Cars use a lot of land. Despite this, many cities depend entirely on the car and get by fine. This can all be explained with one 1963 paper by RJ Smeed, the British transport planner who invented 'Smeed's Law'. This paper shocked me and changed my worldview! 🧵 Start by assuming *everyone* commutes to work by car. This is the land-hungriest option possible. Going by rail, because it is faster than walking, uses the least – 1 sqft. Then walking. then a bus. All the way to a car with driver only which needs up to 100 sqft.

Since 1990, France has built more motorway than the entirety we have in the UK. None of this has cost the French government a centime – private companies fronted the capital, and those driving pay for them through tolls. And their top speed limit is 11mph higher!

This relentless drive to build is why France is more productive than the UK per hour, and approximately as rich as the UK, despite regulation, taxes, and unions

https://x.com/s8mb/status/1837065610712272986

Before 1940, housing in the UK got cheaper like any other good, as technology made land more productive (steel frames, reinforced concrete, electric lifts), and more interchangeable (buses, trams, cars, roads, railways). That all stopped after the Second World War. 🧵 In 1938, local councils had the power to plan, and the right to refuse any development they liked, just as now. But after the Second World War, two things changed. Both dramatically reduced the incentive for councils to grant permissions. The results are famous.

In just five years, the UK's Central Electricity Board built the National Grid, with 4,000 miles of cables, and 26,000 pylons. In 1937, a group of impatient, rebellions engineers switched the connections on without permission. The price of electricity collapsed. By 1932 our government scrapped mortgage regulations and First World War-era rent controls, leading to ourmost dramatic ever housing boom. Growth was so rapid (and America's Great Depression so deep) that for one year, we were the richest country in the world again.

The main two ways that cities have expanded in history are speculative outward growth, and steady urban and suburban intensification. But there is a third way: masterplanned new towns. If done well, new towns can be a brilliant way of growing cities. 🧵 Everyone is familiar with speculative developer-led outward growth, of which there are thousands of acres around all major cities, from London’s Victorian and Edwardian railway suburbs to American ‘sprawl’.

Coming from a country with a strong communitarian ethos based on solidarity, safety, equality, and minimising risk of harm or upset, the UK, it’s interesting to visit one with a national character more based around freedom, independence, and progress at any cost, France. 🧵 The UK has very low speed limits — the top one is only around 110kmh, and these are enforced aggressively with radars and cameras to make sure few die on roads. By contrast the top French speed limit is about 82mph, and it is rarely enforced. The priority is on speedy movement.

In the 2000s we discovered an amazing tool to literally bring inventions from the far future forward to the present, or near future. Despite its huge power we have barely used it since. So Works in Progress has produced a practical easy-to-follow guide that anyone could copy. 🧵 In 2007, Gavi, funded by the UK govt and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, promised Big Pharma that if they invented a vaccine for pneuomococcal disease they would buy it. By 2011, GSK and Pfizer had met their specifications. So far this vaccine has saved 700,000 lives.

In the 1960s and 1970s the UK was pumping huge demand subsidies into the housing market, but rationing mortgages. Houses got smaller every year. By 1980, private homes were smaller than council houses. And they got worse: fewer had washing machines or fridges. How? 🧵 A standard pair of semi-detached houses in the 1960s (L), and their equivalent from the 1930s (R). Across Europe, homes were getting bigger and more modern. But in Britain, they were getting worse, despite rapidly rising incomes and huge demand subsidies.

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.

Recently, I have been trying to work out how well we can predict reoffending by offenders, especially violent offenders, as it's an ingredient into deciding justice policy. I'm going to work through one paper which has really good data on recidivism here. (🧵) This is the paper; link coming later.

The background for why this paper is so good is that it includes every individual born between 1958 and 1980 in Sweden – yes, all 2,393,765 of them. We can thank the Nordic/Scandi countries for often having amazing registry data like this.

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