35 blurbs
There’s an old idea that cities are engines of innovation in large part because they cluster together lots of innovators; these innovators make each other more productive via a variety of mechanisms. Across US cities, a …
GDP per capita is positively correlated with a lot of desirable things, like health and subjective well-being (even though self-reported well-being in the United States has been falling for the last decade, it remains ro…
In 2008, the total market capitalization of US-listed firms was about a third larger than the market capitalization of European-listed firms. In 2023, it’s about triple. What happened? A new NBER working paper by Becker,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“ 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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 …
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…