A lot of UK government actions follow a similar script: 1) The government wants something nice and good, like new capital investment into hospitals. 2) It worries that it doesn’t have public consent for actually raising the money to pay for it through taxes. 3a) It comes up with a policy that the public doesn’t understand, which achieves the short-term policy goal without explicit public consent. 3b) Usually, this scheme costs the public more in total than direct taxation (which the govt thought it couldn’t convince the public to stump up), as with CfDs, PFI, narrow tax base funding, implicit MTRs, etc. 4) Knowledge producers come up with an explanation the public understand; they think it is outrageous. 5) There is a latent demand for further constraints on government freedom of action in the future. This is how we get declining state capacity. Short-term drawing on the social trust we depend on to let governments take complex and roundabout actions with discretion. We need norms against this like the norms against corruption we built at great cost over centuries.

These two houses are the same price. 769sqft in Clacton, one of the UK's poorest towns, or 3,200sqft in an extremely leafy suburb of Houston, Texas.

Eight myths about architecture BUSTED by an expert. I am proud that one of my friends — Samuel Hughes — is one of the most important thinkers in the world. Since he is far too modest to do this sort of thing, and since true fans like me will know him better than he does himself, I have written a GUIDE TO THE THOUGHT OF SAMUEL HUGHES, the contemporary world’s most important theoretical aesthetician of architecture and urbanism. In a concession to popularity, I have structured this in the form of eight myths that Samuel has DEMOLISHED in his work. The first is the idea that survivorship bias is the reason that we think old cities are beautiful. Read on and discover the other seven (and some bonus facts!)