If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen this famous image of three iterations of SpaceX’s Raptor rocket engine.

Construction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car.

This is my third and final essay looking at the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and how it’s likely to affect housing supply.

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is the largest crude oil storage facility in the world.

This is the second installment of my look under the hood of the recently passed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, looking at what each provision actually does and trying to suss out its actual impact on housing supply.

A few weeks ago the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law. This is an enormous housing bill that’s been in the works for roughly a year — I first discussed it on Statecraft back in 2025 — and folks are optimistic that it will, per its description, “increase the supply of housing in America.”

A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material.

Last time in our series on the nature of the construction productivity problem, we looked at economies of scale, finding that capturing economies of scale in homebuilding is difficult.

Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.

For the better part of the last several hundred years, coal was the fuel of choice for generating power.

A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder) by randomly combining increasingly useful existing components.

Many folks, including me, have observed that it seems to take much longer to build infrastructure in the US than it used to.

A major shift in the housing market in the last several years is the rapidly increasing popularity of “build-to-rent” homes — single-family homes that are built specifically for the purpose of being rented out.

Mostly not very long

Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Not long ago we looked at construction productivity trends for the US and for countries around the world. We found that in the U.S., and in most other large, wealthy countries, construction productivity is stagnant or declining. Unlike manufacturing and agriculture, or the economy overall, which generally show improving productivity over time, in the field of construction we find that productivity tends to at best stay constant, and at worst decline over time.

As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.

It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods.

Many who look at the high and rising cost of housing see the problem as fundamentally one of production methods; more specifically, that homes could be built more cheaply if they were made using factories and industrialized processes, instead of assembling them on site using manual labor and hand-held tools.

A theme running through my book is the idea that efficiency improvements, and the various methods for making products cheaper over time, have historically been dependent on some degree of repetition, on running your production process over and over again.

(This is a chapter of a longer report I’m working on that summarizes and expands the last several years of my work on construction productivity.

A theory that has gained traction in the renewable energy space is that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are based on manufactured “technologies”, while fossil fuel energy sources like oil, coal, and natural gas are based on extracted “commodities”.

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology.

This American Enterprise Institute chart, which breaks down how price changes for different types of goods and services in the consumer price index, has by now become very widely known.

The last several decades of technological progress have, in large part, been about finding more and more things we can do with semiconductors and the technology for producing them.

You’ve probably seen this famous graph that breaks out various categories of inflation, showing labor-intensive services getting more expensive during the 21st century and manufactured goods getting less expensive.

A common sentiment I see with folks interested in improving US homebuilding is that we should try and emulate Sweden.

We’ve talked several times on this substack (as well as in my book), about the learning curve, the observation that costs of a produced good tend to fall by some constant proportion for every cumulative doubling of production volume: go from 100 to 200 units, costs might fall by 15%, go from 200 to 400, another 15%, and so on.

Bell Labs, as we’ve noted before, was for years America’s premier industrial research lab.

We’ve spent a lot of time examining the problem of construction productivity in the US — the fact that, across a variety of different metrics, construction never seems to get any more efficient (in terms of how much output you get for a given amount of input), or any cheaper.

The US government had a hand in creating much of the early computer industry.

I am pleased to cross-post this piece with Factory Settings, the new Substack from IFP.

Chapter 1 of my book “The Origins of Efficiency”

The early history of the United States runs along with the first years of the railroad.

From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world.

Last week I wrote about the unexplained rise in pedestrians killed by motor vehicles in the US.

My book, the Origins of Efficiency, is out today!

It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US.

One of the most important inventions of the 19th century was mauve dye, the first synthetic aniline dye.

The last several years in the US have seen a dramatic increase in electricity prices.

The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And most of us probably know that the bomb was built by some of the world’s best physicists, working under Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in New Mexico. But the Manhattan Project was far more than just a science project: building the bombs required an enormous industrial effort of unprecedented scale and complexity. Enormous factory complexes were built using hundreds of millions of dollars worth of never-before-constructed equipment. Scores of new machines, analytical techniques, and methods of working with completely novel substances had to be invented. Materials which had never been produced at all, or only produced in tiny amounts, suddenly had to be manufactured in vast quantities.

But there are also some issues with how the Berkeley Lab report is estimating it.

Ford’s status as a large-volume car producer began with the predecessor to the Model T: the Model N, a four-cylinder, two-seater car initially priced at $500. At the time, the average car in the US cost more than $2,000, and it seemed nearly unimaginable that a car with the capabilities of the Model N could cost so littl

Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.