NEW by me: How Europe has let itself get poor, and how it can become rich again.

I lay out the four big areas I think Europe needs to reform to prosper again:

- Labour markets
- Energy
- Internal trade
- Access to capital

Read now below.

reason.com/2025/08/25/why… In 1995, Western European productivity was 95% of the US's. By 2023, it was 80%.

Western European GDP per capita is $63,000 per year, adjusted for PPP; the United States's is $86,000. In just the last 13 years, the gap has grown by 8.6 percentage points.

🍍 Works in Progress issue 18 is out now 👶

Featuring:

- Prehistoric psychopaths
- The steam networks of NYC
- Urbanism with Chinese characteristics
- How we may conquer menopause
- The Hanseatic League's rise and fall
- The pineapple: the king of fruits

And more! The Hanseatic League was a coalition of merchant cities that grew to dominate trade in Europe and even fought and won wars.

The League's rise and fall is a story of building and holding together a coalition, and of how technology shapes war & economics.

worksinprogress.co/issue/the-rise…

Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated.

A new essay by @bswud, @SCP_Hughes & me.

Why the UK's ban on investment in housing, infrastructure and energy is not just a problem. It is *the* problem.

And how fixing it is the defining task of our generation.

ukfoundations.co The UK has stagnated.

GDP per hour worked has grown by 7% since 2017 – 0.4% a year.

If we'd continued growing at the rate we had been between 1979 and 2008, we would be 25% richer.

As well as higher wages, that would mean £274 billion more in tax revenues every year.

NEW: How Labour's plan to push through strategic projects like data centres and prisons can be made to work, by letting the local authorities affected retain 100% of their business rates bills. We have a chronic problem with blocking projects that are nationally important but locally inconvenient.

Weak growth, housing shortages, crime, high energy costs, droughts and transport congestion are all downstream of this problem.

Here's what I learned reading about Israel's policies that give apartment owners the right to vote to redevelop their buildings into taller, denser developments with more units. 🧵 In buildings built before 1980, homeowners can vote on proposals to tear down their older, dilapidated buildings and replace them with new ones. They get newer, bigger, apartments.

Here's the clever bit: the project is paid for with new apartments added to their buildings/plots.

The most likely explanation for this is that the public is self-interested, and understands that a policy that incentivises capital-owners to consume their wealth or put it into distortionary avoidance schemes hurts them in the long-run.

https://twitter.com/DanNeidle/status/1726901773678559736

Why does the public oppose randomly expropriating the property of people richer than them and 98% tax rates on millionaires? It must be their keen sense of fair play.

🥳 NEW 🚀 BOWMAN 🚀 POST 🥳

"Coasean democracy" – empowering locals to decide on new housing, infrastructure, energy, prisons, and more near them – is the alternative to vetocracy, and the solution to Britain's sclerosis.

sambowman.co/p/democracy-is… The UK industrial price of energy tripled between 2004–21.

UK energy output per person is below France, Germany & the US.

We’re producing LESS electricity per capita than we have at any time since at least the 1980s.

The causes of our economic sclerosis are not hard to find.

NEW 📈 WORKS 🚀 IN 🚀 PROGRESS 📈

Issue 10 is out now!!

Including articles on:

- Empathy for animals
- Faster infrastructure rollout
- Plastic roads
- Prediction markets in misinformation
- How a baby bust toppled France as a superpower.

And more!

worksinprogress.co Most of Europe experienced huge population growth during the Industrial Revolution.

But not France.

If France's population had grown at the same rate as England's, there would be 250 million Frenchmen today.

For the first time, we know what happened.

worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-…

My speech to the Cambridge Union last night on why "this house should prioritise economic growth ahead of everything else".

My case: Economic growth is the Swiss army-knife we need to take on climate change, pandemics, poverty and more. 📈🔬🚀 Short thread with some of the trends I mentioned.

First, GDP per capita versus CO2 emissions per capita. At first, there's a trend of more money -> more CO2, but once we reach the richer world, more and more countries begin to buck the trend.

ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-em…

This govt has obviously been disastrous and I feel chastened for supporting it. I think Truss was right that the UK’s core problem is chronically low economic growth, but the “solutions” of front-loaded tax cuts funded by borrowing, and a blank cheque on energy prices were bad. As we wrote in 2019, you do the hard supply-side reform first, & the tax cuts are the reward. Doing tax cuts first (ones that weren’t even very focused on growth) before getting through things like more housing (if you’re lucky) + energy supply was ADHD.

revivingeconomicthinking.com

🚨 NEW 🚀 WORKS 🥳 IN 🚀 PROGRESS 🚨

A special issue on energy abundance, flying cars, & the next technological frontier.

With @elidourado on nanotech, @_brianpotter on the death of personal aviation, @Ben_Reinhardt on our fusionpunk future – and more!

worksinprogress.co Our lead essay is on energy abundance and flourishing.

The West's slowdown coincided with flatlining energy consumption. @Ben_Reinhardt describes a world that prioritises energy abundance & gets us closer to the sci-fi world we once hoped 2022 would be.

worksinprogress.co/issue/energy-a…

This is very good, on the grip on British politics held by NIMBY boomers.

It's probably the best version of this view I've come across: that there is an unbeatable electoral coalition of middle-aged and old people that has no stake in growth or progress.

himbonomics.substack.com/p/-the-triumph… I have a few thoughts, because I think ultimately I don't subscribe to this view.

1) I think people actually don't vote in directly self-interested ways, usually. Empirically, they tend to vote for what they believe to be in the interests of society / their community.

The forecast on the right here is nightmarish.

Real wages after tax are forecast to be lower in *five years* than they are today.

We're looking at a second lost decade here. This is catastrophic. Nobody in power cares about this.

The govt's agenda is price caps, Brexit, regulating Big Tech, net zero, protecting the green belt, "online harms", the national debt, the "Red Wall", data ethics, cutting immigration, pay gaps, etc, etc, etc.

Economic growth is an afterthought.