Another reason housing in Texas is cheap
What we’ve been reading: urbanism, science, tech, aesthetics and more …
This summer Works in Progress is hosting Invisible College, a week-long residential seminar, to give people aged 18–22 a grounding in the topics most important to us: how the world got rich, what is going wrong with science today, and the political economy of housing, urbanism, and cities. For more information and to apply, go here. Applications will close on 28th April.
In defence of cars, sprawl and natural disasters
With careful planning, roads and cars can be an efficient means of transport even in dense cities. For example, ring roads are often inefficient for drivers because, instead of going directly from A to B, they need to go round the urban centre they are trying to reach. But they spare city centres from traffic so they can be efficient in terms of land use. To make ring roads fast enough that they are appealing to drivers in London, we would need 44 lanes (ideally spread over multiple ring roads, not as one 44 lane monstrosity).
Why America should sprawl (as well as build up).
There used to be a silver lining to natural disasters – they cleared the way for new development. But today’s rules mean that rebuilding is often more constrained than original construction.
Tract was a venture-backed company built to address Britain’s housing crisis by improving the planning permission process. Its founders have published a post-mortem on why they are closing the business and what went wrong: the conservatism of the property market, the lack of scale in Britain, and their unforced errors.
Texas has very cheap housing by American standards, in part, due to their special Municipal Utility Districts which allow developers to build infrastructure upfront and have future residents repay the costs over time.
National elections are rarely swayed by local infrastructure, so it is rarely a priority for national politicians. However, local elections can be decided by local conditions so devolving infrastructure decisions to mayors could mean more and better infrastructure in the UK.
You can watch London’s trains move around in real time on an interactive 3D map.
How hypertumors stop whales from getting cancer, and other science
As animals get bigger and have longer life spans they have more cells which go through more cell divisions. We should expect this to mean the cell’s DNA in larger animals has more copying errors and they get more cancer. Instead we see the opposite. There are two main theories why. First, cancerous tissues are themselves more vulnerable to getting cancer. A creature like a blue whale can survive having gram-sized tumors that grow rapidly and die. In a smaller animal, a similarly sized growth would kill them. Second, we have found evidence in elephants of genes that are protective against cancer itself. It is plausible that similar adaptations exist in all large animals.
You may have seen the news that Colossal Biosciences has genetically engineered the first dire wolf to live in over 10,000 years. This isn’t strictly true, but the science to make these new dire wolf-like pups is impressive nonetheless.
Heather Stone is a science policy analyst at the Food and Drug Administration who want to improve drug access for rare and deadly diseases. She built CURE ID, a platform for reporting and sharing case studies but this has been largely ignored by the administration’s bureaucracy. But Stone ignored her own CURE ID system and personally fast tracked approvals for the drugs a five-year-old girl needed when she was infected with Balumuthis. This piece is part of a Washington Post series on how different government officials work.
Comparing the lifespans and rates of aging in different animals is difficult. For example, we typically count a zebrafish’s age from when its zygote is first fertilized but we count tree shrew ages from when their eyes first open (21 days after birth).
We published a piece on extending fertility windows to help women ‘have it all’. Demographer Lyman Stone wrote a critique of what he calls ‘techno-optimism about fertility’ (paywall). Original author Ruxandra Teslo responded with a critique of Lyman’s critique and Lyman duly responded again. May the debate continue.
Edwin Chon developed methods for plasma fractionation – extracting useful proteins like albumin from blood – and scaled it up to treat wounded soldiers in World War Two. Under the pressure of the war he built a team of chemists, engineers and technicians that iterated quickly to build something that could work on the front lines. After the war he returned to fundamental research and deeply regretted it because without the urgency of wartime, his lab lost much of its dynamism.
By living healthier we minimize the economic problems that come with low birth rates and aging societies. Silver Linings models what impact different anti-aging therapies will have on the economy.
Where’s my flying Sherpa?
No one is safe from automation (or productivity-enhancing cutting-edge technology). A Nepali startup is making drones to help Sherpas.
It is easy to believe that AI will change the world dramatically but it is difficult to have a vivid sense of what this future could be like. A history of the future (2025-2027, 2027-2030, and 2030-2040) paints a picture of what the world may look like – humans in the loop managing AIs that they understand less and less each day, entire countries going AI free (except for defence) and some guesses at what this implies.
Wikipedia is complaining about the cost of being repeatedly scraped by internet crawlers. It says ‘our content is free, our infrastructure is not’. Similarly, Google’s AI summaries are decreasing traffic, and therefore revenue, to people who collate and share high-quality factual content. Google is trying to work out if it can afford to keep upsetting writers and, as an experiment, it removed European news results for one percent of users in eight European countries and found it had no measurable impact on revenue.
23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, its CEO has resigned, and it is facing fines for data breaches.
Stonehenge upgraded
Scott Alexander writes about slave morality vs master morality through the lens of different online commentators. Scott says that ugly postwar buildings are part of our post-WW2 ‘slave morality’ or ‘ensmallening’.
History of Industrial Design is a lecture series that explains the relationship between art and industry. Watch if you are curious about where chairs came from.
On building a working state, marriage and babies, British liberalism and, of course, tariffs
There is a common misconception that the United States stopped building nuclear reactors after the 1970s. But that is not the full story: the US Navy has consistently built at least one small nuclear reactor every year since the 1950s. Read about how Admiral Hyman Rickover created the surprisingly functional Naval Reactors Group.
Europe has expensive energy and Ireland’s is the most expensive. Here’s one reason why.
The Mercatus Centre says that most tax breaks distort the economy, create unfair advantages, and make the system more complex. A few serve a legitimate purpose, like avoiding double taxation, but most don’t.
The Centre for British Progress is a new think tank, based in London. Their founding essay explains that they believe material progress drives human progress but that today wages, productivity and investment are all flatlining. They want the UK to have a more entrepreneurial state that embraces things like Small Modular Reactors and redesigns institutions to reward initiative and streamlines regulation.
Divorce rates for most rich countries peaked whenever their divorce laws were first liberalized but the US remains an outlier with persistently high levels.
The End of Children shows what a world with collapsed fertility looks like: schools with three pupils, day-care centres turned nursing homes, and a young population who see the culture as one in which it is unimaginable to raise children.
The Liberal Digest is a new Substack promoting the best of British liberal thought.
America has everything-bagel liberalism. Britain has everythingism: the belief that every proposal, project or policy is a means for promoting every national objective, all at the same time.
Confused by the economics of tariffs? This post may help.
Books: What virtues should your employees, scientists and politicians possess?
I read Tyler Cowen’s book on Talent. It is focused on hiring but mostly prompts you to think about what traits to value in other people and how to work out if someone possesses them. I recommend it to anyone hiring or dating – so it was basically useless to me but I hope it finds a broad audience.
In 2000, Jan Hendrik Schön fabricated data to pretend he had created a powerful new method for turning organic crystals into transistors. After being exposed, the scientific community – including Nobel prize-winners and major journals – continued to support him.
Published in 1985, Amusing Ourselves to Death predicts a world in which politics is taken over by enraging and entertaining reality TV stars.