Pandemic-driven disruptions have left the global supply chain in a deep crisis, but new technologies and approaches could help avert the next one.

Why it matters: The inability to get goods made and shipped is raising prices and dragging down the global economy.

• More automation will help improve efficiency eventually, but a more sustainable supply chain may require companies to pivot from "just in time" to "just in case."

Driving the news: U.S. GDP growth slowed to 2% in Q3 2021, a lower-than-expected number economists attributed to the Delta variant and supply chain problems.

• According to the Freightos Index, the median cost of shipping a standard metal container from China to the West Coast hit $20,586 in October — almost double what it cost in July, which was already twice what it cost in January and 700% higher than the cost a year ago.

Be smart: While the idea of a supply chain crisis can make it sound as if the global economy is experiencing a shipping deficit of some sort, in fact more goods than usual are flowing.

• That's the problem: the pandemic led consumers to shift from spending money on services to spending on goods — well beyond what the global supply chain could handle — while COVID-related disruptions damaged the ability of factories to get the components and labor they needed to make all that stuff.
• Add to that the years of companies prioritizing "just in time" manufacturing and shipping, with little excess inventory on hand to cushion disruptions, and you have a supply chain crisis.
• "What's important is not so much the 60 or 80 container ships lined up off L.A. — that will eventually get resolved," says Hamid Moghadam, CEO of San Francisco-based Prologis, the largest industrial real estate company in the world. "It's a fundamental issue of capacity to carry more inventory in the system so that you don't have a problem."

The catch: There's a reason companies embraced "just in time" rather than "just in case" strategies — a dollar spent on banked inventory is a dollar that can't be invested elsewhere. Many goods, like fashion or high technology products, will also quickly lose value over time if stored in a warehouse as a hedge against logistics crises.

• Moghadam notes that one solution could be to build more warehouses closer to consumers — which would benefit his company as a leading logistics landlord — but that often meets resistance with the public.
• "People want their stuff immediately, but they don't want to deal with the traffic and the congestion," he says.

What's next: Since consumers are unlikely to abandon their desire for rapid shipping — especially since the pandemic led to a boom in e-commerce — one longer-term solution is to make the supply chain more efficient through automation and other technological advances.

• The Colorado-based startup Outrider is automating operations in yards within distribution facilities, where goods move from trucks and other transport lines to warehouses. That can help reduce costs and improve safety, notes Outrider CEO and founder Andrew Smith.
• San Diego-based Platform Science develops smart fleet management technology that keeps trucks on the road connected, strengthening "actual links in the supply chain," says Jack Kennedy, the company's CEO and co-founder.
• As 3D printing matures, it will allow companies to produce necessary components where and when they're needed, sidestepping both "just in time" and "just in case" for "make on demand."

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A new startup is using VR to treat social anxiety and other mental health issues.

Why it matters: An estimated 15 million Americans suffer from social anxiety, but treatment can be expensive and difficult to access.

• VR can offer targeted treatment that can be done at home and at a more economical cost.

How it works: Austin-based Rey provides VR sessions that put users in a virtual environment that allows them to work through their challenges in a safe space and help "rewire the circuitry" that can cause crippling anxiety, says Deepak Gopalakrishnan, the company's founder and CEO.

• That can mean navigating a doctor's office or another social situation in virtual space, and learning over time to manage the feelings of anxiety that may arise.
• Human coaches provide guidance that help users internalize coping mechanisms for when anxiety strikes, while offline modules accessed via a phone or computer can further reinforce those lessons.

What they're saying: "The immersion and the feeling that you're actually interacting with another human being or another character allows you to sort of work through layers of cognition and understand that the belief patterns you have aren't necessarily true," says Gopalakrishnan.

By the numbers: A peer-reviewed study by Oxford University psychologist Daniel Freeman — who is also Rey's scientific founder — concluded that patients who used automated VR therapy experienced a 38% decrease in anxiety and avoidant symptoms over a six-week period.

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Fertility rates in the U.S. are falling for reasons that go beyond the economic.

Why it matters: The demographic makeup of a country helps decide its future, but it also alters its present.

• A country with fewer young children is one that will likely be culturally less hospitable to parents, which in turn could reinforce declining fertility rates.

By the numbers: 24.6 million Americans are under the age of 6.

• That's the same number as in 1962, but whereas in that year, young children made up more than 13% of the population, today they comprise a little more than 7%.

Between the lines: The reasons behind falling fertility rates are many, from delayed or nonexistent marriages to changing life priorities to lack of financial assistance — a factor that won't be helped by the reduced provisions for paid family leave in the latest iteration of President Biden's Build Back Better plan.

• But another reason is a changing cultural climate around children in many parts of the U.S.

Context: In a recent piece for The Week, Stephanie H. Murray outlined the "cultural weight dangling from the yoke of modern American parenthood," as parents of young children try to navigate a country that seems increasingly unsympathetic to their offspring.

• As young children become rarer, the burden of caring for them becomes heavier — and thanks to the U.S.'s paltry family support system, that burden is largely borne by the parents themselves.
• In another recent article, the writer Suzy Weiss profiled members of Gen Z who are so dedicated to the childless life — whether out of personal preference or concern about a climate apocalypse — that they've decided to undergo sterilization.

Our thought bubble: In any normally functioning market, a shortage of something will induce efforts to increase demand — but that only happens if people actually want the good in question.

• That increasingly doesn't seem to be the case in much of the U.S., and especially among young people in their prime childbearing years.
• Gen Z has a sense that “humans were a mistake," Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist at North Dakota State University, told Weiss.

The bottom line: Politics and economics matter to fertility, but cultural factors may outweigh it all.

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Mark Zuckerberg painted an expansive view of the metaverse on Thursday, but the "embodied Internet" he envisions is still years off, while the concerns about the company's present are both real and urgent, Axios' Ina Fried writes.

Why it matters: Zuckerberg insists that his company can both chip away at its current problems and build toward its future vision. Critics, meanwhile, argue Facebook is trying to turn the page without shouldering responsibility for trouble it has already created.

Driving the news:

• Zuckerberg's keynote speech at a virtual developers' event Thursday focused largely on a far-off vision in which there is a single virtual world, known as the metaverse, which can be entered through a range of devices, many of which are not even technologically feasible yet.
• This embodied Internet would allow people to live and work in virtual space using a mix of realistic and fantastic avatars, donning all manner of virtual clothes and accessories.
• As he outlined the vision, Zuckerberg took a number of shots at Apple, painting the iPhone maker and Google as the real threats to competition and the metaverse as a more open and competitive successor to today's internet.
• And, then there was the rebrand, with Zuckerberg announcing that the company will henceforth be known as Meta, a move that he insists has nothing to do with current controversies.

The big picture: Facebook is embarking on a broad and ambitious future, but it's important to remember just how many thorny new questions we'll all face in a digital universe that puts physically distant people in close proximity.

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An unearthly spectacle (Alex Wellerstein — Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

• All you ever wanted to know about the "Tsar Bomba," the world's biggest ever nuclear bomb.

Agents of Doom: Who is creating the apocalypse and why (Luke Kemp — BBC Future)

• Entirely unrelated to the story above, a guide to the handful of people and groups that could save the world — or destroy it.

The shifting sands of ‘gain-of-function’ research (Amber Dance — Nature)

• One problem with gain-of-function research — no one can quite agree what it actually is.

The 37-year-olds are afraid of the 23-year-olds who work for them (Emma Goldberg — New York Times)

• In which suddenly aging Millennials discover that they too are but spokes in the great wheel of time.

Since I polled my readers on what our four-year-old should wear for Halloween, it seems only fair to share the results.

• His choice: "blue pterodactyl."
• This will be his first real trick-or-treating Halloween, which is too bad because I really liked last year's costume: "Elsa from 'Frozen,' if she were a pirate."