This is meant as a hit piece on Japan, but it’s unreal how every single sentence applies better to post-brexit UK. Except the part about enjoying peace, prosperity, and highly functioning public infrastructures.
We see the world as we are. Trite, but true : no matter our focus of the moment, we will tend to explain everything through that lens.
So unsurprisingly I explain away a lot of what is wrong in the world through the fundamental brokenness of the housing market. And specifically, the fact that we could, but won’t, build nearly enough housing where it matters – creating every incentive for people to spread apart when we know that individuals are happier, and society more productive, when we congregate in denser cities.
I have already written a bit about this. But this piece is clearly better as it quantifies both the supply gap (the wedge between build costs and housing prices that directly measures the cost of restrictions on new buildings), the productivity gap between small and large cities, and how restrictions on new housing development directly drive increases in inequality.
The housing theory of everything – Works in Progress
This is one of the best things I’ve read in a long while. It goes to show what happens when we do not believe that big problems are by definition someone else’s problem, it’s a tale of ownership, of entrepreneurial pragmatism, but also an unbelievably sharp read of what drives some (government) decisions : a sum of totally rational decisions leading to a clearly irrational outcome.
The story of VaccinateCA – Works in Progress
And also a great reminder that “those given gifts must use them on behalf of society”
Inario 