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THE ORIGINS OF EFFICIENCY
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Is Land-Use Regulation Holding Back Construction Productivity?
Ed Glaeser is perhaps the pre-eminent urban economist working today, and I’ve cited his work repeatedly when looking at land-use restrictions and…
Aug 13, 2024
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Brian Potter
110
21
On Klein on Construction
In the New York Times, Ezra Klein investigated the recent Goolsbee and Syverson paper on construction productivity we recently looked at. Klein suggests…
Feb 18, 2023
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Brian Potter
56
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How Batteries Are Making the Electrical Grid More Reliable
To operate reliably, the US electrical grid needs to balance supply and demand: to make sure, at any given moment, that the amount of electricity…
Jun 19
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Brian Potter
161
42
Why Are Nuclear Power Construction Costs so High? Part II
To briefly recap, we previously found that nuclear power construction costs in the US and around the world steadily increased from the late 1960s…
Jun 24, 2022
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Brian Potter
51
14
Why Are Nuclear Power Construction Costs so High? Part I
Nuclear power currently makes up slightly less than 20% of the total electricity produced in the US, largely from plants built in the 70s and 80s.
Jun 9, 2022
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Brian Potter
90
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Reading List 02/08/2025
Ship-mounted lasers, Santorini earthquakes, carbon sequestration via nuclear explosion, the fall of concentrating solar, and more, and more.
Feb 8
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Brian Potter
41
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The Grid, Part II: The Golden Age of the Power Industry
Welcome to Part II of our history of the electric power industry.
Jun 3, 2023
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Brian Potter
68
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The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home, Part II
When we left off, over a few short years mobile home manufacturing had grown into a massive industry, and was supplying an increasingly large fraction…
Jul 22, 2022
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Brian Potter
38
12
How Much Safer has Construction Gotten?
When talking about (the lack of) construction productivity growth, or the fact that we used to build things much faster than we do today, commentators…
Mar 9, 2023
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Brian Potter
35
10
The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home, Part I
A recurring theme of this newsletter is the failure of prefabrication (building homes in factories instead of on-site) to revolutionize the housing…
Jul 15, 2022
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Brian Potter
70
10
Reading List 05/03/25
Blackout in Spain and Portugal, Chinese robot adoption, energy maneuverability theory, the Florida real estate market, battery manufacturing…
May 3
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Brian Potter
52
2
Why Do We Need Infrastructure Policy?
My title at IFP is "Senior Infrastructure Fellow," which means that in addition to publishing this newsletter, I do work related to infrastructure…
Sep 1, 2023
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Brian Potter
73
6
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