94 things to read about Abundance

A look back at key readings and announcements from April through June

Over the second quarter of 2026, we published thirteen “What we’re reading” roundups and spotlights covering research and policy developments across housing, energy, science funding, clinical trials, and more. This digest contains condensed highlights from those posts, organized by theme. Click the linked dates for full details.

Library of Congress. Source: Library of Congress

Housing

1. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the Senate 85-5 and awaits the president’s signature (or, absent a veto, will have automatic enactment by July 10th). 45+ provisions cut red tape, overhaul financing, and provide carrots and sticks for local reform. (June 24)

2. New York took two big permitting steps: Governor Hochul’s SEQRA modernization is reportedly final, and the mayor launched the SPEED Task Force report projecting two years off rezoning timelines. (May 15)

3. “Are we kind of being pricks?“ A Marblehead resident’s viral question captures what happens when towns comply with zoning law by putting housing capacity on a golf course where nothing will get built. (May 8)

4. Jerusalem Demsas also shared her reflections on Marblehead. The town’s story shows what happens when local democracy mediates land-use decisions, and when compliance isn’t the same as housing production. (May 28)

5. Nolan Gray goes deep on California data: ADU permits have produced nearly 150K new units, the density bonus law is facilitating thousands more, and major reforms are less than a year old. (May 8)

6. Michael Andersen of Sightline argues the picture outside California is just as encouraging: states across the country have only recently passed reforms and results are beginning to show. (May 8)

7. A new Urban Institute piece asks what happens after big upzonings in strong markets. Answer: a lot. The evidence that significant reform leads to construction continues to pile up. (April 17)

8. Our Zoned Capacity post got shoutouts from NYC’s Deputy Mayor and Matt Yglesias. In high-rent cities, “Missing Massive” upzoning is essential for unlocking construction that pencils out now. (April 10)

9. Evan Soltas translated his LA permitting paper into a NYC estimate: each year of permitting time saved is equivalent to an 8% drop in construction costs. (April 3)

10. The housing burden is falling disproportionately on new buyers and renters: new homeowners now pay 26% of income, renters who recently moved pay a record 33%. (April 17)

11. Arpit Gupta and Steve Teles diagnose why factory-built housing keeps failing: boom-bust cycles, patchwork regulations, transport costs, and parcel assembly challenges. (April 3)

12. Everyone’s talking about building codes. California YIMBY summarized a UCLA Lewis Center report on how the code-writing process works and how we got where we are. (April 10)

13. Vincent Rollet’s MIT paper on zoning and redevelopment is getting attention from city planners; it’s the kind of structural model that can discipline a rezoning’s projected supply impact. (April 24)

14. Pew’s new address chain video explains how new construction frees up housing across incomes in months, not decades. They also launched a report on pre-approved building plans. (May 28)

15. The NYT editorial board endorsed Massachusetts’ “Legalize Starter Homes” ballot measure, which would require towns to allow homes on small lots in areas served by public water and sewer. (June 3)

16. A VoxEU column argues the relative price of US structures has risen 80% since 1970, making construction productivity a drag on economy-wide growth, not just a sector-specific concern. (June 10)

17. Brian Potter asks where the economies of scale are in construction. The “Idiot Index” (cost of a good vs. raw materials) for housing is roughly 2, not far from the highly automated car industry’s 1.8. (June 3)

18. Florida’s insurance crisis may be easing: after tort reforms, insurers report sharp drops in litigation costs and premium growth. The state had 76% of US insurance lawsuits from just 9% of homeowners. (June 10)

19. Sightline’s new report finds apartments are the climate solution hiding in plain sight: more energy efficient, more likely heated by electricity, and located where people can walk, bike, and take transit. (May 15)

20. Larry Katz’s 1981 article on how growth controls drove San Francisco’s home prices from the national median to the highest in the country in just one decade. A hauntingly contemporary time capsule. (April 17)

21. Oliver Kim reviews a book complicating YIMBYism’s invocation of Singapore: 99-year land leases create a looming political problem, and the city is already so dense that upzoning can’t unlock value the way it does in US cities. (May 8)

22. IFP launched its Transit Abundance Playbook: fifteen memos on why the US pays the world’s highest prices to build transit and how to bring costs down, including on bus procurement. (June 24)

    Energy

23. The House passed a bipartisan geothermal package with NEPA categorical exclusions and faster leasing. But the binding constraints (resource characterization and transmission) remain unaddressed. (June 10)

24. Travis Kavulla explains why more places will look like PJM as data center demand rises: the grid has little excess capacity, and new demand requires costly new investment. (May 28)

25. Matt Yglesias argues “conventional environmentalism” is too focused on efficiency and missing the upside of truly abundant energy. We think cheap energy helps, but some sectors have biotech or materials bottlenecks energy alone won’t solve. (May 15)

26. The President’s FY27 budget proposes 11% cuts to DOE civilian energy programs, and the department has been slow-walking grants it already committed to and slowing new solicitations that keep appropriated funds moving. (April 17)

27. Data centers aren’t the only new large loads: heavy industry is increasingly worried about being outbid for scarce generation resources by data centers willing to pay above-residential rates. (June 3)

28. Zane Kasher’s job market paper finds a 12% drop in home prices within 3 miles of a wind farm. Aesthetic responses vary by country, and blinking lights are a big but cheaply fixable driver of annoyance. (April 24)

29. The energy-growth link is less clear-cut than you’d expect: better energy sector productivity may not affect GDP much, but eliminating power outages could matter enormously and growth effects may be asymmetric. (May 8)

30. LBNL updated its Retail Price Trends and Heatmap/MIT launched an Electricity Price Hub with utility-level data. Price patterns remain fragmented and geography-specific. (April 3)

31. Loudoun County gets 45% of its revenue from data centers, meaning lower property taxes, better schools, and general abundance. But there’s a flip side: residents are fighting the transmission lines needed to power them, and the county chair says people no longer care about the tax benefits. (May 8, June 10)

32. Semianalysis published a comprehensive analysis of space-based data centers. Base case: they don’t reach cost parity with earth until ~2040, but we shouldn’t completely discount the idea. (June 24)

    Innovation Policy

33. OMB published a 412-page proposed revision to federal science funding guidance. Concerns include political pre-award review, mandatory termination clauses, and sweeping foreign collaboration bans. Comments due July 13. (June 3)

34. NSF launched the $1.5B X-Labs initiative: decade-long, milestone-driven funding for independent research teams working outside traditional university structures. A small bet (~1% of NSF budget) but an exciting one. (May 28)

35. A new RFI floats capping PIs at two to four grants. The last attempt (in 2017) was dropped within a month. Supporting younger scientists is the strongest case; responses due August 3. (June 17)

36. The NSF FY27 budget proposes a metascience unit and $50M for Tech Labs (exciting), but also proposes eliminating social sciences and cutting funding 55% (not exciting). Congress largely ignored a similar proposal last year. (April 10)

37. The NIH indirect cost cap fight is over (for now): the administration let the Supreme Court deadline pass. Jeremy Berg’s explainer on how IDC rates actually work is worth your time. (April 10)

38. New medical phrases increasingly come from more specialized scientists and are introduced in less accessible language, both of which slow idea diffusion. Our living literature review program was motivated by exactly this concern. (June 25)

39. Three reads on what happens when AI gets good at producing science’s proxies (theorems, papers) before the processes they stand in for. We highlight Bessis on math, The Paper Factory, and Ted Chiang’s prescient 2000 short story. (May 15)

40. Many funders say they support “high-risk, high-reward” research, yet science keeps getting more conservative. Standard review processes aren’t structured to evaluate risk, and HHMI’s selection model shows promise. (May 8)

41. Ben Reinhardt argues the Vannevar Bush era of “free play of free intellects” is ending. Researchers should think about who their customers are, and independent research labs need to prove they can deliver superior quality. (April 17)

42. Eroom’s Law — drug R&D costs keep going up — may persist not because of science but because only a few large firms can commercialize drugs. Innovation is rate-limited by their pipeline capacity, not discovery. (April 10)

43. Two very different visions for reforming science funding: Gibson in City Journal wants lotteries, scouts, and indirect cost caps; Fineberg in PNAS wants sustained federal investment and talent pipelines. Both want more support for young scientists. (April 3)

44. Grant Witness is now tracking NIH and NSF funding curves in real time which is essential for monitoring whether agencies are spending what Congress approved. (April 3)

45. arXiv’s CS chair announced year-long bans for authors submitting papers with unchecked AI content like hallucinated references. Holding authors accountable for accuracy seems worthwhile, even if the post-ban peer review requirement goes too far. (May 28)

46. Refine, an AI review tool for economics, published a benchmark study, winning ~90% of head-to-head matchups against frontier LLMs. More tool-builders should run and publish studies like this. (June 24)

47. Emergent Ventures announced new grants for metascience policy entrepreneurs and science communicators. (April 17)

    Clinical Trials

48. Dario Amodei’s latest post focuses heavily on clinical trials. AI will flood the regulatory pipeline with drug candidates, so we need major reforms to make sure therapies don’t languish for years. (June 17)

49. ASCO 2026 highlights: Daraxonrasib doubled survival for metastatic pancreatic cancer and lorlatinib showed 55% of ALK-positive lung cancer patients still progression-free at 7 years. On the screening side, the NHS Galleri blood test quadrupled cancer detection but mostly caught stage III rather than truly early. (June 4)

50. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned after friction with RFK Jr. He announced promising ideas but also oversaw departures of career scientists and eroding evidentiary standards. (May 15)

51. Joe Lonsdale’s FDA reform agenda pushes promising ideas: surrogate endpoints, Australian-style Phase 1 trials, and eliminating wasted time between trial phases.(June 3)

52. The FDA announced “Real Time Clinical Trials” but the rollout was muddled. Adam Kroetsch writes it’s genuinely promising but requires the FDA to define how they use live data and build interoperability standards. (May 15)

53. We might finally get a vaccine against Lyme disease but the phase 3 confidence intervals were wide and the trial missed its primary endpoint. We had one in the ‘90s and lost it to unfounded fears. (April 3)

54. Drug development fails 95% of the time. Abhishaike Mahajan explains the financial engineering tricks, from hub-and-spoke companies to synthetic royalties, that keep biotech money flowing despite the brutal odds. (May 8)

55. In Development has a great article on pooling regulatory reviews across African countries so manufacturers don’t have to file separately in each one. The African Medicines Agency launched in 2025 but faces big challenges. (May 28)

56. Niko McCarty ran a bounty to surface ideas for cheaper biology experiments: 430 submissions, 20 prizes awarded. Ideas included a protein printer from DNA origami and gel-filtration protein synthesis. (April 10)

57. Saloni discussed clinical trial reform on the Works in Progress podcast, from why ethics reviews are inefficient to how Australia made earlier-stage trials simpler and faster. (April 24)

58. Niko McCarty and Saloni wrote a biotech/medicine roundup: organ donations are vastly more efficient, semaglutide failed for Alzheimer’s, and a transformative pancreatic cancer drug succeeded in phase 3. (April 24)

    Europe

59. Paul Krugman says Europe is keeping up with the US; Luis and Pieter Garicano say it’s falling behind. The biggest question: does US tech dominance actually matter for European living standards? (May 15)

60. European tourists visiting the US for the World Cup are going viral with their own “driving around tests“, though free hotel rooms and celebrity meet-and-greets don’t come standard with road trips. (June 17)

61. Philippe Aghion identifies Europe’s gaps: no single market, insufficient long-run research funding, no DARPA-like agencies, a culture that doesn’t celebrate risk-taking, too much red tape, and more. (June 17)

62. Samuel Hughes asks whether European housing politics should be Americanized. YIMBYism is effectively nonexistent on the continent, despite housing shortages arguably worse than America’s. (June 17)

63. Kelsey Piper and Alexander Kustov explain why America is better at immigration than Europe: flexible labor markets let immigrants work, integrate, and build public support. (April 3)

64. Europe 2031 paints a scenario where AI access becomes nationalized and Europe’s assumption that it can free-ride on US tech breaks down. Eerie timing, published shortly before the US banned foreign access to Anthropic’s latest model. (June 17)

65. The ERC announced stricter application rules for 2027, likely in response to AI-generated proposals flooding review panels. NIH also capped at six applications per year. The optimal solution is an open metascience question. (April 24)

66. The Centre for British Progress released a paper on street votes: residents collectively hire an architect, agree on upzoning, and vote to allow new housing with value capture to homeowners. (April 24)

    Team Announcements

67. Alex Armlovich published Zoned Capacity Is Like an Artificial Oil Deposit, on why cities can claim they have room for thousands of new homes on paper and still not build them, and

68. Alex Armlovich published Tokyo Land Is Still >$85 Million an Acre, looking at what happens to land values when a megacity achieves housing abundance.

69. Matt Clancy published How do you get Abundance and Growth?, an outline of the Abundance and Growth fund’s plans for what kinds of work to fund in 2026.

70. Matt Clancy published A Little Progress Is Worth a Trillion Dollars, with a web tool and interactive explainer for valuing different growth scenarios.

71. Matt Clancy published An Atlas of Innovation, on how to decide when to use a prize, a research grant, or something else.

72. Matt Clancy published Social Science at the NSF, on how history rhymes with today’s debates about federal science funding.

73. Jordan Dworkin published US Science Agencies Have Money; Can They Spend It?, on why and how to keep track of government spending on R&D.

74. Jordan Dworkin published Our Grandchildren’s AI-Science Bottleneck, on why slow fields may determine the future pace of discovery.

75. Dylan Matthews published How Do States Share Ideas?, a brief introduction to the study of policy diffusion.

76. Saloni Dattani published Why Were Covid Vaccine Trials So Fast?, on how the timeline to develop coronavirus vaccines blew many predictions out of the water.

77. The Abundance and Growth team published What got us into abundance and growth, about the works that were personally foundational to our interest in abundance.

    Writing from our Grantees

78. Witold Więcek co-authored a JAMA perspective on the FDA’s Bayesian guidance.

79. IFP published analysis of Section 901 of the ROAD Act, a prevailing wage report, and the Transit Abundance Playbook.

80. Ruxandra Teslo wrote on how the pancreatic cancer breakthrough came about.

81. Lauren Gilbert published “Immigration and House Prices“ in her Migration Living Literature Review.

82. Ben Holland joined David Roberts on the Volts podcast to discuss why climate funders don’t fund housing.

83. The Foundation for American Innovation hosted the Energy Imperatives Summit in June.

    More Abundance

84. Marc Dunkelman and Alex Mechanick grapple with how democracies make decisions when people disagree, and why our current processes put too little weight on growth. (May 8)

85. The USPS owns 8,500+ properties. Rebuilding at surrounding density levels could unlock 117,000 units and earn nearly $1B/year in leases. State capacity and housing supply in one policy? (May 28)

86. The Jones Act waiver data is in: 45 voyages from 35 ships in just two months, mostly moving oil from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast and Puerto Rico. That’s a lot of pent-up demand. (May 28)

87. Sam Peltzman documents a big negative break in American happiness starting around Covid that has persisted well past the pandemic. Both GSS and Gallup data confirm well-being remains near unusual lows. (April 10)

88. 31% of World Bank policy reports are never downloaded, but the bank still writes them. Todd Moss argues this is a tragic waste of talent that could be solving actual problems. (April 10)

89. The Census Bureau is debating noise infusion for anonymizing data. A Trump Commerce Department proposal to ban it entirely could lead the Bureau to just not release certain data at all. (June 24)

90. Charles Mann and Virginia Postrel launched Everyday Abundance, a new podcast. First episode: the history of brushing your teeth. If anyone can make that interesting, it’s these two. (June 10)

91. In Development launched with a piece on cash transfers. A dollar is worth roughly 250x more to someone in extreme poverty. Harvard’s research ethics committee nearly killed GiveDirectly’s first RCT on grounds that giving people money might harm them. (April 10)

92. A big FRI survey asked AI experts, economists, superforecasters, and the public to predict AI’s economic effects. Surprisingly, the groups weren’t far apart, and all fall well short of “double-digit growth” forecasts. (April 3)

93. Alex Imas on the rise of “relational work”: as AI makes information cheap, irreducibly human elements — trust, presence, judgment — become what people spend more on as they get richer. (April 17)

94. The Labor Automation Forecasting Hub collects predictions on everything from specific jobs to specific states. The forecasts will be wrong a lot, but the clarity is appreciated. (April 24)