Technology as a Search Problem
One of my ongoing research interests is understanding the nature of technological progress: How does new technology come into the world and improve over time?
TechEconomics
Construction Physics.
Brian Potter on buildings, infrastructure, industrial technology, and how things actually get made.
Recent essays
30 of 53Reading List 11/7/2026
Florida’s property tax rollback, projected PCB shortages, the end of Tesla’s Cybertruck, the lack of progress in carbon storage, and more.
How Do Building Codes Affect the Price of Housing?
A great deal of effort has gone into understanding the regulatory burden on housing construction, and the extent to which it contributes to high housing prices.
Reading List 10/31/26
Space fiber optic cable manufacturing, nuclear district heating, Spain’s high-speed rail crash, China’s spaceplane, and more.
A New Kind of Chemistry
Thanks to Kyle Schiller at Marathon Fusion for conversations and information that informed this essay.
Reading List 10/24/26
Minimum lot sizes, Boeing’s next 737 MAX, Fervo short sellers, Figure AI’s training data, and more.
Reading List 10/17/26
Icon’s fundraising, employment in China’s solar industry, grid-scale battery reliability, Tesla’s flying roadster, and more.
How to Train Your Robot
The enormous advance in AI capabilities over the last several years has in large part been driven by the availability of vast amounts of training data.
Reading List 10/10/26
Propane in air conditioners, Anduril making submarine parts, nuclear reactors on the moon, the robotic hand landscape, and more.
The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen
In 1960, a team at the University of Illinois released the first version of their PLATO “computerized instruction system,” a network of what would eventually be thousands of computer terminals connected to large mainframe computers.
Reading List 2026-10-03
A Senate permitting reform bill, the potential of Tesla’s Cybercab, the Navy’s $200 billion worth of shipyard renovations, returning a SR-71 to service, and more.
Understanding the AI That Drives Robots
An Explanation of Vision-Language-Action Models
Reading List 2026-09-26
ASML’s lack of European sales, a California distributed power plant, Starlink as a planetary barometer, and more.
Reading List 09/19/2026
AirBnB’s housing accelerator, rising steel prices, a resurgence of US coal power, low-head dams, and more.
How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine
If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen this famous image of three iterations of SpaceX’s Raptor rocket engine.
Reading List — 09/12/2026
City permitting speeds, more efficient ground source heat pump drilling, an Amazon Air crash in Miami, cooling paint, and more.
Where Has Construction Automation Been Successful?
Construction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car.
Reading List - 09/05/2026
SpaceX’s turbine blade factory, Fervo’s deal with Google, Delhi’s cheap metro, why recycling is overrated, and more.
How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part III
This is my third and final essay looking at the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and how it’s likely to affect housing supply.
Reading List 08/29/26
Sinking London homes, US magnesium manufacturing, the World Humanoid Robot games, catastrophic flooding in Nepal, and more.
How the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Works
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is the largest crude oil storage facility in the world.
Reading List 08/22/26
Los Angeles’ ADUs, electrical transformer manufacturing, gas turbine power plants, how water in the Colorado River is used, and more.
Reading List — 08/15/2026
Home price declines, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, The Boring Company fundraising, and more.
How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part II
This is the second installment of my look under the hood of the recently passed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, looking at what each provision actually does and trying to suss out its actual impact on housing supply.
Reading List 08/08/2026
The Endangered Species Act and housing production, why it’s hard for LEGO to use 3D printing, robotic welding and shipbuilding, modular data centers, and more.
What Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Do for Housing Supply?
A few weeks ago the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law. This is an enormous housing bill that’s been in the works for roughly a year — I first discussed it on Statecraft back in 2025 — and folks are optimistic that it will, per its description, “incre…
Reading List 08/01/26
Pepper-spray drones, China’s chip Manhattan Project, Commonwealth Fusion’s fundraise, and a proposed Dulles Airport renovation.
Why Is Everyone Trying to Build a Solid-State Battery?
A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material.
Reading List 07/25/26
China’s EV subsidies, the future of aeroderivative gas turbines, a US-Saudi nuclear deal, defective roadway guardrails, and more.
Can We Lower Construction Costs with Cheaper Labor or Materials?
Last time in our series on the nature of the construction productivity problem, we looked at economies of scale, finding that capturing economies of scale in homebuilding is difficult.