New and Old #253
Density and happiness, industrial policy for cosmetics, a Strong Towns/YIMBY crossover, and impossible Atari games
Does density hurt happiness?, Happy Cities, Tristan Cleveland, January 17, 2024
Our clearest result is that density is not associated with lower happiness. People can be happy in single family homes, duplexes, townhomes, or high-density apartment buildings. And they can be unhappy in these places.
What does matter for wellbeing is whether people have access to local shops, services, jobs, and other destinations. Residents who had a shorter commute to work were more likely to have social ties with their neighbours, and reported greater overall happiness. People who live near parks were more likely to feel a sense of trust towards their neighbourhood, measured with the question, “If you lost your wallet, do you think you would get it back?” In communities where residents reported a greater sense of trust and belonging, meanwhile, people felt greater overall happiness and social connectedness.
This brings to mind Bonnie Kristian’s recent piece, “Density is not the point of density,” arguing much the same. Density is good, obviously, as a matter of housing people who would otherwise struggle to find homes. But it should go alongside and work towards the whole package of urbanism and community. What this means is that urbanism is easier to sell than density, per se. But it also means that density is not a bogeyman in and of itself.
Shiseido’s Fall, Japanese Cosmetics, & Did You Know China Has an Industrial Policy for Lipstick?, Governance Cybernetics, Dave Deek, January 21, 2026
This is an interesting piece on industrial policy, with a sidenote of the enduring yet eroding premium of “made in Japan”:
The China cycle repeats across industries because it’s policy, it’s clearly not an accident.
Foreign companies enter China seeking growth, build up local competitors through market development and knowledge transfer, then watch their position erode as Chinese brands capture the capabilities they helped create. Harvard researchers studying the auto sector measured this directly: when a joint venture model scored one standard deviation higher on quality, affiliated domestic firms improved by 0.098 standard deviations in those same dimensions. Worker flows and supplier overlaps transmitted roughly 54% of this knowledge transfer. The USTR’s Section 301 investigation documented the explicit strategy: “introduce, digest, absorb, and re-innovate” foreign technologies, a deliberate approach outlined in China’s technology development plans.
What makes China’s approach distinctive is its comprehensiveness. No sector is too small or too consumer-facing to escape strategic cultivation.
Consider cosmetics. Historically regarded as pure marketing, not technology. Lipstick and moisturizer. The kind of industry you’d expect governments to ignore entirely….
Assume China has an industrial policy for your industry. The cosmetics case proves that no sector is too consumer-facing, too marketing-driven, too apparently trivial. If five ministries will coordinate on moisturizer, nothing is safe. Plan accordingly.
If this interests you, read the whole thing.
Interview with Jeff Fong, Free Range City, Andrew Burleson, January 30, 2026
Burleson is in the Strong Towns corner of urbanism/housing, while Fong is a YIMBY, so this is a good conversation on some of the different agreements and tensions there. Check it out!
I’ve been playing through Atari 50 on my Nintendo Switch; it’s an excellent compendium of Atari games plus documents and interviews with programmers and enthusiasts, that puts together the basic sweep of company’s golden age, fall, and modern comeback of sorts.
One of the themes of the interviews is the difficulty of programming increasingly advanced state-of-the-art games for the aging Atari 2600, which was already old in the early 1980s, and the programming wizardry that allowed programmers to squeeze water out of the rock.
Though this one was never released—a Xevious port for the Atari 2600—it was developed almost to completion, and it basically should be not be capable of running on Atari 2600 hardware. This fan website explains it a bit along with screenshots of the prototype playing. I think this kind of thing is really cool.
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