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Crémieux

May 7

Roughly one-third of all of Japan's urban building was done through a process of replotting land parcels and reconstructing homes to increase local density while making way for new infrastructure🧵

Conceptually, it's like this:

In that diagram, you see an area of low-density homes that has undergone land rights conversion, where, when two-thirds of the area’s existing homeowners agree, everyone’s right to their land is converted to the rights to an equivalent part of a new building.

This works well to generate substantial, dense amounts of housing, and it's, crucially, democratic.

All the decision-making power was held by those who were directly affected, and not outsiders to the situation.

If 2/3 wanted to upzone, they could, and they did!

Read 16 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

May 6

Chinese cities occasionally sell land to developers before buying out all the existing residents.

But sometimes existing residents refuse to be bought out, so developers are forced to build around them.

These are "nail houses"🧵

The most famous nail house is undoubtedly Wu Ping's home in Chongqing.

Wu Ping came to national acclaim when she and her husband refused to give up their property to make way for a luxury apartment complex.

They wanted more compensation, and they fought for it for three years.

Wu Ping and her husband refused to leave their property during the debate over the Wuquan Fa, Property Rights Law.

The debate was largely centered around whether and how China would protect property rights given their socialist ideals.

Read 18 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

May 6

I've seen a lot of people recently claim that the prevalence of vitiligo is 0.5-2%.

This is just not true. In the U.S. today, it's closer to a sixth of a percent, with some notable age- and race-related differences.

But where did the 0.5-2% claim come from?🧵

The claim of a 0.5-2% prevalence emerged on here because Google's Gemini cited a 2020 review in the journal Dermatology which proclaimed as much in the abstract.

Simple enough, right? They must have a source that supports this estimate in the review somewhere.

They cite four studies for the 0.5-2% claim, so let's look into those studies.

Read 27 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

May 2

There's a myth that the Islamic world has figured out fertility, but it has not.

They show the same declining fertility rates that other places have. Barring Iraq, the Middle East has lower fertility rates than Israel now.

Exceptions: Yemen and maybe Palestine, both of which have terrible data, so their comparative situation is unclear.

But, two things on that:

Firstly, Jewish fertility is ahead of Arab fertility in Israel.

Secondly, Israeli fertility might be just ahead or slightly behind Palestinian fertility, depending on the source.

Israeli growth is definitely ahead of Palestinian growth due to immigration, Palestinian emigration, and Palestinian mortality.

Read 6 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

May 2

Relationships between class and fertility and IQ and fertility used to routinely be negative in the not-so-distant past.

But across the developed world, they're increasingly positive, albeit only slightly. In this Swedish birth cohort (1951-67), the transition came early:

In this example, there's also some interesting confounding: between families, IQ isn't monotonically associated with fertility, but within families, it is.

Something seems to suppress the IQ-fertility relationship between families!

See also:

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1692995853399593278

Sweden's positive IQ-fertility gradient (which, above, is just for males, since it's draftee data), has been around for quite a while (but has varied, too), whereas in countries like France, Japan, and the U.S., the gradient shift towards being slightly positive is more recent.

Read 6 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

May 2

One of the reasons people are so pessimistic about fertility policy is because they misjudge the counterfactual🧵

Consider this. We have a country with a given fertility level:

The country intervenes with some fertility policy, and the fertility rate continues to fall.

The program is therefore dubbed a failure. Oh no!

But, had the program never been implemented, the fertility rate would have fallen much more.

This is the counterfactual, and it is roundly ignored in favor of the pessimistic conclusion that fertility policy simply does not work.

Read 10 tweets

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