Housing, Thermostats, Conferences, and an Opportunity

Off-Ramps for 8 May 2025

Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight a few interesting pieces that I think you will enjoy reading, and will also signal-boost an important announcement. Please enjoy these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.

The common theme in this week’s edition is the work of the

The Roots of Progress

Institute (RPI). I’ll draw your attention to interesting work by one of RPI’s fellows, and by its founder; and I’ll discuss both the RPI’s upcoming Progress Conference and its Fellowship program, which is currently accepting applications.

More Housing, Less Cost

I had a conversation recently with a friend (also a subscriber!) about a project she’s taken on to build more transit-supportive housing in a nearby city. That conversation was on my mind as I read RPI Fellow

Jeff Fong

’s primer on housing affordability.

Jeff’s overall point is that building more housing ultimately lowers the cost of housing. That claim itself is not new, though it’s more controversial than it should be. Jeff helps to defang that controversy by showing why it is true. Specifically, he identifies three distinct mechanisms by which increasing the stock of housing makes individual units less expensive.

These mechanisms include:

• The Wile E. Coyote Effect, when developers complete projects during downturns, inadvertently creating discounted housing;

• Densification, when adding more more housing to the same land reduces the per-unit land cost component; and

• Reverse Musical Chairs, when today's luxury units become tomorrow's mid-market housing through depreciation and cascading vacancy chains.

I particularly liked the last item. Drawing upon work by Bill Easterly, Jeff considers the 400-year history of a particular Manhattan block to show how neighbourhoods cycle over time; hosting homes that are luxuries, then middling, then affordable, then luxury again.¹

This analysis won’t be so useful for people like my friend, who is specifically interested in public action to create new housing. (Jeff for his part acknowledges that there’s “100% a role” for such work.) But for anyone who is in favour of more affordable housing generally, Jeff makes a useful contribution in explaining why housing production matters at all points on the price spectrum.

A Thermostat for the Earth

[Some people think that] climate change is an existential threat to humanity, and drastic measures are needed to stop it… But “stopping climate change” is the wrong goal. It is an anti-human, anti-agency framing, focused on negating the impacts of human activity. The techno-humanist framing is that humanity should instead create climate control.

—

Jason Crawford

, “We Should Install a Thermostat on the Earth” [emphasis mine]

One of RPI founder Jason Crawford’s ongoing projects is drafting, in public, his opus The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. In this excerpt, Jason lays out the current state of our tools to mitigate the greatest policy problem of our age: anthropogenic climate change. He considers three complementary approaches: reducing or capturing emissions at source, removing CO2 from the atmosphere, and controlling solar radiation through albedo manipulation. They are complementary because they operate across different scales of time: decades for carbon infrastructure, but only years for albedo work.

The fact that Jason puts all of this material in one place is useful. Those of us interested in climate change (which should be all of us) deserve to understand the latest and best thinking about the tools at our disposal and how we might deploy them. It’s good to know that we’ve got options as straightforward as enhanced mineral weathering, which could remove CO2 for as little as $10 USD per ton, and as baroque as stratospheric aerosol injection, which might offset warming from all human CO2 since the Industrial Revolution for a mere $634M annually.

But what really captured my attention here is not the content, it’s the attitude.

Jason argues that the proper goal for human civilization is not merely to minimize human impact. That’s insufficiently ambitious! We should instead aim to actively manage Earth’s temperature.

Climate change, as per Jason, isn’t a morality play, where the sin of industrialization demands the penance of stasis or the mortification of degrowth. Instead, climate change is an engineering challenge, to be solved with human innovation and agency. Our effects on the climate are merely evidence of our clumsiness. Our effects on the climate should should instead be deliberate, systematic, and precise. “Anything that matters to humans should be under our control”, he writes. “The climate matters—so we should control the climate.”

It goes without saying that the technical and political questions this approach raises are broad and deep. But the first step in any journey is determining where you want to go. And when it comes to addressing climate change, I want to go to a place where human agency and ingenuity are celebrated.

Secrets of a Good Conference

Imagine… gathering all your [conference] attendees in a park or a bar, and just letting them hang out. This would be a pretty lazy way to run a conference. It would not be great. But it at least would do no harm. Many conferences are worse than that.

Misha Glouberman

, “Everything You Did to Make Your Conference Better Actually Made It Worse”

Misha Glouberman argues that your typical industry conference is actively counterproductive. The point of such gatherings is to facilitate human connection, and most conferences strive to make this difficult.

To speak plainly: premium lunches, tightly-scheduled programming, and even excellent speakers are often obstacles to meaningful interaction. Round-table lunches limit you to meeting just two people over the hour. A packed schedule of talks usually gives one person a microphone and puts the other 199 in chairs facing forward, preventing conversation. Attempting to add value by adding programming to mealtimes, or to ‘keep to the schedule’ by eliminating breaks, make the problem worse.

Glouberman's advice to planners is simple: do less. As he puts it, “breaks are not time away from the conference, they are part of the experience”, which means organizers should prioritize unstructured time, create conducive spaces for mingling, and relinquish control.

To which I say, have I got a conference for you!

Last year, I described my experience of the 2024 Progress Conference like this:

…if you want a conference to have a specific result, you should design for it. This conference was planned to produce stimulating conversations between strangers. That design was built into both the conference's 'software' and its 'hardware'. In terms of the former, RPI founder Jason Crawford said explicitly that though the team had gone to great lengths to assemble a full slate of interesting speakers and panels, if you went to all of the formal sessions, you were doing it wrong. Instead, conference-goers were to make it their business to meet other people, share notes, and build connections.

Dean W. Ball

notes that “A one-on-one discussion I had with someone turned into a five-person conversation, and then, eventually, into a surprise debate... with what felt like 40 people watching. Not a second of it was planned”. This sort of output was exactly what the conference aimed to produce.

The successor to that event, the 2025 Progress Conference, is now open for applicants to register. If you are interested in the themes of Changing Lanes, I am certain it will be the best conference you attend all year. If you do go, say hello, because you will certainly find me there.

An Opportunity for Progress Writers

Last year's fellows are now leading the AI policy debate, earning recognition for their writing on biotechnology, being cited in the Financial Times on China's penetration of Western markets, and earning the top spot on the Hacker News forum.

Emma McAleavy

, “Applications are now open for the 2025 Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship”

The point of the foregoing is that the RPI finds and foregrounds important voices that are working on important topics, and brings them together in important ways. One of those ways is its Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship (BBI), which is now accepting applications for its 2025 cohort.

The BBI offers a ten-week program that aims to build up the coming generation of progress-focused writers. It does this in three ways: by providing lessons on craft, by facilitating connections to influential thinkers, and—most importantly in my view—building a community.

Writing guidance with detailed feedback from professional editors is helpful, certainly. Meeting doyens of the field like Tyler Cowen or

Virginia Postrel

is useful as well. It’s always good to have access to specialized knowledge, whether in a technical field or in the art of communication.

But ultimately, what writers need—or, perhaps, what I needed—is a sense that the work matters.

Speaking only for myself: the success of Changing Lanes has depended on my feeling that I am part of something bigger than myself… that my writing is not for my own amusement, but is helping to build a better world. Joining the RPI community helped me understand that I am part of a team on a righteous mission. Ultimately writing is a solo activity: a writer is alone in a room, typing, for hours. There’s no alternative to doing that work. (No, ChatGPT is not such an alternative.) It would be hard going, putting in that time, if you didn’t believe that what you did mattered.

The BBI gave me the sense that the work of Changing Lanes matters.

This year, the BBI program runs from 28 July to 10 October, culminating in the aforementioned Progress Conference 2025 in Oakland, which all members of the 2025 cohort will attend. If you think that writing about progress is your avocation, then I strongly encourage you to apply.

Applications are now open for the 2025 Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship

1. I knew Bill socially 25 years ago, when we were both living in Washington, D.C. It’s a small world.