u/works-in-progress

Lately there's a lot of confident takes flying around on daycare — commentators like Erica Komisar claiming it "shrivels" kids' amygdalas and causes lasting trauma, while politicians like Pres. Obama and Pres. Biden claim it pays for itself 7x over in future earnings, crime reduction, grad rates, etc.

The trauma stuff is mostly speculation — cortisol is elevated in daycare kids, sure, but cortisol also spikes from excitement and exercise, not just stress, and the amygdala claim doesn't seem to be backed by any actual study.

On the flip side, the famous studies used to justify daycare's huge ROI (Perry Project, Abecedarian) used tiny samples of severely disadvantaged kids getting intensive extra support, not just regular daycare—and a bigger randomized study found early gains faded by grade school anyway.

Basically: we've studied this a lot, and if daycare had a big effect either way, we'd probably know by now. Right?

Source: Works in Progress

Many cities face the following problem. They have railway lines that go where people live. But these railway lines end at the edge of the city center, and don’t go out the other side.

For cities with this problem, the solution is through running. Terminating a train and turning it around takes a lot of space, space that is usually unavailable in a city center. This means running a railway line through the city often doubles or triples the number of trains it can handle. As a bonus, passengers who are going from one side of the city to the other can do that much more quickly, with no change.

Many cities, such as London, Paris, Munich and Milan, have used through running to turn some of their existing Victorian railway lines into metro-style services, by building tunnels under the city center. A few other cities, like Berlin, built viaducts (bridges that carry roads and railways over obstacles), while others, such as Cologne, have simply added platforms at their main stations to enable suburban trains to run through. But all of these are big cities, with over a million people, where the property value uplift or extra revenues from fares can cover the enormous costs of tunneling. But there is another option, affordable for smaller cities or large towns: the tram-train.

"1,961. That’s the number of documents contained within a single planning application for a wind farm off the northeast coast of England – capable of powering around 1.5 million homes. The environmental impact assessment and environmental scoping documents alone totaled 13,275 pages. To put that into context, that’s 144 pages longer than the complete works of Tolstoy combined with Proust’s seven-volume opus In Search of Lost Time.

This is by no means an outlier for the UK, nor much of the developed world. Developers must prepare mountains of documents to win approval to build new offshore wind farms, nuclear power stations, or transmission lines – the very things needed to keep the lights on and prevent disastrous rates of climate change. Uncertain, slow, and costly approval processes now represent the main barrier to clean energy, but this sclerotic status quo is neither inevitable nor effective.

EDF Energy had to produce 44,260 pages of environmental documentation for Sizewell C, a new nuclear power station to be built on the same site as two existing nuclear power stations in Suffolk, England. Somewhat surprisingly, relatively little of the environmental statement related to the risk of radiation and the disposal of nuclear waste. More ink was spilled on the impact to marine ecology.

As these are private companies applying for permissions, we lack data on the cost of going through this process. However, a Freedom of Information request from New Civil Engineer magazine recently revealed that the UK’s National Highways agency spent £267 million preparing a planning application to build a 23-kilometer road. The planning application, which featured 30,000-plus pages of environmental documentation, was the longest ever prepared."

"Houston is rarely held up as an example of good land use planning. The Texan city, as recently as a few decades ago, famously had a downtown area consisting largely of car parking. But over the last 25 years, without the rest of the world noticing, things have been quietly changing. Downtown is no longer just a giant car park. The city has become a little more walkable. Pleasant rows of townhomes have appeared in the suburbs, alongside amenities like new parks, restaurants and entertainment, and light rail. Housing has remained remarkably affordable and accessible, even as the wider economy boomed and the population rose drastically. 

What happened? Houston is commonly thought to be a clumsy success in affordability, brought about by its lack of zoning. The truth is more interesting. The city’s planning authority implemented reforms that gave landowners automatic permission to build new townhomes, subject to certain conditions; alongside an opt-out system for local residents who do not want these changes to their area. This policy changed the face of the city, for the better. And yet this has largely gone unnoticed by the rest of the world, even those that are struggling with the same problems that Houston has overcome. Houston may have something to teach us on land use planning after all."

"Medical innovation has transformed our lives, but hardly anyone realizes it. You can tell people that global life expectancy has doubled in a century and watch it fail to register – it just sounds like an abstract number, and numbers don’t convey how different life used to be. So let me describe it another way.

If you collapsed with a heart attack in 1950, hardly anyone around you would know how to help. CPR wouldn’t be invented for another decade. If you reached a hospital, a doctor would likely give you morphine, tell you to lie still and hope for the best: the prevailing view was that once the heart stopped pumping, nothing could be done.

That changed in the 1970s. Cardiologists began to understand that with each passing minute, more heart muscle would be starved of oxygen, and once dead, it wouldn’t be able to recover. But doctors could limit that damage by swiftly restoring oxygen supply with a clot-busting drug or a balloon catheter, opening blocked blood vessels and rescuing heart muscle.

In other words, the idea that a heart attack is something you could actively treat is only about fifty years old. Since then, the share of patients who have died within a month of having the most severe type of heart attack has fallen by two thirds.

Zoom out to cardiovascular diseases overall, and the trend is even more dramatic. People in rich countries today have roughly a quarter the chance of dying from cardiovascular diseases as they did in the 1950s at the same ages. Back then, there were no statins, no cholesterol testing, no bans on trans-fats, no anti-smoking campaigns, no bypass surgery, and no implanted pacemakers.

Diabetes, certain cancers, infectious diseases and other conditions have also become far more treatable than they used to be. A century ago, if you were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, your remaining life expectancy would be a few months, and a ‘starvation diet’ would be one of your few options. Today, you’d simply need to wear a small device on your arm to track your blood sugar level and release insulin to stabilize it in real time. A century ago, it was unheard of for anyone to be cured of cancer, except, in rare cases, by a surgeon’s knife. Penicillin hadn’t been discovered, and a simple wound infection could result in sepsis and death. Smallpox still existed. It swept across the world and killed millions globally, year after year.

I think we underestimate how much medicine has progressed because we rarely experience life without it anymore. But it has added years, sometimes decades, to people’s lives. Maybe surprisingly, it’s also reduced inequality in life expectancy: we’ve seen greater gains at the bottom of the distribution, among those who would have died as children or young adults. At the same time, life expectancy has risen at every age.

The statistics go like this. In 1950, the shortest-lived 1 percent of babies born in France lived less than three months. But for babies born after that, that 1 percent started surviving longer and longer: up to six months for those born in 1960, three years in 1970, 18 years in 1980, and 25 years in 1990. Alternatively, you can think about the cohort you went to school with. If you were born in France in 1900, only two thirds of your cohort would still be alive with you when you reached the age of sixty. But if you were born in 1960, 90 percent of them would.

So here’s another way to think about the rise in life expectancy. It means that far fewer parents lose their children, fewer children lose their siblings, and we grow old with more of our friends and family still alive."

"Western countries used to let landowners build almost anything anywhere. Now, strict rules freeze the character of most neighborhoods, banning change and densification. Why? One theory is that modern buildings tend to be ugly, leading residents to support rules that exclude them from their neighborhoods. If this is true, then designing beautiful buildings could lead to more development. Housing reformists have vigorously debated this theory. Many British reformists are sympathetic, whereas Australian reformists tend to be skeptical, and Americans come down on both sides.

I do believe that ugliness plays a role in hindering development, but not in quite the way usually proposed. Ugliness is probably not a major driver of opposition to development by local people. Local opponents have many other concerns that are at least as important, like disruption from construction, loss of green space, pressure on local services, and diminished social exclusivity. But there is strong circumstantial evidence that ugliness is sometimes a major driver of opposition among people who live nowhere near the development in question. The first group are often called 'NIMBYs,' for 'Not in my backyard.' Let us call the second group 'NITBYs,' for 'Not in that backyard.'

While a few NITBYs are fervent campaigners, most are only casually interested. Their motives are faint but basically altruistic: their question is whether or not, based on a cursory assessment, a development is an objective improvement to its neighborhood. In certain contexts, the ugliness of a development can summon into being a huge cloud of NITBYs, whose interest in the scheme may indeed be superficial, but who can nonetheless be collectively potent.

This model is especially compelling in the case of heritage conservation. Until the 1960s, the redevelopment of historic buildings was almost always permitted; today, it is almost always banned by conservation rules. Supporters of conservationism usually portray it as a response to the destructiveness of postwar planners, while opponents see it as a pretext for suburban NIMBYism. In fact, I shall argue, neither explanation is plausible. On the one hand, postwar planners were no more destructive than the Victorians or Georgians had been: the rate of demolition was historically normal, and cannot explain the wildly unprecedented policy response. And on the other hand, there was no need for NIMBYs to invent pretexts to ban new buildings, as they had already successfully prohibited the kinds of development they disliked in the first half of the century.

What had changed, and what generated the host of NITBYs that bore conservationism to victory, was the ascendancy of modernist architecture, a style that most people demonstrably find relatively ugly. Conservationism was a reaction to postwar redevelopment, as its proponents claimed. But it was less a reaction to what the modernists destroyed, than to what they created."

Maybe it’s a weird thought, but I started noticing how famous certain dates are—like July 14, 1789 (Bastille Day) or June 18, 1815 (Waterloo)—while dates that honestly changed our daily lives more are totally overlooked. I'm talking about things like July 5, 1687 (Newton’s Principia), March 9, 1776 (Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations), November 24, 1859 (On the Origin of Species), or even April 26, 1956, when the first container ship voyage quietly changed global trade forever.