Ben Johnson

In 1963, an ex-Marine opened a hot-dog stand, by his own admission without knowing how to cook a hot dog. Decades later Dick Portillo sold the business for around $1bn and bought a 130-foot yacht named… Top Dog. Ben Johnson (@BCJLondon) reviews 'The Everywhere Millionaire' a book that reveals that the American Dream is alive and well, yet the entrepreneurial and often unglamorous successes it produces are not celebrated by the authors. theceme.org/book_review/the-…

From today, Works in Progress is now in stock at Barnes & Nobles nationwide across America. We're in 570 stores in 49 states*, including the flagship stores at Union Square & Fifth Avenue in NYC; Georgetown, DC; State Street, Chicago; and The Grove, Los Angeles. We're also now in Hudson News outlets across most major US airports, and the B&Ns at San Francisco Airport. If you tweet (or LinkedIn/Insta post) a photo of a copy of Works in Progress outside any of these stores, share the post with me or @WorksInProgMag via DM and we'll send you a free tote bag as a thank you. If you're a subscriber already, feel free to do it with own copy! You can see a full map of Barnes & Noble stockists here, and enter your Zip code to find your nearest store. *Sorry, Wyoming, we'll get to you! worksinprogress.co/barnes-no…

The new issue of Works in Progress, arriving with subscribers this week, is our best ever and packed with must-read pieces. Our lead essay is @RobinRivaton and @bswud on how China's cities, and the competition between them, have driven its rise to techno-industrial preeminence. It also includes: - @danwwang on Chinese and American second-tier cities, - @tylercowen on the food of Brazil, - @vpostrel on the invention of supermarkets, - @CharlesCMann on the discovery of porcelain, - @salonium on the myth of accidental scientific discovery, - Stephen Kotkin on Leninism's fatal flaw, - @owl_posting on biomedical hedge funds, - @PMArslanagic on the formula for lovable cities, - @pietergaricano on Ukraine as the future of war, - @PatRubenFitz on the Bronze Age Collapse, and - @SCP_Hughes on the social lives of hard-partying Victorian elites. Plus: love and shame in Ancient Rome, making mosquitoes extinct, the return of 1930s dating norms, and why Pakistan is home to the world's best architect. And our new crossword, our cocktail column, classifieds, and more! The new edition has had a massive design upgrade with beautiful, premium matte paper, a larger form factor, and bigger, clearer and more elegant typeography. It is a joy to read. Copies arrive with subscribers this week: subscribe now or by October 16th to get yours. worksinprogress.co/print/

Britain has an infrastructure costs problem. But what's causing this and how can we fix it? HS2 will cost up to £102.7bn for 140 miles. Spain built the second longest high speed network in the world, 2,500 miles, for less. It isn't just HS2 though. Underground extensions cost twice the per-mile average of France or Italy, and six times Spain's. Heathrow's third runway, excluding new terminals, is expected to cost 10 to 70 times more than other runways. British trams cost more than double the European average. Why are these projects so expensive? There are eight key reasons: 1. Planning: it took 14 years, £300m, and 360,000 pages for the Lower Thames Crossing to go from being designated a national priority to receiving permission. 2. Environmental and Habitats Regulations: these gave us the £216m bat tunnel and the fish disco, as well as an 18,000 page environmental statement to re-open just 3.3 miles of railway on an existing alignment. 3. Judicial review: of 36 legal challenges to approved major projects, only four forced a re-decision. All four were approved again, but fighting a legal challenge can add £120m+ to a project's cost and mountains of paperwork. 4. Funding: the Treasury pays, but cannot directly control a project's spend, so it instead requires long business cases. Once given funding, promoters don't have the incentive to build more cheaply. 5. Procurement: currently generalist teams rely on consultants and are more focused on social value than past performance and value for money. 6. Regulation: quangos and departments create regulation that they don't bear the costs of. E.g. new tram projects must pay for 92.5% of the cost of moving utilities, which means utility companies demand a completely new set of pipes and wires. 7. Lack of state capacity: Madrid trebled its metro at a tenth of London's cost led by nine in-house engineers. The DfT has the second highest staff turnover of any department and cannot effectively oversee a project from design through construction. 8. Centralisation: Mayors cannot fund and approve their own infrastructure. If they could, they'd have strong electoral incentives to build quickly and cheaply, as seen in France and Spain. The good news is that every one of these is a policy choice, which can be reversed. Some fixes need only a letter from the right minister and none require significantly more spending. My new @CPSThinkTank report lays out these fixes and how to lower infrastructure costs. If we implement them, Britain could once again build the infrastructure it desperately needs. cps.org.uk/wp-content/upload…

✨ Announcing fast grants for British progress ✨ Have an idea for how to drive growth and progress in Britain? We’re making small grants for research, policy and other projects, with funding decisions in just two weeks. No academic affiliation required. Need some prompting to start cooking? We’ve got a list of questions we’d love people to tackle - on topics like devolution, AI diffusion, financial regulation and more… Apply here: britishprogress.org/news/fas… More on why we’re doing this: open.substack.com/pub/britis…

Premodern societies tended to be rent by terrible wars. In the early modern period, tens of millions died in wars in Europe, India and China. Just one society found a kind of solution: Japan. Between 1603 and 1853, Japan enjoyed near-perfect peace. The ruling Tokugawa family achieved this through creating what might be seen as the largest prison in the history of the world, the city of Edo (modern Tokyo). worksinprogress.co/issue/sam… Most of Japan was governed by about 260 nobles, called ‘daimyo’ (see first map). To secure their loyalty, the government required that the daimyo leave their families permanently in Edo, essentially as hostages to the state. Most daimyo women thus never saw the domains over which their husbands and sons ruled. The daimyo were also required to alternate years in Edo personally. The result was that most of the surface area of Edo was given over to daimyo palaces, or to accommodation for the hundreds of thousands of samurai retainers they brought with them (see second map). This was arranged through an elaborate zoning system, probably the largest use of zoning before modern times. Edo was extraordinarily top-heavy socially: about half of its population were samurai. Samurai were theoretically a warrior class, but since Japan was at peace, they did little real work apart from gentlemanly occupations like calligraphy. Their main income came in the form of tiny hereditary stipends from their daimyos or the government. These stipends were fixed in perpetuity around 1600, declining gradually with inflation over the next quarter of a millennium. Most samurai thus lived in dignified but extreme poverty, their income determined by the favour in which one of their ancestors had stood centuries earlier. The commoner population was also tightly controlled. Commoner Edo was divided into some 1,500-2,000 fenced and gated blocks. These were then subdivided into gated alleys lined with small houses (see third map). The Low City was thus divided up by tens of thousands of internal checkpoints, all of which closed at night. Edo was not under threat of attack in the Tokugawa period and the city as a whole was not fortified. The purpose of this immense labyrinth of walls and gates was to control and monitor the movement of the population. Prisons are useful things, and the Tokugawa system was a kind of success, making Japan the most peaceful society on earth. But it is also a disconcerting reminder of the power of rent-seekers, and how a whole city can be warped by the political exigencies they create. Edo is a particularly striking case of this, but it is far from alone.

I wrote an incredibly navel-gazing essay for the Institute of Economic Affairs about what I think, where my views come from, and how they have developed over time. I actually wrote it a year ago, but it has come out today and I am so old that I have barely changed in that 12 months. Learn: - How I became a wild-eyed obsessive as a teen - What ideology I consider myself to have - Why I don't think that the difference between 'state' and 'market' matters all that much - The reason I am obsessed with the infrastructure delivery mechanisms of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s insider.iea.org.uk/p/milleni…

7 years ago, Hammersmith Bridge was SHUT for repairs. Today, it STILL hasn't reopened to motorists. Instead, the Government set up a "taskforce" that didn't meet for THREE years. No more delays. The Government must RESTORE the bridge👇🧵

I've done it before, and I'm doing it again, because @BCJLondon has insisted on not only punishing me in return for all his hospitality over the years, but also because the Gurkhas are a fine body of men, women, and families, who need our support. So... trailwalker.enthuse.com/pf/g…

We'd like to share a picture of the full team (minus the man behind the camera, Henry) as The Nasir, Bekri, Tayi, and Lawrence Tribute Trek comes to a close today in Aqaba. Thank you all for your support on our historic journey. To further help our cause: sfcbf.org/