For the last year, I’ve been writing on Substack, at  https://substack.norabble.com . I should have mentioned this change a while ago, but the upside is that I’ve now got 35 new articles on Substack to introduce you to. The new topics over there have been a thread about money and trust: Money: More Than Just Stuff, It’s Trust Money, Trust, and Loans Trust, Money, and Companies The Technologies of Trust A thread about Abundance: Trust is not free The Strategic Case for Abundance Is Abundance Elitist? Rural Abundance is Possible What is Abundance? A thread about AI in general: AI and the Zero-Sum Game The Mirage of Deep Research Writing with AI AI and the Social Ecosystem What is needed to advance the use of AI? The Slop Scapegoat: AI Another thread about AI and economics The Economic Future from and of AI — Part 1: The Existential Horizon The Economic Future from and of AI — Part 2: Risks in the Practical Horizon The Architecture of a Gamble The AI Reality Check AI Jobs: The H...

American cities need more housing. That is obvious to the YIMBY movement. I've heard some attempts to contest that statement, but in the overall range of discourse, it's rare for those who defend opposing viewpoints to respond to that statement directly. Instead, those discussions experience a topic change, either focusing on personal experiences, homeowner "rights", or an attack on landlords. Part of the reason for that topic change is that contending that there is enough housing in cities has to confront the supply and demand topic, and if you're not going to provide more supply, you have to change demand. That line then leads to somewhat hollow arguments about how people don't "belong" in cities and should be elsewhere. It's hard to make that argument without being oblivious to the individuals who are currently making that choice to live in a city despite the very high housing costs, or who would prefer to if they hadn't been forced out by...

Expanding testing is very important now.  It's also clearly an area we were unprepared.  We should commit to having testing capacity long term, to both provide more certainty to anyone expanding testing capacity today, and to be prepared in the future. I had some thoughts about how this testing would be best structured.  It's not possible to test for an contagious disease you're not aware of, but much of the infrastructure for doing so can already be in place, ready to be adapted.  That infrastructure would roughly boil down to a) sample collection b) sample handling c) sample preparation d) sample analysis e) materials: reagents, etc. Scaling these up from scratch is quite a bit more work than adapting to a new contagion.  A commitment to having that infrastructure would have helped a lot with the current crisis. Right now, the focus is rightfully on health care workers, suspected cases and essential workers.  In terms of preparation though, in...

Use Less As part of the current crisis, oil usage is down, and storage around the world is filling up, to the point that oil has traded at negative prices.  As a reaction, many Republican lawmakers want to bailout the oil industry, by providing free access to storage or no-collateral loans.  While it would make sense to ensure oil doesn't get dumped in the ocean, the right way to do that is by producing less oil. These proposals from the Republicans undermine the motivation for the industry to do so.  Workers are important, but they have the same access to unemployment as the other 25 million Americans who are out of work. What this crisis should illustrate is something that has been illustrated many times before, the oil industry is a fragile thing.  In the past this fragility has been demonstrated by massive spikes in prices and fears of shortage, in this case it's the inverse.  Why the fragility?  The simplest explanation is, we use too much....

I was inspired to do some research on what types of office plans were most popular among workers.  So I dived in and started looking and stumbled across an interesting failure in this area.  When a particular office plan was presented, it never included images of monitors.  This seems a somewhat shocking error considering that the average office worker will spend a fair amount of their time in front of screen.  Consider this as an example:  https://officesnapshots.com/articles/the-top-25-most-popular-offices-of-2018/ .  In all 25 examples, the initial shot is of a common space.  I understand that a bit, it's easier to make these distinctive, the creativity of the designer is more unbounded.  But lets be honest, while these areas are useful to collaborative working, without a large screen and space for a keyboard and mouse, the personal ergonomics of them are not adequate for a lot of work.  Dig a little deeper and many of the deeper reviews...

Insurance in developing nations is far less broadly available than developed ones.  In addition, the risks that citizens of developing nations face, are often much more numerous and severe.  Crop-insurance is a common element of agricultural policy in the United States, but less common in Ethiopia.  As Ethiopia has a much higher percentage of their population engaged in agriculture, shocks, such as drought, crop disease, or severe weather have big impacts. Insurance's basic principle is simple, spreading risk across a broader pool.  When harmed, you get assistance to lessen the impact, when you're not harmed, your payments cover the costs of others who are.  But deciding who is harmed is a very time consuming task.  Preventing fraud is important to staying competitive, when looking at private enterprise, and important to public trust when dealing with public programs.  But preventing fraud places burdens not only on the insurance provider, but the cl...

Uber has been disruptive in many ways.  One way, which has been a great disappointment, is the effect on public transit systems.  It was once hoped that ride hailing would provide an assist to public transit, as a gateway to abandoning car ownership.  There have also been hopes that suburban commuters would use ride-hailing as their connection to public-transit which is not accessible by walking in these areas.   Multiple studies have confirmed these hopes have largely not materialized, and public-transit has been weakened . Cities have reacted, mostly by putting barriers to ride-hailing growth.  Sometimes they are collecting extra fees, sometimes placing new requirements.  But mostly these efforts don't do much to change the relationship between ride-hailing and public-transit. I work with a local group that spends time thinking about automated car policy, how to get the most good and the least bad.  We've discussed a proposal that fits ride...

A Chicago Alderman just demonstrated why trying to solve affordability at a local level works poorly at best.  Alderman Maldonado down zoned a collection of properties to "combat gentrification".  On it's own, that would be the worst solution as it's decreasing available housing, which will only push up the prices of the remaining housing.  There's a small silver lining in that he claimed this was a negotiating tactic to push more affordable housing into development plans. The problem here is, that while affordable housing is a great goal, this is a poor way of getting it.  It's not necessary to negotiate for it if you act in a comprehensive way, because you can simply legislate the requirements.  Legislating creates a predictable and equal environment for development.  Negotiating creates friction, uncertainty and is at risk of being arbitrary.  The developers who succeed in such an environment are often going to be that are best at bending the poli...

Housing costs in many areas across the States have been rising quickly.  One of the major causes is restrictive zoning that keeps housing in short supply, allowing demand to push prices higher.  Two weeks ago Oregon passed a bill  with similarities to the failed California SB50 .  This bill takes a statewide response to zoning, upzoning many single family areas to automatically allow higher density housing (quadplexes). It's a fairly amazing development that other states (and cities) should pay close attention to.  Localizing zoning is a fine idea when the concerns are truly local, but when it comes to housing costs, the effects are much more regional.  Left to business as usual, zoning changes at a pace that does not accommodate demand.  Worse yet, when zoning changes it's often only can occur via a backroom deal, which privileges developers with access, ability, and willingness to manipulate the systems. When a developer spends 1 year planning a ...

The Economist ran a special report last week comparing Texas and California strengths and weaknesses.  What's unavoidably obvious is that many of California's weaknesses stem from housing affordability. The finances of their schools are severely hampered by 50% higher salaries for teachers.  That's not largesse, it's driven by the higher cost of housing.  Teachers in California need that money to afford to live there. Net migration is negative (though population is still growing), and the overriding factor here appears to be housing costs. California spends a lot to help it's low-income population, almost 120% more money than Texas per person, yet still ends up with only a marginally lower rate of poverty after transfers despite a much higher average wage.  Housing explains about 80% of the higher cost of living that negates California's more substantial efforts to have less poverty. So, if you care about any of these issues, you should ask, are high prope...

A number of times recently, while having a discussion about a policy with friends or acquaintances, the regressivity of a policy has been raised as a concern.  In one case it was gas tax, in another a carbon tax, in another a bag fee. Does being regressive make a policy bad?  While I agree, it is a point against, it's not the final decision point.  A policy should be looked at in terms of its larger context.  While it's hard to justify putting additional burdens on those with less, a policy can be enacted within a context of policies that overall lighten the burden.  It's beneficial to do so when the policy has net benefits.  For example, a basic carbon tax is regressive; the poor as a percentage of their income are more dependent on gasoline and energy.  But if a carbon tax is enacted within the context of a equal direct cash payment, the overall effect is progressive. It's also important to recognize that distribution can be the smaller questio...

Being involved in an activist group, being (I think) highly rational, and being somewhat resistant to becoming part of social collectives, messaging is something that comes up often.  So reading On Left Straussianism from the Point  did stoke up thoughts. I'll disagree with one part right off.  This isn't all about elitism.  Talking about messaging doesn't only have to involve elites.  It's small group/large group, but it's not always about level of education, it's often about intensity of connection.  When "messaging" in public, the bandwidth is limited, especially in terms of feedback loops.  If someone misunderstands your message, it's hard to correct.  Attention wavers, so key distinctions can be lost.  And then there's the telephone game .  Those dynamics are true no matter what level of education your public has. A second distinction, before you even start to talk about withholding or twisting the truth, we should think first a...

California was pursuing a new transit oriented development bill, SB50. It morphed into a general housing bill, before being killed by a powerful Senator . His arguments, shared by other LA residents , was that they didn't want local control taken away. On the surface, that sounds reasonable, who doesn't like more direct democratic processes? But local zoning has failed to address the problems the bill targets, and it is predictable that it will continue to fail, so long as political engagement maintains its current form. In many places, city-by-city control could work, but California is such a jigsaw of localities that each city has incentives to keep following business as usual, which means, zoning restrictions to prop up property values, which inevitably lead to housing shortages and unsustainable costs for anyone who isn't getting the land value windfall. Even those getting the windfall are trapped into non-optimal decisions by housing immobility. That immobility ha...

It's ironic that in a country where providing free access to basic healthcare, food and water are so contentious, we've been providing one resource for free in astounding quantities: Roads. It's even more ironic, that while proving the roads (and often parking spaces) for free, we've neglected to provide the real need, transportation. Should roads be free? The evidence, from a 50+ year experiment is no. Free roads leads to overuse and traffic jams, a net negative for every potential road user. There is no amount of roads you can build that prevents this tragedy of the commons. Every major city in the US has traffic jams. A city with "good" traffic is one where those only happen for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, and only at certain points. The trouble with trying to build your way out of traffic jams is that housing and driving patterns always shift to consume everything to capacity and beyond. There is also the cost in terms of money, ...

We need housing to be affordable, but how best to do it? If you're thinking about this, you might be interested in this. Bottom-line: Build more housing, ignore rent control. How do you build more housing though? Besides avoiding rent control, and using public money to build housing, how else can you build more housing? Bring down permitting/planning costs. Encourage density. Remove parking requirements. Work together to ensure public transit and other infrastructure. This post inspired by reading...   Seattle City Council Insight

The below article wonders if Uber/Lyft will ever be profitable. Seems likely to me they will. It's the belief that their promises aren't as grand as they make that will lead to that. When investors stop believing that, they'll stop funding discounts, and profitability will emerge seemingly spontaneously. It's probably less than what Uber is promising, as there will be competition. It's worth noting that in addition to competition being somewhat local, Uber and Lyft don't just compete with taxis, but also with public transit and personal vehicles. When competing with public transit, cities should regulate, as there are many public goods arising from quality public transit. The story for personal vehicles however is different, which have most of the same negative aspects of ride-hails, plus some additional negative externalities (parking is a big one). Thus the first step in regulation should be one that targets both personal vehicles and ride-hails. I support...

Excited about New York's new building energy efficiency measures, but a little worried about how it was done. There are too many exemptions here. Focusing on only large buildings (over 25,000 square feet) leaves half of emissions untargeted. Leaving out low-income housing keeps the utility bills for low-income renters high. This kind of exemption is a bad idea. Definitely agree with the goal of trying to help low-income individuals, but there are much better ways than an exemption from these requirements. It would be so much better if the New York passed a support bill, for example funding for housing vouchers as part of this effort, rather than creating those exemptions. The 25,000 square foot limit is also problematic. To some degree this can make sense, temporarily. A bill designed for large properties might not fit well with smaller properties because of increased overhead. But I don't see a commitment here to follow this on, using the learning from the first bill to co...

If we want housing affordability, we'll have to confront our bias toward home ownership. While it has some sound reasoning, it's a brush applied too broadly. The expression of this bias has often done real harm to lower income individuals and families. It's not possible to have constant, high appreciation of home values and affordable homes. It's not possible to have affordable rents and unaffordable homes (without subsidy). You can try to force landlords to provide the subsidy, by rent control, but eventually they'll just sell out to homeowners. Those that remain will operate in areas where appreciation is not expected, home value is depressed, and rent control does not have effect. Unfortunately these areas will be the least desirable, either from crime, access to transit, pollution, or some other element that has real costs on the well being of residents. If we want equitable housing, we should abandon the policies that restrict housing supply, and we shoul...

Effective public transport increases the productivity of a city. Somewhat obvious, but the scale is not. A city without effective public transport is a smaller city. The network effects of being able to connect with others who might spawn ideas and opportunities are diminished by not having effective transport. Transit systems that rely upon buses without priority, which have their service level cut by the congestion of personal automobiles at peak times, suffer as a result. Also notable, is that how areas of the city underserved by public transit are from a economic point of view, not truly part of the city. Improving transit is critical to improving the economic well being of such areas. This post inspired by reading...   City Metric

Chicago should also pursue congestion (road) pricing. Using a personal vehicle on city streets consumes limited road space we all paid for, creates pollution and other effects we all have to live with. When one alternative (transit) consumes these services at a much lower rate, and produces the negative effects at a much lower rate, it's unfair for the higher consumption/externality behavior to pay the same rate. This is the way to restore fairness, while also creating a healthier city with less traffic. The one thing I'd change in the New York's approach, is the exemption for low income. Absolutely agree with the effort to help those with low income, but it shouldn't be an exemption, but rather an in-tandem assistance, such as housing assistance, which could be funded through the revenues and savings of the base policy. This post inspired by reading...   The Economist