Favorites July 12th 2023

David Watson

Jul 13, 2023

jeremylneufeld 2d File under the housing theory of everything: if we build more housing, more people can have the families they want to have “We find a significant negative relationship between land use restrictions and fertility rates across all measures and geographies” scholar.harvard.edu/files… — (src)

Despite the fact that people often think that families need lower density homes, it turns out that it's all one market. Building dense apartments makes space for more families.

Clara Jeffery @ClaraJeffery This is pretty insane. Yes, the cost of housing makes it tough to live in the Bay Area—thanks NIMBYs!—but the result are first responders separated from the communities they serve by TIME ZONES missionlocal.org Dozens of SF police, firefighters ‘super-commute’ from out-of-state City records show that at least 30 SFPD employees live outside of California, including 16 sworn officers. — (src)

Flying in from out of state for shifts seems pretty crazy, but I was actually surprised that there weren't more who are commuting from further inland, but the vast majority live in the bay area: "More than 95 percent of police department employees, and about 85 percent of the fire department"

justinwolfers 12h I've long been a fan of @jason.furman's summaries of the big beautiful family of core inflation measures. His threadbis well worth reading. My summary of his summary: As long as you're looking at recent inflation (the past six or fewer months) — and if you understand the lags involved in falling shelter inflation hitting the official numbers — it seems pretty clear that the underlying inflation rate is DOWN TO TWO-POINT-SOMETHING PERCENT. This is good news, and there's more good news ahead. — (src)

This is all means lower than expected inflation. here's Furman's thread, which has many nice graphs. Wolfers also points out that the 'misery index' (unemployment + inflation) is unusually low in a historical context. The view that it's better to over stimulate and then handle inflation afterwards seems to have been proven right.

Ethan Mollick @emollick On Oppenheimer. We don’t note enough about the fact that fallout from testing had huge impacts. It damaged farming in the Midwest for decades. Decreased yields of corn and wheat, as well as decreased animal fertility & deaths, literally cost tens of billions of dollars to farmers — (src)

Mollick goes on with a few other huge direct costs of US nuclear weapons development. When you watch CGP Grey's video about Nevada, this segment really drives through what a ridiculous amount of nuclear testing we did out in the open there.

Threads

• Long thread from a Sunnyvale city council member on the huge amount of new housing in their Moffett park plan, 20k homes.