What we're reading: January 8, 2026
European Abundance, Clinical Trials, and More!
Happy 2026! This is the first regular installment of highlights from what the Abundance and Growth Fund team has been reading this week.
The European Union has, as an institution, become associated in many European and American minds with strict regulation and thick bureaucracy. Rasheed Griffith has a good piece of pushback, insisting that the EU might be “the world’s most underrated libertarian project.” It was founded, after all, to break down trade and other barriers between European nation-states. Griffith argues it does more of that kind of deregulatory work today than most observers recognize.
Griffith’s essay pairs well with this long X post by Seán Keyes, executive director of Progress Ireland, listing ideas for helping the Republic of Ireland get more housing, infrastructure, and energy production. Some of the ideas are very Ireland-specific (e.g. a joint venture between the Land Development Agency and Irish Rail) but many could apply to any country struggling with these issues. For instance, Keyes suggests creating “pattern books” of standard, pre-approved building drawings to make designing and approving new housing faster and cheaper.
Meanwhile, this Boston Globe editorial on housing, continues their marked increases in pro-housing coverage of the last several years.
Daniel Stid, writing for his substack, points out that there is a mismatch between how much governing happens at the state level (maybe most of it?) and the level of civil infrastructure (think tanks and other policy support actors) that works at that level (not much!).
The FDA recently announced it would shift from requiring two clinical trials to one. Why the change? In his Substack, Adam Kroetsh points out things have been moving in this direction a long time (the FDA has had the authority to approve based on a single trial since 1997 and most drugs approved these days are approved based on a single trial) at least partially in response to rising quality (and cost) of individual trials and an increasing focus on rare diseases.
One reason clinical trials can take a long time is because it can take a long time to see how a patient’s condition turns out - some diseases have a slow progression. A good “surrogate endpoint” is a biomarker that reliably tells you how a disease will turn out, so you don’t have to wait as long to know if a drug is working. But a bad surrogate endpoint can be misleading, and lead to drug approvals that don’t actually help patients. Ruxandra Teslo, writing for the Institute for Progress, is launching a series on getting more good surrogate endpoints.
More Adam Kroetsh! Writing for Asterisk, he puts the FDA’s current trust woes in a longer context: how did the FDA achieve its trusted status in the first place? Kroetsch also reminds us of many of the achievements of the FDA which are maybe not sufficiently appreciated today. This reader was reminded of the maxim: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.”
In case you missed it over the holidays, the Institute for Progress responded to OSTP’s RFI on accelerating science with a wide-ranging set of recommendations. In addition to some metascientific mainstays — like fast grants, program officer empowerment, and multi-stage review — the team highlights the potential of organization-based grants (a model gaining steam at NSF and in Congress), and proposes the creation of agency metascience units dedicated to experimentation and iteration. The latter would be analogous to the UK Metascience Unit.
As an aside, if we needed a reminder about why scientific progress and clinical trial speed matters, Abundance and Growth Fund team member Saloni Dattani gives us a tour of medical breakthroughs of 2025 on her substack.
Disclosure: Ruxandra Teslo, Progress Ireland, and the Institute for Progress have received support from the Abundance and Growth Fund. We have also partnered with the UK Metascience Unit to support various initiatives.