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 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 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, like state capacity, regulatory bottlenecks, and public pessimism. These determine the prices of every day things, how much people trust society at large, and how much better society can get.
Who am I?
I am Abi Olvera.
I co-lead DC Abundance and an Existential Hope Fellow at Foresight Institute. I was a U.S. career diplomat for over a decade. I worked on national security, emerging technology, democracy resilience, biotechnology, and cybersecurity.
I also waited tables for six years. Before Yale and University of Richmond, I was a community college student that went years without health insurance.
You might know me from my piece “Traffic Fatalities are a Policy Choice” and “America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan but America make them illegal” which both hit #5 on Hacker News. I also gave a TEDx talk on the road fatalities.
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Where to start
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.
Healthcare Has a NIMBY Problem and It’s Why Independent Primary Care Clinics Have Nearly Disappeared - The system lets existing hospitals block new clinics, keeps qualified foreign doctors from practicing, and gives specialists control over pricing, which made independent primary care less viable.
The Boring Reason We Don’t Have $7 Rideshares - Rideshare rules written for a skeptical era are now a barrier to the affordable transportation people actually depend on.
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.
