-
Making Sense of the Grid: Long Lines, Local Lines, and the Interconnection Problem
Open up your favorite newspaper, and you’re likely to see a story about electricity. With customers and politicians voicing concerns about data center growth and rising energy bills, it’s hard to avoid talk of the grid. But long before this…
-
Steps Toward an Improved Measure of Prices for Transportation
Why does a building a subway line in New York City cost almost $3.5 billion per mile, or about seven times as much as the rest of the world (Rosenthal 2017)? Why did a mile of Interstate built in 1993…
-
The state capacity crisis
This essay and the longer paper it is based on were written for the Law of Abundance project at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Economy and Society. It is an extraordinary fact about the 2024 election that the areas…
-
A Small Step to a Better APA
In 2023, I used this blog to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision in Calcutt v. FDIC as “unnecessary, unfortunate, and unpersuasive, all at the same time.” So I felt vindicated when, last week, in FDA v. Wages & White Lion…
-
A Conservative Law of Abundance?
Ideally, the abundance agenda would be completely bipartisan. Getting American building again will require a mix of deregulation (permitting reform, zoning changes, preemption), improvements in state capacity (civil service reform, limiting court review, changes to procurement rules), and targeted investments…
-
Defanging NEPA
The House Natural Resource Committee has released its portion of the draft reconciliation bill that’s working its way through Congress. Among other things, the committee draft includes a provision that aims to make NEPA unenforceable in the courts. The way…
-
Musk and Ramaswamy Are Making a Big Mistake
A couple of weeks ago, my kitchen started to smell like sewage. The garbage disposal began to drip. The dishwasher wouldn’t drain. The toilet bubbled when my kids emptied the kitchen sink. At first, I thought the root problem was…
-
The Supreme Court’s Green Double Standard
An 88-mile rail line in a remote Utah desert was at the center of the Supreme Court’s bracing decision last Thursday in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County. The legal battle over that tiny project has now led to…
Join the Network
Sign up to receive email updates from the BUILD Research Network, including analysis, announcements, and access to funding and research opportunities.