Interessant3 #145 | 🏘️Housing Supply Scepticism, 🚀Engineering Futures, 🧠Psychological Sex Differences
Three Interesting Things for W/C 2025-06-15
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.
🧠 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
Join us next week for three more intriguing topics that challenge the norm and expand your horizons! ✌️
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