The White House is taking aim at the housing shortage by deregulating housing constructionđź§µ
A big part of the American Dream was created by a massive housing boom when the troops came home
Since the Great Financial Crisis, practically everywhere has reduced the number of permits they issue for new housing
This has resulted in housing cost growth outpacing wage growth:
To revive the American Dream, we need to build more homes.
If we want to build more homes, we'll have to overcome a lot of different regulatory burdens.
One step is to get rid of federal regulatory burdens that straddle homebuilders and owners with lots of random costs.
This has the broader meaning of:
- getting rid of energy-efficiency guidelines
- getting rid of water use regs
- getting rid of alternative-energy requirements
These regulations might seem good, but they're actually destructive because, for example, you need to handwash dishes:
The really big thing is that the CEQ, which manages the disastrous 1969 NEPA law, has been told to instruct states on a less burdensome implementation of that law.
That means less costly and unnecessary environmental review and attendant grifters:
Every state is also going to be provided with a set of deregulatory guidelines for housing.
This will be used to push states to stop doing things like retroactively applying new building codes, capping permitting fees and timelines, and allowing by-right construction nationally!
The Order also calls for the creation of more ways to let homebuilders leverage preexisting tax benefits by building in Opportunity Zones
This means that they want to reward builders for doing their jobs anywhere, but we're exploiting the fact that we can in these areas. Clever!
Did you know that prefabricated homes face extra regulatory burdens? They shouldn't, but they do, making it harder to build cheap homes
Perhaps my favorite part of the Order is that the administration will encourage states to drop their excess regulations on prefabricated homes:
The Order includes more than this, but the general gist is that the administration wants to see more homes built, and they're aware that the issue is regulatory.
To get America building again and to revive the American Dream in the process, we need more homes.
P.S. This is mostly concerned with single-family homes and there's not anything directly concerning apartments and condominiums in here. Unfortunate, but at least there's some progress and they'll be helped indirectly.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
World War I devastated Britain and likely slowed down its technological progressđź§µ
The reason being, the youth are the engine of innovation.
Areas that saw more deaths saw larger declines in patenting in the years following the war.
To figure out the innovation effects of losing a large portion of a generation's young men who were just coming into the primes of their lives, the authors needed four pieces of data.
The first were the numbers and pre-war locations of soldiers who died.
The next components were the numbers and locations of patent filings.
If you look at both graphs, you see obvious total population effects. So, areas must be normalized.
You know how most books on Amazon are AI slop now? If you didn't, look at the publication numbers.
Compare those to the proportion Pangram flags as AI-generated. It's fully aligned with the implied numbers based on the rise over 2022 publication levels!
Similarly, the rise of pro se litigants has come with a rise in case filings detected as being AI-generated, and with virtually zero false-positives before AI was around.
For reference, the French Revolution ushered in a number of egalitarian laws.
A major example of these had to do with inheritance, and in particular with partibility.
In some areas of France, there was partible inheritance, and in others, it was impartible.
Partible inheritance refers to inheritance spread among all of a person's heirs, sometimes including girls, sometimes not.
Impartible inheritance on the other hands refers to the situation where the head of an estate can nominate a particular heir to get all or a select portion.
In terms of their employment, religion, and sex, people who joined the Nazi party started off incredibly distinct from the people in their communities.
It's only near the end of WWII when they started resembling everyday Germans.
Early on, a lot of this dissimilarity is due to hysteresis.
Even as the party was growing, people were selectively recruited because they were often recruited by their out-of-place friends, and they were themselves out-of-place.
It took huge growth to break that.
And you can see the decline of fervor based on the decline of Nazi imagery in people's portraits.
And while this is observed by-and-large, it's not observed among the SS, who had a consistently higher rate of symbolic fanaticism.
I simulated 100,000 people to show how often people are "thrice-exceptional": Smart, stable, and exceptionally hard-working.
I've highlighted these people in red in this chart:
If you reorient the chart to a bird's eye view, it looks like this:
In short, there are not many people who are thrice-exceptional, in the sense of being at least +2 standard deviations in conscientiousness, emotional stability (i.e., inverse neuroticism), and intelligence.
To replicate this, use 42 as the seed and assume linearity and normality
The decline of trust is something worth caring about, and reversing it is something worth doing.
We should not have to live constantly wondering if we're being lied to or scammed. Trust should be possible again.
I don't know how we go about regaining trust and promoting trustworthiness in society.
It feels like there's an immense level of toleration of untrustworthy behavior from everyone: scams are openly funded; academics congratulate their fraudster peers; all content is now slop.
What China's doing—corruption crackdowns and arresting fraudsters—seems laudable, and I think the U.S. and other Western nations should follow suit.
Fraud leads to so many lives being lost and so much progress being halted or delayed.