2 . When I first moved away from home to study, I started out living in student housing. We all had our own rooms, but every floor shared a kitchen and a common room. There was no supervision from family members, and we were expected to take care of ourselves. I had a neighbor who had, like most of us, just moved away from home. It was his first time on his own, and he felt unhappy.

We had to teach this poor boy EVERYTHING. It started with the mystery of why the plates in the cupboard were always greasy (有油渍的). It turned out that the boy didn’t know he had to use hot water to wash the dishes; he just washed them in cold water and put them back.

He spent the first six months complaining about how he was always running out of money. This was because he didn’t know how to cook. The rest of us lived on the usual student diet and treated ourselves to a pizza on weekends. However, he got fast food every single day. I could feed myself for a month on his weekly meal budget. Moreover, he had no idea how to wash clothes with a washing machine. I had to take him shopping for laundry detergent (洗衣粉) first because he didn’t know what it was. He thought he could just put ordinary soap in the washing machine.

To his credit, the boy was very grateful for the help and very depressed that no one had taught him how to do all these things before he moved out.

One day, the boy’s mother came to visit. He happily introduced all of us to his mother. After we graduated, I was invited to his wedding. He introduced me to his new wife as “the one who taught me how to be a man”.

Drawing High Schoolers to Science

A group of educators and plant scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) are connecting to reshape science classes. And this particular partnership isn’t just helping students get a better understanding of biology; it’s turning them into young scientists, even if only during class.

It doesn’t take long to see that the curriculum born from this collaboration makes for a much different experience than the traditional high school biology classes. For starters, it has a comic book for a workbook. Secondly, students are getting their hands dirty growing plants. MSU researchers are also studying the plant. The high schoolers are asking some of the same questions professional plant scientists are trying to answer.

“We’re getting them engaged with science in science practices, not just having them learn about science,” says Hildah Makori, a researcher at MSU. “They learn to look at things differently. That’s a life-time impact.”

The main characters of the comic book are a pair of young field scientists. They invite the high school students to help with plant research inspired by a real project at MSU. By growing their own plants, the students learn about genetics, evolution and how these interact with the environment.

The team has seen how this practice could keep students in the driver’s seat of their learning. To help the characters out, students set up different experiments to test their ideas.

The program is working. “This comic personally gave me a click that sparked my curiosity,” reads one student’s survey response. “The comic book put a lot of creative atmosphere into the story instead of just looking at words, instead of just listening to the teacher talk,” says another.

Teachers also had positive reviews. In a survey, one remarked how helpful it was to have the comic to refer to. The students could see the comic’s characters doing something in the lab and realize, “I’m able to do this right here at my table and I can do the same thing,” the teacher says.

9 . How Young Americans Spend Their Money

Young people have always puzzled their elders. Today’s youngsters are no different; indeed, they are confusing. They have thin wallets and expensive tastes. They prize convenience and a social conscience. They want shopping to be personal.     1     As they start spending in earnest, brands are trying to understand what these walking paradoxes with conflicting features want and how they shop. The answers will define the next era of consumerism.

Their absolute numbers are impressive. The European Union is home to nearly 125m people between the ages of ten (the youngest will become consumers in the next few years) and 34. America has another 110m of these Gen-Zs and millennials, a third of the population. The annual spending of households headed by American Gen-Zs and millennials hit $2.7trn in 2021, around 30% of the total.

    2     Forrester, a market-research firm, found that most users of “buy now, pay later” apps are around 20. Megan Scott, a 20-year-old student from London, speaks for many of her peers by admitting that, when shopping, she has no self-control—until the bill arrives.

The light-speed online world also appears to have lowered tolerances for long delivery times. A study by Salesforce, a business-software giant, found that Gen-Z Americans, who prefer to use their phones to pay for shopping, are the likeliest of all age groups to want their groceries delivered within an hour.     3    

The Internet has also changed how the young discover brands. Print, billboard or TV advertising has given way to social media. Instagram, part of Meta’s empire, and TikTok, a Chinese-owned app, are where the young look for inspiration, particularly for goods where looks matter such as fashion, beauty and sportswear.     4     Such apps are increasingly adding features that allow users to shop without ever leaving the platform. According to McKinsey, six in ten Americans under the age of 25 had completed a purchase on a social-media site.

10 . In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not an increase in deaths, but a drop in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (AI) leads to optimism in some quarters, the baby bust (婴儿荒) hangs over the future of the world economy.

Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems. The world is not close to full and the economic difficulties resulting from fewer young people are many. The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners. Retired folk draw on the output of the working-aged, either through the state, which requests taxes on workers to pay public pensions, or by cashing in savings to buy goods and services or because relatives provide care unpaid. But whereas the rich world currently has around three people between 20 and 64 years old for everyone over 65, by 2050 it will have less than two. The implications are higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises.

Low proportion of workers to pensioners are only one problem resulting from collapsing fertility. Younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, the ability to think creatively so as to solve problems in entirely new ways. This youthful energy adds to the accumulated knowledge of older workers. It also brings change. Patents filed by the youngest inventors are much more likely to cover breakthrough innovations. Older countries and their young people are less enterprising and less comfortable taking risks. Because the old benefit less than the young when economies grow, they have proved less keen on pro-growth policies, especially housebuilding. Creative destruction is likely to be rarer in ageing societies, restricting productivity growth in ways that compound into an enormous missed opportunity.

Eventually, therefore, the world will have to make do with fewer youngsters—and perhaps with a shrinking population. With that in mind, recent advances in AI could not have come at a better time. A productive AI economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. Eventually AI may be able to generate ideas by itself, reducing the need for human intelligence. Combined with robotics, AI may also make caring for the elderly less labour-intensive. Such innovations will certainly be in high demand.

If technology does allow humanity to overcome the baby bust, it will fit the historical pattern. Unexpected productivity advances meant that demographic time-bombs (人口定时炸弹) failed to explode. Fewer babies mean less human genius. But that might be a problem human genius can fix.