How crushing the NIMBYs created modern capitalism and more
Two articles I cowrote in the latest issue of Works in Progress
I cowrote two of the articles in the latest Works in Progress, on two of my biggest obsessions: how ionising radiation is just not that harmful in small doses, and how the Williamites and Georgians used seventeenth-century street votes to pass land reforms that led to massive English/British growth.
The radiation piece was inspired by both Alex Chalmers and I reading a range of scientific papers on the Taiwanese cobalt-80 rebar scandal. We were genuinely surprised and shocked to discover that they were full of classic signs of p-hacking and publication bias, suggesting that the links they allegedly discovered between cancer and low-dose-rate (but high accumulated dose) ionising radiation from radioactive cobalt were false. Especially given that being in any of these apartments seemed to cut their cancer rates by 35 percent versus age-corrected Taiwanese!
This matters because nuclear regulation is premised on the idea that giving lots and lots of people small doses of radiation (or large doses but at a very slow daily rate) is just as bad as giving small numbers of people large doses of radiation at a very quick daily rate. Which seems to be false.
Everything is a tradeoff. If we treat any release of radioactive material as an unmitigated disaster, then we get ALARA, which makes nuclear power more and more expensive over time. The cost is not worth what we get for it. If we made nuclear power twenty times cheaper then we would get more nuclear releases, but what we lost in radiation harm would be small, and what we gained in the benefits of cheaper, cleaner energy would be utterly transformative.
Read it on Substack here:
My other article is an even bigger obsession of mine. I am incredibly grateful that Kara Dimitruk, one of my great inspirations here, facilitated it with her deep subject matter expertise. There has been a little quibbling with some of the framings (and not really any of the details or core claims) by some people, and I think that some of these criticisms are fair enough, but I’m sure if you go and read them you’ll agree that they don’t materially affect the important parts of our thesis.
The core argument is that in a country without a highly legitimate state, in this case the England (and then Britain) of the late 1600s and early 1700s, trying to topdown important socioeconomic changes is quite difficult. But that doesn’t mean change is impossible. What countries in these positions need to do is generate legitimacy for change somehow. At the time, they used two main mechanisms: democracy and compensation, combined in a range of ways. Typically they used both. Sometimes, for particularly contentious projects, they used national democracy, plus local supermajoritarian approval, plus compensation.
My not-at-all-hidden agenda is to suggest that we are once again in this position. I think we should use supermajoritarian approval plus compensation to replan areas. I think we should use carefully designed direct compensation to avoid being held up by powerful national veto players tacitly drawing support from pretextual opponents. Delhi and Jakarta achieved pretty good metro buildouts by putting their railways above roads, which they already owned, to avoid using compulsory purchase (eminent domain), which would be unpopular. Britain refused to do this for HS2, aiming instead for the theoretically optimal route. But its apparent political powers, like free use of compulsory purchase, are paper tigers. It will be the most expensive train line of all time.
I have been warmed to discover that people like it, and it’s become my most popular ever Works in Progress piece already. Read it on Substack here: