Issue 17: No great stagnation in cruise ships
Plus: animals as chemical factories, how progress lost its glamour, and how Madrid built 120 miles of metro in twelve years.
Works in Progress Issue 17 is out now.
Our lead article is about the horses, hamsters, crabs and other animals we use as chemical factories.
Plus:
How Madrid managed to build its metro for a tenth of the cost paid by Londoners or New Yorkers;
Cruise ships – proof that smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is still possible at sea;
Initially, it may seem obvious that cities with housing shortages will have higher rates of homelessness. But homelessness is not just about there being too few homes to go around: it is driven by mental health and drug abuse problems as well, and it is not straightforward why housing shortages would make those worse. But they can, says Salim Furth. The crucial factor is spare bedrooms in family and friends’ homes that vulnerable people can turn to in times of crisis for shelter and support. When these are scarce, because a city is stopping homes from being built, people in trouble may have to resort to more dangerous alternatives that can be difficult to escape from.
On dry land, many of the most important technologies we’ve got have hit a brick wall. Buildings have stopped getting taller. Railways have become so expensive that we just don’t bother building them anymore. Jet airplanes have actually regressed from the supersonic speeds some were capable of during the era of the Concorde. But at sea, progress sails on. The Icon of the Seas is an engineering marvel, writes Michael Hopkins, and the gross tonnage of it and other cruise ships has grown almost linearly. And, while some roll their eyes at the ‘human lasagna’ on offer on these ships, they demonstrate that density levels almost unheard of in any developed world city can be highly attractive, even to very old people, if they come with the right amenities and security.
Between 1995 and 2007, Madrid expanded its metro by 126 miles, tripling it in length and giving it the third-longest metro in Europe, only surpassed by London and Moscow. And it did it for between $81 million and $115 million per mile, in 2024 terms – a tenth of the price of London’s Elizabeth Line, a thirtieth the price of New York’s Second Avenue Subway, and considerably cheaper than even contemporary projects like the Jubilee Line extension. They did it, Ben Hopkinson explains, by getting the incentives right for local politicians to prioritise speed and low costs, and by avoiding the gold-plating that drives costs in other cities up enormously. Perhaps we can learn from the madrileños.
People used to dream about the world of tomorrow, writes Virginia Postrel. But then, from around the 1970s, popular visions of the future started to become dystopian, marked by fears of overpopulation, environmental catastrophe, and corporate tyranny. Why did progress lose its glamour, and how can it get it back?
We cannot manufacture a cure for snake bites the same way we produce most pharmaceuticals we need. Instead, we inject living horses with diluted snake venom, which generates an immune response in the horse and fills their blood with the antivenom we need. We extract their blood – about 1.5 percent of the horse’s body weight every month – and refine it to get the antivenom we need. Horses are not the only animals we use as chemical factories, explain Asimov Press’s Xander Balwit and Niko McCarty. Horseshoe crabs, chickens, silkworms, snails and hamsters have all been, or still are, used to produce chemicals we cannot manufacture synthetically. Our lead essay details the history of our use of animals as chemical factories, and explains why we have remained dependent on animals even as our other technologies have progressed.
America’s, and the world’s, cows are now extraordinarily productive. In 2024, just 9.3 million cows will produce 226 billion pounds of milk (about 100 million tons) – enough milk to provide ten percent of the country’s calorie intake, and still have some left over to export. And America exports more bull semen than almost the entire rest of the world put together. The story of the modern dairy cow, as Jared Hutchens writes, is one of foresightful use of data, and an effective partnership between the US Department of Agriculture and the country’s farmers.
A lot of people think the form of a building should follow its function. But what the function of a building actually is isn’t straightforward, says Ralf S Weir. When considered as the setting for a dystopian tragedy, Thamesmead has a lot to offer, which is why it was used as one in A Clockwork Orange. But considered as a place to live, it falls short, as do many of the things we’ve built in the era of ‘functionalism’. Considering function properly means thinking clearly about what purposes particular buildings have, which often involve being easy to live inside and beautiful.
Links in Progress
We’ve started a regular newsletter, ‘Links in Progress’, that rounds up noteworthy news and research in some important areas. We have started with new developments in the world of pronatalism (making it easier for people to have babies, if they want to), and infrastructure (making it easier for airports to add runways, if they want to). More to come on subjects like housing and architecture. If you don’t want to get these, you can opt out here.
More from Works in Progress
San Diego’s infinite housing glitch – Nolan Grey on how a loophole in the ‘granny flat’ rules has allowed San Diegans to build ‘granny towers’ in their backyards.
Stewart Brand on the overuse of the term ‘existential risk’: ‘The dread is harmful. It fosters helplessness. It makes us fear the future and fear everything deeply new. And it is grossly exaggerated.’
Did modern tastes for minimalism arise from a desire to signal status in a world of cheap ornamentation? Probably not, says Samuel Hughes, because the same cannot explain why similar trends emerged in other artistic fields at the same time.
It is far from conclusive, but it is possible that anaemia is protective against malaria, writes Deena Mousa. If so, that would undermine the effectiveness of some health interventions in the developing world.
The duplication crisis may be as much a problem as the replication crisis, writes Jake Taylor-King, with researchers re-publishing the same studies and results again and again with minor tweaks just to pad out their professional resumes.
Foundations
Ben, Sam, and Samuel Hughes released an essay called Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated . It argues that Britain has essentially banned investment in the most important physical infrastructure it needs to grow: housing, electricity pylons, railways, roads, data centres, nuclear reactors, tramways, and more. And when it does build these things, their prices rise to astronomical levels thanks to the regulatory, legal, and administrative costs they face. Some facts to illustrate the scale of the problem:
Between 2004 and 2021, the UK industrial price of energy doubled relative to consumer prices. It is now the highest in the world.
With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million.
Tram projects in Britain are two and a half times more expensive than French projects on a per mile basis.
The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.
The essay was cited in the House of Lords, and a digested version was published in the Sunday Times.
Boom
Boom: Bubbles and the end of stagnation, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber, is out now from Stripe Press. Read a sample of its chapter on fracking, and why cheaper energy is so important, here.
What we’ve been up to
Sam appeared on the Financial Times’s Economics Show to talk about Foundations with Soumaya Keynes, Bloomberg’s Merryn Talks Money podcast, the Quillette podcast, the Society of Professional Economists’ podcast, Virginia Postrel’s podcast, and the Macro Minds podcast, and recorded a fireside chat about it with former British security minister Tom Tugendhat.
Ben became a father for the second time. The family is doing well.
Saloni gave a talk on ‘How to speed up medical breakthroughs’, wrote about how HPV vaccines can help eliminate cervical cancer, the history of antipsychotic medicine, and a retrospective of charts to understand the COVID-19 pandemic
Rachel hosted a Stripe Press pop-up bookstore in Toronto, and has been asking people to stop listening to TikToks out loud in public.
Around the web
What if we’re overestimating human capital improvements, which would make our Total Factor Productivity stagnation much less bad than it appears?
At the height of railway mania in 1846, Parliament mandated 9,500 new miles of railway, the equivalent of sixty-seven HS2s.
The compliance doom-loop: rent-seeking depresses returns to productive activity, making rent-seeking relatively more attractive than productive activity, depressing returns to productive activity, making rent-seeking relatively more attractive…
How Britain can build data centres. And how it can avoid shutting down its remaining nuclear reactors at the same time.
A new clinical trial of tirzepatide, a GLP-1 drug, finds that it reduces the chances of diabetes by 90%, among people with obesity and pre-diabetes.
During the 1970s and 80s Colonel Gadaffi commissioned Maltese funk musicians to record songs praising his regime.
Most bottlenecks slowing biology today are biophysical rather than computational, but it may still be possible to rapidly accelerate progress in biology.
Two recent trials find that lenacapavir, a new HIV antiviral drug, reduces the chances of an HIV infection by 96–100%. While previous preventive antivirals are taken as daily pills or monthly injections, lenacapavir is only injected once every 6 months
A video on how Besançon, a French city of 100,000 people, built and runs its tramway cost-effectively.
GDP = C + I + G + (X - M): a mischievous equation.
What it’s like to volunteer to get dysentery, for research.
A company is building the world’s largest gun in the Nevada desert to shoot materials into space at high speeds as a cheaper alternative to rockets.
How the world’s first national electricity grid was set up by a group of engineers who didn’t wait for permission.
Improve your Negroni by reducing its Campari, vermouth and water content.
YIMBG: Progress Ireland proposes Accessory Dwelling Units for Irish back gardens.
Merry Christmas.
– Sam, Ben, Saloni, Rachel