Crémieux Profile picture
Mar 12 • 9 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
Manhattan is arguably America's most iconic city, and more arguably, its only 'real' city.

But its own laws have made the buildings that make it so iconic illegal to build more ofđź§µ Image
Many of the existing buildings in Manhattan that you couldn't make today are too tall by current standards. Image
Many of the existing buildings in Manhattan that you couldn't make today have too many apartments by current standards. Image
Many of the existing buildings in Manhattan that you couldn't make today have too much space dedicated to business by current standards. Image
Many of the existing buildings in Manhattan that you couldn't make today have building footprints that are too tall by current standards. Image
But the buildings that make New York tall, dense, and filled with architectural juxtaposition also made New York so iconic, they made it more livable than it would've been otherwise, and they made it great.

The new laws simply don't respect the old vision for New York. Image
This problem isn't unique to New York either.

In tons of American cities, existing builds are illegal by new standards that are generally not justified by any sort of safety or quality concerns, but which instead are driven by local interest groups and dumb policymakers.
For example, in San Francisco, 54% of all homes that exist there are illegal to build today! Image

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More from @cremieuxrecueil

May 7
Roughly one-third of all of Japan's urban building was done through a process of replotting land parcels and reconstructing homes to increase local density while making way for new infrastructuređź§µ

Conceptually, it's like this: Image
In that diagram, you see an area of low-density homes that has undergone land rights conversion, where, when two-thirds of the area’s existing homeowners agree, everyone’s right to their land is converted to the rights to an equivalent part of a new building. Image
This works well to generate substantial, dense amounts of housing, and it's, crucially, democratic.

All the decision-making power was held by those who were directly affected, and not outsiders to the situation.

If 2/3 wanted to upzone, they could, and they did!Image
Read 16 tweets
May 6
Chinese cities occasionally sell land to developers before buying out all the existing residents.

But sometimes existing residents refuse to be bought out, so developers are forced to build around them.

These are "nail houses"đź§µ
The most famous nail house is undoubtedly Wu Ping's home in Chongqing.

Wu Ping came to national acclaim when she and her husband refused to give up their property to make way for a luxury apartment complex.

They wanted more compensation, and they fought for it for three years. Image
Wu Ping and her husband refused to leave their property during the debate over the Wuquan Fa, Property Rights Law.

The debate was largely centered around whether and how China would protect property rights given their socialist ideals.Image
Read 18 tweets
May 6
I've seen a lot of people recently claim that the prevalence of vitiligo is 0.5-2%.

This is just not true. In the U.S. today, it's closer to a sixth of a percent, with some notable age- and race-related differences.

But where did the 0.5-2% claim come from?đź§µ Image
The claim of a 0.5-2% prevalence emerged on here because Google's Gemini cited a 2020 review in the journal Dermatology which proclaimed as much in the abstract.

Simple enough, right? They must have a source that supports this estimate in the review somewhere.Image
They cite four studies for the 0.5-2% claim, so let's look into those studies. Image
Read 27 tweets
May 2
There's a myth that the Islamic world has figured out fertility, but it has not.

They show the same declining fertility rates that other places have. Barring Iraq, the Middle East has lower fertility rates than Israel now. Image
Exceptions: Yemen and maybe Palestine, both of which have terrible data, so their comparative situation is unclear.

But, two things on that:

Firstly, Jewish fertility is ahead of Arab fertility in Israel. Image
Secondly, Israeli fertility might be just ahead or slightly behind Palestinian fertility, depending on the source.

Israeli growth is definitely ahead of Palestinian growth due to immigration, Palestinian emigration, and Palestinian mortality.Image
Read 6 tweets
May 2
Relationships between class and fertility and IQ and fertility used to routinely be negative in the not-so-distant past.

But across the developed world, they're increasingly positive, albeit only slightly. In this Swedish birth cohort (1951-67), the transition came early: Image
In this example, there's also some interesting confounding: between families, IQ isn't monotonically associated with fertility, but within families, it is.

Something seems to suppress the IQ-fertility relationship between families!

See also:
Sweden's positive IQ-fertility gradient (which, above, is just for males, since it's draftee data), has been around for quite a while (but has varied, too), whereas in countries like France, Japan, and the U.S., the gradient shift towards being slightly positive is more recent. Image
Read 6 tweets
May 2
One of the reasons people are so pessimistic about fertility policy is because they misjudge the counterfactualđź§µ

Consider this. We have a country with a given fertility level: Image
The country intervenes with some fertility policy, and the fertility rate continues to fall.

The program is therefore dubbed a failure. Oh no! Image
But, had the program never been implemented, the fertility rate would have fallen much more.

This is the counterfactual, and it is roundly ignored in favor of the pessimistic conclusion that fertility policy simply does not work. Image
Read 10 tweets

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