E13: How to feed the world, the $16,000 pineapple, a titanium heart and much more:
Tony Morley, March 20th 2025
“Both humans and hawks eat chickens — but the more hawks, the fewer chickens; while the more humans, the more chickens.” — Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879
The story of the pineapple is the story of agricultural progress, trade and globalization. Here's the story of how the cost of a pineapple fell from $16,000 to $3.00.
"Thus, in 1764, at the peak of pineapple mania in England, it is estimated that the average cost to cultivate a pineapple – taking into account the construction of the pinery, the import of pineapple plants from the Caribbean, and the gardening labor for three or four years – was approximately £80.
This translates to about £12,000, or $16,000, today. By the time of Stephenson’s retirement in the 1840s, cartoons show that in London even the lower classes could try a pineapple slice for a mere penny, about the price of a large loaf of bread."
Étienne Fortier-Dubois
I wrote a similar op-ed for The Up Wing back in 2024.
"Today the pineapple is a largely unregarded tropical fruit, casually thrown across inexpensive value pizzas or dried and mixed in cereal. The dramatic inflation-adjusted drop in cost from >$6,000 per pineapple to <$3.00 per pineapple, a 99.95% decrease, was driven by open markets, technological innovations in transport and energy capture, and powerful free market forces."
Tony Morley
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The History and Future of Food, How to Feed the World
Vaclav Smil is a juggernaut of technical writing and a preeminent global expert on energy, resources, and the material world. His work spans 49 feature-length books and more than 500 papers. His latest book, How to Feed the World, published March 4th, is an invaluable window into global food production and consumption.
"An indispensable analysis of how the world really produces and consumes its food—and a scientist’s exploration of how we can successfully feed a growing population without killing the planet."
Vaclav Smil
Inexpensive meat was a breakthrough, slightly less inexpensive meat could be the next
Making meat inexpensive was a breakthrough that took thousands of years; making meat more ethical could take far shorter if we're willing to pay a little more for it.
Tariffs lay fertile grounds for poverty
While correlation does not necessarily equate to causation, we can say with some reasonable confidence that tariffs and protectionism are fertile ground for poverty. Here's a look at which countries charge the most tariffs.
"Although most developed countries have been pushing for lower trade barriers in order to foster competitiveness, tariffs continue to be very high in some parts of the world."
Katharina Buchholz
A patient survives 100 days and leaves the hospital with a breakthrough titanium turbine heart
“An Australian man in his forties has become the first person in the world to leave hospital with an artificial heart made of titanium. The device is used as a stopgap for people with heart failure who are waiting for a donor heart, and previous recipients of this type of artificial heart had remained in US hospitals while it was in place.”
The culmination of more than 20 years of work by Daniel Timms and the team at BiVACOR — this new pump is the only one in the world to utilize magnetic levitation. A singular rotating turbine, magnetically suspended within the pump, dramatically improves durability and output. The design, manufacture, and successful transplant represent a breakthrough technology in artificial heart life support.
Smriti Mallapaty
"Many mechanical heart devices support the left side of the heart, and typically work by pooling blood in a sack, which flexes some 35 million times a year to pump blood. But these devices have many parts and often suffer failures. BiVACOR, which only has one moving part, will in theory experience fewer problems."
New acoustic method for breaking up kidney stones in situ
A new method for creating a vortex of sound waves could improve how kidney stones are broken apart in situ while reducing the likelihood of damaging other tissue.
"The treatment of kidney stones could soon be getting much faster, easier, and safer. Scientists have devised a method of non-invasively tearing the objects apart, using what are known as "acoustic vortex beams."
Universitat Politècnica de València
The breakthroughs that gave civilization covid vaccines, may soon furnish humanity with a fleet of cancer vaccines
The technological breakthroughs that fast-tracked the development and deployment of Covid vaccines, inadvertently laid the groundwork for a fleet of new cancer vaccines that could prove game-changers in the fight against disease.
"It used to take 20 years to get a drug to market. Most cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market. We showed the world that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools."
João Medeiros
"The left needs to abandon its miserable, irrational pessimism"
The Left can't build a better civilization working from a pessimistic worldview, no matter how much-impassioned doom-mongering they throw at it. You need to believe it's possible, and I dare say likely. To quote Johan Norberg in his 2010 book Progress, "People who believe in the future also invest more in the future."
“A hundred years ago the average person, in one of the world’s wealthiest societies, could expect to live until 40. Now global life expectancy is 73”
If you disregard the proclamation about UBI, shots across the bow of Marc Andreessen and the unnecessary central planning and State worship, Aaron Bastani has at least got the headline and tagline correct.
Aaron Bastani
Bureaucracy is strangling America's "build, baby, build"
Building a better America requires, first and foremost, building. Excessive red tape threatens American progress, and the ability to build, quite literally, a better future.
“The process of getting approval to build something tends to be way harder than the actual building itself.” “So, what happened? How did we go from a nation of roll-up-our-sleeves builders to a nation strangled with red tape?”
“But the cost of these delays isn’t just measured in time and money. It’s measured in the decay of our existing infrastructure. Because an inability to build new stuff means we’re stuck with old stuff … that’s often breaking down.”
The maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leone has fallen by 75%
The maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leone has fallen by 75% since 2000. From 1,680 mothers perishing for every 100,000 live births in the year 2000 to just 440 per 100,000 two decades later in 2020.
Hannah Ritchie
I wrote about this for Big Think back in 2023, “The radical drop in maternal mortality was a public health miracle”
“Between 2000 and 2017, the global maternal mortality rate fell by 38%. In low-income countries, the decline was more dramatic still, with a reduction of 46%.”
Tony Morley
Google’s new Gemini Robotics AI model brings astonishing fine motor skills and general utility to humanoid platforms
Google DeepMind has just announced two new robotic control models, which seek to allow future robotic systems to better understand their world while improving their ability to understand and execute human instruction. It's another step toward bringing humanoid robotic systems into the realm of general utility.
"For example, with Gemini Robotics, you can ask a robot to "pick up the banana and put it in the basket," and it will use a camera view of the scene to recognize the banana, guiding a robotic arm to perform the action successfully. Or you might say, "fold an origami fox," and it will use its knowledge of origami and how to fold paper carefully to perform the task."
Benj Edwards
The time is right for America to embrace an established technology that would improve the ethics of raising chickens for eggs and meat for very little additional cost
Nearly a million newly hatched male chickens are unceremoniously gassed, dumped into shredders, or otherwise killed each hour globally. However, the good news is that a technological solution that avoids the hatching and subsequent necessity to cull male chicks could be coming to the United States.
"But here’s the good news: Technology to end this grisly practice is finally coming to the US. Known as “in-ovo sexing” (“in-ovo” is Latin for “in the egg”), the technology detects the sex of a chicken while still in the egg so that companies can dispose of them before they hatch to avoid the shredding and gassing."
Kenny Torrella
Vaccinating poultry against bird flu could be a game-changer
Vaccinating poultry against bird flu could be the breakthrough that could save millions of birds, ease supply shortages, and prevent the spread of the virus.
"Without a new policy including vaccines, the government will continue to slaughter every flock with a bird flu infection to limit the spread of the disease. Those deaths have totaled over 166 million birds in the U.S. since 2022."
JOSH FUNK
A U.S. startup's largest new reactor has just achieved a critical milestone in electric steel production
Low-carbon electric steel is getting closer to commercial reality, holding the promise of transforming an extremely carbon-intensive but critical industry.
"Boston Metal was founded in 2013 to commercialize the technology. Since then, the company has worked to take it from lab scale, with reactors roughly the size of a coffee cup, to much larger ones that can produce tons of metal at a time. That’s crucial for an industry that operates on the scale of billions of tons per year."
Casey Crownhart
Peak Human: What we can learn from history's greatest civilizations, is about to drop
Johan Norberg’s most recent book, “Peak Human, What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages” explores the rise and fall of other golden ages in global civilization, and asks, “How do we ensure that our current golden age doesn’t end?”
Norberg, ever the champion of human progress and author of The Capitalist Manifesto and Progress, has yet to leave the progress-inclined reader wanting, and his latest book is highly recommended as a pre-order must for 2025.
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