Obesity drugs, Belgium Travel, UnConference invite.
Unconference invite. Belgium visit. Obesity drugs. Paul Graham. Upcoming podcast with Fuschia Dunlop. Barbie, anti-cars, cows
Unconference invite Sep 15
Belgium visit: transport, planning and toilets
Obesity drugs: very positive data
Paul Graham: podcast with Tyler Cowen
Upcoming podcast with Fuschia Dunlop
Links: Barbie, anti-car, breeding cows; insurance and ergodicity
Thanks to everyone who came to the meet-up. Lovely to meet you all. My next co-hosted event is a Sep 15 UnConference at Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator UnConference 2023 with the title:
How can we accelerate towards a fair and sustainable future?
Invite is here. Do register. Previous notes on the UnConference section on Civic Future’s Progress summit are here.
Date: Friday, 15 September | Approx 9am to 5pm
Venue: Chatham House, 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE
Do Come: link to register here.
I was away in Belgium. My summary observations on transport, architect planning, chips (french fries), food, African diaspora and toilets.
Belgium has higher GDP per capita than the UK overall but in a similar ball park to the London-Oxford-Cambridge area. Brussels (1.2m people) is richer than London (9m people) but not central London (1m people). As observed by John Burn-Murdoch in the FT recently, London does much of the GDP lifting for the UK.
I had observations on transport, architecture planning, chips (french fries), food, African diaspora and toilets.
The transport appeared to be very well connected, reliable, fast and cheap. A mix of trains, buses and trams (there was some biking but not like Netherlands, and maybe even a little under London). Urban planner, Alain Bertaud argues that transport infrastructure is one of the main items a city / government has to get right. He views cities as labour markets.
Interestingly, we observed an amount of anti-social behaviour towards public transport. Anger from people due to late transport, or just missing a tram / transport; and lots of graffiti. The UK seems potentially to have less of this due to pro-social communications (respect adverts, “see it say it sort it”, art works?) There also seemed to be quite a number of people who don't appear to bother to pay (they might have passes as much of Brussels travel is free for residents) but I judged there was significant free riding (difficult to say whether at higher/lower levels than London). Those are really the only negatives I saw. The dense transport networks allows very easy travel and presumably allows agglomeration benefits to accrue over a wider area. This transport and urban density, I posit, is an important factor in Belgium wealth made more important by the increasing value of human capital and intangible spillovers (cf Westlake and Haskel).
Still, local and regional transport is super great (as it is in Netherlands) and I think there is an emerging consensus that the UK, out of London, could really do with this. (And, perhaps, for all its faults TfL as an overall net positive to London).
In Brussels, many of the buildings rise 6 stories up. While this is true of very centre of London. It seemed true of Brussels into the very wealthy areas out of the centre as well. Offsetting this, there are many public squares/triangles ranging from very large to the small. Typically there are cafes, bars surrounding these squares and people eating and drinking outside even in cool weather.
This spills over in the neighbourhoods we walked around. Many cafes and small bistros had chairs spilling out into the streets.
In England the buggy, disability stakeholders and the local council planning would not tolerate this level of outdoor cafe seats. It seems obvious to me this is cultural. Many pavements were also cobbled.
At the margin, I judge it helps these small businesses stay profitable. At the cultural side, there is some kind of mild mingling effect going on.
Overall, I judge this is a positive effect. The one mobility incidence I saw just had them swerve into the road to avoid the chairs and no one seemed to mind or care.
Building height: taller than London. Most buildings in Brussels have been built high, it seems. Even residential area buildings seem to be 5 to 7 stories high. The equivalent in London are 2 to 4 stories.
There tends to be wider boulevards in Brussels (cf Paris architecture) to offset the height crowding impact but not everywhere. The residential parts had roads equal or narrower than London equivalents, but 1 to 3 floors higher.
The plentiful squares offset this. There are decent parks all around as well. I’m unsure exactly what density this comes down at but it strikes me as more dense than most of London, with a better balance. The neighbourhood squares help foster community as well. The London equivalents are local shop parades, and some garden squares (most of those squares in eg west London are private). I think this is an argument for the urban densification advocates.
On the other hand, for a large city there were not enough toilets. Due to family obsessions, I spend a lot of time in toilets and looking at hand dryers. Toilets are interesting as they are a microcosm of many debates in society. For instance:
Identity (do you remember the time before accessible toilets, let alone gender neutral toilets)
Health/toilets as human rights (should you pay? Does it have to be free)
Planning (should cities plan for toilets)
And when you think about poorer nations, the lack of enclosed toilets is arguably one of the 10 biggest solvable problems of the world. In the region of 3bn to 4bn people don’t have good access to safe toilets! Yes. Check out WHO or US CDC on this.
There are broadly two schools of thought. The more market based school that suggests toilets should be paid for by the user and the revenue used to maintain the toilet (price as signal, market forces etc.) economist John Cochrane has written about this view. The state capacity view is that toileting is a public good and human right and should be funded from taxes and free at point of use. You can mix these views together as well, and have some paid and some free. I think legislation (enforcing free toilets) in the US (where applied) has not worked very well. Plentiful toilets of both types of system can work to an extent. In the US, cafes (think Starbucks or Mcdonalds) are public toilet substitutes in many areas. In Belgium, there are plenty of signs saying for customer use only, please pay 2 euros if not a customer.
In any case, at least for Brussels I thought there were not enough toilets - paid or free - and interestingly it seemed to be one of the only reasons to keep coins - to pay for toilets.
Belgians are obsessed by the french fry / chip. They believe they invented it (the story some tell is that US soldiers confused Belgium and France in WW2) and they have many independent fritereries dotted around the city. I found it interesting that frites (and waffles) were the two highlighted food dishes, with waterzooei and Flemish-style stews coming in a distant third. In Brussels itself, a high number of Korean and Japanese restaurants. For Korea, is this part of Korea’s increasing cultural strength (as on off shoot of its strong GDP, Squid Game etc)? There are roots in French cuisine and dutch cuisine, but I didn’t feel the Belgian food identity was that strong. Chips/fries and waffles? The high end, were modern French / European tinged. At the low end, aside from fries, the Africa diaspora food looked very good. Whole roasted fish in spices was going for 10 euros or under in restaurants I spied. There seemed to be a whole Africa disapora sub-culture (good looking Senegalese, Ghanian etc. places). I didn't get a strong handle on it, but there seemed to be another strata of culture threading through there.
Last note. The Atomium was popular. Lasting legacy of Expo 58, a “world fair”. Anton Howes and others have argued for more World Fairs today. The legacy of the Atomium would point to this potentially being a good idea. Ghent worth a visit (large medieval centre, pretty canals, church art). Random family shots here.
There continues to be massive news from the world of healthcare constantly. This week there was new data from an obesity drug trial showing a reduction in serious cardiovascular events (death, heart attacks etc aka MACE, Major Adverse Cardio Events). This reduction was 20% vs control arms and was very significant compared to the trials of this nature we have seen. The mechanism is thought to be at least in part anti-inflammatory as well as via weight loss.
I think it is now likely that these obesity drugs and the ones to follow may have very significant changes to society. Obviously through the direct lens of better human health, and the second order of eg less weight related problems (think hip, knee replacements; as well as sleep apnea, fatty liver etc) but indirectly due to a change in food calorie consumption. The average American might be consuming 3000 to 3500 calories, heavy in cakes, sweet drinks and snacks. On these drugs the calorie intake falls 1000, to 2000 to 2500 calories (where 2500 is average needed) and the food losers are cakes, sugary drinks etc.
I think this is likely to be profound although the impacts will be felt mostly in 5 to 10 years time. Medscape article here.
I actually discussed quite a lot of this in my 2022 pod with scientist Stephan Guyenet. Pod link here.
VC billionaire Paul Graham prefers essays to podcasts. Hence his interviews are rare. He is considered one of the most successful (and thoughtful) investors around. Worth reading/listening to him with Tyler Cowen here.
I've not seen Barbie but it has provoked much thought from people. Here is a long form essay from Sang-Hwa:
“Is it fair to critique a children’s film about Barbie dolls for its insufficiently rigorous, somewhat shallow portrayal of feminism? After all, even its diehard champions will concede that its critiques are not exactly original or disruptive. In response, some have, not entirely without grounds, pointed out that this ebullient-pink extravaganza is – hello?? – all about having FUN. Popular entertainment is clearly not the answer to oppression, so all the dull detractors should just take their stale, stodgy scholasticism elsewhere. Besides, Barbie’s message that beauty isn’t everything and even people as gorgeous as Margot Robbie sometimes feel ugly might well be a major eye-opener for clueless 13-year-olds. …
Others have attempted a more clever and erudite justification of the apparent superficiality, claiming that the film is a ‘post-feminist satire of what feminists imagine a perfect world looking like’. It’s true that the matriarchal Barbieland is patently imperfect and just as bad as the real world patriarchy, insofar as the Kens are objectified, excluded, and disenfranchised. Despite the roseate Capitol glimmering in the backdrop, there is also not much need for government in this largely apolitical utopia except the brutal regime of self-imposed beauty standards that evidently still reigns supreme. “
Cars: Away from Barbie, with much talk on ULEZ / congestion pricing here is - at heart - an anti-car long form essay evoking planning and for car owners to really pay for their negative externalities - from James:
“Bakewell’s core objective, in improving cattle, was to make them as profitable as possible. His core insight was that you could divide a cow with two horizontal lines, with butchers paying the most for the topmost meat on cows’ backs, fit for roasting — “gentlemen’s meat” of the sirloin and fillet. The middle section was less valuable. And the lowest, generally boiled, was “only fit for the army”. Over the course of decades he thus selectively bred cows with the largest possible backs — where the most valuable meat was — and the leanest possible lower parts, their bellies forming a sort of triangle.”
A little more technical, but this blog discusses insurance from an ergodicity viewpoint. Worth pondering. Fom my LML lab friends.
“We will discuss the fundamental insurance puzzle – why do insurance contracts exist? Because this is such a basic question, we don’t need to go into great actuarial detail, but we do need to sketch what we mean by insurance. In essence, the story is this: you’re exposed to some risk, something that might happen in the future (a fire or a car crash etc). A bad event beyond your control with bad consequences. Insurance contracts allow you to mitigate the financial aspect of those consequences: you can buy an insurance policy for a fee, and you will receive a cash payout if the bad thing happens.”
Finally, I am hoping to be podcasting with food writer Fuchsia Dunlop soon (hence lead picture). Let me know if you have questions.
Hope everyone is having a great August. Be well.