Three things are true at once:
The world is terrible. The world is better than it’s ever been. The world can be better than it is.
Headlines focus on the “terrible.”
If you only watch the news, you miss the reality of the systems underneath. You miss that both maternal mortality and the proportion of children in child labor worldwide has more than halved since the year 2000.
To understand where we are truly going, we must look past the noise and find the levers of progress.
Positive Sum is a newsletter about those levers.
I write about the unsexy structural forces—state capacity, regulatory bottlenecks, and public pessimism—that determine the impact of new technologies and how much we can improve people’s lives.
This systems-based analysis is how we move beyond zero-sum narratives and spread powerful, positive-sum solutions.
Understanding how our current systems work is the only way to realize the massive benefits AI promises (like accelerating science) and to mitigate its downsides. My goal is to move the conversation towards grounded insights.
Who am I?
I am Abi Olvera. I look at the world from the bottom up and the top down.
From the top down: I was a career diplomat for over a decade. I worked on national security, emerging technology, democracy resilience, and cybersecurity. I’ve also been a fellow at Council on Strategic Risks, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Institute for AI Policy and Strategy.
From the bottom up: I was a waitress for six years. Before Yale, I was a community college student that went years without health insurance. I know what the price of a lunch means to a working person, and I know how it feels when the system fails you.
You might know me from my piece “Traffic Fatalities are a Policy Choice,” which hit #5 on Hacker News, or my TEDx talk on the same subject.
I study the machinery of society. I advocate for progress, whether that’s voting reform, city design, or AI governance, because I care deeply about things that improve people’s everyday lives.
Subscribe
Subscribers to the free edition receive 1-2 articles per week.
When you become a paid subscriber, you are the engine that keeps this running. Your support tells me that my work is worthwhile: the deep dives into systems, the policy research, and dispelling fear-driven narratives.
Your support means I can dedicate myself to this analysis and continue doing on-the-ground work here in DC. It truly means a lot.
Where to start
If you are new here, these are my most popular pieces:
America Could Have $4 Lunches Like Japan – Zoning and food safety laws add up to outlaw tiny restaurants operated by one or two staff.
The Misinformation I Fell For – Why smart people fall for bad systems of information.
AI Researchers Should Study Real World Barriers, Not Just Capabilities - We need more attention on “societal frictions,” the bureaucratic, physical, and institutional barriers shaping AI diffusion.
Societal Advancement Does Not Come Naturally – Some of the most basic and uncontroversial practices we have today - things like handwashing in medicine, lightning rods on buildings, and women’s right to vote - faced tremendous opposition.
