The posts for June will be released over the next couple days, with regular programming resuming from Sunday onwards.
1. Supply Scepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability
- The phenomenon: Supply scepticism is the belief, held by a very large number of activists, renters, and community members, that adding more market-rate housing doesn’t help affordability and may actually raise prices. This coalition increasingly blocks housing proposals, joining forces with traditional NIMBY resistance.
- Both economic theory and real-world data show increasing supply does moderate price growth, even in tight urban markets. Limiting supply reduces economic productivity, imposes environmental costs, and exacerbates inequality.
- Sceptic argument 1: Land is scarce, so it should be used only for affordable housing. Counter: Land can be used more intensively by allowing for more dense housing, and market-rate projects often include affordable units through inclusionary policies.
- Sceptic argument 2: New supply is all luxury, and won’t benefit the poor. Counter: Supply in one segment relieves pressure elsewhere. Filtering down is real, it’s how much of the affordable rental stock historically emerges. !
- Sceptic argument 3: More supply induces more demand. Counter: Housing demand isn’t “infinitely elastic”. Unlike motorways, housing is a rivalrous and excludable good: Only one household occupies a home, so the extra unit does not diminish the usefulness of neighbouring homes. Added supply still lowers pressure on prices, even if some new demand follows.
- Sceptic argument 4: New buildings raise local rents through gentrification. Counter: Evidence is mixed, but blocking development often increases displacement risk by tightening supply further.
- Supply Scepticism: Housing Supply and Affordability – NYU Furman Center
2. Intriguing Engineering Feats for 2025
A global snapshot of real-world tech launches: rockets, robotaxis, AI memory, and more. Highlights:
- MethaneSAT will soon make high-resolution emissions data public, offering transparency and climate accountability on a new scale.
- The U.S. begins vitrifying Cold War-era nuclear waste at Hanford, turning radioactive sludge into stable glass blocks.
- Airhart’s Sling aircraft promises a one-hour training path to flight, though the $500k price tag will clip most wings.
- India’s Agri Stack aims to revolutionise farm data integration for 60M small-scale farmers, streamlining aid and disaster response.
- Baidu expects its Apollo Go robotaxi fleet to become the world’s first profitable autonomous taxi network, by slashing vehicle production costs to just $28k.
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- High-bandwidth memory (HBM4) will power next-gen AI, while high-NA EUV chipmaking may extend Moore’s Law into late 2020s.
- 9 Intriguing Engineering Feats for 2025 – IEEE Spectrum
3. Asperholm et al. – Living Conditions and Psychological Sex Differences
A meta-meta-analysis on how wealth and equality shape psychological sex differences, sometimes counterintuitively.
- Reviews 54 studies and performs new analyses on 27 large datasets, linking national conditions to sex differences in traits and cognition.
- Finds that sex differences in personality, negative emotion, and episodic memory are _ larger _ in countries with higher living standards.
- In contrast, differences in sexual behaviour, partner preferences, and maths ability are smaller in these same countries.
- Economic indicators (like GDP) were more predictive than gender-equality metrics, raising questions about the “equality = similarity” assumption.
- Suggests a nuanced “gender-equality paradox”: societal development may amplify certain psychological sex differences rather than erase them.
- Living Conditions and Psychological Sex Differences – Perspectives on Psychological Science