Dear reader,
We began Headway in December 2021 with a project called Hindsight. We wanted to look back on predictions in the news from five or more years ago to see what had come of them.
We started by scouring The New York Times’s archives for dozens of past forecasts, and then asked a few questions about each: What did we expect to happen? What actually happened? And what can we learn from it?
That pursuit resulted in four lessons about the role our indicators of progress play in moving society forward. The concept for this newsletter picked up where Hindsight left off.
In this week’s edition, we’d like to revisit our inaugural lessons in light of the exploration we’ve undertaken for the past six months. Then we’ll reflect on a few more conclusions about progress that present themselves now.
Next week, we’ll take a brief pause. We’ll resume the last full week of August in a more condensed format that highlights journalism from across The Times that fits Headway’s lens.
Read on for our synthesis of the past and present lessons of progress.
— Matthew Thompson
How do Headway’s inaugural lessons fare in hindsight?
So far this year, we’ve reviewed 25 different measures of the current state of our society. (Feel free to review them all for yourself here.)
No. 1: There are always multiple futures.
For this lesson, I invoked Jim Dator, the influential futurist who tended to group images of the future into four categories — Collapse, Discipline, Transform and Grow.
“At any given time,” I wrote in 2021, “all four phenomena are happening at once: A booming population masks a looming long-term decline. The collapse of one industry enables the blossoming of another. A lethal viral epidemic transforms, with strict adherence to a regimen, into a livable disease.”
I continue to observe this lesson at work in many of the trajectories we’ve chronicled. That looming population decline I referred to 2021 is now a matter of widespread concern, for example, at the same moment when some are decrying too much immigration. We’ve covered the potential bifurcation of America’s K-12 education system, the fact that we’ve become both less connected and less murderous, the reality that babies are growing both more precious and more vulnerable.
No. 2: Most of the indicators we use to define our progress tend to blur on close inspection.
“Numbers can seem so solid,” I wrote in 2021, “until you look closely at what they represent and they begin to melt into air.”
The measure that first came to mind when I revisited this lesson was the rise in U.S. college applications at a moment when the nation’s higher education system is facing challenges on numerous fronts. As Susan Shain reported, the disconnect probably comes from the fact that fewer students are applying to more schools.
But this has been a persistent rule of thumb in many of Headway’s areas of coverage — the annual tally of homelessness is widely considered an undercount, a police department can technically solve more homicides than were committed in a given year, and the price of eggs may not actually be a good proxy for the health of the consumer economy.
No. 3: Even flawed measures of progress can be catalysts for action.
Despite their flaws, our statistics continue to have an impact. It’s probably not an accident, for example, that after Camden, N.J., experienced its worst year of homicides on record, the city significantly overhauled the way it deals with violent crime, beginning an arc that last year resulted in the fewest homicides in four decades.
Some forces resist quantification. It has been notoriously difficult to determine which interventions are most responsible for lessening violence. But the clear reductions in violence that cities like Camden have seen are leading many cities nationwide to emulate its approach.
No. 4: Defining progress is how we make it.
Just investing attention in our indicators can help foster change, I wrote in 2021. Of all our conclusions from the initial round of Hindsight, this might be the one that most merits revisiting.
Throughout this year, it has been surprising to see the number of measures like infant mortality and traffic fatalities that had tracked years of positive outcomes before they took a turn for the worse.
What has the exploration of the past 6 months revealed?
The most frequent metaphor for progress might be a pendulum. For more than a century, writers and essayists have used that device to describe the backward-and-forward nature of human achievement.
When tallying the lessons of Hindsight, it struck us that the metaphor was too simplistic to represent the true picture of how progress advances and retreats. We chose the wheel instead. “What it doesn’t crush, it carries,” I wrote in 2021. “Even as it’s moving forward, parts of it move backward. Actions meet equal and opposite reactions, and the friction of that clash spins us ahead.”
This resonates with what we’ve observed this year.
No. 5: Progress is slow, and chaos is constant.
Most indicators we’ve looked into this year, or over the course of Headway’s run, show years of sustained progress in a positive direction. But our problems tend to shape-shift as we figure out how to address them.
Traffic fatalities offer a useful example. They are significantly lower than they were 50 years ago, yet troublingly higher than they were a decade ago. Much of the nation’s success in lessening fatal car crashes came from interventions like seatbelt laws and airbags, but new market forces — such as a consumer trend toward larger vehicles, and distracted driving with smartphones — have driven casualties back up.
No. 6: Interventions can be victims of their own success.
Sometimes the mechanisms we put in place to resolve our challenges seem problematic after we’ve overcome them. Nowhere is this more evident than in the domain of public health.
When it first became mandatory to report measles cases, the U.S. had 6,000 deaths from measles each year, according to the C.D.C. The introduction of the measles vaccine wiped out the disease in the U.S. by 2000. Now, after lethal cases of measles had seemingly become a thing of the past, concern about the vaccine threatens to reverse the disease’s eradication.
No. 7: You can’t always count on data to be available.
In just the same way as our problems shape-shift, the data we use to track them is always subject to change. Although experts on government data told us that relatively few reports went away altogether in the past couple of years, staffing cutbacks and other changes are affecting the quality and robustness of some of the information the government collects.
As Minho Kim reported for The Times in late July, information actively being sought in public records requests has also become increasingly hard to get. Federal agencies received the highest number of such requests on record in 2025, and they released the requested information at the lowest rate since 2010.
No. 8: There’s always an alternative measure of success.
Our indicators reflect not only how we define our problems, but how we prioritize them. For example, the annual Point-in-Time count of homelessness became a federal priority at the same time as national leaders were being persuaded that the lack of housing made it more difficult to confront other challenges like substance use disorder — a critical part of the argument for Housing First, the government’s longstanding anti-homelessness policy.
Shifting political winds and other forces can change that calculus. Opponents of Housing First now cite the weak evidence that the policy improves health outcomes as an argument for treatment mandates as a precondition for housing. The shift harks back to a bygone era when treatment mandates were standard, and the success of Housing First at keeping people with addictions off the street was among its primary draws.
And so the wheel moves forward and backward at once.
What can I check out next?
In my years of editing Headway, I’ve often found it illuminating to revisit pieces in the Times archives that herald past successes against present challenges. So here’s a selection of a few such pieces, covering some of the same challenges mentioned in today’s newsletter.
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In 1981, Bayard Webster captured the newfound optimism among public health experts that measles could soon be eradicated, after finding that new cases of the disease had dropped 80 percent from the year before. (It took nearly 20 more years for the disease to be declared eliminated in the U.S.)
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In 2006, David Scharfenberg chronicled a novel policy approach in Westchester County, N.Y., that had reduced rates of homelessness by nearly two-thirds.
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In 2009, Abby Goodnough marked a notable decline in highway fatalities, which had fallen to their lowest level in nearly 50 years. Two years later, Tanya Mohn marked the decline in all roadway fatalities to levels not seen since 1949, although the director of an advocacy group for road safety cautioned that they were still much higher than in Europe.
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In 2011, Richard Oppel spoke to criminologists and other experts across the U.S. mystified about the nation’s sustained drop in violent crime. Three years later, Justin Wolfers noted for The Upshot that public perception of crime rates still hadn’t caught up with the reality of the decline, a phenomenon we continued to observe as the homicide rate dropped to its lowest level in 125 years.
— Matthew Thompson
Your turn
Test your knowledge: The Office of Management and Budget, a White House agency, granted 31 percent of Freedom of Information Act requests in 2024. After a surge of requests in 2025, what percentage was granted?
Tell us your thoughts: What lessons or patterns have you observed in our exploration of key indicators of the nation’s circumstances this year? What principles or paradoxes of progress do you find most useful to keep in mind? Please email your thoughts to [email protected].
Following up: Those of you who wrote in last week seemed to broadly agree with my arguments that life expectancy is the best all-around measure of the collective health of our society, and that its trajectory is a telling indicator of changes in how we treat one another. It also measures how you treat yourself. In that spirit, here is a list from our colleagues on the Well desk of nine things experts wish you’d do in midlife to increase your longevity.
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