Last week we looked at trends in skyscraper construction speed for New York and Chicago, finding that New York has gotten significantly slower at…
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(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects. For a correct analysis, see the…
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When talking about (the lack of) construction productivity growth, or the fact that we used to build things much faster than we do today, commentators…
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February 2023

This week we’re continuing our investigation of productivity trends in US construction. We previously looked at single family home construction, and…
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The modern world uses shocking amounts of steel - in the US, we make roughly 575 pounds of steel per person per year. At the peak of US steelmaking in…
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In the New York Times, Ezra Klein investigated the recent Goolsbee and Syverson paper on construction productivity we recently looked at. Klein suggests…
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I've mentioned a few times that I generally prefer looking at construction progress through the lens of cost indexes rather than productivity indexes…
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January 2023

Since there’s more interesting things happening in construction than I can cover in a weekly post (especially if I’m spending posts writing about things…
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Several people have asked me about a new NBER working paper that takes a look at construction productivity (a popular topic around here), “The Strange…
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Welcome to the Rise of Steel part II. We previously looked at the early stages of industrialization of iron and steelmaking, between roughly 1200 and…
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There's a new paper out exploring some of the chemical mechanisms at work in Roman concrete. As per usual, it’s triggered a round of enthusiastic…
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One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the ubiquity of steel. Nearly every product of industrial civilization relies on steel…
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