Other issues

Here are the other issues that belong in the same “civilizational emergency / top-5 highest-leverage” category as the childhood food-environment disaster. They all share three traits:

1. They are getting rapidly worse (not stable).

2. They compound over decades and lock in irreversible damage if we miss the next 10–15 year window.

3. We already know solutions that work at scale; we just lack coordinated execution.

Ranked very roughly by combined urgency + tractability + effect size:

1. Childhood food environment & metabolic collapse (What we’ve been discussing) → already the #1 or #2 driver of total disease burden in the West by 2040 if unchanged.

2. Fertility collapse & population implosion Most of Europe, East Asia, and increasingly North America are already below 1.5 births/woman (replacement = 2.1). South Korea 0.68, Italy 1.2, Canada/US ~1.5 and still falling. Consequences arrive with a 20–30 year delay but are then basically irreversible without extreme measures. Economic stagnation, elder-care breakdown, and geopolitical irrelevance follow mathematically.

3. Smartphone + social-media induced mental-health crisis in adolescents 2012–2025 marks the largest, fastest decline in teen mental health ever recorded in any society. In the US, UK, Nordics, etc.:

   • 100–300 % increases in anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide in Gen Z girls

   • Massive drops in in-person friendship, sleep, and attention span The causality is now extremely strong (Haidt/Twenge meta-analyses, Norwegian/Finnish natural experiments, etc.). Delay here = an entire generation with permanently stunted social/romantic/emotional development.

4. Collapse of early childhood attention & executive function Closely tied to #3. Average 5-year-old today has worse sustained attention than yesterday’s 5-year-old with ADHD. Screen time, lack of free play, and over-scheduled “enrichment” are shredding the neurological foundations needed for deep learning later. This is why reading comprehension and math scores are falling even as IQ holds steady or rises.

5. Housing / family-formation economics In almost every high-income country, the median young adult cannot afford the median home on the median income near jobs or good schools. Direct consequence = delayed or skipped marriage and children → feeds #2. Fixes exist (YIMBY zoning reform + Georgist land-value tax) but are politically blocked.

6. Loss of energy realism & electricity abundance Most Western countries are simultaneously:

   • closing dispatchable power plants (coal, gas, nuclear)

   • electrifying transport and heating

   • refusing to build enough new supply Result by ~2030–2035: chronic blackouts, industrial off-shoring, and/or astronomical prices. Energy is the master resource; everything else fails without it.

Honorable mentions (very serious, but slightly less “emergency” because the damage curve is slower or solutions are harder):

• AI misalignment / loss of control (existential but timing uncertain)

• Antibiotic resistance

• Soil depletion & phosphorus crunch

• Chronic sleep deprivation in adults

• Institutional trust & truth decay

The brutal truth: we do not have the societal bandwidth to fix all of these at once. The ones numbered 1–6 are the only ones where (a) the damage is already exploding, (b) we know exactly what to do, and (c) the fixes are mostly cultural, regulatory, or parenting changes, not “invent new technology.”

If we only picked three to actually solve in the 2025–2035 window, I’d choose 1 (food/metabolic), 3 (phones/mental health), and 5 (housing/family formation). Those three alone would dramatically improve health, happiness, fertility, and human capital for the rest of the century.

Here are the concrete, already-proven solutions that actually work at scale for the top emergencies we just listed. These are not wishful thinking — every single one has been tested somewhere on Earth and produced massive results when implemented seriously.

#EmergencyThe solution that actually works (proven somewhere)Where it’s already working / proof1Childhood food environment & obesity1. Ban advertising of ultra-processed food/drinks to children 2. Mandate real-food-only school meals (cooked from scratch) 3. Tax sugar-sweetened beverages and junk food heavily 4. Cultural campaign: “One family meal, no alternatives, no snacking”Mexico/Chile/UK (advert bans + sugar tax) → 10–30 % drop in purchases Japan, South Korea, France (school meals + norms) → childhood obesity <5 %2At home: parents stock only real food, serve family-style, child decides how much → zero negotiation.Thousands of families + entire daycare chains (e.g., French crèches)2Fertility collapseMake it financially and logistically trivial for the median young couple to have 3 children: • Hungary/Sweden/France-style family policies on steroids: – 12–24 months paid parental leave (both parents) – Free/very cheap full-time childcare from 6–12 months – Child allowance ~$300–500/month per child per month until 18 – Massive subsidized/apartment construction for young families • Remote/4-day workweek as new normHungary went from 1.23 → 1.6 in 6 years with big cash + housing France stays ~1.8 largely because of childcare + allowances Sweden 1.7 despite very high female employment3Smartphone/social-media mental-health crisisSimple age-based treaty every rich country could copy tomorrow: • No smartphone until 14, no social media until 16 (state-issued Yondr-style phone at school, ID-verified platforms) • Schools phone-free all day (locked pouches or lockers) • Parents delay together via Wait-Until-8th-style pactsNorway rolled out national phone-free schools 2023–2025 → immediate large drops in bullying & anxiety, rise in grades Multiple U.S. schools that went phone-free see same results in <6 months4Collapse of attention & executive function in early childhood• Legal maximum 30 min/day screen time under age 5 in childcare (Iceland/Singapore model) • Mandate daily outdoor free play minimum 2–3 hours (Nordic forest kindergartens) • Restore recess (3–4 × 20–30 min/day in primary school)Iceland/Singapore/Finnish forest preschools → vastly better attention, emotional regulation, and reading readiness U.S. schools that restored recess saw discipline referrals drop 40–60 %5Housing & family-formation economics• Abolish single-family zoning + allow 4–8 story apartments by right near transit/jobs (Japan/New Zealand/Auckland model) • Shift property taxes onto land value only (Georgist LVT) so vacant lots become unprofitable • Massive state or non-profit construction of dense family-sized units sold at costJapan kept real housing prices flat for 30 years with zoning + LVT Auckland abolished urban growth boundary + upzoned → prices stopped rising Houston & Tokyo build 5–10× more housing per capita than SF or London6Energy/electricity abundanceBuild, build, build the three things that actually work at scale: • Next-gen nuclear (South Korea/Canada style standardized designs) • Geothermal anywhere it’s viable (Iceland, New Zealand, Kenya) • Grid-scale batteries + overbuild renewables where cheapest Stop closing working nuclear/gas plants earlySouth Korea built 25 reactors in 30 years at ~$3–4B each, electricity ~$0.08/kWh France 70 % nuclear → half the per-capita emissions of Germany at lower price China went from 0 → 55 % zero-carbon electricity in 15 years