The Long Boom?
We were facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. What happened?
In July 1997, WIRED invited readers to imagine that the emerging internet age would produce 25 years of accelerating prosperity, expanding freedom, and environmental recovery. By the time that forecast reached its endpoint in 2020, the world was wealthier, healthier, and more connected — but also entering a pandemic, confronting renewed great-power rivalry, and struggling with political division and a warming planet. The Long Boom wasn’t simply right or wrong. It anticipated much of the technology that transformed the world while badly misjudging the political and social consequences. So what happened to the future it promised — and are we making the same bet on artificial intelligence?
The Promise Of The Long Boom
Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden began their article The Long Boom by identifying what they called a “bad meme” that had spread through American culture since the 1980s. America was in decline. Good jobs were disappearing. Crime was out of control. Schools were collapsing. The environment was imploding. Their target wasn’t any single statistic or political argument. It was the cumulative effect of countless negative stories forming one emotional conclusion: the future was closing. Schwartz and Leyden wanted to replace that narrative with an expansive alternative. Their compressed philosophy was “Open, good. Closed, bad.” Open economies attracted investment and talent. Open societies encouraged experimentation. Open networks moved ideas across borders. Prosperity, knowledge, tolerance, and freedom would reinforce one another.
Schwartz brought substantial credentials to the project. He’d directed scenario work at Royal Dutch Shell and helped establish the Global Business Network, an influential consulting organization whose participants included corporate strategists, technologists, futurists, and countercultural figures such as Stewart Brand. Scenario planning wasn’t intended to produce one guaranteed forecast. Its practitioners developed several internally consistent futures, tested assumptions against them, and asked what decisions would remain sensible under different conditions. Schwartz and Leyden therefore described the Long Boom as “not a prediction, but a scenario.” That qualification matters, but it doesn’t settle the issue. The article supplied specific dates, a chronological history of the future, and confident claims about what would occur in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020.
The machinery behind the forecast was remarkably ambitious. Five overlapping technological waves — personal computing, telecommunications, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and alternative energy — would keep the world economy expanding as each successive wave matured. Computers would make organizations more productive. Telecommunications would connect billions of people and create a planetary marketplace. Biotechnology would transform medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing. Nanotechnology would reduce the material required to create useful products. Clean energy would weaken the geopolitical importance of oil. Global trade, deregulation, education, immigration, and private enterprise would carry these benefits outward, creating new middle classes whose members would demand stability, tolerance, and political freedom.
This was the Long Boom’s deepest assumption, and it explains both its insight and its failure. Schwartz and Leyden proved better at anticipating capabilities than consequences. They could see many of the emerging technical ingredients of the twenty-first century: networked computers, digital commerce, global communication, automated translation, genetic medicine, cleaner transportation, and the economic rise of Asia. They were much less successful at anticipating who would own those systems, how the gains would be distributed, how governments would use them, or how societies would react when rapid change threatened economic security, political identity, and social status. The technology arrived. The benevolent political settlement surrounding it didn’t.
Why 1997 Felt Like History Had Opened Up
The confidence becomes more understandable when the article is returned to its historical setting. Real US gross domestic product grew by about 3.8 percent during 1997. Annual unemployment fell to 4.9 percent. Median household income rose for a third consecutive year to $37,005 in contemporary dollars, roughly returning to its previous 1989 peak. The violent-crime rate had fallen from more than 747 incidents per 100,000 people in 1993 to about 611 in 1997. Inflation was subdued, equity markets were climbing, and the expansion that began in 1991 showed little sign of ending. Economists were debating whether information technology had finally resolved the old productivity paradox: computers could be seen everywhere except in the productivity statistics.
The technology itself still looked unfinished and therefore full of possibility. The commercial Web was growing quickly, but most people connected through slow dial-up modems. Mobile phones existed, but smartphones didn’t. Search engines were primitive, digital video was cumbersome, and electronic commerce remained an experiment. There were no dominant social networks, no mature app economy, and no small group of platforms governing much of the world’s information. Computers were moving from isolated office machines toward universal infrastructure, but the architecture of digital life hadn’t been decided. The future seemed open to invention rather than already owned.
The geopolitical setting encouraged the same feeling. The Soviet Union had disappeared. The European Union was deepening, China was integrating itself into international markets, and Russia’s chaotic transition hadn’t yet hardened into authoritarian nationalism. Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, an event that could still be viewed as part of China’s gradual incorporation into a global commercial order. Trade agreements, telecommunications liberalization, privatization, and cross-border capital flows appeared to be drawing countries toward a shared system. WIRED didn’t merely report on that world. It presented Silicon Valley’s mixture of technology, entrepreneurship, systems thinking, individual liberty, and counterculture as a possible model for civilization.
Then, on July 2, 1997 — one day after the publication date of “The Long Boom” — Thailand abandoned its defense of the baht and allowed the currency to float. The baht fell sharply, and the crisis spread through Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, and other economies. Businesses failed, currencies collapsed, savings vanished, and millions of people faced unemployment and hardship. The crisis didn’t prove that the Long Boom was foolish. Long expansions can contain brutal recessions. But it immediately exposed one of the article’s blind spots. Connected systems don’t transmit only investment, information, and innovation. They also transmit leverage, fear, contagion, and policy mistakes.
The Material Long Boom That Really Happened
The article’s clearest success was its recognition that computing and telecommunications would become universal infrastructure rather than remain specialized industries. By 2025, the International Telecommunication Union estimated that six billion people — about 74 percent of humanity — were online. Broadband video, electronic commerce, remote collaboration, instant international communication, searchable knowledge, and increasingly capable machine translation became ordinary. A moderately priced smartphone now provides access to maps, cameras, translators, libraries, communications systems, entertainment archives, and computational tools that would have required entire institutions in 1997. Schwartz and Leyden were right that networks would reorganize business and culture.
The forecast period also produced an extraordinary, if uneven, record of global human development. Revised World Bank estimates indicate that approximately 1.5 billion people escaped extreme poverty between 1990 and 2022. Not all of that should be counted as a successful forecast: the trend had begun before the article appeared, China accounts for a large part of the decline, and changing international poverty lines complicate historical comparisons. Nevertheless, the scale is difficult to dismiss. Global mortality among children under five fell from about 84 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1997 to roughly 39 in 2020. Access to electricity, sanitation, vaccination, education, and communications expanded across much of the developing world.
China’s rise was simultaneously the article’s greatest geopolitical success and its most revealing conceptual failure. Schwartz and Leyden understood that the center of economic gravity was shifting toward Asia. China became a central manufacturing power, an enormous consumer market, a technological competitor, and an indispensable part of global supply chains. Hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens experienced major improvements in income, housing, health, education, transportation, and consumption. But the political convergence the authors expected never occurred. Markets, international trade, a growing middle class, and digital connectivity didn’t automatically produce liberal democracy.
Biotechnology and clean transportation followed a similarly mixed pattern. The Human Genome Project didn’t meet the article’s proposed 2001 date, but it was completed in April 2003 — more than two years ahead of the scientific project’s original schedule and under budget. Genomic sequencing, targeted therapies, mRNA platforms, gene therapy, and CRISPR moved from speculation toward clinical practice. By July 2026, the US Food and Drug Administration had expanded approval of the CRISPR-edited therapy Casgevy to patients as young as two. In transportation, battery-electric vehicles rather than hydrogen fuel-cell cars became the leading alternative to combustion. More than 20 million electric cars were sold worldwide in 2025, representing about one-quarter of new-car sales. The Long Boom frequently identified the correct direction while choosing the wrong mechanism or timetable.
The Future It Couldn’t See
The article understood that the internet would matter, but it didn’t foresee the device through which most people would experience it. The smartphone combined the personal computer, telephone, camera, navigation system, music player, television, newspaper, store, and social network into an object carried throughout the day. That convergence made the internet far more intimate than the desktop-centered future of the 1990s. It also created an economy based on constant behavioral observation, notifications, recommendation systems, location data, and monetized attention. Digital technology didn’t simply change how people worked. It reorganized dating, friendship, childhood, entertainment, shopping, political organizing, and personal identity.
Social media was the even larger omission. Schwartz and Leyden imagined electronic town halls, interactive democracy, and a “never-ending planetary conversation.” They didn’t anticipate that networked communication would also reward outrage, accelerate rumors, enable coordinated harassment, fragment public attention, and make political identity a continuous performance. Nor did they foresee the industrial architecture that would emerge around it: enormous stores of personal data, automated advertising auctions, influencer economies, algorithmic amplification, and platforms with user populations larger than most countries. Connectivity expanded the range of available voices, but it didn’t create a common reality.
The article also failed to anticipate the events that would repeatedly reorganize the political economy of its forecast period. The dot-com bubble collapsed. The September 11 attacks were followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, expanded state surveillance, intensified border security, and a security-centered political culture. The housing bubble and global financial crisis exposed how leverage, opaque securities, regulatory failure, and interconnected institutions could transform private risk into public catastrophe. The Great Recession damaged employment, household wealth, trust in expertise, and confidence in globalization. COVID-19 then demonstrated that a biological shock could close schools, interrupt supply chains, stop travel, overwhelm hospitals, and force emergency decisions affecting almost every aspect of life.
Some of the most important positive developments were also absent. Cloud computing allowed organizations to rent vast computational capacity rather than building it themselves. Reusable rockets changed the economics of launch. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling revived North American oil and gas production just as futurists expected fossil fuels to lose their strategic importance. CRISPR made targeted gene editing dramatically more practical. Lithium-ion batteries and solar cells improved far faster than the hydrogen economy anticipated by the article. Large language models introduced a kind of general-purpose software that can write, translate, summarize, code, tutor, analyze, and converse. Forecasts often fail not because nothing happens, but because the wrong technology wins or the social consequences overwhelm the original technical prediction.
The Prosperity That Didn’t Distribute Itself
Schwartz and Leyden didn’t merely predict that total output would rise. They expected global economic growth to approach 6 percent, allowing the world economy to double approximately every twelve years. They imagined that the resulting prosperity would expand middle classes, weaken a permanent American underclass, and give billions of people a stake in political and economic stability. The world did become far richer, but the gains didn’t distribute themselves. The World Inequality Report 2026 estimates that the wealthiest 10 percent of humanity owns roughly three-quarters of global wealth, while the bottom half owns approximately 2 percent. Extreme poverty can decline at the same time that ownership becomes extraordinarily concentrated.
The distinction between absolute and relative improvement is crucial. A household can own better electronics, use safer transportation, enjoy more effective medicine, and communicate almost without cost while remaining economically insecure. Gross domestic product doesn’t reveal whether people own appreciating assets, whether their wages keep pace with productivity, whether their communities attract investment, or whether housing, education, healthcare, and childcare remain affordable. Even the encouraging Census Bureau report on 1997 income showed that the typical household had only just returned to its 1989 level after eight years. The boom was already less universal than the atmosphere surrounding it suggested.
Digital markets intensified this problem because network effects favor concentration. A search engine becomes more useful as it indexes more information and collects more data. A social network becomes more attractive when everyone’s friends are already there. A large online marketplace can spread infrastructure costs across millions of transactions. A cloud provider can build facilities and specialized systems that smaller competitors can’t easily reproduce. The networked economy created immense value, but it frequently concentrated control over standards, distribution, data, and access to customers. The relevant question became not merely whether people could join the network, but who owned it and who governed its terms.
Technology didn’t mechanically produce this distribution. Policy shaped the outcome. Tax systems, labor law, antitrust enforcement, education, housing regulation, financial rules, trade policy, public investment, intellectual-property law, and the ownership of productive capital all influenced how the surplus from innovation was divided. The Long Boom treated access to markets and networks as though access would naturally create bargaining power. It didn’t distinguish between participating in a system and owning a meaningful share of it. Innovation can enlarge the economic pie, but institutions determine whether the expansion appears as higher wages, lower prices, better public services, more leisure, larger fortunes, or some combination of them.
The Political Future That Failed to Converge
The article’s political optimism depended on the idea that markets, communications, education, and rising incomes would reinforce freedom. China demonstrated the weakness of that assumption. The country integrated itself into global manufacturing, educated millions of engineers, constructed advanced infrastructure, developed major technology companies, and connected most of its population to digital services without adopting competitive national democracy. Freedom House’s 2026 assessment gave China a political-rights and civil-liberties score of 9 out of 100. Whatever one thinks of the exact methodology, the larger pattern is unmistakable: economic modernization didn’t force political liberalization. Advanced technology could empower citizens, but it could also expand the administrative reach of the state.
Russia followed another path the article both underestimated and partially anticipated. The main scenario expected Russia to establish a functioning market economy, deepen its connection to Europe, and participate in a more stable continental order. Instead, privatization created enormous fortunes for politically connected insiders, democratic institutions weakened, independent media contracted, and political power became concentrated around Vladimir Putin. Nationalism and grievance displaced much of the earlier language of integration. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, producing the largest European war in generations. The optimistic chronology failed, while one of the article’s “scenario spoilers” — a Russian kleptocracy or nationalist regime threatening Europe — came disturbingly close to reality.
Europe produced a more mixed record. The European Union expanded eastward, adopted a common currency, created continent-wide legal and commercial institutions, and helped stabilize countries emerging from communist rule. Those are substantial achievements. Yet the euro crisis exposed tensions between a shared currency and national fiscal systems. Migration became politically destabilizing, nationalist parties gained influence, and the United Kingdom formally left the European Union on January 31, 2020, after 47 years of membership. Europe neither collapsed nor completed the smooth post-national integration imagined during the 1990s. It endured by repeatedly negotiating conflicts over sovereignty, identity, democratic accountability, and unequal economic adjustment.
Most fundamentally, the nation-state didn’t disappear. National governments remained the primary institutions responsible for currencies, taxation, courts, borders, public health, social insurance, military security, infrastructure, and industrial policy. During the financial crisis, governments rescued banks. During the pandemic, they closed borders, funded vaccines, issued emergency payments, and determined public-health rules. As technological rivalry intensified, they subsidized semiconductor factories, restricted exports, reviewed foreign investment, and treated supply chains as national-security assets. Freedom House reported in 2026 that global freedom had declined for a twentieth consecutive year and that only about 21 percent of the world’s population lived in countries it rated Free. Liberty turned out to be an institutionally demanding achievement, not the automatic reward for modernization.
A Cleaner World — and a Hotter One
Schwartz and Leyden believed that information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and alternative energy would reduce the material intensity of economic growth. Factories would become cleaner. Products would require fewer resources. Agriculture would become more efficient. Cars would pass through a hybrid phase and then adopt hydrogen fuel cells. Oil would lose its geopolitical centrality, while a growing world economy moved gradually back into balance with nature. Some of the logic was sound. Rich countries reduced many conventional air pollutants. Electric motors proved far more efficient than combustion engines. Renewable generation expanded rapidly. Digital communication replaced some travel, paper, physical media, and other material activity. But greater efficiency per unit of output wasn’t the same as a reduction in total environmental pressure.
The recovery of the ozone layer is the strongest evidence that planetary environmental damage can be reversed. The United Nations reports that nearly 99 percent of controlled ozone-depleting substances have been phased out and that the ozone layer is on a path toward recovery. It’s exactly the type of global improvement that a late-1990s optimist hoped humanity could achieve. But it didn’t arise automatically from economic growth or technological sophistication. Scientists identified the mechanism. Governments negotiated the Montreal Protocol. Industries developed substitutes. Regulators imposed schedules and restrictions. Nations monitored compliance over decades. The market adapted inside a coordinated political framework.
Climate change produced the opposite result. The peer-reviewed Global Carbon Budget 2025 estimated fossil-fuel carbon-dioxide emissions at a record 38.1 billion metric tons in 2025. Human-caused warming reached approximately 1.36 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 average in 2024. At the beginning of 2026, the estimated remaining carbon budget for a 50 percent chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees was approximately 170 billion tons of carbon dioxide — roughly four years of emissions at the 2025 rate. This occurred despite dramatic progress in clean technology. Utility-scale battery-storage costs fell by about 93 percent between 2010 and 2024, while solar costs fell by roughly 87 percent.
The environmental forecast therefore deserves neither ridicule nor vindication. Schwartz and Leyden correctly understood that innovation could weaken the relationship between economic production and environmental harm. They underestimated cumulative emissions, infrastructure turnover, political resistance, rebound effects, and the scale of growing global consumption. A more efficient car lowers energy use per mile, but the gain can be offset when more cars travel more miles. Digital products can replace physical ones, but data centers, networks, devices, and artificial-intelligence systems require energy and materials of their own. The world became cleaner in several local and regional respects while becoming hotter and more ecologically stressed at the planetary level.
The Ten Spoilers Hiding in Plain Sight
The most surprising part of the original article wasn’t its optimistic conclusion. It was a sidebar listing ten developments that could terminate or weaken the boom. Schwartz and Leyden imagined escalating conflict between the United States and China; disappointing technological productivity; Russian kleptocracy or nationalist authoritarianism; a breakdown in European integration; climate-related ecological and food disruption; terrorism or crime provoking a security retreat; pollution and disease overwhelming public systems; energy shocks and Middle Eastern instability; a global plague; and a social or cultural backlash against rapid change. Read today, the list resembles an outline of the following quarter-century.
US–China relations hardened from commercial engagement into tariffs, export controls, military tension, and technological rivalry. Russia became authoritarian and invaded Ukraine. European integration survived, but the euro crisis, Brexit, migration conflict, and nationalist politics weakened confidence in its direction. The September 11 attacks produced wars, surveillance, border restrictions, and a security-centered political response. Oil prices surged during the 2000s, and Middle Eastern instability remained potent. Climate impacts became more visible. COVID-19 fulfilled the global-plague scenario in unmistakable form. Populist, nationalist, religious, and cultural movements mobilized against globalization, immigration, scientific authority, social liberalization, and elite-led modernization.
It would still be misleading to claim that the authors scored ten perfect predictions. The technological boom didn’t collapse from a complete absence of productivity. Digital systems transformed entire industries even when economy-wide productivity growth disappointed. The European Union didn’t disintegrate. Renewable energy didn’t fail; solar power, wind, batteries, and electric cars developed faster than most observers expected. Pollution didn’t produce the specific worldwide cancer catastrophe the article contemplated. COVID-19 was devastating, but it didn’t kill anything close to the 200 million people considered in the sidebar. Several spoilers were broad enough that some version was likely to occur during a 23-year period.
The list nevertheless creates a genuine paradox. Schwartz and Leyden understood many of the forces that could obstruct their preferred future. They simply assigned those forces the wrong weight. The main narrative treated technology, openness, and growth as structural trends, while nationalism, war, disease, ecological damage, and backlash were relegated to the margins. Actual history repeatedly moved those supposed exceptions to the center. Looking back on the forecast, political scientist Dave Karpf wrote that “the social world has proven both more complicated and more fragile” than the authors anticipated. Their problem wasn’t blindness. It was confidence that the virtuous cycle would prove stronger than the disruptions they’d already identified.
The Moral Case for Optimism
The Long Boom was never only an exercise in forecasting. It was an argument about what persistent pessimism does to a society. In a letter published after the article, journalist Mariel Garza described growing up amid apocalyptic visions of nuclear war and social collapse. “Finally someone has something positive to say about our future,” she wrote. Her response captures part of the article’s importance. It gave readers permission to believe that technological and social upheaval might produce greater freedom and abundance rather than inevitable decline. In a media culture where warnings appear responsible and hope can sound unserious, its optimism was an act of provocation.
Modern research suggests that the complaint about negativity wasn’t imaginary. A 2023 study in Nature Human Behaviour examined roughly 105,000 headline variations tested through more than 370 million impressions. For a headline of average length, every additional negative word increased the click-through rate by about 2.3 percent. Positive words had the opposite effect. The study didn’t show that journalists fabricate negative events or that readers are irrational. It demonstrated that media producers operate in an attention market where negative framing creates a measurable commercial advantage.
The news also provides an inherently distorted sample of reality. Wars, murders, crashes, scandals, outbreaks, bankruptcies, and natural disasters happen as identifiable events. Improvements in sanitation, literacy, life expectancy, agricultural productivity, safety, and childhood survival accumulate gradually. A disease outbreak is news; the absence of millions of expected childhood deaths isn’t. A factory closure has a date, images, and displaced workers who can be interviewed. The gradual creation of thousands of jobs across unrelated firms may never become one story. A person consuming a perfectly accurate stream of individually negative reports can therefore develop a deeply inaccurate understanding of long-term change.
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That doesn’t mean optimism should be protected from criticism. Positive narratives can conceal suffering, excuse inequality, and transform powerful interests into supposedly neutral agents of progress. When improvement is described as inevitable, people harmed by change can be dismissed as backward, irrational, or personally defective. The alternative isn’t cynicism. It’s disciplined optimism: confidence that difficult problems can be solved, combined with serious attention to power, ownership, institutions, evidence, tradeoffs, and unintended consequences. Schwartz and Leyden warned that societies without an expansive future become “short-sighted and mean-spirited.” Their moral instinct may have aged better than their political economy.
Are We at Another Long Boom Moment?
Artificial intelligence now occupies the imaginative position held by the internet in 1997. Its capabilities are improving rapidly, investment is enormous, and its final social form remains unsettled. Early workplace research shows substantial but uneven effects. Economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond studied the introduction of a generative-AI assistant among 5,179 customer-support agents. Access to the system increased issues resolved per hour by an average of 14 percent. The gain reached 34 percent among novice and lower-skilled workers, while experienced high performers saw little benefit. The system appeared to capture practices used by strong workers and make them available to less experienced colleagues.
The economy-wide outcome remains uncertain. A 2025 OECD analysis estimated that artificial intelligence could add between 0.4 and 1.3 percentage points to annual labor-productivity growth over a decade in highly exposed G7 economies such as the United States and United Kingdom. That would be historically important. But the result depends on adoption, complementary software, organizational redesign, worker skills, competition, energy supply, and the range of tasks future systems can perform. The OECD’s 2026 productivity review also found that multifactor-productivity growth remained weak across many advanced economies during 2023 and 2024. AI may be beginning to change the numbers, but it hasn’t settled the debate.
The opportunity is larger than AI alone. Machine learning is converging with robotics, cloud computing, genomics, synthetic biology, precision medicine, electric transportation, solar power, batteries, advanced manufacturing, and reusable launch systems. AI can help design proteins, search for materials, optimize energy networks, automate engineering, and lower the cost of scientific experimentation. Leyden has explicitly returned to the framework of his earlier work through The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, a forthcoming book and series built around artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering. The resemblance to 1997 isn’t accidental. Once again, several general-purpose technologies are maturing at the same time.
We may indeed be entering another long expansion in productive capability. But capability alone can produce at least three different futures: a broadly shared boom; a powerful but unequal technological boom surrounded by political instability; or a fragmented transformation slowed by rivalry, concentrated ownership, institutional failure, and public resistance. The lesson of 1997 isn’t that optimism is embarrassing. It’s that there’s no automatic mechanism converting technical abundance into social abundance. The next Long Boom won’t be proved by an AI benchmark, a stock-market valuation, or a laboratory demonstration. It will be proved when extraordinary technologies produce ordinary forms of security, health, agency, time, and dignity — and when enough people share those gains that they recognize the boom as their own.
Editorial Disclaimer
This article is an independent retrospective and commentary on “The Long Boom,” written by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden and published by Wired in July 1997. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Wired, Condé Nast, or the original authors. The accompanying cover image is an original editorial illustration inspired by the visual concept of the 1997 feature, created for purposes of criticism, analysis, and historical commentary; all referenced titles, quotations, trademarks, and original artwork remain the property of their respective owners.
References
Original article, response, and historical background
- The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020
- Rants & Raves: Contemporary Reader Responses to “The Long Boom”
- Long Live the Long Boom
- Conspiracy of Heretics: The Global Business Network and Scenario Planning
- Shell Scenarios
- The Art of the Long View
The economic and cultural setting of 1997
- Money Income in the United States: 1997
- IMF Approves Stand-By Credit for Thailand
- Financial Sector Crisis and Restructuring: Lessons From Asia
Connectivity, poverty, and human development
- Global Connectivity Report 2025
- June 2025 Update to Global Poverty Lines
- UNICEF Data: World Demographics, Health and Infant Mortality
Biotechnology, transportation, and clean energy
- International Consortium Completes Human Genome Project
- FDA Approves First Gene Therapy for Young Children With Sickle Cell Disease
- Global EV Outlook 2026: Trends in Electric Cars
- Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2024
Inequality, political freedom, and globalization
- World Inequality Report 2026
- Freedom in the World 2026: The Growing Shadow of Autocracy
- China: Freedom in the World 2026 Country Report
Environmental outcomes
- Ozone Layer Recovery Is on Track, Helping Avoid Global Warming by 0.5°C
- Facts and Figures on Ozone Protection
- Global Carbon Budget 2025
Retrospectives and critical assessments
- In a Letter to His Kids, WIRED’s Founding Editor Recalls the Dawn of the Digital Revolution
- 25 Years of WIRED Predictions: Why the Future Never Arrives
- The Curse of the Long Boom
- The End of the Long Boom
- The Long Boom That Wasn’t — and What We Can Learn
