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No, this isn't about AI, this is about the housing debate. Where we should hope for something better than we're getting. Perhaps not sensibility, or good sense, but how about we start by hoping for sentience?To start with, this defines the crisis, wrongly, as being exclusively about the quantity of homes available. But (and leaving aside the fact we have 1.5 million more dwellings than households: ONS/census data), the crisis is actually about the cripplingly high cost of buying or renting a home and the short supply of social housing – very different to 'not enough homes'.Dig a little deeper and you get the 'supply and demand' argument: 'increasing housing supply will bring prices down'. But this logic doesn't work if demand stays high.Yes, there's much else wrong with that piece from the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. But our hope - not even a demand, merely a hope - that we might be able to observe a little economic sentience when matters economic are being discussed? Leave aside that ignorance of the really basic stuff about supply and demand and focus on that last - "if demand remains high". But if demand remains high then that's the reason itself to build more houses. People want there to be more houses - that's high demand. Therefore there should be more houses because that's what people want. They're actually insisting that because people want more houses therefore they shouldn't be allowed.As we say, sentience in the debate would be useful. But what really worries us is that CPRE has an input into housing policy. How did we end up with the economic understanding of this level being an input into public policy formation on matters economic?

This week we're discussing life, politics, and the power of 'ordinary hope' with Professor Marc Stears, the inaugural director of the UCL Policy Lab.

Streams of Hope Christian School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, offers a wide variety of options for families, including full‐​time school, part‐​time school, homeschool enrichment classes, online classes, and a Friday homeschool co‐​op.

Somewhere along the line that is - a source of hydrogen that is both cheap and also fits in with whatever are insisted upon as the rules of our new green overlords. The reason? Lebensraum.No, not the A. Hitler vileness, back a generation to Imperial Germany. The observation was that those nations with a higher population would survive (this doesn't have to be true but it was thought so then). From that logically, and correctly, follows that more food supply is necessary in order to feed the higher population. But there's a limit to how much food can be grown from a piece of land - therefore more land is required, that lebensraum. In Germany's case, Poland and the Ukraine. That was indeed the line of thinking in those 1890s and so on. And given the constraints of the time (and the refusal to believe in importing food in large quantity) we might not like what they believed but believe it they did.This all changed with the Haber Process - being able to make ammonia from natural gas. CH4 into HN3. Now it's not necessary to have more land, one can slather ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3 and made from that HN3) onto it instead.Artificial fertilizers mean it's not necessary to conquer more land in order to feed the population. Huzzah.But as a part of the Mitsubishi Group is pointing out, the price of gas inside Europe is currently such that there's pretty much no fertilizer production. And if we all stop, entirely, using that natural gas, the CH4, then that old way disappears. We then get back to fights over enough land to feed people. No, going organic doesn't solve this. Precisely because fertilizer is a substitute for that more land, organic requires more land than fertilized. We'd be back with the battles - and also have, to a useful approximation, no land at all left for wildlife once we've fed humans from our now more extensive but less productive fields. We really don't think we'd like that world at all. Our conclusion here being that we really do hope that some form of green hydrogen production does work. At scale and cheaply. For that's the essential input to this process of being able to feed the 8 billion of us. A cheery thought for Christmas Eve, eh?

Conversations with a coalition of Israelis who aren't willing to wait for the government to get their loved ones back after October 7

"Big data" is particularly useful for demonstrating variation across large groups. Using administrative tax data, for example, Stanford economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have shown big differences in upward mobility rates by geography, by the economic background of students at different colleges, by the earnings of students taught by different teachers, and so on.…

Hopefully, states will use this power sparingly to allow network providers to continue to adapt as the internet ecosystem evolves.
The post Net Neutrality’s Glimmers of Hope and Hidden Timebombs appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The Middle East and the entire world need an alternative to the cyclical violence between Israelis and Palestinians. The risks of using the recurring formula –tested so many times with increasingly monstrous results– of occupation, terrorism, collective punishment, devastation and hatred are too high. The alternative to violence can only come through politics. A profound […]
La entrada Recognising Palestine, a prerequisite for hope and peace se publicó primero en Elcano Royal Institute.

Placing solar panels over canals is attracting attention in California. But will solar canals live up to the hype—and will they work in California? Turlock Irrigation District's general manager, Michelle Reimers, tells us about a new pilot project that could answer some of these questions.

If Joe Manchin or Larry Hogan thinks he'll be elected on a No Labels ticket, he'll be sorely disappointed.

The residency requirement for Senators applies to those who are "elected," and not "appointed."

The influence of Australia's deterrence-based asylum policy is spreading across Europe and the United Kingdom, with serious consequences for both human rights and the rule of law. Obstacles to the implementation of 'offshore processing' in particular might force States to refocus on their own asylum processing capabilities.

There is remarkably little rigorous evidence demonstrating social and emotional learning's academic benefits. SEL can also be a vehicle for promoting critical race theory ideology.
The post Does Social and Emotional Learning Work? Let's Hope Not appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

First printed in the physical edition of La Prensa on 27th of February 2024. Twenty-five years ago I had the good fortune to be living in Russia. My wife and I spent almost four years in Moscow. We felt so lucky to be able to travel all around that most extraordinary country. In many ways, […]
The post Russia – 25 years of broken hopes and smashed dreams first appeared on Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Blogs.

"The desire to dare remains strong in society. And that desire to dare is fostered by a knowledge that others will be there to help when things go wrong." ~ Anthony Gill