I'm grateful to Jonathan for writing this and very pleased to publish it in Works in Progress – he does great work, and I like him and respect his views immensely. I have two thoughts in response. One is that I am not hugely compelled by people telling others what they should focus on. As long as you're not doing active harm to the world, it's fine to work on a less high-priority area than you could. Comparative advantage is not always easy to judge from outside and part of living a satisfying life is doing what you find most intrinsically interesting and rewarding. And entrepreneurship is *inherently* about working on things that other people underrate! There wouldn't be any opportunities for discovery if it was clear exactly what everyone should focus their time on. (I don't have much time for people who complain that a handful of EAs are worried about shrimp welfare either, unless they are actually hurting the shrimp.) Two: even if you concede Jonathan's argument that encouraging nice buildings and places does not instrumentally advance the cause of YIMBYism – we can agree to disagree – I think that it is a mistake to dismiss aesthetics as being trivial. People want beauty and pleasure in their lives, not just boxes to sleep and work in. Cities should be amazing places to be, and the way they look and feel is a big part of that. The greatest cities I have been to are Paris, London, Tokyo, and New York, all of which are breathtakingly beautiful cities in their own way, even though some of them create that beautiful whole from various ugly parts arranged well. I think this is often true of parts of London, where individually ugly buildings nonetheless combine to make a beautiful skyline or street. The best places, like inner Paris and lower Manhattan, combine beautiful streetscapes with individually-beautiful buildings. If you think too much about "units of housing" and not enough about which places people most want to live in and visit, you will miss a lot of what actually matters to people about the places they live and visit. It is a constant error to think that the "function" of buildings and cities does not include "being pleasant and looking nice". This is all obviously subjective, but so are lots of other important things that still benefit from some form of collective decision making – pollution, noise, public order, the provision of public goods. The interesting meta-question to me is what institutions allow for the best ways to make these decisions and resolve conflicts between people.

Remember the time a transit community engagement consultant wrote an article about visiting Amsterdam to see how they built transit infrastructure and was shocked and offended that they didn’t do “community engagement”?

We have nationwide rent controls now. This tribunal didn’t just stop a rent rise within a tenancy, it cut the rent to below what had been agreed between the landlord and the tenant at the start of the tenancy based on a judgement of what the property is worth.

Senior planning academics appear to think that people spend a million dollars on an off-the-plan apartment without being able to find the north arrow on the floorplan??? And that these rules a) increase amenity, b) don't increase costs but c) wouldn't be built anyway???

Abundance usually gets explained as a list of problems: zoning, permits, licensing, slow approvals. Here’s what we'd actually get if we fixed them: Lunch costs $4, like it does in Japan and Singapore. Most US cities require three or four separate sinks, which makes a kitchen under 200 square feet nearly impossible. Anyone can open an owl cafe or a vegan lesbian bookstore. Japan is full of tiny, oddly specific businesses run by one or two people. They survive because small spaces are cheap and enough people live close enough to walk in. A room in a big city for $400 a month. These buildings housed millions of low-income and older Americans until cities banned most of them by the 1980s. A three-bedroom apartment you can stay in after you have a kid. US codes require two staircases in buildings over three stories, so family-sized units only fit on the corners. Most of the world allows one staircase. A new electric car for about $10,000. China sells these globally. Americans can't buy it. A government so dependable it's boring. When a loved one dies, you report it once instead of to every agency. We can decide to make it happen here. The full list has 16 things, from taco trucks on every corner to no more pandemics. I wrote this to also announce that today is DC Abundance's official launch! If you’re in DC, come celebrate and see the G.O.A.T. Derek Thompson speak!

I mean it takes this chart (from a Jericho Guardian piece) and changes it to omit the primary kind of public sector home construction going back to the early 80s. Am I allowed to call that a chart crime?

Exclusive: Another prestigious award has gone to a writer who seems to have used AI as the crisis of trust in the literary world intensifies, @vauhinivara reports: theatlantic.com/books/2026/1…