The master sculptors of history did not chip away at a block of stone to get at the statue inside. Instead, they made plaster models (right), which unnamed skilled craftsmen turned into statues with precise pointing machines (left). Ornament has *always* been industrialised. Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Rodin all worked this way. They produced moulds, which were turned by others into statues and sculptures. This type of art was always meant to be mass produced.

Between 2005 and 2010, Israel gave apartment owners the right to agree by supermajority to demolish their rickety pre-1980 building and replace it with a bigger, better, newer one. Here is a thread of five before and afters one architect there sent me. 🧵 Every single one of these is the same building, and where possible I tried to get an identical perspective. That wasn't always perfectly achievable: there were loads of 'after' images, but not always lots of 'befores'.

Very little in history has been more difficult than land reform – who owns agricultural land, or what can be done with modern residential land – zoning or planning reform.

But Pyotr Stolypin squared the circle in Imperial Russia. 🧵 First, the context. Imperial Russia in 1905 was a vast, sprawling almost-feudal state. It had grown dramatically over the past 400 years.

An incredible 2001 paper re-analysed every then-available dataset on historical European homicide rates. This turned up an amazing trove of estimates.

Firstly, England. Note that it's a log scale – 1300s England was a war zone! These estimates come from a range of sources. Local court data, combined with separate population estimates. One particularly good series following Kent for a long time. And then, from the 1800s, official data.

The Nordic countries have incredible population registries, meaning that everyone in the country is tracked through life by crime, income, health, and so on. This means *lots* of interesting statistics. Here's a paper, studying 12.5m Swedes, on how crime runs in families. (🧵) First, the paper. Link at the end.

Although induced demand is not a helpful concept, and roads are useful way of generating agglomeration benefits, roads (and private cars) have two big costs.
One is the externalities they cause. Another is the land they use. These have important implications.
As promised, a🧵 First my thread and post explaining how roads satisfy a latent demand for journeys, make housing cheaper by opening up much more land for productive development, support economic agglomeration, and helped start the Industrial Revolution.

https://twitter.com/bswud/status/1711678279818649786

When we build more roads, more people drive. But I don't think it's helpful to call this 'induced demand'. I'll explain why. 🧵 There is a popular argument around the internet that it's pointless building roads, because people will just drive more ('be induced to demand more driving'), filling up all the extra road space, meaning traffic will go back to where it was before.

I think economics could do with a better term than ‘rent seeking’, which is very confusing to non economists who are unfamiliar with the eccentric sense of ‘rent’ being used. What better term could we use? This one is the best so far

https://twitter.com/mattdobra/status/1596174304248487939

Excellent genuinely unpopular opinion here from @edwest.

- Schooling is massively overrated.
- Kids love pretending to have a job & being useful.
- Learning by doing > taught instruction.

unherd.com/2019/11/why-ch… Of course, just letting children have a lot more freedom would be nice too. There used to be such a thing as children’s culture

https://twitter.com/sarahdoingthing/status/518382078094614529?s=21