Madison’s Notes: Progress Is A Choice: On the Systems of Modern Civilization with Charles C. Mann

Ryan Schinkel interviews journalist Charles C. Mann about his New Atlantis essay series “How the System Works,” which examines the four hidden systems that sustain modern life: food, water, electricity, and public health.

Mann argues that progress, though heavily criticized over recent decades, deserves defending. Global malnutrition fell from roughly 40% in the 1970s to about 8% today, even as population nearly tripled, thanks to the Green Revolution’s three pillars: synthetic fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process, expanded irrigation, and high-yield crop varieties bred by Norman Borlaug and others. Similar transformations brought electricity to some 6.5 billion people and, through unheralded figures like the Manchester sewage researchers Fowler, Arden, and Lockett, made dense cities livable.

But each system faces mounting strain: freshwater scarcity and wasteful flood irrigation, an aging grid dependent on volatile fossil fuels, and a public health establishment facing populist backlash over bureaucratization. Mann warns of a competency crisis, too few trained people to maintain what we inherited, and of institutional sclerosis that invites destructive overcorrection.