This week we’re drawing some inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges and writing about articles and books that don’t exist. We didn’t read any of the following pieces because, so far as we know, nobody has written them yet. But we wish they had!
Matt Clancy: This week I wish I was reading “What’s a PhD cost and what’s it worth?” a new NBER working paper. The paper (would) trawl through the last few decades of NSF and NIH PhD training programs to identify quasi-random surges in funding for PhD students. It would use these to estimate both how much it costs to “create” a new PhD, and what the impact of a 10% increase in the PhD labor force is on the rate of innovation and economic growth. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, it would find the marginal impact on growth of funding a new PhD is [redacted] compared to funding original research. The paper would also find [redacted] programs tend to produce PhDs at the lowest cost, suggesting we might want to do more of them.
Jordan Dworkin: Four years ago, in “A Vision of Metascience”, Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu asked the reader to imagine they were “a science fiction writer depicting a scientific discovery made by an alien species.” It seems likely, they say, that “such aliens will have radically different social processes to support science. What would those social processes be? Could they have developed scientific institutions as superior to ours as modern universities are to the learned medieval monasteries?” This week, I wish I were reading a series of vignettes creatively answering that call, exploring how scientific processes and institutions might look under the stewardship of dramatically different societies, cultures, minds, and technologies. Duly inspired by related endeavors from David, and Scott, and Scott, and Corin, and Scott again, these yet-to-exist vignettes have a flair for the humorous and bizarre, while also giving us valuable new frameworks for thinking about what is and what could be.
Willow Latham-Proenca: Maybe more Calvino than Borges, but I’d like to be looking at a constellation of new papers following a huge geographic and sectoral expansion of (something like) the Critical Mineral Project dataset, a cradle-to-grave project tracker. Unlike most public data, this version not only shows how long a project spent in permitting, but time spent in pre-permitting discussions and/or litigation (two common ways a project can end up dead by attrition). With the grunt work of compiling datasets out of the way, future researchers can focus on parsing out which provisions really drive up time and costs (like this and this), and investigating which are most cost-effective in protecting public welfare (like this) – a roadmap for evidence-based future policy.
Nisha Austin: This week I wish I were reading something about which ~five numbers tell you a policy field is growing rather than just getting louder. I'd like to see some metrics around things like how many paid jobs there are in the field, how many organizations reach year three, how many people leave advocacy for jobs in government, and what share of the field's money comes from someone other than the funders who started it. Some of this is already countable: there is a jobs board with roughly 280 listings on it today (worth noting this is an aggregator of adjacent orgs and not necessarily a single field), and the best public count of pro-housing groups is still more than 140, assembled off social media in January 2022 by two researchers who admitted they had probably missed some. Someone please go count them again!
Alex Armlovich: This week I wish I were reading an analysis of the consequences of the regulatory cliff between America’s single-family “International Residential Code” (IRC)1 and our multifamily “International Building Code” (IBC). One hypothesized reason for the 20th century disappearance of “missing middle” multiplex buildings–duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, etc–is that beyond the direct zoning bans on them on most land in most US cities after WWII, these buildings also trigger stricter IBC rules, raising costs enough to make multiplexes uncompetitive compared to attached rowhouses built under looser IRC rules2. Architects in the New Urbanism movement, predating the modern YIMBY movement, have long advocated for allowing multiplexes similar in overall size to a single family mansion to be able to use the IRC rules available to mansions, but face opposition from the legacy fire protection lobby, who argue the IRC isn’t safe enough.
Unfortunately, there is no research on the fire safety increment at the IRC-IBC cliff3. The old-fashioned fire officials who oppose IRC rules strangely don’t bother collecting fire safety data by building code type, making it impossible to decisively assess the debate. Detailed fire outcomes data would allow quantitative social scientists to perform a social benefit cost analysis of the sort typically required by federal rulemaking4. America’s building codes have added provisions written by vibes, hunches, and industry vendors for so long, and with so little outcome data collected, that even the most basic questions are debatable.
Thus far YIMBYs have pursued a “no-regrets” comparative approach to building code reform, pushing for egress and elevator rules that have already been proven safe in Europe and elsewhere. But since Europe has no equivalent codes for America’s IRC-style light wood frame buildings, the champions of the international comparative approach (like the Center for Building in North America) have been silent on the IRC-IBC multiplex question. So that’s what I wish I were reading: If not a full-fledged federal RIA-style analysis, then at least a basic fire safety analysis to demonstrate whether IBC rules even meaningfully affect life safety in the first place (let alone whether they do so cost-effectively). All we know right now is that fire death rates are extremely low in all forms of new construction–there is not yet publicly available evidence, nor do fire regulators even attempt to collect usable evidence, that there are meaningful safety benefits from any of the incremental regulatory cost triggers in the IRC, in the IBC, or between the IRC and IBC5.
Saloni Dattani: Last week I thought, “I’d love to read more about Australia’s clinical trial system and how it compares with the United States!”, since Australia is known for having a much faster process for starting early stage clinical trials. But then, on Friday, Ruxandra Teslo and Adam Kroetsch published a report for IFP on exactly that topic, which was great, and I thought “Wow, that was fast!” So now I’ll suggest that I’d like to read about the institutional history of TIMI, the academic research organization that has coordinated more than 80 trials to test treatments for heart attacks across 50 countries, and has massively influenced cardiovascular medicine globally. A whole book-length treatment would be the dream, but I’d also be satisfied with a detailed report or book chapter. Hopefully that will be published next week too.
Finally, here are some announcements from our team and grantees:
One bittersweet announcement: Dylan Matthews is leaving the Abundance and Growth Fund to join Caleb Watney’s new US AI Policy team at Coefficient Giving. Dylan will also continue to be a guest contributor on the AGF blog, so we'll only miss him some of the time. I know he’ll do great work with Caleb.
Coefficient Giving is now on Substack! Subscribe now, and think of it as your one-stop shop for the best of CG thought across the internet.
CG also launched Launchpad Funds, an RFP for new funds organized around one outcome and led by a “general manager” accountable for it. Expression of Interests are due October 2.
1DaySooner is hiring for a few roles, including a research fellow for their CTA team and a project lead to shepherd CTD Commons through its initial planning period and to create the momentum and proof points needed for a successful public launch.
Building codes are supposed to regulate life safety characteristics of buildings, while zoning codes regulate the uses and sizes of buildings, but America’s building code regulators have a century-long history of suppressing multifamily apartment buildings under false pretenses. Single-family homes in the US face the looser IRC, while multifamily homes face the stricter IBC, which in turn contains numerous “cliffs” in regulatory stringency with increasing building size.
Portland, OR has one of the only multiplex zoning reforms that has produced a significant construction response, but they achieve this largely by tightly limiting the floor area allowed for single-family dwellings and increasing it only for multiplexes. In a kind of “Dark YIMBY” inversion of the NIMBY toolkit, it’s not wholly illegal to build a single family home under Portland Residential Infill Program reform, the rules are just pretextually slanted to make it a lot harder than a multiplex.
The cost data is surprisingly weak too. The most popular industry standard cost estimation data, called RS Means, doesn’t collect data for building typologies at key cost-triggering code cliffs. Academic studies have tried to do the best they can with RS Means data, but we’re still flying blind on some of the big questions on building code costs.
The IRC and IBC model codes, which are written by private NGOs and published for profit, do not undergo any form of social benefit cost analysis.
Other countries that perform social benefit cost analyses for changes to their building code rules for major components like sprinklers can offer suggestive breadcrumbs for US policymakers on individual components. But again, we’re flying blind on differential requirements in the US context, like how much more safety an expensive NFPA 13D sprinkler adds over a cheaper NFPA 13R sprinkler, compared to the very cheapest NFPA 13 sprinklers–and in precisely what contexts those differences might matter.
These are all awesome, but I especially love the “counterfactual categories” orientations of the ‘alien science’ and ‘field growth’ tiers. The former is more speculative in a generative sense while the latter is more speculative in a ‘maybe this tells us what we want to know’ sense, but in both cases the relevant intellectual lift is “envisage new mechanics for constructing model-level explanations about the workings of a knowledge-base”.
…which is hugely important, IMV, because I don’t think there’s really any other reliable way to free oneself from a bunch of otherwise-illegible path dependencies that parameterize the possibility space.