How Long Does It Take to Plan a Bridge?
Many folks, including me, have observed that it seems to take much longer to build infrastructure in the US than it used to.
TechEconomics
Construction Physics.
Brian Potter on buildings, infrastructure, industrial technology, and how things actually get made.
Recent essays
30 of 34Reading List 05/30/26
A California chemical leak, weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor startups, a startup that will clean your house to get robot training data, Blue Origin’s rocket explosion, and more.
Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding?
Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.
Reading List 05/23/26
Squatter removal services, Apple finding uses for defective chips, process heat use in California, the brewing Colorado River crisis, and more.
The Rise of Build-to-Rent Housing
A major shift in the housing market in the last several years is the rapidly increasing popularity of “build-to-rent” homes — single-family homes that are built specifically for the purpose of being rented out.
Reading List 05/16/26
Tokyo’s cheap housing and expensive land, the House response to the Senate housing bill, an IED near an Alabama dam, Fervo’s IPO, and more.
Reading List 05/09/2026
Trapped buildings, in-home data centers, cardboard military drones, Brightline’s potential bankruptcy, and more.
How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?
Mostly not very long
Reading List 05/02/2026
Chilling effects in the build-to-rent sector, how fast could robot manufacturing scale up, PJM’s new interconnection queue, the backlash against battery storage, and more.
How an Oil Refinery Works
Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Reading List 04/25/26
Transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more.
Construction Costs Rarely Fall
Not long ago we looked at construction productivity trends for the US and for countries around the world. We found that in the U.S., and in most other large, wealthy countries, construction productivity is stagnant or declining. Unlike manufacturing and agricu…
Reading List 04/18/2026
A quadruped welding robot, the China Shock 2.0, transformer startups, China’s mysteriously moving satellites, and more.
Reading List 04/11/2026
Is the Strait of Hormuz open yet, building code cost benefit analysis, Intel joining Terafab, sponge cities, and more.
Helium Is Hard to Replace
The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.
Reading List 04/04/2026
Aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more
Information and Technological Evolution
I spend a lot of time reading about the nature of technological progress, and I’ve found that the literature on technology is somewhat uneven.
Reading List 03/28/26
Plastic price jumps, crypto-backed mortgages, a proposed AI data center pause, US battery manufacturing, and more.
The Age of the Amplifier
As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.
Reading List 03/21/26
Damage to the Ras Laffan LNG facility, housing bubble risks, North Korea’s naval production, Bezos’ $100 billion for manufacturing automation, and more.
How Much Computing Power is in a Data Center?
Every day there’s some new story about the enormous amounts of investment in building AI data centers.
Reading List 03/14/26
Closure of the Strait of Hormuz, banning build-to-rent homes in the US, Honda’s EV losses, Travis Kalanick’s new company, Corpus Christi’s water crisis, and more.
The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home
It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods.
Reading List 03/07/2026
Data centers disconnecting from the grid, solar PV efficiency records, repairs for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Ford’s EV missteps, former OpenAI CTO’s new startup.
A History of Operation Breakthrough
Many who look at the high and rising cost of housing see the problem as fundamentally one of production methods; more specifically, that homes could be built more cheaply if they were made using factories and industrialized processes, instead of assembling the…
Reading List 02/28/26
LA permitting costs, trickle-down housing, Panasonic stops making TVs, robotaxi remote operators, geothermal progress.
Reading List 02/21/26
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology.
Is the Future “AWS for Everything”?
A theme running through my book is the idea that efficiency improvements, and the various methods for making products cheaper over time, have historically been dependent on some degree of repetition, on running your production process over and over again.
Reading list 02/14/26
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology.
Trends in US Construction Productivity
(This is a chapter of a longer report I’m working on that summarizes and expands the last several years of my work on construction productivity.