16 blurbs
This week I read what I wished I was reading last week : a detailed explanation of how Australia’s clinical trial system compares to that of the United States. The key difference is in their phase one trials, which are t…
My family vacationed (or as they might say, “vacationed”) in Spain over the last couple of weeks, and we walked a portion of the Camino de Santiago from Sahagún to León. We had our three and six year olds in tow, so ther…
Energy-rich countries may not be all alike, but energy-constrained countries are also often each unhappy in their own way. Taiwo Hassan Odugbemi, Meron Tesfaye and the Energy for Growth Hub break down the monolith of unr…
One of the big biotech stories of the 2020s has been the rise of China. A recent survey of industry leaders found broad agreement that the US now lags behind China in clinical development of new drugs, and two years ago …
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,…
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…
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 …
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…
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 …
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…