge that model.

The Enlightenment became a European project, and eventually a world project.  But at its beginning, it was deeply rooted in the particular historical experience of 17th century England and Scotland. And that particular historical experience was far from inevitable!  In fact, it was very weird and contingent.  Starting in 1637, the two British kingdoms quite suddenly took a right-angle turn into uncharted territory.  The consequences were momentous, and we’re still living with them.

Anyway.  If you go to St. Giles Cathedral?  Besides the modest memorial pictured above, there’s also a small plaque erected a couple of centuries later.  It reads:

“Constant oral tradition affirms that near this spot a brave Scotch woman Janet Geddes on the 23 July 1637 struck the first blow in the great struggle for freedom of conscience which after a conflict of half a century ended in the establishment of civil and religious liberty.”

And that’s all.

Three distinct concepts are relevant here: the ideal number (a normative answer to a survey question), the intended/expected number (what respondents plan to have or think they will actually have), and the actual number (completed fertility). These diverge in systematic and informative ways.

Start with the ideal. Across most high-income countries, around 50-60% of young women report an ideal family size of two children, with a smaller group preferring 3 and another, smaller group preferring 1, Only a small number see childlessness, or large families of four or more children, as ideal. This has been relatively stable for decades, despite large changes in education, labour markets and gender roles. In Australia, Europe and North America, the modal response is still two, with a minority favouring one or three, and very few choosing zero as an ideal. However, there has been a gradual decline in the mean ideal family size over time, with more women reporting an ideal size of one or zero.

Next, consider intentions When young women are asked how many children they intend (or expect) to have, the number is consistently lower than the ideal, typically by about 0.2–0.5 children on average, and the gap is larger for the youngest cohorts. That is, as ideal family size has declined, expected family size has declined slightly faster. Most importantly it has been below replacement, at least since the 1990s. Expectations are also more sensitive to circumstances. They fall when housing costs rise, when career paths become more uncertain, and when partnership formation is delayed. In other words, expectations embed a constraint set: they are a forecast conditional on anticipated economic and social conditions.

Two further patterns are worth noting. First, the gap between ideal and expected fertility is larger for more educated young women, reflecting steeper career–family trade-offs and later partnering. Second, the share of young women expecting to remain childless has risen, even though very few state childlessness as an ideal.

Finally, actual fertility. This is where the big drops have shown up. Completed fertility for recent cohorts in most OECD countries is now around 1.5–1.7 children per woman, and period TFRs are often lower still, especially after the post-GFC and pandemic shocks. Australia has moved from around replacement (near 2) in the late 2000s to roughly 1.6 or below in recent years. For women currently in their twenties, completed fertility will almost certainly end up below both their stated ideals and their early expectations, unless there is a substantial reversal of current trends. For a while it seemed as if births were merely being postponed, but this does not seem to be be the case any more.

In short, when young women are asked how many babies they want, they still mostly say two. When asked what they expect, they say something less. And what actually happens is less again. For policy, the distinction matters. If the objective were to raise fertility, measures that relax constraints—housing affordability, childcare, predictable career paths, and support for combining work and parenting—are the natural levers.

Changing society to make it more child-friendly is difficult but feasible. Given the massive monetary and labour cost of raising children, no subsidy is going to have a significant effect on ideal or planned numbers. But the removal of constraints like the absence of childcare can reduce the gap between palnned and actual births.

Other constraints are harder to fix. Most importantly, plans for having children commonly anticipate a stable life partnership, which cannot be guaranteed. The same is true of fertility problems. Finally, for some parents, the experience of having a first child is traumatic as a result of health problems, postpartum depression or the failure of the transformative experience of parenthood to offset the loss of freedom it entails. The result, often, is a decision to stop at oen

With better institutions and economic policy, it might be psssible to reverse the increase in the gap between intentions and outcomes that has occurred this century. That might raise births by between 0.2 to 0.3 children per woman. That’s not enough to push fertility above replacement. But it would rule out the collapse scenario we see in places like South Korea, where the combination of patriarchal norms and a modern economy makes childbearing an unappealing choice for most young women.

Although the polls predicted Orban’s defeat, nothing I read foreshadowed the scale of the victory – a two-thirds majority which will allow the reversal of all of Orban’s constitutional changes. Some credit for this must go to JD Vance. The spectacle of a US vice-president appearing in Europe to complain about foreign influence must have been too absurd for voters to accept. Putin’s unsubtle interference allowed Peter Magyar to remind Hungarians of Russia’s previous crimes against Hungary.

Within Europe, the effect will be to isolate Putin’s last supporter in the EU, Slovakian PM Fico. It should now be possible to get rid of the veto power exercised so balefully by Orban, with Fico’s support, and to constrain financial aid to Fico’s government. That will enable an acceleration of Ukraine’s admission along with Moldova, while Serbia (still aligned with Russia) can return to the back of the queue.

More generally, it’s a huge blow to European Trumpism, already on the ropes after Trump’s repeated attacks on putative allies. Trump-Orban supporters like Farage in UK and AfD in Germany are trying to back away from their public statements of support, but we have rhetorical receipts. Conversely, those advocating a clean break with Trump, like Sanchez in Spain have ben strengthened.

Less directly, the result should accelerate Britain’s return to the EU. Brexit and Orbanism were parallel projects, and both have failed miserably in delivering the prosperity they promised. Moreover the result has confirmed the toxicity of Trumpism, even in one of Europe’s most conservative countries. Starmer has taken the first steps, finally admitting that Brexit was a disaster. Hopefully he will be gone soon, and his successor will be free to start the serious work of returning at least to the single market and something close to free movement.

Intellectually and financially, this is a disaster for the “post-liberal” far right, of which Vance has been the most prominent representative.

Under Orban, Hungary represented a beacon of Christian (more specifically Catholic) nationalism of the kind put forward by post-liberals like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. The voters’ rejection of the Orban government will be followed by thoroughgoing exposure of the corruption of his regime.

Orban was also a source of lavish grants and speaking gigs, ultimately paid for by long-suffering EU taxpayers. That’s all over now. Those who have taken those gigs will come under a lot more scrutiny. In Australia they include Tony Abbott, Alexander Downer, Brian Loughnane (former Liberal national director), Greg Sheridan and many less prominent but highly influential figures.

Most important, but less clear, are the implications for Trumpism in the US. The result is a double-edged sword. By showing that even an entrenched regime like Orban’s can be defeated in a democratic election, it gives us hope. But the lesson for the Trumpists is that democracy must be suppressed as soon as possible. An Orban-scale defeat in the 2026 midterms would make it very difficult to steal the presidency in 2028. Looking at the polls that’s quite likely unless the 2026 elections are suppressed, as Trump has previously suggested.

Doubtless there will be disappointments in the future. But, for the moment hope is in the ascendant.

It was an age of fire, that ended with ice. Australia was part of the super-continent Gondwana, which was not yet south. By continent standards it was moving fast. By the end of this era, the Ordovician, it would be at the south pole.

In the water there were snails, trilobites, corals and some ‘primitive’ fish. On the land, some little bug type fellas with exoskeletons were starting to colonise Gondwana, which was otherwise empty of critters.

Volcanoes ruled a section of Gondwana that mining companies now refer lustfully (or covetously) as the LFB, the Lachlan Fold Belt. Deep in the earth, gold was already there. Hot magma rose upwards towards the surface, releasing fluids as it went. Amidst these fluids was liquid gold. Gold poured onto the surface of Gondwana, producing substantial reefs of golden metal due to volcanic ‘intrusions’ and also thin streaks through the granite. Then there was the Devonian , which was the Age of the Fishes, because fish came to be on top of the earth’s food chain (if one can have a favourite geological era this is mine). In this era, some of this gold was disrupted by more geological activity, so that gold was enfolded in quartz. This was the gold that diggers began to extract by the rivers in Ophir and Hill End in 1851.

What are we to make of this gold? Perhaps it was waiting patiently under the earth for its purpose to be fulfilled, when finally, the combinations of the end of the Napoleonic Wars, new British banking legislation, imperial expansion, steam ships and settler colonial confidence let thousands of people to take the three-week trip from Sydney to Bathurst and the eight hour journey to extract the gold.

Which is to say, was it always gold, not in terms of composition ot substance, but potential? Was the ‘gold’ sought by diggers and the bankers who bought it from them, embodied in what the magma deposited? Or did the diggers bring gold – the idea of gold – with them? And was it that idea which was infused with the historical moment, the confluence of a specie shortage, the disciplining of bank money and increased global mobility – so much for those diggers to carry! – that made gold, gold?

This is clearly important. Check out the price of gold over one hundred years (source: https://www.macrotrends.net/).

There was the gold standard and dollar-gold convertibility until 1969. Then, the moment that gold wasn’t important (in one way of thinking about it), the price goes nuts. And it goes nuts, as we have just seen, because of lots of ideas about gold: a safe haven when other currencies look dodgy, an opportunity for short-term gains in the process etc.

The relationship between the idea and the price is obvious.

But it is not just the idea of gold, is it? The point of it being gold is that it is actually, materially gold. Of course other metals are also important, but even in bimetallic systems of currency, while you can exchange their value like we do types of currency, you can’t actually substitute silver or cooper or anything else for gold. It actually has to be gold.

No wonder we have so many stories of people able to turn something that isn’t gold, into gold. This was the ancient science/philosophy (when those two were pretty much the same thing) of alchemy – or, at least, a sub-branch of alchemy called chrysopoeia, which distinguishes the gold-making branch from spiritual uplift/elixir of life type branches (though some scholars point out that these were in fact entangled).

It was also the gift/curse of Midas in Greek mythology, whose touch turned everything to gold. And then there is Rumpelstiltskin, who could spin straw into gold.

Of course, all such things are mythical. Gold cannot be magicked into being. There are a few cases of sciencing it into being, but in at least one case it was radioactive. That would probably impact its price, I reckon.

What about 400 million years ago? Did the Ordovician volcano perform primodial alchemy?

Turns out, no. The gold was already there.

Recently, astrophysicists have been able to prove that gold is created when stars collide.

I mean this seems like fucking nonsense, doesn’t it? But seriously. Here is how you make gold.

First you need not just one dead star, but two. Getting hold of two dead stars is quite difficult, but I reckon with some perseverance we can make it work.

Specifically they have to be ‘neutron stars’, which sounds like a star wearing a Superman cape, but is just the ultra-dense remnants left over when a star dies.

Then you need the two stars to collide. Not just line up in the sky when you’re looking at them – we’re making GOLD here, not the zodiac.

It is tricky to do, but the payoff is great. One 2017 collision produced 3 and 13 earth-masses of gold (that’s a pretty wide margin of error, but obv the low end is fine).

How do we get it to earth though? Well this is the really tricky bit. The gold that the Ordovician volcano reached down and extracted from the earth’s core and deposited on the LFB. Well, it was in the dust that coalesced to form the earth itself. When the earth was made of molten stuff, the gold sank deep into the core. Bits of gold dust have sometimes fallen from space, but most of it was produced by the cosmic alchemy and then helped form the earth itself.

Suddenly, today’s price ($4,650.80 USD an ounce) seems a bit of a bargain.

This post is part of my CH Currey Memorial Fellowship at the State Library of NSW on ‘What happened to the gold’?

Short answer: today that number is 5 million dollars per hour.

Longer answer: The “lifetime equivalent hourly wage” that I calculated in my book was assuming Musk would never take holidays, work 50 hours a week and work until 65. His 809 billion estimated assets would then translate into an hourly equivalent wage of 6,914,530 dollars per hour (hence almost 7 million per hour). Assuming he works 70 hours a week and until he turns 75, it would still amount to 4,938,950 dollars per hour – almost 5 million per hour.

That is: if Elon Musk were paid an hourly wage for his work, he’d need to earn about 5 million dollars per hour to amass that fortune. Of course, this should not be taken literally. There is no such wage. Moreover, this estimate assumes he doesn’t spend any of it. The point of this “lifetime equivalent hourly wage” is rather to make an extremely abstract number, that most people cannot cognitively process, understandable.

I’m glad this journalist asked, but that doesn’t mean she will use it, or even less so that the WSJ will publish any of this – it has happened a few times that USA/UK journalists interview me for a piece on extreme wealth that then doesn’t get published – sometimes they ghost me, sometimes they tell me they wrote the piece (and even share it) but the paper decides not to publish it.

Rising extreme wealth concentration and the relentless drive of the überwealthy to keep accumulating more lies at the core of almost all the world’s most lethal problems. It takes central stage in Luke Kemp’s masterpiece Goliath’s Curse, in which he asks what makes empires collapse. Kemp argues that our current empire is global because of the way our economic system is so radically global, and that if this empire goes down, it will affect all of us (and not just wipe out a geographically bounded empire as it did in the past, for example with the Aztec or the Roman Empire). While Kemp is pretty pessimistic at our odds of saving ourselves from collapse, he argues that it requires in any case two things – a cap on wealth and deep democracy.

Yet we are still not doing anything about extreme wealth concentration, because (a) most people vote for economically right-wing parties who prefer protecting the (extremely) rich above addressing the serious problems humanity is facing, (b) the extremely rich have in too many places captured our collective decision making (often via their corporate structures), (c) and too many regular people are still ignorant about the harmful effects of extreme wealth.

I think the only reasonable course of action is to double down on our efforts to address (a), (b), and (c).

But not that long ago, it would have been exceptional. Until about 1980, competitive sport for those over 70 was restricted largely to golf and lawn bowls. Until the 1990s, there wasn’t even a category for 70-year-olds in most competitive triathlons. The small number of competitors over 65 were lumped into a single category. The first 70-year-olds recorded as completing the demanding Kona Ironman event in Hawaii (3.8km swim, 180km ride, 42.2km run), to which I still aspire, were Hiromu Inada (male) and Ethel Autorino (female) in the year 2000.

What’s true of triathlons is true of endurance sports in general. Older athletes seem to be becoming more numerous, and also quite a bit faster, across a wide range of sports.

One example is the rise of parkrun, the weekly timed 5km run which has grown virally since it began in the UK in 2004. Tens of thousands of Australians over 70 have completed at least one parkrun and cursory review of the published results suggests a thousand or more turn out on an average week.

This reflects a broader change, with studies indicating an increase in physical activity among older Australians. The proportion of adults over 65 in Australia who were insufficiently physically active fell from 72% to 57% between 2017-18 and 2022.

This hasn’t changed the way we talk or think about the over-70 population. People are still classified as “older” or even “elderly” (a term more redolent of walking frames than running shoes) as early as 65, even though they are now expected to keep working until they are 67.

This has an impact on discussions around health and aged care. In 1980, Australians who reached the age of 70 could expect to live another 12 years or so. Today, they (in my case, we) can expect to live another 17 years on average, with more than half surviving to 80.

The assumption that the 80-year-olds of today will have the same health needs as those of the past implies a big increase in health care costs. But increased survival rates mean that old people today are healthier on average than people of the same age in the past.

Most 70-year-olds are much less likely than those in the past to have smoked. When combined with increased physical activity, the result has been a drop in the incidence of coronary heart disease, a major cause of both death and disability.

The Australian Burden of Diseases Study (2024) reported that while life expectancy at age 70 rose by about two years between 2003 and 2024, the expected time spent in ill health rose by as little as six months.

The trends we are seeing are better understood not as an “ageing population” but as a gradual stretching of the lifespan, with most milestones being reached later and later. Young people study longer and form households later, a fact reflected in the current rental crisis. Prime-aged adults, who were retiring earlier and earlier until recently, can now expect to work well into their 60s.

And, while the inevitable end comes for us a bit later than it used to, the process hasn’t changed much. Most people retain moderately good health until their last few years, before declining rapidly. Few spend more than a couple of years in residential aged care, with only a small fraction of that involving high-intensity care.

I’m old enough to be thinking about this future fairly regularly. For the moment though, I’m more focused on my imminent graduation into the 70-74 category, where I will be among the youngest (or least old) competitors, and a serious chance at a podium finish.

That distance from the process provides me with a somewhat different perspective on how Large Language Models (LLMs) are changing things. The rise of LLMs combined with the growth of the global university sector and the dominance of a “publish or perish”[1] has inevitably produced a flood of AI-generated slop which threatens to overwhelm the whole journal process, especially when AI is also being used to generate referee reports.

But will it always be slop? I’ve been trying out various LLMs, including OpenAI Deep Research and, more recently, its French competitor Mistral. I recently used DR to write a piece in the format of a journal article, though I have no plans to submit it anywhere.

The process started when I ran across a reference to Hempel’s “paradox of confirmation” in Richard Pettigrew’s Substack newsletter.

I was interested because Hempel’s work is adjacent to my main remaining research project on reasoning with bounded awareness. And, I love me a good paradox.

The paradox runs as follows. Suppose we want to make a probability judgement about the claim “all ravens are black”. Every time we see another black raven, we count this as confirmation of the claim. But, as Hempel observes, “all ravens are black” is logically equivalent to the contrapositive “every non-black thing is not a raven”. When we observe, for example, a white shoe, we should increase our belief in the contrapositive, and therefore in the original claim.

This seems obviously wrong, but the majority view of the philosophers who’ve written on the subject is that we should, indeed, increase our belief in the blackness of ravens very marginally upwards whenever we see a non-black non-raven. It’s easy enough to come up with what seems like a refutation, along the following lines
“Consider a world with one raven and one shoe. Each may be black or non-black. If the colour of the shoe is independent of the colour of the raven, observing the shoe tells us nothing about the colour of the raven”

I tried this out on Deep Research, and it turns out that this isn’t a new argument: a more complicated version was put forward by I.J. Good (a collaborator of Turing, and early predictor of superhuman AI), back in the 1960s, but didn’t settle the dispute. Here’s an updated statement of the problem from Branden Fitelsen

DR put up a vigorous defence of the mainstream position, and forced me to refine my position, as well as giving me lots of useful references, in a part of decision theory with which I’m not so familiar. However, as is usual with LLMs, and despite the shift away from the sycophancy that used to prevail, DR eventually came around to my way of thinking.

My final position was that the paradox reflects the impossibility of Hempel’s core project of deriving probability judgments independent of any model of the world. I saw the analogy to a similar project that was popular in economics in the 1980s, vector autoregression. It was claimed to be theory-free, but actually depended on (often implicit) identification assumptions, that is, the way in which variables are introduced into the estimation process.

You can read my paper here

What have I learned from this episode? Most notably, there is a version of vibe coding here. Starting with an idea, which might or might not be original, it’s now pretty easy to turn it into a working paper that looks like the standard product, including citations [2]. That’s a good thing for the growth of knowledge, but it is going to create huge problems for the use of journal publications as a credential by academics seeking employment or tenure.

Instead of just AI slop, journals are going to be faced with increasing volumes of papers that are plausibly publishable. In fields like economics and philosophy that will mean increasing rejection rates from their current absurdly high levels (above 90 per cent anywhere decent) to the point where acceptance or rejection is a lucky dip, or else the result of insider connections (for example, I saw this paper on the US seminar circuit and I know the author is a good fellow)

It’s also important to remember that while LLMs are causing big changes, they are a continuation of a process that’s been going on steadily at least since 1970 (it seemed brand-new when I started university in 1974). Innovations around that time were citation and keyword indexes (big thick books in tiny print) and survey/review journals like the Journal of Economic Literature. Then came the Internet. Even though it hasn’t lived up entirely to its early promise, Internet access has massively reduced the gap between the core and the periphery of the academic world, at least to the extent that the gap reflects communication problems. For me, as an Australian not particularly keen on international travel, this has been transformational.

In some ways, it’s a pity to be leaving the academic game when such marvellous new tools are available. In other ways, I’m glad to have done my work without worrying about whether I would be replaced by a computer program. But either way, LLMs aren’t going away and we will have to work out a way to live with them.

fn1. Although that’s a pejorative, I’m not a fan of the norm, dominant in philosophy and most of economics, of publishing only a few articles (say, one per year) and only in the very top-rated journals. As was once said of me, I embody the primal urge to publish, and used to turn out articles by the dozen. But now that we have blogs, Substack on so on, I can satisfy my need to express my views on every topic without the tiresome process of dealing with referees (I now deal with comments, but I can respond to these or ignore them as I please).

fn2. As some recent examples have shown, you need to check these. But that was always good practice, if not universally followed – a lot of citations I’ve seen turn out to be cut and pasted from earlier papers, propagating errors along the way. And the replication crisis has turned up numerous examples of papers being cited after they were retracted.

It so happened that during my morning jog today, I listened to a political-book-podcast** that juxtaposted a review one of Habermas’ last books – on the structural change of public discourse as a result of social media – with a review of a children’s book on classism. This triggered a whole chain of thoughts for me, about what I admired in Habermas’ approach to deliberative democracy, and where I had always felt a certain discomfort.

In a nutshell, Habermas’ account of democracy is all about what people say – how they communicate, not how they behave. It has long been a criticism, raised by feminist thinkers and others, that he has too rationalist an account of democracy, which shuts out emotions and fails to take into account types of political utterances beyond rational arguments.*** But what is also missing (and is missing in a lot of democratic theory), is what people do. It’s all deliberation, discourse, not behavior and action (which you might distinguish, roughly, as being routinized and following social conventions vs. being planned and directed at goals). This creates an open flank: how to deal with the all-too-frequent gap between what people say and what they do? It’s not enough to have a system in which everyone gets a chance to speak, what democracies ultimately need is a system in which citizens behave and act in ways that are in line with democratic values. And behavior and action are influenced by a whole set of forces beyond rational arguments – emotions, yes, but also material interests (the price of eggs!), and deeper ideological landscapes.

I’ve always been struck by the discrepancy between the talking of a certain academic circles, and the doing of others. What I mean is the way in which academically trained city dwellers, who know everything about today’s societal problems, can talk and read and write endlessly about them, but without ever attempting to do anything (maybe because their academic or artistic jobs are so greedy). And then, there are people I encounter in non-fancy, often rural areas, who have never heard of Habermas or the term “deliberation” (in fact, sometimes I wouldn’t dare to discuss with them about their voting behavior and would try to hide the fact that I’m a philosophy professor because that would come across as so pretentious). But they do so much – they run local associations, they support neighbors, they help newcomers integrate (including newcomers who are refugees). This is about behavior on the ground, rooted in human needs and everday sociability, not highflying discourse.

Yes, I know, these are clichés, and yes, there are exceptions. But I think there is also something to the cliché.

Now, I tend to think that most people are in principle willing to act cooperatively and in line with the basic legal structures of democratic society, because they do accept the system as legitimate (so that the use of force by the state can remain an exceptional means for exceptional cases). But if the system is seen less and less as fair, and as “not working” for one’s own interests, this kind of general acceptance can become fragile. Many people will then complain in discourse, to be sure, but if this does not seem sufficient, they often vote with their feet and change their behavior – by turning to antidemocratic parties, by emigrating, by no longer seeing laws and regulations as bindings, etc. (and I’m fully aware that part of the problem is that while some of the interests in question are legitimate, not all are, which makes the whole situation so complicated…).

Which brings me to the topic of class. Habermas wrote many of his books on deliberative democracy at a time when West Germany understood itself as a “levelled middelclass society” (a notion introduced in 1953 by Schelsky, but which remained part of public discourse for much longer): a society in which class no longer matters because everyone can participate in the consumption of certain material and cultural products that post-WWII economic growth created. It was also a time – especially in the 1970s – with a massive expansion of public education, creating many opportunities for social mobility. And, not least thanks to a pretty strong system of unions and co-determination, there was also some social mobility for those not attending university, with a conveyer belt for talented people without university education into positions of power. I guess that in the zeitgeist of these years, the idea that all citizens can participate in public discourse must have seemed less strange than in seems today.

Today, class obviously matters, in at least two ways. One is the sheer material one. In many countries, average wages have not risen for years. The welfare state and the state as provider of public infrastructure are seen as being in decline, which is often true, and probably has a lot to do with lack of tax money because the rich and transnational coprorations do not contribute enough. If you have a decent income, you can compensate for that privately. You can pay for that extra health insurance package, and the private tutoring for your kids, and the taxi that you take when the bus is, again, failing to show up. If you struggle to make ends meet, you don’t have those options.

In other words, in the time in which Habermas’ most important works appeared, the whole political economy in the background of “public discourse” was in a shape that made the idea of everyone having a chance to participate not completely utopian. But in today’s societies shaped more and more by diverging class experiences, how can this still happen?

The second way in which class matters, which is maybe even more difficult to address, is the ability to participate in public discourse. One can integrate women and non-white people into “discourse,” and we certainly should do more to really make this the case (the whole discussion about “epistemic injustice” is very much about this). But what about those whose education, family background, and job conditions simply do not prepare them for talking in the kind of way that official “public discourse” today requires? When, for example, have you seen a newspaper op-ed written by a non-college educated person? When did you see a podium in which theoretically and practically trained people would have exchanged perspectives?

I guess there are two directions that deliberative democracy can take in response (apart from doing whatever is possible to reduce the socio-economic injustices in its background). One is to turn from purely deliberative towards participatory models, with real involvement of real people. The “sluice” model Habermas had suggested (where the best arguments get filtered out in public discourse, then make it into parliament, get refined even more and end up being embodied in laws) is too vulnerable not only to classist exclusion but also to lobbyism by the super-rich, who prevent laws that would serve society at large but cost them money.

The second is to expand the concept of what counts as democratic participation, from discourse to behaviors – and that, I think, requires a honest conversation about economic conditions and specifically how people are treated at work. If people can train what it means to collaborate, find compromises, and look for fair solutions in their everyday working life, they can bring these skills to the political sphere as well. (Did she do all this spiel about Habermas to end up at her hobbyhorse of workplace democracy, you might think – maybe, but then it’s something I’ve been chewing on for a long time…).

In other words, democracy-as-discourse, important as this idea remains, has preconditions in the wider socio-economic system of society that Habermas did, arguably, not sufficiently address.**** It’s not that he would be against these arguments, I guess – it’s just that they are not at the core of his theoretical building. To think democracy today, and to understand what’s hollowing it out, we need to look beyond the level of discourse.

 * I’m not sure about his impact on the eastern regions of the former DDR – it would be interesting to hear from readers about this!

** Andruck in DLF (in German) – highly recommended.

*** Here is – again in German, apologies, AI can help – on of the sharpest but also thoughtful criticisms that I have ever come across.

**** And I’m not claiming that these are the only blind spots; one might, for example, think about the (economic and political) relations of Europe to other parts of the world…

And why not?  The Soviet Union was gone, and now the Reagan-Bush years were over.  Ding dong, the witch is dead!  We had a charming new President, who was going to use American power to push for peace in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Middle East.  The economy was picking up.  A bunch of promising new drugs were about to start pushing back the AIDS epidemic.  Nirvana was working on a new album.  People were talking about this new thing called the Internet, and it sounded pretty cool.

That said, “Candy Everybody Wants” was a distinctly odd choice.  Because there’s a huge disjunct between the music — which is a big cheerful aural hug, all happy brasses and soaring major chords — and the dark and cynical lyrics.  The music is fist-pumping inspiration.  The lyrics are about how our choices in media consumption are making us cruel and stupid.  Presumably they chose it because it works well as a duet — 10,000 Maniacs’ other big hit, “These Are Days”, was very much a delivery system for Merchant’s distinctive voice — but still: 0dd.

Over in Germany, Peter Lenk was finalizing his designs for Imperia.  She’d go up a few months later.  I very much doubt he watched or listened to “MTV’s Inaugural Ball”.  But I definitely think he was picking up on that early-1990s, post-Cold War swell of optimism. 

That zeitgeist was particularly strong in Germany, where the dust was still settling from the fall of the Wall. 


[no lie, that was a moment]

Re-unification!  All those Soviet armored divisions just across the border suddenly just… going home!  The looming threat of nuclear war dwindling to almost nothing!  And — wildest and most surprising — the sudden disappearance of a corrupt and oppressive system that had seemed invulnerable, immovable.  If Soviet Communism could suddenly just vanish, what might not be possible?

So I think Lenk was definitely feeling that surge of national optimism.  And I think he was reacting against it.  You might say that while the rest of us were dancing to the music of “Candy”, Lenk was listening carefully to the words. 

And I think — whether deliberately or not — he set up Imperia as a critique of that historical moment.  As a counterpoint.  Imperia may be about the Council of Constance, but she’s also about 1993.  If she’d gone up five years earlier, or five years later, I think she would have been something very different.

Give ’em What They Want

Okay, so through the last two and a half posts we’ve zigged and zagged through a bunch of European history and culture:  Botticelli, Balzac, the Emperor Constantine, bad Popes, Expressionism, Renaissance bankers, Nazis.  But none of this answers the question:  is Imperia (the statue) a serious work of art? 

I think yes, she is.  And part of the reason is this: she rotates.  She makes a complete turn every four minutes.

Yes, rotating sculptures are generally dopey.  But here I think it works.  Because Imperia means “empire”, and empires don’t look one way.  Empires have broad horizons.  Imperia turns because her claim to authority is very great.  Universal, perhaps.  Hegemonic.

You can see her as a straightforward comment on hypocrisy and that works.  You can see her as powerful men baffled by female sexuality and charisma — reduced, as we noted, to impotence or frustration.  You can see her as the patriarchy turned inside out.  And those things work, sure.  But I think Imperia is most interesting and alarming when we see her as a system.

Remember, the members of the Council of Constance came together to reform the most important institution in their world.  They had the tools to do so.  They had the brainpower, they had the time, there was broad popular support. But the Council failed because the Council members chose, collectively, to not solve the problem.  And they made that collective choice because they were themselves part of the corrupt system.  Everybody took bribes.  Everybody was profiting.  Everybody was complicit.  A clean and honest Church would have been better, everybody knew that, but they simply couldn’t get there from here.


[nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft]

In 1993, the Germans were still basking in the afterglow of the end of Communism.  Communism was corrupt, oppressive, and claimed to be universal.  But — in Eastern Europe, at least — Communism was imposed at gunpoint, from outside.  And I think, whether deliberately or not, Lenk was saying: all right, the bad system imposed upon us is gone.  Does that mean we’re done with bad systems?  Or will we, collectively, choose something that’s every bit as bad?

And that’s what I think we’re looking at here.  Imperia is a system, and she’s a bad system, and she’s the system that we create for ourselves by our collective  choices. 

Imperia is a bad Nash equilibrium.  She’s that corner of the Prisoner’s Dilemma where we all choose to send each other to jail forever.  

Imperia is the house always wins.  Imperia is a gacha game.   Imperia is vendor lock-in.  Imperia is our fossil fuel addiction.  Imperia is the algorithm that, based on our choices, limits our choices.  She’s the Love Island franchise.  She lifts us up — and leaves us impotent or frustrated.  Imperia is closing down all the newspapers and killing the high streets. She’s all of us knowing what we want, and getting it, good and hard.  If you’re workin’ for the Man every night and day, it’s probably Imperia you’re working for.  When all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life?  He’ll look upwards to meet Imperia’s concrete smile.  

Every four minutes, she turns.  She looks out over the river that the Romans bridged, and the lake where the Hapsburgs fought the Swiss, and the city that the Allies could have bombed but didn’t.  She looks north to Berlin where the Nazis burned Lovis Corinth’s paintings, and east to where Jan Hus came to be burned by the Church.  She looks south to the Rome where Raphael immortalized her namesake, who died young, and then died young himself, and she looks west to Paris where Balzac wrote a story about her and then killed himself through overwork and coffee.  She looks beyond that to the New World that Prince Henry started the search for, all unknowing, back when the Council of Constance was closing up shop, and where Lovis Corinth’s painting of her rests in a private collection.  And in one hand she holds the limp and depressed Emperor, who claims secular power over the bodies of mankind, and in the other she holds the petulant and helpless Pope, who claims spiritual power over the souls. 

And oceans rise, and empires fall, and the tourists come and gawk and snap selfies and maybe buy a keychain.  And she smiles her small cruel smile, and she turns, and she turns, and all the horizon comes under her stony gaze.

And that’s all.

To call this pledge ambitious would be an understatement. No nuclear plant has started in construction (as defined by first nuclear concrete) in Europe or North America since the disastrous Hinkley C project in 2017. And the future is not much better. The UK will presumably go ahead with the Sizewell C project, duplicating Hinkley, but that will only replace retirements of existing plants. In France, sites for six reactors have been identified, but no investment decision has been made. And in the US, even the announced restart of reactors closed as uneconomic in recent years is looking doubtful.

Actually existing nuclear power programs around the world are similarly limited. China has an established industry which starts construction around 10 new plants every year, and typically connects them 5 to 6 years later. Russia builds about one per year, mainly to replace old RMBK (Chernobyl style) plants.

Russia’s nuclear firm Rosatom also has an export business. The typical pattern is a generously financed project, building two to four reactors in a middle-income country that wants the prestige of having nuclear power. South Korea has completed one such project (Barakah in UAE, which took about 15 years) and has a contract for another with the Czech Republic. Because nuclear power is uneconomic even with subsidies, these deals are typically “one and done”. Having shown that they can generate nuclear power, few countries have been willing to strain their budgets for a second vanity project.

The great remaining hope is Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

This term is commonly used to refer to reactors small enough to be built in a factory and modular in the sense that they can be shipped to a site in the numbers required to meet the power needs of the installation. It is also used more loosely to refer to reactors generating less then 500 MW of electricity, compared to the 1000-1400 MW that have been standard in recent decades.

SMRs of the first kind don’t exist and probably never will. All the early proponents, with one exception have given up. The only surviving firm, Nuscale, had to abandon its initial plan to construct plants in the US because of cost over-runs. A contract has supposedly been signed with Romania, but the Romanian PM sounded distinctly unenthusiastic in a recent interview.

As I remember it is a fairly big sum, USD6-USD$7 billion and the business plan must also account for how the energy will be consumed. The investment will be made once a funding formula will be found. Given the very large amount of money, the complexity of such projects and the technology being in early days, I estimate we will not see the investment immediately.

For reference, given a capacity of 462 MW (6 units of 77MW), the implied unit cost is $US13-15 billion per GW, comparable to the disastrous Hinkley C project.

There are quite a few small but non-modular reactors around. Unfortunately most of these are relics from the early days of nuclear power (Gen II in the jargon). There are only two recent prototypes, one in China and one in Russia. Quite a few others have been announced, but they have no real advantage over the larger designs from which they are derived. Even if a handful get built, they are irrelevant to the future of energy.

In summary, nuclear power is a technology of the past. The only routes to a clean energy system are renewables and energy efficiency.