Metrics to keep an eye on in 2024, from solar cells to superhero movies - The Economist   

By Gilead Amit, Rachel Lloyd, Jonathan Rosenthal, Tom Standage, Pratibha Thaker and Christopher Wilson

Sometimes the best way to follow a trend is to plot it on a chart. Here is a selection of noteworthy metrics that are worth keeping an eye on in 2024, from solar-cell technology to superhero movies. Some are merely fun—while others are potentially world-changing.

The cost of launching things into space has plunged over the past decade, a direct consequence of the development of reusable rockets by SpaceX, the rocket-launch company founded by Elon Musk. Its Falcon 9 rocket has a reusable booster stage, which can send a payload on its way to orbit and then return to Earth, touching down either on land or on a drone ship. Not throwing away the booster, which costs tens of millions of dollars, but instead reusing it up to 15 times, has slashed launch costs, and SpaceX now carries more to orbit than the rest of the world combined. But launch costs could soon fall even further, if two new rockets make successful flights in 2024. The first is SpaceX’s Starship, the largest rocket ever built, which is fully reusable and can carry as much as 150 tonnes into orbit, ten times more than Falcon 9. But keep an eye, too, on Neutron, a new reusable rocket from Rocket Lab, a rival startup. It aims to be competitive on a cost-per-kilogram basis with the Falcon 9, but for smaller payloads. To open up new opportunities in space, what goes up must come down—in price.

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What responsibilities do individuals have to stop climate change? - The Economist   

The vast majority of readers of The Economist would recoil at the idea of stealing from a poor Malian goatherd or a struggling Bangladeshi farmer. Next to none would countenance murdering such a person. They would feel little differently if they committed these crimes as part of a mob, rendering the responsibility diffuse. Nor would they feel much better if their actions were only likely, but not certain, to do blameless strangers serious harm: they would not scatter landmines in a populated area, for instance.

How, then, should we think about readers’ (and your correspondent’s) responsibility for global warming? Almost every human activity involves some emissions of greenhouse gases. Global warming is already harming the livelihoods of many people, including lots of poverty-stricken goatherds and farmers. At the extremes, the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, storms and heatwaves brought on by global warming is killing people—a tragedy that will get worse as the planet bakes. Are rich Western consumers thus conniving in theft and murder?

Many would dismiss such a question as hyperbole. How much harm is any one person doing through their planet-cooking ways? How could you even answer that question, given that the precise impact of any given wisp of greenhouse gas is unknowable?

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Americans are moving to smaller towns in the South - The Economist   

“Keeping Austin weird” has been more of a slog than locals anticipated. Inundated with Silicon Valley refugees and Manhattan defectors, the Texan city once known for its cool subculture has become a tech metropolis. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Tesla set up shop there, offering jobs that made it a magnet. From 2010 to 2020 metropolitan Austin’s population grew by more than that of any other big city, by one-third to 2.3m.

It has since burst at the seams. Housing supply has failed to keep up with rocketing demand. In September the Austin Board of Realtors said the city is short of 152,000 affordable two-person homes. Locals are getting priced out, homeless people line the downtown streets and traffic is hellish.

Cities across the Sun Belt, from Charlotte to Dallas, have seen an influx of newcomers over the past decade. Dubbed the “new great migration”, it has been led by thousands of black college graduates moving south, fuelling urban renewal in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, even as cities in the north-east, Midwest and west shrink. And small southern towns are growing fastest.

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The return of The Economist’s agony uncle - The Economist   

Dear Max, I am a 23-year-old social-media marketer who has only recently been required to return to the office. I had been told that the office would be great for having watercooler conversations. My office doesn’t seem to have a watercooler. What should I do?

Now you ask, I’m not really even sure what a watercooler is. But the basic idea is to find a place where you know colleagues are bound to go regularly and where you can engage in light conversation about whether they saw anything good on TV last night. My advice is to hang around any tap and you should meet colleagues fairly regularly.

I have just been promoted into a senior role. I have noticed that many of my new peers like to open meetings with small personal anecdotes about something that happened to them that day—a minor cycling accident, say, or a chance encounter with an old acquaintance. It seems to be a way of getting people to relax a bit. The trouble is that nothing interesting ever seems to happen to me. What should I do?

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