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Thank you for sharing this! I'm sympathetic to the YIMBY movement and appreciate your piece's comparative perspective.
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Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
A preliminary estimate, and a request for better ones.
Summary
I believe the standard literature estimates for the number of DALYs attributable to a case of stunting are too low, largely because they don’t account for the long term effects. This means that childhood nutritional interventions that reduce the prevalence of stunting may be substantially more cost-effective than previously believed.
Epistemic status
Exploratory and back-o...
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Hey Bryan, agree that this is a really interesting cause area in high-income countries. I've written a report on UK planning reform for Founders Pledge. We've recommended London YIMBY, who are working to strengthen Johnson's proposed reforms and design politically-palatable proposals that will actually get through Parliament.
As you know, proper land use reform could have very large welfare benefits so I'm excited to see more work bringing attention to the issue! Now the trick is finding policy proposals that overcome the huge political barriers to reform. I'm glad you think Biden's proposals are decent.
Very interesting report! Thanks for reading.