Works in Progress

Yes, this type of criticism is baffling and, frankly, a bit morally outrageous. ProPublica can't be expected to do all the work of uncovering all sides of the truth. They already do the hardest work: uncovering what the powerful would rather that we not know. They do enough; what are the rest of us doing? I would agree that it's historically been uncommon for the media to give balanced perspective on civilizational progress, but some good sources for this have emerged in recent years. One of my favorites is Works in Progress magazine: https://worksinprogress.co/

The ability of citizens to restrict or prohibit building in their jurisdiction is extremely strong, basically everywhere in the developed world[1]. There's not much they can do to affirmatively cause things to be built - that still takes capital and expertise - but local controls have stifled many, many, many parts of economic development and greatly skewed the economy. [1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-great-downzoning/

> To be fair, most countries have due to privatisation Japan's system is almost entirely private and is best in the world by nearly every metric. We (the people) do know owe support to depopulated areas. If you choose to live in the boonies the government is not required to build roads, sewers, power to your place. Japan's private system works because the government mostly got out of the way and let them build and run complementary businesses. Most other countries either make them public, and then they eventually are underfunded and are prevented from expanding, OR, if they do let them be private they find some other way to cripple them like by disallowing other interests. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-railways/

It's mostly a matter of when the demographic transition started: https://nitter.net/pic/media%2FGEDBLvOXUAANUlK.png%3Fname%3Dsmall%26fo… France used to be “the China of Europe” (which is why we kept being at war with the whole continent at once). Had France followed their neighbors' demographic, it would be home to more than 200 million people. The demographic collapse of France in the 19th century, while Germany kept growing, alone explains the French defeat in 1870 (and then the two world wars). More data on that piece of history, and a hypothesis to explain it, here: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-baby-bust/

Agree. This blog post about the history of ASML is absolutely brilliant: https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/how-asml-took-over-the-world

Stewart Brands article The Maintenance Race[0] was one of my favorite posts in 2022. [0]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-maintenance-race/ EDIT: discussion at that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32196345

This is a good read on why the UK is producing less than it did before. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-britain-doesnt-build/

I'm not sure why everyone picks on radiology as the 'obvious' field that will get automated. So far it has been the opposite: > In 2025, American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered a record 1,208 positions across all radiology specialties, a four percent increase from 2024, and the field’s vacancy rates are at all-time highs. In 2025, radiology was the second-highest-paid medical specialty in the country, with an average income of $520,000, over 48 percent higher than the average salary in 2015. Simply put, radiologists do a lot more than merely read scans: > Radiologists are useful for more than reading scans; a study that followed staff radiologists in three different hospitals in 2012 found that only 36 percent of their time was dedicated to direct image interpretation. Source: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-algorithm-will-see-you-now/

> lowest rate of investment High costs of 1. Energy 2. Transport 3. Housing Are the cause of low private and public investment. The author treats the lack of public productivity growth as separate from the lack of public investment but the latter causes the former Excellent piece about it here. https://ukfoundations.co/ TLDR: "it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand. This, in turn, lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues." Housing is probably the biggest culprit. More on that here. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/

One of the authors is from the center for policy studies, which is a thinktank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher and 2 others. The other two authors seem to be the founder and one of the main contributors to https://worksinprogress.co/ which describes itself as "a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world." So I'm going to guess it's gonna be that sort of thing. Someone with a neoliberal economic perspective who stands to benefit from government investments in largescale infrastructure projects.

It is more accurate to say that failure to build out enough housing, as well as other buildings, infrastructure, and industry, has made devastating poverty acceptable in Britain. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything Meanwhile, people like this are like: "Increase supply? haha, best I can do is subsidize demand!"

HOUSING PRICES Every time I see a story about economic anxiety and dissatisfaction among people under 40, I want to etch "housing prices" on a hammer and beat people over the head with it. Housing prices are the economic problem in most of the developed world. The economic problem, singular. Everything else is at least okay, and some things are great, but housing prices negate it all. Canada seems to have this disease worse than (most of) the US. Not sure why. It looks like utter madness, especially since Canada has a lot more land than the US per capita. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ I think that article understates its case. Real estate prices are destroying civilization. So many other problems are downstream of real estate hyperinflation.

I agree with you politically and spiritually. However, Patrick Mackenzie is a person of the highest calibre (see, e.g., this: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-vaccinateca/). There is a need for laws, and there is a need for laws that respect freedom. As of 2023, the details of how a freedom-respecting social system would work have only been scantily developed. If men like patio11 aren't convinced by the pro-freedom case, why would anyone else be? The libertarian movement has supported many bad actors. Cryptography has supported many evil acts. Libertarianism is not bad and cryptography is not evil; but no-one serious will follow us until we clean up our act. (It's not enough to say that the current system is bad or worse. The current system is terrible. But we should be aiming to set things right, not simply tweak things on the margin.)

We send out notifications via our Substack here https://www.worksinprogress.news/

Works in Progress: https://worksinprogress.co/ Most articles are focused on public policy but there is a good spread of topics. Strangely, it was acquired by Stripe last year.

There's also a good argument that rent/housing affects more of our broader lives than anything else - often called "The Housing Theory of Everything". https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ If you're interested in helping the housing problem across the US, I encourage you to check out: YIMBY Action who does local activism across the US, and particularly active in SF Bay Area and CA. https://yimbyaction.org/ Full disclosure, I'm on the board, but I joined because the ROI / growth are both crazy. We have a tiny budget / staff but have a huge impact on the discourse, passing various laws and pushing cities to follow the law to approve housing. We're now we're at inflection point and need to scale it out.

This is a fantastic retelling of this story: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-maintenance-race/

I truly agree with most of what you say. This famous article discusses why housing is becoming a huge problem everywhere and why that's super bad for the economy: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything. It's been discussed here a few times, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28531025. The compromise Barcelona made is not enough. Sadly, that beautiful city is IMHO the prototypical case of getting ruined by too much tourism. In their defense, I think it's safe to state all mid-to-large cities in EU are quite crowded and unaffordable. For example, Copenhagen used to be a place where citizens enjoyed great purchasing power. Despite rent control and sale taxes, a single person in a well-paying job can hardly afford a mortgage for a decent flat right now. The same can be said of Munich, Madrid, London and many, many other places.

In short supply people who own has the power. No surprise here. I recommend this article, The housing theory of everything, as an introduction on why housing is not just another problem: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/

People are fighting the wrong fight when they attack this guy (or attack the people attacking this guy, for that matter) It isn't SF Bay Bros'/foreigners'/companies' fault that houses are too expensive. It's because of strict zoning laws and a lack of building enough housing to match supply with demand[1]. Demand keeps going up way faster than supply, nationwide, and we're all feeling the squeeze [1]: A great example of this is the super low housing costs in Tokyo. My mother in-law and sister in-law are renting a 3 bedroom apartment right now, 20 minutes outside Shinjuku (one of the "Giant Bustling Megacity" parts of Tokyo) for $1300/month, which they can comfortably afford while working part time doing low end janitorial work. More info here: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/

Tragic. My heart goes out to all the parents affected; the sense of loss of control on top of everything else can't be easy, at the risk of a tasteless understatement. I'd love to see more data given I remember there was a lot of news articles(1) in the vein of 'we expected more of a suicide surge in COVID across all demographics... but we didn't?' and then a few weeks later, this article pops up. Either this demographic (and possibly others) was disproportionately affected, or something's fishy about data. (2) https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/ SSC weighs into this topic.

I've come to the conclusion that high housing prices are pretty much the root of most of our problems and is probably the biggest factor in increasing wealth inequality. I came across the housing theory of everything recently [1][2]. Disappearing third spaces, out-of-control inflation. homelessness, etc can all be traced back to housing affordability being the primary factor. I tend to abhor buying vs rent calculators. I always have. Why? Because of inelastic demand. You can't opt out of the housing market. Well you can. It's called being homeless. If you rent, you have in effect taken a short position on the housing market. If house prices go down, rents tend to follow and you're better off than those that bought. If house prices go up, you're worse off. That's a short position. So, by buying a house, all you're doing is closing out a short position. You might argue "but you still win or lose depending on the housing market's movement" but that's not actually true. Why? Because if all houses double in value, you still own 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. You're actually no better off. Who is? Corporate landlords and those that own swathes of houses. But your "investment" in tdhe housing market is used to buy your vote. You have a tendency to become a NIMBY. You tend to think of rising house prices as "good" despite the ultimately destructive effect on society. Once again, China has been proven to be correct. Xi Jinping said back in the 2010s "houses are for living, not…

Per "Choose Boring Technology" [0]: > Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while... If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you’re in trouble. From my POV, the author spent their innovation tokens on a political commitment. I would not recommend this path to someone starting a company. It's hard enough already. Also, many American companies that might have been useful to the author were founded by Europeans, e.g. GitLab. There's plenty of European talent for making widely adopted infrastructure. If those companies aren't in Europe, it's worth asking why [1]. [0] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology [1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-europe-doesnt-have-a-tesla/

From https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-metro-cheaply/ contrast Madrid's train stations, copy and pasted as much as possible, vs London's, where each has its own interesting and complex architecture. The article claims simple, consistent Madrid stations were easier to build. Idk if it's true or not, but it's an appealing argument that architects are interested in architectural uniqueness and complexity which adds costs. Similarly, the data viz architect sort of assumes more complex visualizations would be helpful if the public wasn't so phone addicted and inattentive: "some data stories are just too complex and nuanced to be aggregated in bar charts and line charts. Surely, they’d be curious about more complex visualizations" ...well where's the discussion of if visualization complexity is actually good for data stories? If everyone knows how to read a bar chart and a line graph, that's a point in favor of standard copy and paste visualization. The one case where imo fancy visualizations actually help is maps. Not only is the example of facebook friendships in 2010 cool, a world map really is the best way to show where people/connections are (ofc maybe it's just a heatmap ie https://xkcd.com/1138/ idk if they divided by how many people live there but still cool). So there are probably lots of stories a map visualization helps tell by showing where stuff is. But yeah in general I felt like the article spoke to data viz only as art to wow data…

General aviation has been on the decline primarily because of the way US liability law is structured and the cost of FAA airworthiness certification. A quirk of legislation made it such that old models of planes are shielded from lawsuits, among other issues. If you are a manufacturer, why bother designing a new plane when you can keep selling the same world war 2 era stock? It's not like you will have any competition. The cost of certification is also why Boeing tried to avoid certifying the 737 max as a new plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalization_Act https://worksinprogress.co/issue/planes-claims-and-automobiles/ Fewer people are learning to fly except to go work for the airlines. Most of the small aviation manufacturers and engine producers have been snapped up by China. It's so expensive to certify an engine for flight that most of general aviation is using engines where you burn leaded fuel and manually control the carburetors and fuel injectors. In aviation, a 1940s era airframe is considered perfectly safe, and it is completely acceptable to use vacuum pneumatic instruments despite them being significantly less reliable than MEMS or solid state ring laser (or fibre optic) gyros. Even something as simple as a radar altimeter would cost well into the 5-6 figures. It's a very backwards industry similar to medicine and pharmacy. The doctors believe in hazing new grads through residency, while biotech legislators holds the view that right to…

> Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe. Those are downstream of housing restrictions to a large extent. From "Housing theory of everything" [0]: Consider a cleaner living in Alabama. In 1960 they could move to NYC and earn wages 84% higher, and still end up with 70% higher income after rent. In 2010, they could move to New York City and become 28% more productive, and earn a wage 28% higher – and reduce the surplus of workers back home, letting them demand higher pay. But since housing costs are so much higher, the net earnings and living standards of someone like this would fall if they moved today, and wouldn’t be worth it. The same would be true for plumbers, receptionists and other professions that allow other people to specialise at what they’re best at and minimise the time they spend on things like DIY and answering the phone. By contrast, top lawyers get wage boosts that are still sufficiently higher to justify a move in both 1960 and 2010, even after the higher rents they’ll have to pay. [0] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/

This article definitely flipped my "let's assume this is bullshit until proven otherwise" bit. That bit really ought to be on by default, come to think of it. I think about this quote when reading articles like this (to say nothing of the research it draws on): > The best way to identify sketchy scientific claims is by their level of abstraction.... if a new paper claims that attractive people are more (or less) generous than ugly people, I would be highly suspicious. “Generosity” is a very abstract and nebulous quality, and I would want to know how it was measured...The profound abstractions of everyday life—happiness, relationships, sleep, nutrition, motivation, pain, belonging—are the concepts most vulnerable to scientific abuse. (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-trust-undermines-science/) The phrase "hurts children's brains" seems almost ludicrously abstract to me, so it's a little suspicious from the get go. Then I get to their examples. The example of a train track literally running next to a classroom is one thing—I can see that being a problem—but it's a bit different than being next to a city street, which is where the article immediately pivots. Is the average classroom so loud that people physically cannot concentrate? Quoting studies that say that loud classrooms affect student performance doesn't demonstrate that most classrooms are too loud to concentrate, and that anything needs to be done about it. And even if classrooms in Barcelona are all too loud…

> your network will not have a jump start on everyone else I think this is not the most useful frame. You don't necessarily need to outcompete people for limited spots (I think a lot of people's definition of success or greatness is very narrow, and mostly informed by what others are vying for) I think the bar for doing something great is shockingly low, most people aren't even trying. That's the impression I get every time I read a patio11 article (most recently the super long but worth it "story of vaccinate CA" [1]. This is not patio but same vibe, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Manometer Readings" [2]). My takeaway from these is that there are big problems in society that nobody is working on. This is kind of a good thing for ambitious folks: everywhere you look there are problems everywhere, the bar for making something better than what is there is low. I think the network & support is critical but it isn't always given. I think great things happen when we start to move towards what we are capable of fixing, what is within our control, finding others who have that attitude and supporting each other. I think for me now, the point isn't to outcompete everyone/make it to the top 1% or whatnot, it's to make it as far as is possible with what I have. Those two approaches are identical if you have the support to reach the 1%. But if not, why worry about what is outside of my control? I have plenty within my control in the menatime. [1]…

For my part, I've been building an AI agent that watches the daily change feed from clinicaltrials.gov and sends out a personalized newsletter that filters for specific trials and answers specific questions about those matched trials: https://zeeq.ai. Hopefully a useful tool for anyone that is interested in participating in or tracking clinical trials. Thank you for making it. From what I've seen and experienced, the problem has been "garbage in, garbage out"—that is, there isn't sufficient data posted publicly on clinicaltrials.gov to figure out which trials are best and which are actually open and available. My wife wrote "Please be dying, but not too quickly: a clinical trial story. A three-part, very deep dive into the insanity that is the 'modern' clinical trial system" on using the system, and the actual experience of it: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-too-quickl… To figure out what's actually going on, we've had to make a lot of appointments and talk to oncologists to understand what is available and what isn't. The AI companies whose systems we tried missed the better treatments (e.g. BCA-101, or petosemtamab / MCLA-158), although we did not try yours, so perhaps it's capturing material others aren't. "Phone calls and appointments" are how I wound up learning about Seagen / Pfizer's antibody drug conjugate (ADC) PDL1V:…