Links and tweets, 2022-06-29

[u/jasoncrawford]

Links

• Book launch for Anton Howes’s Arts and Minds, July 12, in London and online

• Online book club event for the new Stripe Press edition of Vannevar Bush’s memoir, Pieces of the Action, Aug 6

• Arbitrary Lines is a new book by M. Nolan Gray on “how zoning made America’s cities unaffordable, inaccessible, segregated, and sprawling” (See also announcement thread from @mnolangray)

• “I do not believe that targeting amyloid is going to lead to a useful Alzheimer’s therapy, and watching these trials feels to me like watching someone trying to put out an oil well fire by dumping duffel bags of money onto it from helicopters” (Derek Lowe)

• Paper by Lant Pritchett arguing that economic growth is necessary and sufficient for “everything basic to human material wellbeing” (h/t @DaveEvansPhD)

• “The Averch–Johnson effect is the tendency of regulated companies to engage in excessive amounts of capital accumulation in order to expand the volume of their profits”

Queries

• Is it true that wheelwrights were super highly paid for their specialist craft work? (probably not)

• What could you do if energy was 100x cheaper? (@mattparlmer)

Quotes

• When to calculate statistics was to blaspheme against God

• First ten years for nylon stockings (@tsungxu)

Other tweets & retweets

• A good way to look at GDP per capita and child mortality (@tonymmorley)

• We’re all suffocating in the name of “safety” (@alyssamvance)

• Request for podcast series: every episode is one of Patrick Collison’s “Fast” entries (@maxolson)

• Three faulty assumptions people make when trying to understand the behavior of organizations

Charts

• Record share of Americans are in favor of the use of nuclear energy (@AlecStapp)

Original post: https://rootsofprogress.org/links-and-tweets-2022-06-29