203 blurbs from 31 weekly roundups, 2026-01-08 – 2026-08-05.
If you’ve been following the conversation around the design of scientific institutions and funding strategies, you may have come across a table breaking down how different characteristics map onto different mechanisms. F…
In June, the FDA issued new draft guidance stating that drug makers no longer needed to run two trials to demonstrate the efficacy of a new drug before it could be approved; rather, “one adequate and well-controlled clin…
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is considering implementing a $100,000 fee on international students who want to work in the United States after graduation via the optional pract…
A forthcoming paper lends some structure to the intuition around regulated utilities (these are the vertically-integrated kind, with a local monopoly and their own generation facilities – they’re “regulated” because a st…
The Snail Darter. Source: wikipedia You may have heard about the effects of the Endangered Species Act on big construction projects — like the famous case of the tiny “snail darter” fish and its role in delaying the Tell…
3D printed structure. Source: Can We Lower Construction Costs with Cheaper Labor or Materials? One of Brian Potter’s latest Construction Physics installment s asks whether cheaper labor or materials can meaningfully cut …
Changes to Innsbruck. Source: Beauty in my Backyard Samuel Hughes has a new Works in Progress essay asking again whether beauty can solve the housing crisis . He distinguishes NIMBYs (locals who oppose development of all…
Last week, I mentioned a big Congressional Budget Office report estimating the economic impact of federal spending on non-defense research and development efforts (think basic and applied science at the National Science …
I enjoyed reading Oliver Kim’s article on the two lives of Robert McNamara: one as US secretary of defense and chief escalator of the Vietnam War, the other as World Bank president and crusader against global poverty. He…
Compared to some of the other areas we work on , improving “state capacity” can seem a bit nebulous. The end goal of improving the productivity of government is laudable, but what, specifically, does that mean? With that…
“Abundance” as a movement has a set of diagnoses of what’s wrong with US public policy, and how to fix it, but it also has a historical narrative behind it, which goes something like this: the US used to be able to build…
How much do prices affect how much electricity we use? It’s an increasingly relevant question, since changing when people and firms use electricity – usually to try to spread out short-term peaks – is often one of the fi…
Kalshi, one of the biggest prediction market platforms, announced last week that it has started letting people bet on the outcomes of clinical trials and FDA regulatory decisions. This would make it possible for investor…
If you were in the Northeast US last week, you probably got at least a noseful of Canadian wildfire smoke. We’ve written before about the extraordinarily high health costs of wildfires, but Zeke Hausfather makes a convin…
I enjoyed reading a post by Witold Więcek on the Clinical Trials Abundance blog, titled ‘ Market shaping and trial design belong together ’. He explains why people interested in solving market shaping problems – such as …
This week I’m at the NBER Summer Institute , taking in lots of new work on the economics of science and innovation. Two of the papers being presented have already made appearances on this blog (one on idea diffusion , an…
Here at AGF, we tend to think investment in research and development, whether by governments through agencies like the National Institutes of Health or in private businesses and universities, is worth an awful lot. When …
A forthcoming paper by Michael Hankinson, Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Morris Davis surveyed roughly 1,700 residents of expensive areas and found that most people do have a price. Over 80 percent accepted at least…
Halina Bennet has a summer housing roundup at Slow Boring : Beyond the already-covered ROAD Act, California's Governor Newsom signed AB 179, replacing the state's notoriously fragmented affordable-housing financing with …
Solar panels only generate power when the sun is shining, and everyone knows you can’t make the sun shine on demand. What the startup Reflect Orbital proposes is: maybe you can? Cofounded by a SpaceX veteran, the company…
It’s been a busy few weeks in transmission – at the close of June, 11 western states agreed to improve coordination and permitting for transmission across their shared footprint (much of the western grid outside of Calif…
The great blogger known as owlposting has an awesome new podcast episode with Alex Rubinsteyn and Ben Vincent, two scientists who work on cancer immunotherapy, on ‘How to design a cancer vaccine’. The general idea behind…
Does upzoning lead to new homes? Does it reduce the cost of homes? Michael Wiebe has an accessible review of the academic literature around upzoning in his living literature review, examining empirical studies on major u…
This Monday was the deadline for public comments on OMB’s proposed rewrite of the rules governing federal grantmaking. The response was immense, with more than 200k comments submitted over the past few weeks. As expected…
Aaron Shroyer and Sarah Brundage at NAAHL have the essential federal implementation guide for the ROAD Act . None of the law's ~47 housing sections are wholly self-executing: NAAHL counts 124 discrete implementation acti…
Kimberly Burnett has a new piece at Niskanen on HUD's new best-practices guidance for states and localities, focusing on one key recommendation: regulate modular housing by harmonized and objective performance standards …
To add even more uncertainty to the fraught landscape of energy planning and regulation, the end of the Supreme Court opinion season last month brought a highly controversial ruling in Trump v. Slaughter , where the cour…
The most interesting thing I read recently was the winning entrants in the Astera metascience essay contest , for which I was one of the judges. While not every winning essay was related to AI (see these two , for exampl…
Anthropic made two announcements in the last week about its plans in AI for science. First was the launch of Claude Science , a platform that integrates dozens of scientific databases and bioinformatics models and curren…
For America’s 250th anniversary, Brad Wible invited a trio of pieces for Science’s Policy Forum tracing the institutional shifts that built the modern US scientific enterprise. Ronald Daniels writes about the founding of…
One of my favorite 4th of July traditions is to go to the historic fort in town for a reading of the Declaration and firing of the cannons by a historical reenactment group. This year, with the sweltering temperatures, w…
Our regular roundup from earlier this week is posted here . It’s been six years now since the publication of Ideas are getting harder to find , a famous paper in the economics of innovation which documented that vast inc…
I’ve been listening to the wonderful new podcast Everyday Abundance (no affiliation!) by Virginia Postrel and Charles Mann, based on Dylan’s recommendation two weeks ago. Each episode looks at the history of some aspect …
This week, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a new initiative called ‘Operation Trial 1 Blazer’ that aims to bring back early-stage clinical research, which has increasingly been outsourced t…
(... probably ). Semianalysis is out with a comprehensive comparative analysis of the costs and uncertainties around space-based datacenters, arguing that while technical, operational, and cost barriers mean that space-b…
There are a growing number of AI tools for various components of the scientific process, but there are rarely careful, public evaluations of how they perform and compare. Last week Refine, an AI-powered review tool for e…
Economists, sociologists, demographers, and other researchers need accurate, ideally individual-level data to understand what’s going on in the world. At the same time, most people don’t want information like their addre…
The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 85–5 on Monday; the House takes up the amended package today, and President Trump is expected to sign it within the week. The bill’s 45-plus provisions cover a wide …
The first major federal housing bill in roughly 30 years just took a big step forward. After months of ping-ponging between the House and Senate, all four corners (the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Banking and…
Meme from the Internet The science sleuth Sholto David recently uncovered a mix up that’s affected hundreds of papers in biology. Scientists who were intending to work with the p16-INK4a antibody, to flag a tumor suppres…
It may not be the most scintillating reading for the general audience, but the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is out with an extremely cogent, clear rundown of over 40 proposals to speed up how fast large loads – data ce…
"Should European housing politics be Americanized?" asks Samuel Hughes . American policy frames usually map badly onto European debates, but housing is an exception: Europe's housing shortages are arguably worse than Ame…
It’s 2017 again: the Gorillaz are topping charts, Star Wars is in theaters, and the NIH is discussing a potential cap on the number of grants a single PI can hold at once. Last week the agency published an RFI floating p…
If you’re staying on top of AI news, you probably don’t need me to tell you to read Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s latest essay . That said … you should read Dario Amodei’s latest essay. It’s the most detailed look at the …
As part of the month-long debate about the extent of the European/American gap in living standards, Luis and Pieter Garicano suggested a “ driving around test ”: “Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a…
Potential routes for transmission lines in Loudon. Source: Dominion Energy, via Bay Journal Last month, Dylan wrote about Loudoun County, Virginia , home of the largest concentration of data centers in the world, and whe…
Have you ever wondered why some innovative approaches only get used once or twice? It’s something I’ve often thought about with clinical trials. Take platform trials, which test multiple treatments within a single trial,…
A new VoxEU column argues that declining construction productivity has fueled an 80% increase in the relative price of US structures since 1970, offsetting the benefits of continued declines in the cost of equipment. “Co…
Geothermal power station in Iceland. Source: Wikipedia The House passed a bipartisan geothermal package (plus a freestanding bill) last week – big hits are statutory formalization of a NEPA categorical exclusion, expandi…
I just finished reading Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet , which has to be a top-ten abundance and growth book for its description of the Green Revolution’s effect on crop yields and recounting of the failed apo…
We’re experimenting with a different format where we occasionally spotlight a slightly longer What we’re reading post. Our regular roundup from earlier this week is posted here . Dr. Brian Wolpin, who presented the resul…
One thing we’ve been tracking is the proliferation of state and local abundance agendas. In the last year, we’ve seen Abundance New York publish a detailed policy roadmap across housing, transit, energy, and governance; …
The NYT editorial board endorsed the Massachusetts “Legalize Starter Homes” ballot measure , which would require localities to allow homes on small lots in areas served by public water and sewer. The endorsement lands al…
There’s been so much focus on energy for data centers that it’s possible to forget that they’re not the only new large loads. A short report this week highlights a potential challenge for heavy industry – access to incre…
One factor in the high cost of housing is that we’re not better at building houses; construction productivity is relatively flat (not only in the US , but in many countries ). It’s often presumed that this is because hou…
Last week the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a proposed revision to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance . It runs 412 pages, and carries significant implications for federally funded science in…
Joe Lonsdale’s recent Substack post, “What America Needs from a New FDA Commissioner,” is notable as much for who’s saying it as for what it says. Lonsdale is a Palantir cofounder turned venture capitalist who is closely…
By now you’ve probably seen the viral clip of Marblehead resident David Modica asking his fellow townspeople the question heard ‘round the internet. Jerusalem Demsas wrote about it in The Argument , making the case that …
What is it like to know that a new drug exists – and has been proven safe and effective – but that it simply isn’t available where you live, and you might die without it? This was the reality for millions of Africans dur…
“The USPS owns over 8,500 properties and leases over 25,000 more. It also needs money.” In a new Brooking Report , Aaron Shroyer, Ben McAdams, and Glen Nuckolls argue we can kill two birds with one stone: the Postal Serv…
Pew’s Housing Policy Initiative is making a splash with its new video explaining “address chain” filtering: How new market rate construction frees up housing opportunities across incomes and neighborhoods as occupants of…
It seems obvious that increased demand for electricity from data centers must raise prices. But electricity prices can move in counter-intuitive ways. We’ve talked before about how electricity price increases largely had…
In other news, arXiv’s CS section chair Thomas Dietterich announced that authors who submit papers with “incontrovertible evidence” of unchecked AI content (e.g. hallucinated references or leftover chat content like “her…
Earlier this month NSF announced its new X-Labs program , a $1.5 billion, decade-long initiative to fund independent, milestone-driven research teams working outside of traditional university and corporate structures. Th…
The Jones Act, the American law that bans ships manufactured outside the US from traveling between US ports, has been an economic burden on the country for decades. The best study on its impact estimates the cost at 0.1 …
One reason that clinical trials are slow, expensive, and wasteful is that the data they generate are locked in siloed systems and manually transcribed. Recently, the FDA announced a pilot project to fix this, which would…
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned this week, just over a year in the role. It seemed sudden from the outside, but was reportedly a long time coming internally, with months of friction with RFK Jr. Apparently, the fi…
New York took two big steps on housing permitting this week. After weeks of late-budget deadlock, Governor Hochul’s SEQRA modernization is reportedly final with bill text coming next week. The deal reportedly exempts NYC…
Matt Yglesias dropped an avowedly contentious take on energy abundance, arguing that “conventional environmentalism” is overly focused on efficiency and missing the upside of truly abundant energy generation. Yglesias ar…
Alan Durning at Sightline has a new report arguing that the climate movement is underrating one strategy for reducing climate change: apartment buildings. Apartment buildings have lower carbon emissions than single-famil…
The US is richer than Europe. This is not especially controversial: residents of just about every European country, save for tax havens like Luxembourg and the petro-state of Norway, lag the US in median income . But is …
Our scientific ecosystem often prizes outputs that, themselves, don’t necessarily drive scientific progress, but instead are useful proxies for the more intangible processes that do. Three reads this week have me thinkin…
Many leading science funders have a stated goal of supporting ambitious, “high-risk, high-reward” research, or at least specific programs dedicated to that cause — to give a few examples: “ ARIA was built to… go after id…
Drug development fails 95% of the time, making biotech a brutal investment environment. So how does the industry keep the money flowing? Abhishaike Mahajan, also known as Owl Posting, has a great post on the financial en…
Loudoun County, Virginia is notable for a few things. It’s the richest county in America by median household income , significantly richer than runners-up in Silicon Valley; it houses Dulles Airport and is thus the exurb…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between energy and growth lately, which is less clear-cut than you might expect. I’ll be writing more about this soon, but this set of papers on energy and development does…
Oliver Kim has a detailed review of a new book on Singapore’s public housing system that complicates the YIMBY movement’s frequent invocation of Singapore as a model. The country houses 76 percent of the population in hi…
Two recent pro-housing champion advocates make the case that zoning reform is working. First, Nolan Gray of California YIMBY goes deep on the California data in “ Where Are All the Cranes? ,” documenting how ADU permits …
Our existing processes for how we decide what is allowed when there is disagreement are a key reason its hard to build things in the USA today. Over the last week, Marc Dunkelman and Alex Mechanick wrote an interesting p…
“ Are we kind of being pricks? ,” asked a resident at Marblehead’s annual Town Meeting this week in a video that went viral (full disclosure: I live here and serve on the Housing Committee). After four votes over three y…
Nisha Austin: Around the time when I started getting into ‘Abundance’ (in the way we all think about it here), my mother-in-law gave me Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry . I think she was trying to piece together ex…
Alex Armlovich: How Skyscrapers Can Save The City (2011) . Ed Glaeser introduced almost everything YIMBYism is today in this Atlantic feature published years before the first modern YIMBY grassroots groups were even foun…
Willow Latham-Proenca: Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy . I frequently argue that Francis Fukuyama is an under-acknowledged intellectual godfather to t…
Saloni Dattani: I don’t have a foundational text that drew me to clinical trial reform. I learnt about the topic during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was surprising how efficient some pandemic clinical trials were and, despi…
Jordan Dworkin: As Science Evolves, How Can Science Policy? Coming up in science, my peers and I enjoyed critiquing the institutions in which we worked, and occasionally used our computational skills to probe and quantif…
Dylan Matthews: The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty . My first obsession in public policy was the problem of poverty in the rich world: why, in a nation as wealthy as the United States, do…
Matt Clancy : The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective . Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in the UK and not somewhere else in Europe? Allen argues it’s down to economics. It’s only worth doing all …
Separately, Niko McCarty and I wrote a round-up of news you might have missed in biotech and medicine . For example, did you know that organ donations have become vastly more efficient because of improvements in preservi…
On a new episode of the Works in Progress podcast, Ruxandra Teslo, Ben Southwood and I chatted about everything you wanted to know about clinical trial reform — from why ethics reviews are so inefficient to how Australia…
Vincent Rollet’s MIT job market paper on zoning and the dynamics of urban redevelopment — which won Best Student Paper at the 2025 European UEA meeting and lands him at Stanford and then UChicago — is getting attention f…
Our friends at the Centre for British Progress (with Labour Together) are out with a new paper on street votes —a mechanism that lets residents of a given street collectively hire an architect, agree on an upzoning plan,…
In the interest of getting our fair share of aesthetic controversy, we’ve been reading Zane Kasher’s job market paper on wind farm construction and the effect on local residents. While the paper focuses on implications f…
As AI drives down the time & effort cost required to produce scientific grant proposals, funders are likely to be flooded with eligible, reasonable-seeming submissions that strain an already overburdened review system. I…
There are a lot more loose vibes than specific predictions when it comes to AI’s economic impacts these days, which is why I was grateful to see Metaculus, Renaissance Philanthropy, and the Schultz Family Foundation coll…
I’ve been thinking a lot about AI lately , and how it relates to the kind of work our team does to try to chip away at bottlenecks to economic growth. One key question here is whether the economy of the 2030s and beyond …
Eroom’s Law (the reverse of “Moore’s Law”), for those of us who don’t spend all our days thinking about pharmaceutical innovation, is a term describing the historical trend that the R&D cost of developing a new drug seem…
My friend Lauren Gilbert has launched a new magazine called In Development , aiming to be the New Yorker (or Works in Progress?) for global development. I enjoyed reading the inaugural piece by Paul Niehaus, co-founder o…
One thing I’m not reading this week: your writing about metascience policy. If you’d like to fix that, Emergent Ventures just announced a new tranche of grants for (1) metascience policy entrepreneurs and (2) science & m…
In the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush famously posited that “ scientific progress… results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in a manner dictated by their curiosity. ” In a …
Beyond the budget request, DOE has also been slow-walking grants it already committed to (a similar pause is now in place at NOAA ) as well as slowing the pace of the new solicitations and award obligations that keep app…
The President’s Budget for fiscal year 2027 was released earlier this month - while it’s just the Administration’s proposal (actual appropriations will be enacted by Congress later this year), it’s a worthwhile barometer…
Sticking with housing, the burden of the housing shortage is falling disproportionately on new buyers and renters, according to a piece last month by Jess Remington . Prior to 2022, new homeowners and existing homeowners…
Larry Katz, known today as a legendary labor economist, had a precocious side quest in urban economics as an incredibly incisive observer of the downzoning crisis that hit the Bay Area in the 1970s. His Commencement spee…
A new Urban Institute piece asks, what happens to housing production after “big upzonings” in strong housing markets? It turns out, a lot . Top economics journals have long considered case studies of upzoning too trivial…
Niko McCarty, founder of Asimov Press and now a fellow at Astera Institute, recently ran a bounty to surface new ideas to reduce the cost of lab experiments in biology. I found his reflections really interesting. He rece…
The legal fight over the NIH’s proposed 15% indirect cost cap is over (for now). STAT reports that the administration let the Supreme Court petition deadline pass without filing, ending 14 months of litigation. The court…
The National Science Foundation’s 2027 budget request makes for some high variance reading. Two things that have me excited are the proposal for an NSF metascience unit to “champion agency-wide efforts to explore non-tra…
Our AGF post on the “Zoned Capacity Illusion” got a warm reception , with shoutouts from NYC’s Deputy Mayor during Mayor Mamdani’s Reddit AMA on housing; and from Matt Yglesias on why YIMBYs need to center zoning feasibi…
Everyone’s talking about building codes! Though we have not yet fixed most of the obvious growth control regulations, like zoning, permitting, & procedural review laws, housers are also looking ahead to the more obscure …
When I’m arguing to more AI-pilled friends that the tech’s diffusion through the economy might be slower than they think, one of my go-to examples is “doctors still use fax machines.” But another good one, that I just le…
Sam Peltzman has an alarming new paper about American happiness. Since 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a random sample of Americans how happy they were, and in the blue line of the figure above I’ve plott…
We might finally get a vaccine against Lyme disease ! Maybe. Hopefully? Unfortunately, the confidence intervals in the phase three trial were really wide: after four doses, its efficacy was estimated at 73.2%, with a 95%…
Research in action: Why permitting reform matters . Evan Soltas translated his recent LA permitted reform paper, that we featured a few weeks ago, into a localized estimate of the value of permitting reform in NYC. Each …
It’s a big week for electricity price data - the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory updated its Retail Electricity Price Trends and Drivers with 2025 data and new analysis, and a Heatmap/MIT/CleanEcon collaboration la…
However you want to reform science funding, structural shake-ups require that there are functioning agencies to reform; to keep tabs on how things are going on that front, Grant Witness is now tracking NIH and NSF fundin…
This week, there were two very different pieces on reforming how we fund science. In City Journal, Michael Gibson (former VP of Grants at the Thiel Foundation) argues that Jim O’Neill’s nomination as NSF director is a ch…
We at AGF don’t work as directly on AI issues as many of our peers at Coefficient Giving, but you can’t really think about the medium to long-run state of the US and world economies without thinking seriously about AI. I…
Why America is so much better at immigration than Europe is a fascinating new piece by Kelsey Piper and Alexander Kustov (who also writes the great Popular by Design substack on immigration). Piper and Kustov point to a …
Industrial Policy for Housing Policy is a new blueprint for tackling the housing crisis from Arpit Gupta and Steve Teles. One bit I particularly liked was the five-part diagnosis of why factory-built housing has failed t…
The nation’s largest offshore wind farm to date, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project - which clocks in at 2.6 GW - sent its first commercial power to the grid this week (it joins Rhode Island’s Revolution Wind, wh…
“You will be hard-pressed to find a true admirer of Excel,” writes David Oks (who I first noticed as one of the Gravel Teens and is now at a16z , truly an ideological evolution for our time). But Oks is, if not an admire…
More progressives in the housing space are coming out against the Senate’s build-to-rent ban . The growing concern is that the ban could reduce rental housing supply when affordability remains a pressing issue. It’s a to…
In most product markets, transitory supply and demand shocks can spike prices, but as long as there’s open entry to the market allowing elastic supply, prices come back down near marginal supply costs . This is rare in A…
I’ve been revisiting some older papers that might shed light on the benefits of faster clinical trials. Let’s start with a short 2007 paper by Frank Lichtenberg, which looked at the correlations between deaths from vario…
How about one more from Asimov before they go: this week Alvin Djajadikerta published “ Designing AI for Disruptive Science .” In it, he explores the possibility that (current approaches to) AI-for-science might enhance …
The very best biology magazine in the world, Asimov Press , announced they’re winding down (for now). I’ve been an advisor to them since before they started, and I’m very sad to hear the news, even though I’m looking for…
One of the big challenges in permitting reform is that it’s really hard to forecast how changing one piece of the massive US legal/regulatory permitting system will play out. At a more micro-level, it’s also a headache f…
It’s official: the Trump administration is suspending the Jones Act , which bans non-US flagged vessels from traveling between US ports, for sixty days in an attempt to keep gas prices low amid the Strait of Hormuz crisi…
Separately, Jerusalem Demsas writes about how urban divestment is ( still , as Pete Saunders reminds us) a much larger problem in the US than urban “gentrification”, but compositional & mimetic drivers of un-representati…
Brian Potter examines the elusive cost savings of the prefabricated home , and as someone now living through the third modular construction hype cycle of my career, the piece is a useful corrective. There’s a reason we k…
Back in 2023, we asked Michael Wiebe to take a look at a 2021 article by Enrico Moretti titled “ The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors. ” We were interested because one of the inputs to ou…
Got your guesses about Alphafold ready? Here’s what Hill and Stein found. Did experimental (i.e., non-computational) structure determination decline? The rate of experimental structure determination is unchanged, and the…
While you’re thinking about that, let’s stay with science. Does MAGA Actually Want American Science to Win? is the latest from Ari Shulman, writing in The New Atlantis. Shulman argues that MAGA’s critique of the failings…
Ryan Hill and Carolyn Stein have a new working paper on how AlphaFold has affected protein structure research in the five years since its release. They ask three primary questions: Did experimental (i.e., non-computation…
I’ve also been following the BioNTech announcement that co-founders Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci will leave the company by year-end to start a new biotech focused on next-generation mRNA therapeutics (their third startup)…
Adam Kroetsch has a new post arguing that if we want to make trials more efficient, we need to pay attention to the boring stuff , in other words, the unglamorous work of clinical operations like setting up trials, recru…
This year has seen AI agents break through in a serious way among social scientists I respect . So it was only a matter of time until social scientists designed an AI benchmark to see how good agents really are. Meysam A…
On a happier note: This week the Astera Institute announced Radial , a new division committing up to $500M over the next decade to experimenting with how life sciences research is organized, funded, and shared. Early pro…
In a previous post , we noted that Congress largely preserved science budgets for FY26, rejecting large proposed cuts. Unfortunately appropriations are only step one. A few weeks ago Nature reported that OMB has been wit…
Federal permitting negotiations have re-started in the Senate, following the first steps of an apparent thaw in solar permitting. Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute has a timely piece in response, discussing the…
Meanwhile, closer to home, Governor Hochul’s EXPRESS NY initiative is accepting submissions through April 3 from anyone who can identify a state regulation or practice that adds unnecessary burden — with a focus on housi…
The Senate passed the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 89–10 on Thursday — a landmark pro-supply package that streamlines housing regulation, creates new building incentives, and modernizes federal programs. A…
Last week, Abundance NY put out The Abundance Agenda , a roadmap to, well, Abundance for New Yorkers. I’m a fan of just how concrete the document is, both in terms of the big picture and the small. On the big picture, th…
The main thing Alex has been reading this week is the text of the Senate Banking Committee housing reform bill , for which he is deep in the details. It’s encouraging to see bipartisan movement on federal housing policy,…
Another interesting thing about the paper discussed in item #4, about Dutch nitrogen regulation and residential building, is that it was written completely by AI! It’s part of the Autonomous Policy Evaluation Project (Pr…
Around 23% of the terrestrial territory of the Netherlands is a protected area; to secure a permit to build near these areas, environmental review about nitrogen impacts are particularly important. The country used to us…
When novel technologies get shoehorned into ill-fitting permitting systems, the results are rarely enviable. In a recent piece , Samuel Roland tours the byzantine landscape of state-level geothermal regulation. While som…
Last month we posted a Kiesling/Macey paper, which argued that perverse incentives for incumbents help keep energy supply constrained. A paper published last week by Dasom Ham, Owen Kay, and Catherine Hausman dovetails n…
If policymakers in the US can agree on anything, it’s that they want more semiconductor plants (“fabs”) built in the US. The bipartisan CHIPS & Science Act promised hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies to…
The rise and fall of DOGE was an interesting state capacity story to me on a number of dimensions: DOGE cuts threatened to undermine state capacity in a number of ways; it was pitched as a way to bring in outside tech ex…
STAT reports on a growing number of state-level science funding proposals. Massachusetts’ governor has proposed a $400 million DRIVE initiative, a coalition of medical schools and researchers is pushing New York to creat…
There was a good back-and-forth on NIH funding in the Good Science Project last week. Aishwarya Khanduja and Stuart Buck first made the case that science funders would benefit from adopting some VC-style practices, then …
On the trend of surprising public opinions, solar is remarkably popular among Trump voters, according to two MAGA-aligned polls released this month. The first, a survey run by Trump’s head campaign pollster, found 51% of…
Sometimes a pro-housing reform’s most articulate communicator is that reform’s biggest opponent. In a remarkable video , NYC Councilmember Vicky Paladino describes how New York’s pro-housing ballot measures have ended th…
Tokyo is the world’s largest city, with 38 million people sharing one agglomerated labor market. Despite high land prices, Tokyo’s structure rents are remarkably affordable by global megacity standards ; they allow high …
How much do permitting burdens raise the price of housing? This is a big question in our housing work, and it can be hard to measure the exact contribution of zoning applications, historical preservation review, and othe…
One exception to the generalized support for skilled immigration, however, is support for a specific visa, the H-1B, among US tech workers (see the previous link for some discussion). A recent analysis by George Borjas a…
“ It is simply remarkable how robust public support for skilled immigration is. ” Alexander Kustov takes a look at research on the US and abroad, and points out that despite all the rhetoric, support for skilled immigrat…
Transportation policy is the flip side of housing policy. In fact, in many urban economics models, the two are inseparable: house prices are determined by time to commute to the city centre (pay more for a shorter commut…
Ed Mendoza of the Metropolitan Abundance Project has a new feature leveraging research by the Pew Charitable Trusts on how new housing construction moderates older and more affordable “Class C” housing rents even more th…
It’s been a big week for clinical trials. The FDA refused to review Moderna’s flu vaccine trial despite previously indicating their trial design was acceptable. Then, they reversed course . It’s unclear what prompted the…
A new NBER working paper introduces GABRIEL , an open-source library that wraps GPT for extracting, rating, ranking, and categorizing qualitative information from text data. Of note for innovation policy: they apply the …
This week I’m reading a father-son team with competing explanations of why Europe lags behind the US in generating innovative companies. Luis Garicano (and coauthor Per Strömberg) look specifically at Sweden, which has b…
Continuing that theme, the weaponization of environmental review as a tactic to delay or block new building has tended to cast the conservation movement as an antagonist to the Abundance Movement. But the same permitting…
We don’t usually talk about permitting reform as a life-or-death issue. But evidence from a new paper suggests that maybe we should, at least where wildfire management is concerned. Min Zhang and coauthors find that wild…
Childcare is a domain where technological progress doesn’t help reduce costs that much, because labor costs are such a big part of the story. If you want no more than 4 kids per adult, you’re always going to have to pay …
This week I’m working my way through Asterisk Magazine’s newest issue on science, which has many excellent pieces relevant to folks working on innovation policy. Click for Jolie Gan’s exploration of the increased importa…
The EPA just repealed the endangerment finding – the 2009 determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and the regulatory foundation for US climate policy under the Clean Air Act. Philip Rosset…
What could the EU learn from housing incentive design ideas in the US? Progress Ireland notes growing US interest in flexible infrastructure funding grants awarded on a per-housing-unit basis . US policymakers have had t…
One of AGF’s goals for 2026 is to learn more about the landscape of abundance and growth politics in the European Union, and to think about how we can support European policymakers and activists who want to build more ho…
Why does it feel like things are always getting worse? That’s a deep question , but in the short term, part of the problem might be the internet: people who answer the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey onl…
AI makes it easier to do good science, but it also makes it easy to churn out junk papers. Late last month, arXiv, under strain from a rapid increase in submissions, changed its policy to block new university-affiliated …
Now for the ugly: a few days ago the Council on Government Relations released a new report on research regulations ; they find that 66% of new or revised requirements since 1991 have been issued in the last 10 years, wit…
It’s admin burden week in the AGF Innovation Policy vertical. Let’s start with the good: last week the NIH announced that they will no longer consider “Basic Experimental Studies Involving Humans (BESH)” to be clinical t…
Here at AGF we care a lot about ensuring basic scientific research gets funded and conducted well, and this piece in Works in Progress by Aria Schrecker is a nice illustration of why that kind of work can matter in achie…
Why is it so hard to build enough electricity supply to meet surging demand? A new draft paper from Joshua Macey and Lynne Kiesling argues that the current regulatory system creates perverse incentives for incumbents to …
This year’s remarkably bipartisan burst of federal housing policy legislation is back in action after the earlier breakdown of House-Senate talks: The House has put their package on the calendar this week, and the Senate…
David Card, Jesse Rothstein, and Moises Yi had a cool study published last year to try and get a reliable estimate of the wage benefits you get from living in a superstar city. You might think you can tease this out by j…
Finally, let’s zoom out to a big question: is progress slower than it could be, because too many people don’t believe progress is possible? I’ve wondered about this for awhile; in 2024 I wrote about the decline in positi…
Last week’s science appropriations news was encouraging, but a Nature feature this week documents the damage done over the last year: almost 8,000 grants were terminated or frozen (2,600 of which have not been reinstated…
When drugs lose patent protection, the incentive for large-scale clinical trials of new indications dries up. A recent working paper estimates that hundreds of new uses for existing drugs have gone undeveloped as a resul…
Most discussions of health care in the US focus on the consumer or demand side: how do we lower drug prices for patients? How do we help the 8 percent of Americans lacking health insurance? How do we make it easier for p…
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are meant to protect research participants, but today their fragmented standards often create needless delays. In a new piece for the Institute for Progress, Ruxandra Teslo argues that …
Much of NEPA’s power to slow down project timelines comes from the lawsuits it enables. Litigation doesn’t just slow down projects directly - it also incentivizes agencies to spend time “bulletproofing” their environment…
A geographical analysis of electricity prices published this week points out the fragmented nature of the affordability crisis. 2019-2025 price increases varied widely by state, with increases in California and the broad…
Assessing the Cost of Impact Fees on Affordable Housing: An Analysis of Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Projects in California - Housing policy watchers may be familiar with the RAND report on how Californian multifamily d…
Critical comment on ‘Does Rent Control Turn Tenants Into NIMBYs?’ - How does rent regulation affect incumbent resident outlooks on housing growth? Two common intuitions have opposite signs: Maybe rent regulation makes re…
Abundance as we see it entails a pragmatic disposition towards governance and results that can transcend partisan and factional divides. Mayor Mamdani’s endorsement of SEQRA reform is a genuinely novel demonstration of h…
To what extent is anti-growth zoning really a different problem from stagnant construction sector productivity? An NBER working paper sheds some light on the question. The construction productivity growth collapse after …
Climate mitigation debates often pit restrictions on fossil fuel supply (mildly confusingly for abundance readers, called “supply side policy” in the article) against efforts to make clean energy more competitive. Zeke H…
The Food and Drug Administration has released a draft “Guidance for Industry” on using Bayesian methodology in clinical trials for drugs and biologics, which has been in the works for several years. It lays out practical…
The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 probably wins the prize for “most Kafkaesque US federal law.” Whatever else it does, the PRA dramatically increases the amount of paperwork federal workers have to do. In theory, this …
Market shaping. So hot right now. But for funders used to the simplicity of push funding, it can be difficult to figure out how to appropriately size a pull mechanism such that it sufficiently incentivizes innovation wit…
Congress is pushing back on the administration’s proposed science cuts, as the NYT and Science report. The Senate’s bipartisan CJS package largely preserves funding across the board — science budgets at NASA and DOE are …
As an aside, if we needed a reminder about why scientific progress and clinical trial speed matters, Abundance and Growth Fund team member Saloni Dattani gives us a tour of medical breakthroughs of 2025 on her substack.
In case you missed it over the holidays, the Institute for Progress responded to OSTP’s RFI on accelerating science with a wide-ranging set of recommendations. In addition to some metascientific mainstays — like fast gra…
More Adam Kroetsh! Writing for Asterisk , he puts the FDA’s current trust woes in a longer context: how did the FDA achieve its trusted status in the first place? Kroetsch also reminds us of many of the achievements of t…
One reason clinical trials can take a long time is because it can take a long time to see how a patient’s condition turns out - some diseases have a slow progression. A good “surrogate endpoint” is a biomarker that relia…
The FDA recently announced it would shift from requiring two clinical trials to one. Why the change? In his Substack , Adam Kroetsh points out things have been moving in this direction a long time (the FDA has had the au…
Daniel Stid, writing for his substack , points out that there is a mismatch between how much governing happens at the state level (maybe most of it?) and the level of civil infrastructure (think tanks and other policy su…
Meanwhile, this Boston Globe editorial on housing, continues their marked increases in pro-housing coverage of the last several years.
Griffith’s essay pairs well with this long X post by Seán Keyes , executive director of Progress Ireland, listing ideas for helping the Republic of Ireland get more housing, infrastructure, and energy production. Some of…
The European Union has, as an institution, become associated in many European and American minds with strict regulation and thick bureaucracy. Rasheed Griffith has a good piece of pushback , insisting that the EU might b…
No blurbs match those filters.