🎤 Now up: Episode 2 of Right of Way. Thomas Hochman and I talked to Peter Stahley and Richard Meyer about how laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act work, how they can be a barrier to deploying projects of all kinds, and how to fix them.

you can see the ai age everywhere except in the productivity statistics that's because economic value is not just about smartness rl can turn smart models into useful products, yet applying rl to real tasks isn't easy i tried and here's what i found! (link in bio / at end)

Explosion of mediocrity, video gaming edition: it's become easier to build games, so there are more and more games every year; but the number of highly acclaimed games per year has stayed constant or even declined slightly (orange dots).

For the first time since graduating law school ~15 years ago I have a new employer! Excited to announce that I have begun work at the Institute for Progress (IFP) as a Senior Technology Policy Fellow. A thread on IFP and what I’ll be doing there. 🧵 1/7

Federal hiring is broken. It can take years to get a job, the pay scales are too rigid, you can't promote a rockstar, and you can't fire a dud. Today on Statecraft, Judge Glock asks: What if we just copy what the states already do? statecraft.pub/p/how-to-fix-g…

.Judge Glock x Statecraft 🔥🔥🔥

The US uses around 322 billion gallons of water each day. This week on Construction Physics, I look at where it all goes. construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the…

The difference is, "Her" is set in a universe that forked in 2018. In that universe, California passed SB 827, and Los Angeles has abundant housing. (And an express train from downtown to the beach.) In our world, SB 827 got voted down and things just kind of suck.

Final reminder: The deadline to submit ideas for our Transit Policy Playbook is this Sunday. Submit here: ifp.typeform.com/to/MxcGvvQw The bar for submitting is low! Just need to explain the problem (<200 words) and the solution (<200 words). If selected, we'll work with you to

Deadline to pitch your ideas for the Transit Policy Playbook (a collaboration between IFP and Slow Boring Matthew Yglesias) is this Sunday. Submit your idea! All your transit friends are doing it.

Prati and Senik (2025) below discuss "the rescaling hypothesis", that if surveys ask for happiness on a scale of 0 to 10, then an "8" in 1990 is not the same as an "8" in 2020 Which is plausible if "10" is "the best life", and that has risen over time 1/n

It seems like there is not enough of a policy response to the fact that, with 57M miles of data, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles experience 85% less serious injuries & 79% less injuries overall than cars with human drivers. 2.4 million are injured & 40k killed in US accidents a year

Fukuyama was so prescient. In a society with strong rights and material comfort, but light on demanding shared purposes and some degree of sacrifice, thymotic energies go searching. Some quiet into bourgeois hedonism; other will seek “metaphorical wars” and eventually real ones.

I keep meeting people who are skeptical self-driving cars will ever happen. I tell them I took one to the airport in Phoenix several months ago, did a test ride in DC, they’re currently all over San Francisco, etc and it’s blank stares like I’m telling them about Santa.

You should toss your children

Incredibly excited for my brand new class at Toronto Rotman this fall: Progress! Econ history + theory + history of tech/thought + philosophy on why rare orgs at rare times in rare places accomplish new things. Trying to put rigor onto an idea that is very much in the air. 1/3

NEW STATECRAFT It's Dan Wang Answering the questions OTHER PODS won't ask statecraft.pub/p/leninist-tec…

Science faces a replication crisis: billions wasted, progress slowed, policy misled A new idea from I4R's Brodeur & Barbarioli in IFP's #LaunchEngine imagines how to build automated replication infrastructure for *better* and *faster* science ifp.org/the-replicatio…