2026-04-17
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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 …