What we’re reading, February 20, 2026
Wildfire’s hidden costs, conservation meets abundance, and Europe’s innovation gap
Happy February 20! Here’s what caught our attention this week:
We don’t usually talk about permitting reform as a life-or-death issue. But evidence from a new paper suggests that maybe we should, at least where wildfire management is concerned. Min Zhang and coauthors find that wildfire smoke — specifically, the PM2.5 particulate matter in it — contributed to roughly 24,000 deaths per year in the contiguous US between 2006 and 2020. Concerningly, the authors find no evidence of a “safe” threshold — indicating that chronic exposure is risky even at low levels. Combined with growing evidence that proactive fuel management significantly reduces the severity of subsequent wildfires (Davis et al. 2024 found 62–72% reductions in severity for treatments involving prescribed burns), this makes an even stronger case for streamlining the regulatory requirements that slow down forest management. — Willow Latham-Proenca
Continuing that theme, the weaponization of environmental review as a tactic to delay or block new building has tended to cast the conservation movement as an antagonist to the Abundance Movement. But the same permitting and decision-processes which take so long and introduce so much uncertainty into the building of new infrastructure projects also hamper the goals of the conservation movement. As noted above, the burden of complying with regulation delays controlled burns, which leave forests vulnerable to fire. Shawn Regan, writing for The Ecomodernist, catalogs a number of additional ways that the conservation movement and the abundance and progress studies movements are working towards the same goals. — Matt Clancy
This week I’m reading a father-son team with competing explanations of why Europe lags behind the US in generating innovative companies. Luis Garicano (and coauthor Per Strömberg) look specifically at Sweden, which has been unusually successful at generating “unicorns” (tech companies worth over $1 billion) given its small population. They credit this to the existence of an active angel investor community in the country, which in turn they credit to a tax provision that allows startup founders to avoid capital gains tax on shares they sell — but only if they in turn invest the money in other startups. Pieter Garicano, a very smart commentator on European economic issues and Luis’s son, has a long essay in Works in Progress that places the blame instead on Europe’s restrictive labor laws, which make it time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes outright impossible to fire workers; this then makes it a bad idea to hire lots of workers on projects that might fail, which hampers innovation. The solution, he argues, isn’t to abandon workers but to embrace Denmark’s “flexicurity” model pairing rules allowing easy firing with a generous safety net to catch workers who are let go. — Dylan Matthews
A new NBER working paper introduces GABRIEL, an open-source library that wraps GPT for extracting, rating, ranking, and categorizing qualitative information from text data. Of note for innovation policy: they apply the framework to study technology diffusion, filtering 18 million Wikipedia articles down to ~25,000 industrial-age technologies and extracting characteristics for each. They find that lags between invention and adoption have shortened from ~50 years in the 1800s to ~5 years today (with interesting heterogeneity, e.g. military and transportation technology diffuse faster than average, while agricultural, medical, and energy technology diffuse slower). The pace of technology adoption is an important input for innovation policy decision-making; CBO recently conducted a preliminary analysis of the budget impacts of R&D investment, within which they modeled a 15-year ramp from outlays to peak productivity effects. If the invention-to-adoption gap is truly compressing as fast as the authors find, R&D may pay off in shorter windows than typically assumed. — Jordan Dworkin
It’s been a big week for clinical trials. The FDA refused to review Moderna’s flu vaccine trial despite previously indicating their trial design was acceptable. Then, they reversed course. It’s unclear what prompted the reversal (likely political backlash), but as Ruxandra Teslo argues in a new blog post, the episode highlights how regulatory uncertainty can be worse than strict standards, making it harder to plan for and meet standards. On a more positive note, Adam Kroetsch laid out thoughts on the FDA’s new Bayesian statistics guidance that I found particularly helpful. He explains that the new guidance has been a long time coming and should help translate subjective judgment into a more transparent, quantitative framework. He also argues that it is especially valuable as the FDA has shifted from screening large numbers of low-quality trials and requiring two statistically significant trials per drug, to evaluating fewer, larger trials that can incorporate additional sources of evidence. — Saloni Dattani
Ed Mendoza of the Metropolitan Abundance Project has a new feature leveraging research by the Pew Charitable Trusts on how new housing construction moderates older and more affordable “Class C” housing rents even more than other, newer, “Class A” housing prices. Although organizations like the National Low Income Housing Coalition rightly remind supply-side YIMBYs that families earning less than 60% of metropolitan Area Median Income in the US will usually need income transfers to afford safe and dignified housing that meets contemporary middle class norms, YIMBYism in high-rent regions is still a powerful antipoverty tool that helps people of all incomes. — Alex Armlovich
Transportation policy is the flip side of housing policy. In fact, in many urban economics models, the two are inseparable: house prices are determined by time to commute to the city centre (pay more for a shorter commute). More broadly, a lot of the value of our housing policy work is premised on helping people access the benefits of agglomeration economies; better transportation within a city achieves the same goal. In Transportation for the Abundant Society, Gregory Shill and Jonathan Levine argue that transportation policy should focus less on mobility and more on creating an abundance of accessibility to valuable places. They go on to then lay out an agenda for achieving transportation abundance, focusing on major legal and institutional barriers. — Matt Clancy