I pitch Build, Baby, Build in today’s New York Times. No illustrations, but a bunch of cool graphs cooked up by Sara Chodosh of the NYT data analytics team. The original title was “The Panacea Policy,” but now it’s “Yes in My Backyard: The Case For Housing Deregulation.” And for you, dear readers, it’s ungated!…
I’m not a political pundit, but I’m guessing that yesterday’s despicable assassination attempt on Donald Trump increases the likelihood that he reclaims the White House. That’s probably not good news for trade policy (though Biden has been just as bad), but it will be very good news for housing policy. Not because of what Trump […]
Four months ago, I described a speech by Chris Bishop in his capacity as Minister of Housing as perhaps the most important speech given by any Government minister since the election last year. He’s just given another, arguably even more important, laying out in words of one syllable what the Government plans to do…
Here is one excerpt: What few appreciate is that the overregulation of housing has blocked a classic American path: moving to a higher-wage part of the country to secure a better life. A paper by the economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag shows that housing costs now routinely outweigh wage gains: While janitors and waiters do indeed […]
From a new working paper “The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890-2006” by Ronan C. Lyons, Allison Shertzer, Rowena Gray & David N. Agorastos (emphasis added): “Zoning was adopted by almost every city in our sample during the 1920s. We see a slightly steeper gradient over the next two periods (coefficients of .48 […]
Numerous trade associations are asking the Supreme Court to review a lower court’s decision that effectively allowed California to push electric vehicles (EVs) on the rest of the U.S.
After 14 years of net-zero nonsense from the Conservative Party, Nigel Farage’s climate-skeptic Reform Party has taken away a third of the Conservative vote.
Chris Bishop has announced changes to housing laws which will make a huge difference to housing affordability. Almost every expert has said that to reduce pressure on house prices you need to both build up and build out. The NIMBYs oppose building up and the Greenies opposes building out. Phil Rayford in 2017 had some […]
Peter Dunne writes – In 2016 New Zealand instituted comprehensive new health and safety laws for workplaces and other areas of activity. The expectation was that the new regime the legislation introduced would dramatically improve the culture and practice around safety in the workplace, reduce the numbers of accidents and save lives. However, the most […]
Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.” I’d never heard of it before and it’s quoted in this review of a book called “Free Lunch Thinking – How Economics Ruins […]
For those who are interested in public law, a very interesting paper by Dean Knight summarising the various court cases over the Covid-19 response. It details in which areas the Government won judicial reviews, and in which areas they lost. The TLDR version is: Hopefully we will not go through another pandemic anytime soon.
I am not a Fauci hater but I think this criticism of Facui from epidemiologist and oncologist Vinay Prasad hits the mark: Lockdown was specifically advocated for by Anthony Fauci (‘15 days to stop the spread’/ ‘hunker down’/ ‘shelter in place’), and Fauci would go on to make hundreds of other specific policy recommendations. Although he initially […]
Below is my column in The Hill on the start of the Hunter Biden trial and the elements of a classic jury nullification strategy by the defense. It is not clear that it will work in an otherwise open-and-shut case, but it might. What is clear is that it may be all that Biden has […]
We have been treated to multiple reports of negative consequences unforeseen by policymakers pushing the Green Energy agenda. A sample of the range: Ford ready to restrict UK sales of petrol models to hit electric targets, Financial Times Why US offshore wind energy is struggling—the good, the bad and the opportunity, Tech Xplore Another solar […]
QUESTION TO CLAUDE 3: The EU and China lag behind the US in economic dynamism, measured by start-up activity, number of unicorns, age of unicorns (younger indicates more rapid innovation), and in productivity growth. Can you document this and tell me why?ANSWER: Here is the data to document the economic dynamism gap between the US,…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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