notboring.co

Expanding the Radius of Daily Life

It is an anthropological invariant rooted in territorial behavior that when humans access a faster mode of transportation, they use it to travel further instead of traveling less. We are born to spread. We like to commute about 30 minutes each way, or about an hour a day. Give us a faster vehicle, and we don't pocket all the time we save. We spend it to reach more of the map.

noahpinion.blog

Will Americans want more housing if it looks prettier?

While the paper by [ Broockman, Elmendorf, and Kalla (2026) ] provides pretty good evidence that ordinary people's aesthetic objections to bad, very unfit-to-context buildings affect their support for development (to the extent they care about anything development-related)…no one has shown that any specific set [of] design standards would materially improve public support for development, apart from pretty obvious stuff like "don't put up new buildings in low-density areas that are much taller than their neighbors")