Several very good articles in the latest edition the Works in Progress.
1. On the decline and rise of polyester fabric,
Four decades later, polyester rules the textile world. It accounts for more than half of global fiber consumption, about twice that of second-place cotton. Output stands at nearly 58 million tons a year, more than 10 times what it was in the early ’80s. And nobody complains about polyester’s look and feel. If there’s a problem today, it’s that people like polyester too much. It’s everywhere, even at the bottom of the ocean... The problem wouldn’t be about the cloth but about the wearer’s body. The fabric had to be more than color-fast, clean, or cheap. It had to keep the user cool or warm or dry, undistracted by physical discomfort and the energy toll of weight. The imagined customer wasn’t a housewife tired of laundry or a fashionista looking for the next big thing. It was a skier, a jogger, or a basketball player. Polyester triumphed by becoming a performance textile... By answering the demands of outdoor enthusiasts and athletes, polyester developed attributes that pleased just about everyone... Made from polyester, the new material could keep mountaineers warm for long periods, and it dried quickly. Unlike wool or cotton, polyester resists rather than absorbs water... Polyester makes it possible to clothe a world population of nearly 8 billion people at a much lower toll on land and water than cotton or wool would exact.
2. London transportation history facts,
... the same team had become world leaders in making it hard to drive around London. They brought in London’s first pedestrianized streets and bus lanes. They implemented the world’s largest parking control area and invented the concept of residents-only parking – both ideas designed to discourage car use. They began constructing London’s most recent new Tube line and planned a ‘Crossrail’ twice the size of the line destined to open later in 2022. They pioneered policies which would be considered best practice by their successors today, like integrating land use and transportation planning so as to minimize pressures on the network. They even had plans for a system of road pricing that were so far along that they’d had a draftsman design the permits that would go in car windscreens. As for Peter Stott – the head of the GLC’s transportation department and London’s answer to Bulldozer Bob – he was a shy engineer who seemed painfully conscious of the damage that traffic was doing to London. As early as 1969 – well before it was fashionable – he was trying to convince his counterparts at the Ministry of Transport that the best use for London’s expensive new system of computer-controlled traffic lights would be to slow traffic down, rather than speed it up, in order to balance the flow of traffic across the city as a whole. He was even so worried about exhausting the national supply of trees suitable for roadside planting that he convinced the council to buy its own tree nursery.
The article is about how the grand three Ringways project of the sixties and seventies failed to take off, and in turn replaced by a series of small projects
Despite abandoning its roads, London does possess one of the world’s best public transport networks; Londoners who drive into the central area are freakishly rare. More broadly, car engines are around 10 times quieter than they were; air pollution, though a serious problem, has declined to 20 to 30 percent the level of 1970 even after factoring in all those extra cars... The policy measures that made this happen were nothing like the Ringways – big, bold, and high-risk. London’s buses and Tubes were revived by patient managerialism that focused on providing the public with a service they’d choose to use, rather than glitzy new capital projects. The car was partly scared away from the center by the introduction of a congestion charge in 2003, but much more by the sheer expense and impracticality of finding anywhere to park. Vehicle emissions and noise standards are set to take effect over decades, and are so dull that even post-Brexit Britain has no plans to do anything other than copy its neighbors. Not a single person working on these policies would think they were saving London; but quietly, year by year, they did.
3. Interesting read about how while the kitchens have remained physically more or less the same since the 1960s, though what gets made there and how it's used has changed in very significant ways.
There was a series of key kitchen appliances that were invented in the early 20th century, facilitated by the introduction of electricity and running water. These included the domestic refrigerator, the electric stove and oven, the dishwasher, the blender, the kettle, and, in 1947, the microwave. Although it took time for many of these to make their way into normal people’s homes, the changes meant that, as the story goes, by the 1960s, home kitchens looked completely different to how they had in 1900... The new wave of cookbooks led to higher ambitions for home cooks, who wanted to create fine food at home... In the kitchen, the new cookbooks made it possible for cooks to replicate traditional recipes at home. But focus tended to be on how to best replicate those recipes that were born in professional kitchens, not to figure out what the home was best suited for. By the 1980s, a new idea began to emerge: that home cooks could even best restaurants if guided by a scientific approach... recipe writers, and sometimes even home cooks themselves, began to wonder if they could improve on traditional techniques instead of just copying them... So began an explosion of popular food science.
4. Another on the heights of buildings
Initially, the practical functionality is limited by the technology itself – what’s built and used is close to the limit of what the technology is physically capable of doing. As the technology develops and its capabilities improve, there’s a divergence between what a technology can physically do and what it can economically do, and you begin to see commercialized versions that have lower performance but are more affordable. Then, as people begin to build within this envelope of economic possibility, capability tends to get further constrained by legal restrictions, especially if the new technology has any (real or perceived) negative externalities... Construction technology also shows this dynamic, with engineering, economic, and legal maximums diverging. The economic height of buildings is lower than what’s physically capable of being built, and once that economic height rises high enough we will start to see legal restrictions spring up that further limit building height.
The arrival of tall buildings,
Two technologies allowed these (historical) limits to be exceeded. The first was the metal skeleton (first iron, later steel), which dramatically increased the height that structures could physically be built. The Eiffel Tower, with its wrought iron skeleton, reached a height of 981 feet, approaching double the height of the previous tallest structure, the Washington Monument. The second was the elevator, which made it feasible to reach those upper floors. These developments dramatically increased the height that buildings could economically reach, enabling the construction of the first skyscrapers. Prior to the metal skeleton, the tallest buildings and structures were built using load-bearing masonry. The taller the building got, the thicker the walls needed to be at the bottom to support the loads above, meaning every additional floor reduced the available space on the floors below... Prior to the elevator, upper floors on tall buildings tended to have lower rents since accessing them was more difficult (this is still true in buildings without elevators, such as New York walk-ups), giving diminishing returns to building taller even if you were physically capable of doing so. The elevator reversed this dynamic and made upper floors, with their better views, and their isolation from the noise and smells of the street below, more valuable.By the late 1880s these technologies had been fully developed. The Bessemer process, invented in the 1850s, allowed large quantities of steel to be produced in minutes, rather than days. The addition of the Thomas basic process in the 1870s, which removed phosphorus impurities that would make the steel brittle, relaxed the restrictions on the quality of ore required. This allowed steel to be mass-produced economically – the price of steel dropped from $170 per ton in 1867 to $32 per ton in 1884. And while the idea of the elevator wasn’t new (the Colosseum had elevators for raising animals into the arena), the development of the steam engine (and, later, electricity) provided a means for efficiently powering them, and the first steam-powered elevators began to appear in the early 1800s. But it was the development of Otis’ safety brake in 1853 (which prevented the car from falling if the cable snapped) that made them safe enough for passenger use, and commercial buildings with elevators began to appear in the early 1870s.
How externalities brought about restrictions,
As the number of tall buildings in New York increased, residents became increasingly concerned about their negative effects. Tall buildings blocked views and cast shadows, important in an era where nearly all buildings were lit using natural light. People worried about increased congestion, insufficient access to fresh air, and fire safety. New York passed its first zoning code in 1916, which placed limits on building massing. Prior to this, a developer faced no restrictions on how tall or large they were able to build on a parcel of land, allowing for huge buildings that completely occupied their lots... After the 1916 zoning law, a building’s height remained unrestricted, but only up to ¼ of the lot – any construction on the remainder of the lot was required to have a series of step-backs as the building got taller, resulting in a distinct “layer cake” style.
It's interesting that the American cities like New York and Chicago already had several tall buildings at the turn of the 20th century before it started imposing zoning restrictions on height. In contrast, Indian cities have been imposing height restrictions even at their low baseline levels.
About the economically viable height frontier,
Building taller requires more complex mechanical and plumbing systems, due to the higher water pressure and the complexities of handling outside air (which may, for instance, be moving at a high speed). It requires larger and more expensive lateral resisting systems and foundations. While the building is under construction, it takes more time to move workers and materials to the upper floors, resulting in higher construction costs. This all combines to make construction more and more expensive as the building gets taller. The result is that you see a distinct parabolic shape in the returns on investment for a tall building. The point of maximum return varies depending on the city, the type of construction and the location of building, and real estate professionals go to great effort to determine the economic building height for a given case. For an office building on a piece of valuable urban real estate, this has traditionally been considered to be in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 storeys tall... Lateral design controls building height for a few reasons. For one, while gravity loads increase linearly with building height, wind- and earthquake-induced bending moments rise with the square of building height – doubling your building height increases bending moments by a factor of 4. Deflection and lateral sway is even worse – it rises in proportion to the height to the 4th power. Doubling height (while keeping everything else unchanged) increases lateral deflection by a factor of 16.
And this on the case for taller buildings,
Glaeser et al. 2005... found that the cost of rent in Manhattan was approximately twice the marginal cost of an additional floor, concluding, “the best explanation for why [developers] do not take advantage of this opportunity is the reason they tell us themselves: New York’s maze of building regulations effectively cap their building heights.” Cheshire et al. 2007 found similar magnitudes of rent-to-cost ratios in a variety of major European cities. When Glaeser et al. tried to estimate the size of building height externalities in New York, they concluded it was nowhere near the magnitude of the rent/construction cost difference, suggesting current height limits are far stricter than necessary.
5. It's widely accepted that the major share of the value of an innovation cannot be appropriated (William Nordhaus estimated just 2% of the long run value is appropriable by the innovator), thereby creating the need for intellectual property protections. This long read discusses the possibility of "buyers of first resort" being able to get new technologies off the ground. Matt Clifford calls them "venture buyers".
It is this idea – of helping to bridge the gap between development and adoption – that being a Buyer of First Resort aims to solve. Most innovation policies focus on the supply side by funding basic research or giving companies subsidies or grants. These are crucial elements, but replicating the success of a lab like Bell Labs may require supporting every stage of the process – including making sure the product makes it to market. This can complement other ways we support early-stage R&D. Subsidising early-stage research via grants or tax credits does not imply that any of this will be successfully translated into useful applications. Subsidising only patentable applications through intellectual property institutions and buying finished products may lead to free riding on basic research. Generating an optimal level of research may require an ecumenical approach that works at all points of the process. Buyers of First Resort work in two key ways that other R&D support systems cannot: speeding up technology transmission and scale-ups, and encouraging firms to apply their technologies in risky ways.
Governments have typically been buyers of first resort. One example from NASA's commercial orbital transportation service program (COTS) which ran from 2006-12 to encourage private sector to provide for resupply on the International Space Station after the space shuttle was decommissioned. In simple terms, it was an attempt to get the private sector to acquire space launch capabilities.
This was a risky proposition for private companies... To overcome this problem, NASA agreed to be the cornerstone user of launch services provided by the companies it contracted with for a pre-agreed number of years after the shuttle was decommissioned, in order to provide reasonably stable market demand for the successful companies... Because NASA was a Buyer of First Resort, and because it used milestone-based funding that reduced risk for the companies involved, the project was appealing to a wider variety of companies, including, unusually for a contract this size, many startups. One of those startups was SpaceX... Not only did COTS create a global power in the space industry, but it led to a rocket – the SpaceX Falcon 9 – that was ten times cheaper than what NASA would have paid to develop the system in-house itself.
It was replicated in the Covid 19 vaccine development efforts
Buyers of First Resort have also been a crucial part of efforts to develop vaccines for Covid-19. Operation Warp Speed, the American programme to support vaccine development, acted as a Buyer of First Resort when it used advanced purchase contracts to channel funding to vaccine candidates before they were viable in the market. Other countries such as the UK also bought vaccines well in advance of their being approved, shifting future demand to the point at which it was needed to guarantee a higher level of supply.
6. Finally on gender pay gap, this essay points to a study in Denmark which compared the earnings of women who were successful in their first IVF treatment with unsuccessful women (but may have had children subsequently). Its findings highlight the "motherhood pay gap"
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