Issue 15: To change a norm
Issue 15: To change a norm
Plus: bland buildings can't be blamed on labor costs, reasons to be sceptical about prediction markets, and gentrification policies that actually help.
The 15th issue of Works in Progress has just gone live.
Our lead essay explains how Western societies conquered drunk driving, first through deterrence, and then by changing social norms.
The issue also includes essays on:
New York’s long road to implementing London-style congestion pricing;
How Britain experienced housing ‘shrinkflation’ only otherwise seen in the Soviet Union;
Our lead article explains how Western societies curbed drunk driving by changing cultural norms. In the 1960s, ordinary adults drunk drove from time to time. The behavior was too normal to punish harshly, says Nick Cowen, but over time, gradual increases in detection and punishment helped to create a social norm against drunk driving. The article shows how this happened and discusses lessons for building norms against other criminal and antisocial behavior.
Economists, entrepreneurs, and academics have all hoped that prediction markets could be used to forecast the future, but virtually all prediction markets are small and illiquid. Even the most important questions on contemporary prediction markets see vastly less volume than the most trivial financial market or sports betting book. They will never take off, predict Nick Whitaker and J Zachary Mazlish, because they offer a service that no one really wants. Markets need to either generate long-term returns – like the stock market – or work in very short windows of time – like sports betting markets – to have sufficient volume to produce accurate predictions. Prediction markets don’t do either.
On 30th June, New York plans to start charging drivers to come into Manhattan between Central Park and the bottom of the island, in a scheme similar to, and directly inspired by, London’s congestion charge. But it has taken decades, and several false starts, to get to this point. Based on interviews with the dozen key figures who brought the policy about, Ben Adler shows how advocates eventually managed to build a successful coalition to implement road user charging in America’s most congested city.
Many believe that British housing problems started in the last few decades. Nothing could be further from the truth. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s attempt to drive up British exports in the 1960s caused mortgage rationing that held down house price appreciation, but at the cost of ‘shrinkflation’ in new housing: British houses got smaller and smaller during the 1960s, even as house sizes grew rapidly in the rest of Western Europe. Samuel Watling tells the forgotten story. When Ted Heath removed controls on mortgages in the early 1970s, prices exploded at the fastest pace in history before an about-turn that almost destroyed the housing market. The article shows that all of these issues could have been avoided had housing supply been more elastic.
Large and public buildings have lost their ‘ornament’ over the past hundred years. Public buildings of today usually have no sculptures, carvings, cornices, moldings, or other decorations. Some argue that this is because labor costs have risen to make this unaffordable. This does not fit the evidence, argues Samuel Hughes. Buildings were getting increasingly ornamented throughout history as more advanced technology was applied to producing ornament, making it cheaper through mass production. The decorations inside our houses – candlesticks, flower pots, vases, prints and paintings – have gotten cheaper and more widely available across the income scale. Changes in taste, not economics, are the best way to understand why ornamentation of buildings declined.
Gentrification – inflows of richer people to poorer neighborhoods, and the related displacement of the existing residents – is one of the most heated issues in housing. It’s easy to see why: concerns about poorer residents being pushed out are not baseless, and nearly everyone is skeptical about the rapid changes in their neighborhoods of what they know best. But while stopping population movements around a country and a city is impossible, argues Anya Martin, more housing supply in high-demand areas may accommodate influxes of people and let existing residents benefit from the changes instead of losing out from them.
Invisible College
Works in Progress is hosting a week-long summer school in Cambridge for 18–22 year olds: Invisible College. If you are 18–22, or if you know someone who is, then they ought to apply to come. It is going to be dense with the ideas we think are the most important and best. Please submit applications by May 31st.
Even more
Stripe Press is popping up in Paris next week. Come along! And come and have drinks with the Works in Progress team as well.
Samuel Watling wrote for Notes on Progress about land value tax advocate Henry George’s desire to abolish cities. He also explained how planning and zoning restrictions closely resemble the Corn Laws of the nineteenth century.
Jon Neale wrote about Britain’s amazing interwar Art Deco apartment boom, which left us with some beautiful blocks treasured to this day.
Check out new episodes from the podcasts we sponsor, The Studies Show and Bretton Goods.
Remember that you can follow us on Apple News.
WIP author Tom Chivers has published his book Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World. Check it out!
Roots of Progress has opened applications for the second cohort of its intensive eight-week program for blog-writing.
What we’ve been up to
Nick wrote for this issue on prediction markets and hosted events for Works in Progress in New York, Sydney, and Singapore.
Ben speculated on what profit the residents of Palo Alto could make if they decided to develop the city (at least $1 trillion). He wondered if the UK should reclaim land in some of its territorial waters. He tweeted about cool townhome developments in Houston.
Saloni explained how the rise in reported maternal mortality in the US was due to a change in its measurement, not an actual rise. She also visualized the causes of death across the lifespan.
Sam shared some of the articles and blogposts that have influenced him with Matter. He spoke to Matt Bufton about ‘why we can’t have nice things’, or NIMBYism and how to solve it.
More from around the web
Brian Albrecht proposes a new measure of competition that measures how easily more efficient companies can win market share.
Mars is the most hospitable celestial body in the Solar System, and it’s almost impossible to live on: it has gets 1,000x the ultraviolet radiation that Earth does, plus much more particle radiation, and its poles get to -150C. But worst of all, there’s almost no water.
Tiger attacks accounted for nearly two-thirds of the (enormous) casualty rate caused by the East India Company’s salt production.
An item-by-item account of what is making Hinkley Point C the most expensive nuclear power station ever built.
Voters don’t know that building more homes reduces house prices. And the more salient you make YIMBY issues, the less happy they are about building new homes. And read this thread on the paper.
How the Japanese monarchy survived to become the world’s oldest.
South Tyrol, the culturally- German province of Italy, has steadily increased its birth rate with pragmatic, practical, progressive pro-baby policies.
In 1762 two British naval ships carried a Spanish frigate carrying loot that would be worth £10 billion today if it was the same fraction of the economy.
Build costs are the main driver of house prices for the vast majority of American homes. Only in superstar metropolitan areas without space to sprawl do land costs and scarce permissions drive up prices.
The UK government did a cost-benefit analysis of rules requiring new apartment blocks to have second staircases and found that the costs would be 294 times greater than the benefits.
The American murder rate appears to be dipping back onto its pre-Covid trend.
GLP-1 agonist drugs like Semaglutide/Wegovy and Mounjaro work in part by resetting the body’s ‘lipostat’, the regulatory system in the brain that opposes weight loss efforts.
When was the last time we built a new city? An interview with California Forever founder Jan Sramek.
Why companies do stock buybacks, and why most criticisms of them are misguided.
An article on the ideas behind the ‘progress’ movement.
Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gangs has been highly successful – but how much of a threat is he to Salvadorean institutions and democracy?
The convincing evidence that Covid did not come from a lab leak.
See ya.
— Saloni, Nick, Sam and Ben