Archive - Construction Physics

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Last week we looked at trends in skyscraper construction speed for New York and Chicago, finding that New York has gotten significantly slower at…

Mar 24

(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects. For a correct analysis, see the…

Mar 15

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…

Mar 9

February 2023

This week we’re continuing our investigation of productivity trends in US construction. We previously looked at single family home construction, and…

Feb 28

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…

Feb 23

In the New York Times, Ezra Klein investigated the recent Goolsbee and Syverson paper on construction productivity we recently looked at. Klein suggests…

Feb 18

I've mentioned a few times that I generally prefer looking at construction progress through the lens of cost indexes rather than productivity indexes…

Feb 1

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…

Jan 28

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…

Jan 26

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…

Jan 18

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…

Jan 10

One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the ubiquity of steel. Nearly every product of industrial civilization relies on steel…

Jan 5

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