79 things to read about Abundance

A look back at key readings and announcements from January through March

New York City public library reading room. Image from Library of Congress.

Over the first quarter of 2026, we published eleven “What we’re reading” roundups 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.

More Abundance

1. Shawn Regan, writing for The Ecomodernist, catalogs ways the conservation and abundance movements share goals — permitting that slows infrastructure also hampers conservation. (February 20)

2. In “Transportation for the Abundant Society,” Shill and Levine argue policy should focus on accessibility to valuable places, not just mobility. (February 20)

3. Abundance NY’s Abundance Agenda sets ten-year goals: halve cost overruns, build 500K homes, double bus speeds, with detailed policy mechanisms throughout. (March 13)

4. Daniel Stid points out there’s a mismatch between how much governing happens at the state level and the level of civil infrastructure (think tanks, policy support) that operates there. (January 8)

5. Ashish Jha argues we’ve been too focused on the demand side of healthcare. The supply-side questions matter too: are we letting enough hospitals get built? Are we licensing enough physicians? (January 30)

6. Childcare costs are hard to reduce because labor is such a big part of the story. One easy fix: more states should let daycares operate above the ground floor. (February 13)

7. Alexander Kustov finds public support for skilled immigration is remarkably robust, even on the right. So why do we have so many restrictions? The vocal minority is concentrated where it has the most influence. (February 27)

8. George Borjas argued H-1B workers earn 16% less than comparable natives. EIG’s new analysis says the comparison isn’t apples-to-apples; when corrected, the gap falls to 7.5% and shrinks further with adjustments. (February 27)

9. The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 probably wins the prize for “most Kafkaesque US federal law.” Posting a voluntary government survey requires a 20-page document with annotated screenshots. (January 23)

Housing

10. Anti-growth zoning and stagnant construction productivity may be the same problem: an NBER paper finds the post-1970 productivity collapse coincides with downzoning, and growth controls directly limit economies of scale. (January 23)

11. Does rent control make tenants into NIMBYs or make them more open to growth? A critique of a Berlin study digs into why the literature still can’t say for sure. (January 30)

12. California’s local impact fees consume a troublingly high share of federal LIHTC subsidy: a new Terner report finds $300M/year in fees against $550M/year in new awards. (January 30)

13. David Card and coauthors find coastal superstar cities pay a 10-18% wage premium — but those gains are mostly eaten up by higher costs of living, especially housing. (February 6)

14. Progress Ireland explores tying EU infrastructure funds for high-opportunity metros to actual housing production, drawing on US models like the Build Now Act. (February 13)

15. Evan Soltas and Jonathan Gruber find that permit approval raises land prices by 50% in LA — a clever way to measure the cost of permitting burdens on housing. (February 27)

16. Tokyo houses 38 million people with remarkably affordable rents. The US-Japan Foundation explores what American cities can learn from Japan’s approach. (February 27)

17. New housing construction moderates older “Class C” rents even more than newer “Class A” prices — YIMBYism in high-rent regions is a powerful antipoverty tool. (February 20)

18. The Senate passed the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 89-10. A late investor ban threatened build-to-rent, but a HUD Code exemption may preserve the pipeline. (March 13)

19. We asked Michael Wiebe to review an influential paper on high-tech clusters and housing. He found serious problems, prompting us to downgrade our innovation-effects estimate. (March 20)

20. Brian Potter examines the elusive cost savings of prefab housing. The benefits tend to be schedule and quality, not price, and it’s not a substitute for zoning reform. (March 20)

21. Jerusalem Demsas writes about how urban divestment is a much larger problem in the US than gentrification, but compositional drivers crowd out the statistical reality. (March 20)

22. Austin, TX: supply finally caught up to demand and rents are back to pre-pandemic levels. Pew’s new analysis shows what happens when permitting actually works. (March 27)

Energy

23. Zeke Hausfather makes the case that making clean energy cheap is more tractable than making fossil fuels expensive, and that the 1.5C target has become a political snare. (January 23)

24. State-level electricity price increases vary widely: California and the Northeast are driving the national pattern, but other regions may be catching up. (January 30)

25. Why can’t we build enough electricity supply? Macey and Kiesling argue the regulatory system gives incumbents perverse incentives to keep supply constrained. (February 6)

26. The EPA repealed the endangerment finding. Philip Rossetti has a helpful take on the legal battles ahead, and a new working paper finds this type of climate policy uncertainty depresses investment, R&D, output, and raises prices. (February 13)

27. Wildfire smoke contributed to roughly 24,000 US deaths per year from 2006-2020, with no safe threshold. Proactive fuel management reduces severity 62-72% — if regulators let it happen. (February 20)

28. Solar is popular among Trump voters: 70% support when panels are American-made. But broader GOP support may be trending down — reform windows matter. (February 27)

29. Eliminating constraints on moving energy would have saved $3-5B in generation costs in 2023, and $6-7B in 2022 when gas prices spiked. Coastal incumbents benefit from the status quo. (March 6)

30. Samuel Roland tours the byzantine landscape of state-level geothermal regulation: mismatched frameworks, unclear water law, and legal risk that can kill project financing. (March 6)

31. Federal permitting talks have restarted in the Senate. Alex Trembath argues the need for bipartisan compromise is an opportunity, not a drawback. (March 13)

32. NEPA never explicitly provides for private lawsuits, but it became a litigation machine. Samuel Roland offers a deep dive into how that happened. (January 30)

Innovation Policy

33. Congress preserved science budgets for FY26: the Metaculus forecasters we commissioned got it roughly right. But Nature documents real damage: ~8,000 grants frozen, 20% staff losses at science agencies. (January 23, January 30)

34. The Institute for Progress responded to OSTP’s RFI on accelerating science with recommendations including fast grants, program officer empowerment, and agency metascience units. (January 8)

35. The Market Shaping Accelerator released a new guide for sizing prizes and advance market commitments, with an interactive calculator for estimating incentive sizes. (January 23)

36. Hundreds of new uses for off-patent drugs may go undeveloped because nobody has incentive to run the trials. Nicholas Reville proposes an NIH High-Leverage Trials program. (January 30)

37. 66% of new or revised federal research requirements since 1991 were issued in the last 10 years, with 2025 showing the biggest jump. COGR’s new report shows admin burden on researchers is rising fast. (February 6)

38. AI makes good science easier but also makes junk papers easier to churn out. Oliver Hanney writes about what comes next: curation, academic influencers, living documents. (February 6)

39. GABRIEL, a new open-source AI framework, finds tech adoption lags have compressed from ~50 years in the 1800s to ~5 years today. R&D may pay off faster than we assume. (February 20)

40. A good back-and-forth on NIH funding: Khanduja and Buck push VC-style practices for funders; former NIGMS director Berg responds that R01s already work more flexibly than critics think. (February 27)

41. State-level science funding is growing: Massachusetts proposed $400M, New York is eyeing a $6B biomedical institute, and Texas voters already approved $3B for dementia research. (February 27)

42. AlphaFold boosted basic protein research 15-35% on previously unsolved structures, but hasn’t yet shifted early-stage drug R&D. Hill and Stein’s new paper finds structure was a bottleneck for science, not drug discovery. (March 20)

43. Does MAGA actually want American science to win? Ari Shulman argues the critique of status quo science is broadly on point, but the policy conclusions won’t make America stronger. (March 20)

44. Astera Institute announced Radial: up to $500M over a decade to experiment with how life sciences research is organized, funded, and shared. Plus an essay competition on systemic bottlenecks. (March 13)

45. SocSci-Repro-Bench tested AI agents on reproducing 54 papers. Claude fully reproduced 78% accurately; OpenAI’s Codex got 35.8%. The results weren’t memorized, the models did the work from scratch. (March 13)

46. Alvin Djajadikerta explores whether AI-for-science might enhance prediction within current frameworks while weakening our capacity for true paradigm shifts. (March 27)

Clinical Trials

47. The FDA released draft guidance on Bayesian methods in clinical trials. But as Witold Wieçek notes, it reads like Bayesianism with frequentist guardrails. (January 23)

48. How much is a faster clinical trial worth? Frank Lichtenberg estimated ~4,200 life-years lost per drug if post-1990 medicines hadn’t been available. Philipson et al. found PDUFA sped up approvals by 6-7%, generating $14-31B in surplus. (March 27)

49. NIH dropped the “BESH“ clinical trial classification — good news for neuroscientists who had to treat simple EEG studies as clinical trials since 2014. (February 6)

Adam Kroetsch wrote extensively on trials this quarter:

50. The FDA announced a shift from requiring two clinical trials to one. Adam points out this has been moving in this direction since 1997 as most drugs are already approved on a single trial. (January 8)

51. He puts the FDA’s trust woes in historical context: how did the agency earn its trusted status in the first place? A reminder that the world is awful, much better, and can be much better still. (January 8)

52. His take on the FDA’s new Bayesian guidance explains how the guidance has been a long time coming and should help translate subjective judgment into a more transparent framework. (February 20)

53. He argues we need to pay attention to the boring stuff like the unglamorous work of setting up trials, recruiting patients, and collecting data. (March 13)

54. Adam also launched the Clinical Trials Efficiency Project. (February 6)

Ruxandra Teslo covered surrogate endpoints, regulatory uncertainty, and IRB reform:

54. A good surrogate endpoint can save years of trial time; a bad one can be misleading. She is launching a series on getting more good ones. (January 8)

55. IRBs are meant to protect research participants, but fragmented standards create needless delays. She makes the case for reform: let researchers choose any compliant external IRB. (January 30)

56. The FDA refused to review Moderna’s flu vaccine trial, then reversed course. She argues regulatory uncertainty can be worse than strict standards. (February 20)

57. She argued that AI alone won’t speed up clinical trials and the real bottlenecks are regulatory and operational, not technical. (March 6)

Europe

57. A father-son duo offers competing explanations for Europe’s innovation gap: Luis Garicano credits Sweden’s angel investor tax incentives; Pieter blames restrictive labor laws. (February 20)

58. Rasheed Griffith argues the EU is “the world’s most underrated libertarian project,” doing more to break down barriers between nation-states than most recognize. (January 8)

59. Progress Ireland’s Seán Keyes lists ideas for more housing, infrastructure, and energy in Ireland, from joint ventures to pre-approved “pattern book” building designs. (January 8)

60. EU Commission staffers argue that EA community members should seek employment at the Commission; in Europe, working inside government can be a uniquely powerful route to impact. (February 13)

Team Announcements

61. We launched the Pop-Up Journal Initiative with the Sloan Foundation. The NBER will host the first journal on the “Griliches Question” about R&D returns. (February 27)

62. We published a directory of Living Literature Reviews, continuously updated research syntheses by expert authors across abundance-related topics. (March 13)

63. Jordan Dworkin made the case that replication is underrated. (January 23)

64. Jordan and Stuart Buck debated the ROI of funding replications over at The Good Science Project. (January 30)

65. Saloni Dattani published The Case for Sharing Clinical Trial Data. (February 13)

66. Dylan Matthews published “What Gilded Age America and 1960s police can teach us about state capacity“. (February 27)

67. Saloni wrote on the history of clinical trial reforms: how randomization, preregistration, and results reporting went from radical to standard practice. (March 6)

68. Jordan published “Who Will Program-Manage the Program Managers?“. (March 27)

69. Dylan launched a substack. (January 8)

70. Saloni wrote about The Golden Age of Vaccine Development in Works in Progress. (January 8)

71. Saloni published a tour of medical breakthroughs of 2025 on her substack. (January 8)

72. Saloni and several grantees launched Clinical Trials Abundance, a joint blog publishing weekly on making trials more efficient. (February 13)

Grantee Announcements

73. Ben Schifman discusses the NEPA litigation “doom loop” and its potential fixes in a new long-form piece at IFP. (March 6)

74. Open NY stood alongside Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams to support modernizing environmental review. UK Research and Innovation opened their second round of metascience grants. (February 13)

75. Renaissance Philanthropy launched Pilot City, connecting cities with local academic expertise through matchmaking events. (February 13)

76. Sightline Institute’s “funded inclusionary zoning“ model inspired a bill that just passed the Oregon Senate. (February 27)

77. Speculative Technologies announced the 2026 Brains Fellows. Renaissance Philanthropy launched the BiTS Americas cohort training scientists to lead large-scale research. (March 13)

78. Progress Ireland published on how Brussels can help with Galway’s housing problems using funding conditionality tied to housing production. (March 13)

79. Greater Greater Washington published their take on DC’s draft Future Land Use Map — only 15K units by 2050, banking on leftover development sites. The draft drew mass protest. (March 27)