Briefs
Before anything gets published here, the claim behind it is checked against the data and given a verdict. These are those checks, as written — every figure sourced to a named, dated release, and the open questions left in.
Some of them refute the idea that prompted them. Those are the ones worth reading.
- CONFIRMED
Hired, or not fired: the bigger shock healed faster, and only the flows say why
Unemployment peaked higher in 2020 than in 2009 — 14.8% against 10.0% — and was back to normal three and a half times faster. The headline poses that puzzle and cannot answer it. The flows can: 2009 was a collapse in job-finding, slow to repair, while 98% of 2020's rise was people losing jobs, and 78% of them were on temporary layoff. People on layoff get recalled.
- CONFIRMED
Which prices, in what order: the inflation was a relay, and shelter ran the last leg
The 2021-23 inflation did not rise and fall as one thing. Energy and core goods started it, then handed the contribution on: energy's annual rate turned negative in March 2023, the very month shelter peaked. The headline peaked eight months before the typical price did, and between 2021 and 2024 food, energy and goods removed 4.64 points of inflation while core services added 0.49.
- QUALIFIED
The four numbers behind emissions: the clean-energy story is about the term that didn't move
World CO2 is population times income per person times the energy each dollar takes times the carbon each unit of energy carries. Over 2000-2021 the two scale terms pushed emissions up 69.5 points and the two efficiency terms pulled them down 30.2. But only one efficiency term moved: energy intensity fell 24.9% while the carbon intensity of energy fell 1.5% — and rose to a peak in 2012. Renewables enter the identity through the term that did not budge.
- CONFIRMED
Area or yield: the land-sparing is real, and it is fading
World cereal production grew 3.57 times since 1961 and 90% of that came from getting more out of each hectare rather than clearing more land. But the 90% is a long-run blend that is thinning: yield supplied 82% of growth in 1961-80 and 73% in 2010-23, while world yield growth roughly halved and fell outright in 2024. Area expansion is coming back, concentrated in South America.
- QUALIFIED
Births, deaths and the door: migration is not a contributor to growth, it is the whole of it
Germany grew by 462,006 people in 2023 while registering 314,889 more deaths than births. Japan and Italy show the same negative natural increase with substantial migration and still shrink. The mechanism is unambiguous in named countries — but the producers disagree about population itself: across twenty countries, four differ even in the SIGN of the 2022-23 change, so any COUNT of such countries is a choice of source rather than a fact.
- CONFIRMED
What solar displaced: addition at world scale, substitution only where demand stopped growing
Wind and solar added 3,605 TWh of generation between 2010 and 2023 — and fossil fuels added 3,628 TWh over the same years. Fossil generation fell only in systems whose total demand was flat or falling, and the best-known success, the United States, is 70 percent a switch from coal to gas.
- REFUTED
The world got less murderous, and one country shows what it can cost
Global homicide fell 25% between 2000 and 2024, almost entirely outside the Americas. El Salvador fell 93% in seven years while its incarceration rate reached the highest ever measured — two facts the aggregate hides.
- QUALIFIED
Rearmament: real, and starting from the lowest base since the Cold War
The world spends 2.47% of GDP on its militaries against 6.14% at the 1962 peak. Rearmament since 2018 is real and starts from the least militarised the modern record contains — and China, whose arsenal grows fastest, spends a falling share.
- CONFIRMED
Working hours: the productivity converged, the time didn't
The rich world shortened the working year for 150 years, then the US stopped and continental Europe didn't. Americans now work 454 hours a year more than Germans — while producing almost exactly the same amount per hour.
- CONFIRMED
Nuclear arsenals: the 83% decline is real, finished, and mostly a filing cabinet
The world holds 83% fewer nuclear warheads than in 1986 — and the count has stopped falling. Most of the recent decline was a dismantlement queue draining out, while five of the nine nuclear-armed states now hold their largest-ever stockpile.
- REFUTED AS FRAMED
Maternal mortality: the stall was COVID; the real story is the denominator
The world's maternal-mortality progress looks stalled since 2015. Extended to 2023 it isn't — the flatline was the pandemic. What is real is that global improvement is being partly masked by where the world's babies are born.