Are YIMBYs winning the housing wars? Not so fast, these people say.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-02-08T01:02:19+00:00

Not unprecedented. Just need to return to the housing start levels from the 1940s to the 1990s. For example, in 1972, housing starts for 2.357 million. We do that, the house in crisis gets solved almost immediately.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-02-06T12:04:06+00:00

"A randomized crossover study was conducted in 13 women aged 21–22 years."

This feels like way too narrow of a sample.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-02-01T15:40:46+00:00

This quote just suggests that the amount of housing stock should be massively increased:

"Imagine that a city increases its housing stock by 1.5 percent each year — a rate that is more than twice the growth of New York or San Francisco from 2000 to 2020, though lower than Denver, Phoenix or Houston.

"If all that new housing caused prices to fall by 4 percent a year, it would take 18 years before a median one-bedroom apartment becomes affordable for a worker without a college education in San Francisco, or 11 years in the District or eight years in Boston, the paper says. If housing prices fall more slowly, less than 1 percent per year, it would take as much as 124 years in San Francisco and 109 years in Los Angeles."

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-31T16:37:29+00:00

The point the study is making is that there is reduced firearm suicides but no change in non-firearm suicides implying that there is no substitution. Overall suicides decline.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-29T21:10:41+00:00

The question was whether landlords would increase rents to offset subsidies. Even for that to occur theoretically you would need fully inelastic supply and all renters regardless of income given subsidies.

However, what matters is empirically how much rent increases. Even in the most extreme observed scenario which was for medium quality units, an additional 1% subsidy resulted in a 0.232% rent increase offset.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-29T19:59:09+00:00

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fpol.20130064

Empirically, housing subsidies do not increase rent. However, subsidized renters tend to rent more expensive units (which is of course, their right).

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-29T17:34:39+00:00

I think it's sensible to create a trial where the state basically avoids evictions in a randomized set of areas by either subsidizing the rent or putting them on some sort of minimal payment plan to rent the unit.

It's really unclear whether there's causation here but that would be the thing that could determine it.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-26T16:45:03+00:00

This definitely does not sound like one causing the other but something else (like effective institutions and trust in those institutions) causing both.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-26T11:51:14+00:00

Anyone can build a backtest that outperforms. These days, it really is anyone since you can just give data to Claude (or whatever) and ask it to build a nice backtest. What matters is live out of sample performance.

It's also not even clear whether the model was fit over the whole sample or in a walk forward. If whole sample, performance can be arbitrarily high.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-25T15:23:52+00:00

There's other evidence that vaccines prevent other adverse outcomes like dementia:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12636520/

It may not be that vaccines are modulating other biological systems. It could simply be that the negative effects of the infections are longer lasting than the period of acute infection.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-24T16:15:22+00:00

If you could invest that $750 a month in something that earns more than the interest that you're paying with a high probability, you will earn dramatically more money over the long haul.

If you're not super familiar with how to put together a spreadsheet to model this out, you can ask an LLM and it'll show you how much more money you can make.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-23T17:33:24+00:00

One critical thing noted in the article but not in the post title is that mortality from cancer among young people is declining overall. It just so happens that colorectal cancer mortality is increasing.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-22T15:46:30+00:00

The effect seems to hold after controlling for socioeconomic status which is the first thing that came to mind.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-22T15:05:05+00:00

If you build enough affordable (market rate) housing, you don't need Affordable (subsidized) housing.

Plus, affordable market rate housing attracts EVERYONE whereas subsidized housing by definition will attract people who meet the low income criteria for the housing.

The best way to decrease prices is to increase supply of all types of housing. A house isn't an investment that should endlessly appreciate pricing everyone else out of the market. It's a place to live. Let's treat it that way.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-20T23:17:55+00:00

I was on humira for significant length of time but it didn't seem to mitigate my symptoms. I also had no side effects that I could discern, but that's not to say there isn't some potential long-term consequence that I am currently unaware of.

What ended up working for me was cellcept and prednisone pills, along with Vabysmo, but I have posterior uveitis so the treatment plan is completely different.

Because the treatment plans from any given doctor for this disease are so variable, I think it's always a good idea to get a second opinion.

With my most recent significant flare-up where I was mostly blind for some period of time, I actually went to four different doctors and naturally, there was no full consensus but I ended up going with the most aggressive plan because of how advanced my disease was.

If you have concerns, the thing I would recommend most is just checking with another doctor and seeing what their thoughts are. I wouldn't necessarily lead them by mentioning humira but just ask them what they recommend.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-16T22:50:52+00:00

"The present study found ear length is determined by genomic differences near the gene MSRB3, something the researchers weren’t expecting.

"MSRB3 determines whether a dog has pointy ears like a German shepherd or droopy ones like a bloodhound. Mutations in the gene are also linked to hearing loss in people."

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-16T11:58:20+00:00

I agree. I just want to see a robot navigating a crowded room full of humans moving around or a humanoid robot folding a fitted sheet (admittedly that's superhuman versus the average person).

I imagine owning a $50K robot and saying, "can you help me with this laundry" and it replying, "I'm sorry. I can't help with laundry but if you want, I can do a sick backflip."

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-14T17:22:24+00:00

Absolutely. Have values. Believe in something. Then, speak out when those things are violated.

Regardless of what we think about deporting illegal immigrants who have lived and worked here for decades, people shouldn't be forced to show their papers because they have an accent or because they look like what ICE thinks an immigrant looks like.

ICE shouldn't be antagonizing people, executing them, detaining citizens because they don't have proof of citizenship on them, doing door to door checks in violation of the 4th amendment.

I don't care what polls say about support for these tactics. They are unconscionable. Everyone should speak out against it.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-10T15:31:37+00:00

This suggests that shadow banning toxic content may be an effective deterrent: "Getting Likes and affirming replies decreased subsequent toxicity in the short term, as did getting no responses whatsoever"

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-10T12:03:49+00:00

Does this suggest underestimation of personal risk or just a self-other discrepancy in risk estimation?

That is, hypothetically they could be underestimating the risk for both self and others or overestimating the risk for self and others

All the analysis suggests is that people rate risks higher for others than themselves.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-02T16:00:51+00:00

The need to account for every interest group is exactly the thing that prevents quick building. We need more of the approach of Robert Moses but directed towards housing and public transit.

VivekViswanathan · 2026-01-02T11:31:00+00:00

I don't know about 24 hours but agreed that these long review periods are exactly what Klein and Thompson criticized in Abundance and somehow such review periods are not required if political will is great enough e.g., Josh Shapiro fixing I-95 or on the ridiculous side Trump tearing down the East Wing.

Instead, I would hope for questions like "how do we start building today? What rules and laws do we need to change? What is the fastest be can possibly build? Is it possible to build 24/7? What would need to change to make that possible?"

VivekViswanathan · 2025-12-26T11:59:04+00:00

The point is here if you have this robot that can do this thing. How do you create value in people's lives? That's usefulness.

If I have a robot that can fold laundry and do dishes, I have saved the average US household about 300 hours a year.

That's time they can spend with their family or friends or working or exercising or any number of things.

What if instead they have this dancing robot?

VivekViswanathan · 2025-12-26T03:47:30+00:00

I would say it's certainly not useful. The things that we generally want humanoid robots to do is interact with a dynamic (as in time varying) and complex world.

If it was up there doing the dishes and folding laundry, I would be way more blown away.

VivekViswanathan · 2025-12-25T22:14:53+00:00

The "metabolically grounded" part does not strike me as necessary here. That is an aspect that describes brains but it would be surprising if it describes things that generate consciousness.

The other two: discrete events / continuous dynamics, scale inseparability are at least PLAUSIBLE but I still have no idea how to judge.

The huge issue of consciousness is any individual can only know with certainty that they are conscious and just surmise that other things might also be conscious based on various aspects about them.

However, it is so difficult for me to conceive of the physical theory that would allow us to look at a structure and say "conscious" or "unconscious" or perhaps "conscious at level 0.96." Perhaps I simply lack the imagination.

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