2026-04-10
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…