By Brendon Harre*
The Labour-led government has had a mandate since 2017 to reform the built environment. To change the Resource Management Act (RMA), and how transport, housing, and infrastructure systems are delivered. They had this mandate because of the public’s concern about the housing crisis.
Arguably so did the earlier National led government because John Key campaigned on housing affordability before the 2008 election.
But Labour failed to deliver. Kiwi Build hasn’t even achieved 5% of its 100,000 houses target, and Auckland light rail has become a 60km underground metro system from the airport to the North Shore that will never be built because it is too expensive.
Much of what has been delivered there has been a backlash against, such as, the three-water reforms, and the medium density residential standard amendment to the RMA.
Added to the backlashes and the undelivered promises has been compounding events like the Reserve Bank inflating the housing market in response to Covid.
All of this has meant the public has lost faith in Labour’s ability to deliver solutions for the issues they care about.
Not delivering on campaign promises is likely to be the underlying cause of Labour’s declining public support. Governments get voted out rather than oppositions get voted in. Something if National gets into government they will need to be mindful about because they have been campaigning strongly on ‘cost-of-living’.
In a month’s time we will have a new government that will carry the ‘delivery’ yoke. Most likely the new government will not be led by Labour.
This means in the built environment space the overall strategy can be reviewed.
Labour has tried a top-down, Wellington-centric, steam roller strategy. It hasn’t worked.
Houses are too expensive, infrastructure is too expensive, and what infrastructure we do have is often of a third world standard.
What New Zealand’s infrastructure is like, can be described in crude terms by the following examples – repeatedly there has been shit flowing down the streets of New Zealand’s capital city and you have to boil water in New Zealand’s premier tourist town to not get the shits!
In summary, local government is broken, and Wellington has shown itself incapable of riding to the rescue. Serious consequences, like the housing crisis are the result.
I think this means the next government will need to grow a growth coalition.
What does this mean?
International evidence shows that when local and regional government are given better infrastructure funding tools, they form a growth coalition that implements more pro house-building policies – for instance, they voluntarily relax zoning requirements without being steam rolled into it.
I would be deeply suspicious of a continuation of the steam roller strategy with the likes of capacity assessments. For instance, National’s 30 years of zoned housing supply capacity will be subverted without wholesale reform to how local government funds infrastructure. The subversion process has already started.
National committing to forming growth coalitions with local and regional government would be a much better strategy for achieving its cost-of-living promises. A growth or change coalition would be the opposite of the vetocracy that currently reigns in the built environment space. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes that the public gets despondent with the lack of progress that vetocracy causes which then leads to populism and authoritarianism.
My impression from National’s housing and infrastructure spokesperson - Chris Bishop – is that he would favour solutions whereby infrastructure pays for itself. This could be consistent with a growth coalition approach.
The infrastructure commission has a great little video looking at how New Zealanders pay for transport, electricity, water, and telecommunications services. This is part of an ongoing area of work for the commission. So, there is some thinking at the institutional level on different ways that infrastructure can be funded.
For transport infrastructure I believe there are four hypothecated funding solutions.
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Motor vehicle pays - what we currently use to fund the National Land Transport Fund (NLTF). And this system could be updated with better congestion charging, car parking fees, and road tolling.
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Building construction pays – central government shares construction related GST with local government (ACT’s policy).
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Land pays - better land value capture tools, such as targeted rates, or land readjustment as used in Japan.
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Agglomerated clusters of people pay – in France for instance, there is regional transport taxes in bigger towns and cities. Roughly 1 cent in the euro of PAYE tax goes to regional transport providing entities, which are appointed by local or regional government. it is called Versement transport (VT). Essentially this means the agglomeration gains from transport infrastructure that allows a greater number of people to be better connected raises incomes above what they would have been (and reduces living costs). A small, hypothecated tax on these better-connected peoples over time pays off the infrastructure that provides the improved transport connections.
See this link for the segment of the video that discusses how France used VT taxes to roll out light rail across an increasing number of large, medium and small French cities. Pay particular attention to how in French cities workers are better connected to places of employment compared to similar sized cities in the neighbouring UK which does not have the VT infrastructure funding tool. Note research has indicated the more workplaces a worker can access in a given commuting time is associated with higher levels of productivity.
Finally, when looking at creating a new built environment strategy that grows a growth coalition New Zealand should look to examples from outside the English-speaking world. Because the English-speaking world has for decades under built housing and has the most expensive infrastructure costs.
Source - The Anglosphere needs to learn to love apartment living.
Housebuilding rates in English-speaking states have fallen behind the rest of the developed world
It is noteworthy that New Zealand’s transit infrastructure building costs are four times France’s. Imagine how much transit infrastructure New Zealand could build if it had France’s cost structure and imagine how much housing supply this would unlock!
Source – Transit Cost Projects.
This is a repost of an article here. It is here with permission.
82 Comments
Has there not also been studies suggesting that at a certain level apartment living may actually be negative towards ones overall well being? Maybe the factors are more cultural and lifestyle dependent? One certainly sees a big difference between French and English, how does this input into academic studies for city planning?
In hindsight one could suggest it's our city planning that is at fault. Rather than being built around a central business district and travelling to the centre, it may make more sense to live centrally and travel outwards. Plan various industries and services within a wagon wheel design. Inevitably you'd have overlapping wagon wheels for the bigger cities.
It may be too late now in many instances. What if we were to retrofit all the office high rises into apartments and rebuild the suburbs? How would you force/incentivise the people to change the only way of living they've ever known?
Building apartments is just about giving people choices and there are other housing choices - duplexes, terrace housing, and so on, that should also be part of the mix.
NZ's population would need to double and all those people would need to be housed in apartments before the majority of kiwis lived in apartments. NZ is not going to turn into an apartment nation any time soon, even if we did embrace a growth coalition.
Of course there is a natural tendency to fear change - so discussions like this will induce anxiety - but my bet is afterwards people will think - 'what were we worried about'.
There are studies showing social isolation issues with high rise apartment buildings (greater than around 5 or 6 floors. However, with good design it is possible to get higher density and a better living environment, well connected with the natural world.
The book 'A Pattern Language' by Alexander and others provides many very useful and well-researched design factors to achieve this.
They lived there because fossil energy supplied and serviced their energy-demanding lives. That exactly explains your 'century or two'.
But those were finite, they are half-gone (the best half) and much of the global conflict this last 30 years, has been over who get the rest.
Ex fossil energy, all city bets are off. Those wide-eyed wonderers who think we're going to run a renewably-energised replica of our current lifestyles, let alone grow the total, are....... somewhat divergent from reality. No solar-powered factory will EVER produce solar panels the EROEI is just not there, nor will it ever be (the Laws of Thermodynamics are - unlike economic posits - immutable). Can cities live on local solar input? Dunedin might get by, using the Taieri as a supplementary food-source; Auckland hasn't a prayer.
And I'd be surprised if anyone reading this, has lived on solar energy for as long as me, or on as little as me. I went there first in good faith, and can report back with confidence; ex fossil energy, we are a species in gross overshoot and degrowth will be the only order of the day. Cities ex fossil energy will be little more than disintegrating, desperate slums.
Yep. We're thinking of a move to apartment living - with a view of 'people' moving around: walking their dogs; kids heading to school; people on a night out; people going to work; ships coming in and out of the port, etc. etc. But then we've been lucky to have already experienced all the other alternatives - beachfront, rolling countryside, mountain views, and so on.
That's what is amazingly great about NZ - we have choices. Everyone should just pursue their dreams whilst being respectful of others and of the planet. Recycle, re-use (don't buy new if you can buy used); eat less meat (learn to love peanut butter - lol); share your home, your meals, the 'stuff' you no longer need; your car; your wisdom; your hard earned spare dollars; and your heart. I really think living a 'good life' is not all that hard - we just need to identify the opportunities to share and to therefore have less impact on the planet.
Utopian rant over :-).
"In 133 BCE, Rome became the first city in the world to reach a population of one million people."
https://www.britannica.com/facts/Rome#:~:text=In%20133%20BCE%2C%20Rome%….
My comment was really about peoples attraction to cities being much longer than a couple of centuries. Logical in terms of for eg security, work, education, wealth creation & protection, diversity in opportunity
You miss the point.
Rome relied on vast subsumed external acreage - and still collapsed. Her EROEI turned negative; the usual economics nonsense clipped the ticket (de-silvered the coinage) but that didn't change the physics.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24543829
You other posits are - not surprisingly - moot. As we are seeing, many of the 'benefits' are disintegrating; health, education, social cohesion, sewers....
You are actually wrong on this one. The Sri Lankan city of Anuradhapura was claimed to have 2 million inhabitants around a couple of thousand years ago, hard to say if that's super accurate, but from being there the scale of it is easily in the hundreds of thousands. It didn't last because it was sacked by Indians. How long it would've sustained itself after that, hard to say but probably it would've succumbed to changing climatic conditions.
Large cities weren't a hallmark of the classical era, largely because the communications, knowledge base and statecraft of the times made the formation of such large populations a rarity.
Well yeah, Anuradhapura managed it's scale off the back of classical era Sri Lankans being masters of irrigation. So dramatic changes in rainfall would've interrupted the viability of the city. I believe that attributed to the decline of earlier large Cambodian civilisation (although ultimately that fell due to invasions by the Thais).
That might be your opinion. But people consistently have been choosing to live in urban environments all around the world for a century or two now. In NZ 85% of kiwis live in urban environments. Surely we should make these built environments as good as possible?
Fair play to you. There's a reliable map on how to live a long healthy life, and it incorporates being usefully active for your whole life (whereas a retirement village will shorten a life 2-8 years), access to fresh fruit and veges, regular moderate exercise, few stress antagonists, and meaningful social groups. This rules out suburbia in general which relies on cars too much. Possibly some sort of replicable contained living space? I.e. for Auckland, thousands of small, walkable villages, within Auckland.
Not just a century or two. European walled cities kept the rural out not the city dwellers in. For example my ex-wife's Breton family could enter Brest during the day but had to be outside when the city gates were shut at dusk.
There is evidence that merely seeing greenery is good for our mental and physical health but that doesn't prevent high density apartment dwelling if it is well designed.
I certainly liked living in London and having everything on my doorstep without driving everywhere. I’d suggest it’s healthier too, and I think the stats back me up, Hong Kong and Japan have the highest life expectancy, people in central New York are much thinner than those in Houston.
At the end of the day Brendon is right, let the people decide.
Men in Knightsbridge, a very wealthy part of London, have an average life expectancy of 94.1 years - the highest in the country - living nearly 15 years longer than the average male.
The English live over two years longer than the Scots. I doubt it is the result of white supremacy.
Altogether its pretty shocking and Parnell residents need to pop a cork in it to stop it flowing directly into the Waitemata harbour. Just imagine if it was summer and you wanted to take a swim, probably the whole summer is out anyway the daily volume is huge. Still we are in the shit with Labour so is anyone really surprised ?
You have to be joking. Labour are the ones that want to take the waters away from the useless councils remember. Sewerage in Auckland and boiled water in Queenstown, and National wants to keep the status quo.
Imagine what it will be like when those pipes are another 20 years older.
More like the taxpayer spends millions getting them up to saleable condition. They then calculate the market value is less than what they spent , so they are sold at a huge loss to let the private sector run them more efficently. a few years down the track the private sector needs a baleout , or the govt buys them back for way more than we sold them for.
The most public/social houses built since the late 1950s claim is just playing with statistics. State and social housing (where rent is no more than 25%of income) as a percentage of total housing stock has been falling since 1991. Including since 2017. Currently we would need to build 43,000 more social houses to catch up to where we were in 1991.
Journalist and academic Max Rashbrook has done the numbers. You can check it out here.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/25-09-2023/did-national-really-just-s…
We need to degrow proactively
before mother nature aka physical limits do it for us.
As this writer should be well aware, by now.
Belief - the ability to supersede facts with pre-held visions - is an interesting phenomenon.
If National get in, they will be overcome by events, as Labour were. Anthropological arrogance got us into this mess, and anthropological arrogance is not the way to address the future.
Strawman argument.
Give it a name then put it down - whereas you reference the idiot who said we had reached the last ideological stage of human history?
We have just had a two-day seminar on de-growth: https://www.degrowth.nz/
It's where things had to go. You'd do better to advocate zero immigration and a 2-1-0 child policy. Even then we'd struggle.
It’s not a strawman argument, you’re missing the point. Dwindling fossil fuel, if that’s what you’re worried about, will require optimism, adaptation to the change. Change for the better is also known as progress, which itself requires open minded conjecture and criticism. What we’re actually getting is relentless pessimism and close minded orthodoxy which probably leads to a bad outcome, namely regression.
You conflate optimism with supply. There were the usual percentage of optimists on the Titanic; made no difference.
Adaption I agree with fully - but at such a lower level of energy/resource-use that what we will end up with will not resemble what we have. What are you suggesting we replace bitumen with? Make tyres from? Move stuff with?
PDK you are such a zealot that you have to impose your worldview onto every discussion. You have no filter. You cannot ever look at something from a different perspective. Consider new evidence etc. You made up your mind decades ago after reading one book about the limits of growth...
If I put myself in your shoes I would have thought NZ moving to a system where growths pays for itself would be an improvement. Because infrastructure that cannot sustain itself would not be built.
Not possible while interest and profit are charged; they were both evolved to fit the growth paradigm.
Proxy can be held - economists talk about the velocity of money - but sooner or later its home is to be swapped for processed parts of the planet. Of which there is no longer enough (and increasingly hasn't been since the 1970s. hence the neolib pust to commandeer more and more of the Commons.
Reducing my several hundred reads to 'one book' is a straw-man argument itself. Interesting that you had to do so. I've done enough research in the Limits/repercussions field, to account for a couple of PhDs... Whereas I regard you has having an emotion, around which you hang hopeful posits (the much more common human thinking-type)
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2015/04/programmed-to-ignore/ Read all of that link, Brendon. Then find a Myers Briggs test and run yourself through it. I'll guarantee you aren't INTJ. Apply some thought to how much you don't divest emotions from your thinking (I suspect you have a strong empathy/nurturing bent) and how you might better do dispassionate thinking.
Bodes badly for the species, made worse by the noisy conflicting narratives currently swirling.
I was taught lateral thinking when I was 11 or 12; offspring of a serial inventor, thought-inversion and logic come easily. I know that bitumen is made of, and delivered by, a finite resource - and am quite comfortable asking what, if anything, replaces it? You, I suspect, are not.
'New evidence' can be used to pander to hopium, and hopium assumes there will be new evidence - but when you're up against hard limits and Thermodynamic Laws, there is no 'new evidence'. (like - sorry, E doesn't equal MC squared..) And it the E that I like getting my head around. Also remember that I went ahead (called Early Adopting) in that space - a long time ago.
Our problem is that we are going to attempt to maintain, then we will attempt to triage/maintain, then we'll attempt to maintain a lower-level. All of that will waste the remaining resource stocks - particularly the fossil energy ones. The best move from here, is to identify the best level maintainable given presently-known technologies and go there straight away while we still have the buffer. Imagine no bitumen, and see how many of your posits hold?
Easy answer PDK. The French light rail systems do not require bitumen. If there is a shortage in bitumen It will become more expensive and alternative non-bitumen requiring transport systems will be the better option.
Also to note. If cities become less attractive and self sufficient places in the countryside like you promote become the best choice then cities will not have the resources to build new infrastructure (but that will be ok because people will be leaving).
Re "Also remember that I went ahead (called Early Adopting) in that space - a long time ago."
Pfft - PDK you are not an early adopter. You are centuries late. Thomas Malthus was the original person to theorise about population or economic growth leading to resource overshoot and collapse.
before mother nature aka physical limits do it for us.
This is where you start to scare me Power. I have the feeling this is where the evil side of the generally thoughtful nature of the end-to-growth narratives.
And it will start with the culling of people. Poor Asians and Africans will be the top of the list. Endless stream of viruses released perhaps to finish them off. All for the privileged white people in places like Nu' Ziillun.
I think it's morally wrong.
That's not my writing, is it? (can't remember or think why I'd have said that). - why the italics?
There's nothing in pointing out that overshoot is followed by collapse, or that we need to reduce to a sustainable level of consumption, which is either evil or 'good'. Those are human judgements, not physical or ecological ones.
Hardin's Lifeboat Essay is what you need to read:
https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_ethics_case_…
:)
The landed nimbys are well outnumbered by those in our greater city areas who accept the lowest cost accommodation they are able to access within manageable distance of their income. They will move with lower cost as it presents and industries relocate with incentives.
I've advocated before to build new efficient and resilient cities in reduced risk areas and abandon the legacy colonial ports to the nostalgic who can be left to bear the full cost of their upkeep.
Good stuff, Brendon.
I've lived and worked in many large European cities while being based in London. In the 90s the English attitudes towards apartments struct me as elitist and ignorant. But by 00s these attitudes were changing. Kiwis still seem entrenched though. (The comments above confirm this.)
We need to change. But Kiwis are afraid of change. We're a fearful bunch.
Thus, when common sense solutions, like your's above, are presented, their immediate reaction is to protect the status quo as 'not broken'.
Sad.
The 1/4 acre, if not shadowed and if thoughtfully used, can do a lot to alleviate food-demand (as it did during both world wars). Allotments every block or so, would help too;
https://modernfarmer.com/2022/04/urban-farms-in-detroit/
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/how-much-land-fee…
OK, it can work in NZ. But you should understand it's not a global solution.
You're a stubborn old devil at times.
I liked listening to Bill Mollison, one of the godfathers of permaculture, partly because he was quite open minded and pragmatic.
And I accept the ecological doomsday scenario is quite possible but confused as to why it always feels like we're collectively being held to ransom. Almost like a Jonestown scenario.
We have ample energy. We just need to leverage it better.
Where?
The sun. The moon.
The sun provides huge amounts directly as sunlight (e.g. solar, alcohol, etc.) and indirectly through gravity (e.g. hydro). The moon provides tides that we've barely even begun to harness at but the energy there is truly staggering!
Your doomsday scenarios (not to mention the nonsense you derive from them, e.g. Living close to food production is the only long-term way) are junk.
I've looked at energy alternatives for 20 years, lived on solar off-grid for all that time. As I said upthread, I was an early adaptor.
And I can tell you, fossilised-sunlight energy is orders of magnitude more compact and useful, than real-time solar.
As or tidal, anyone who has done their thesis on it, has quickly moved on to something else.
Oh - and 'doomsday' is yet another strawman argument. Seems to be a common association; unresearched optimism and deflected cause/causal appraisal.
When I was in the UK in 1990 there were abandoned apartment blocks with all the windows smashed as far back as then. Nobody wants to live in an apartment 7 days a weeks really, especially the crap we build the size of a shoe box. You have enough problems with a neighbour over the fence, one living above you, below you and sides would be hell. Deliberately bought a house with only two neighbours, the fewer the better.
Apartments in Europe are mostly human scaled. Five or six stories maximum. Britain after the war had badly designed high rise social housing towers which were a disaster. This set back the ability to build UK cities upwards many decades. Only now in places like Manchester are the Brits learning how to build up there cities in a well designed manner.
This is our biggest challenge today. Not only how do we live, but how many will live? At 8 billion we must be somewhere close to peak population. Demographers are promising us less by century's end. I think they might be right. The little pill has done wonders in the west & its popularity is spreading. Where it hasn't yet reached they still have guns & anger in abundance but it's not stopping the outward surges. The African northward surge is almost unstoppable while the Asian outward one is ongoing, even while the biggest contributor tries to stop it happening. Tomorrow's world is going to be a lot different than today's whether we want it, like it, or not. Do I have any answers? No, not really. Not this side of the grave anyway.
Having lived and worked in Singapore, which is all about apartment living, we'd need a lot of changes here to the way we do things: but we have shown ourselves very poor at innovating the way we run our cities because of vested interest in the status quo.
Changes would need to include
- City design practices (stop building on flood plains and allow medium density on the outskirts for a start),
- functional public transport (huge busses are not working: how about driverless trams or ariel gondolas like Medellín - it's about as hilly as here),
- A relaxation to our zoning and other controls (the world will not end if people live over their businesses or devise their own solutions to things),
- A rethink of the way we design and build (we need to embrace methods like SIPS that while newish here have been in use in Europe and North America since the 1980s),
- Do something about the anti-social way people can behave (resident's associations with real powers, as opposed to landlords who just don't want to get involved - playing the stereo at 11 or having parties until 1am on a Wednesday is not acceptable if we have more apartments.
- Changes in ownership models: co-ops where there are owner occupiers or renters who are involved in running their building, to get away from the for-profit model of ownership and low-value-add "professional" property management.
- Get central and local government out of the way of people developing their own solutions (but that would require a revolution in the self-interested status-quo)
- And infrastructure: maybe pry the cold, dead hand of our history of vested interest away from the way we do things and try new approaches. Maybe let overseas contractors do the work with their own people to leverage scale as we seem incapable of doing anything about the role of a few dominant local players who have not demonstrated competence.
The transport infrastructure examples cited are a little disingenuous as we have a long way to go in terms of density - the urban density of somewhere like Tours is around 4000 per kM2, Auckland is 2400 and somewhere like Dunedin is 410 - and the local public transport often uses separated networks (various types of rail) and can tap in to substantial inter-city transport systems, which we don't have, either.
""Do something about the anti-social way people can behave"" This is critical. It applies to adjacent rural properties too but generally the higher the density the bigger the issue. It needs to be planned before building large apartment blocks. How do our many retirement villages cope? How does Singapore handle it?
Wow that transport build cost chart is a shocker. The way we do business cases needs to change, it’s just a debacle. For example how can a $15 billion tunnelled LR be chosen over a $3 billion surface level, surely the benefits are not 5x greater. Too many consultants out to make it gold plated, each project needs to be the best bang for buck.
Why not employ one guy permanently on a decent salary who isn’t a dickhead with the job title “bang for buck officer”. I’d suggest he/she could save the country billions.
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has made the same comment about NZ's stupidly high transport infrastructure build costs.
Apparently the Mayor liked French trams when he visited the country to watch a world cup rugby match in Angers (a small city of 300,000 people).
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/trams-plans-and-parking-fines-wayne-brown…
He should look into how they were funded...
Cities: New Zealanders make their choice already.
Did you know that each year more New Zealanders move out of Auckland than move there? And that it's been that way for many years. Not even a new phenomenon.
Population growth in Auckland comes from international. So it's the same thing, folk choose small Auckland over big places like Mumbai.
There's been a strong flow of internal migration away from Auckland since at least 2016. I personally know a dozen who've gone to Northland, BOP and Otago. Why wouldn't you, in the last decade or so Auckland's become an overcrowded, dysfunctional nightmare. Here's an article about it from 2020.
https://www.infometrics.co.nz/article/2020-11-kiwis-shifting-from-citie…
So the internal movement of New Zealanders is not to the more isolated areas of the country. It is to the more affordable areas near the cities. Selwyn and Waimakariri near Christchurch, regional Wellington north of the city, and the parts of Northland, Waikato and Coromandel close to Auckland.
The problem is unaffordable housing, which in large part is a strategic problem related to successive governments not creating a growth or change coalition that includes tools where the local gains from infrastructure delivery can pay for the cost of building the infrastructure.
The people I know who made the move owned property in Auckland. They cashed up and for the same money or less bought nicer properties with more land in towns and cities without Auckland's disadvantages (although Tauranga is bad now too). Some were able to get work transfers or work remotely but others took pay cuts to leave.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/the-listener/politics/market-research-rather…
This is probably the main reason why Labour and Narional are giving us poorly thought through campaign promises like GST off fruit and veges and changes to tax system that will not generate the income promised rather than actual policies that will deliver solutions to the problems people care about.
This quote from the above article reinforces how the forces of vetocracy have an easier political task compared to those who want to form a coalition to make a positive change.
"Lees-Marshment is an academic – she is careful not to make any of the moral judgments that Hooton dispenses. But she does feel that market research is often more of a guide on what not to do. It tells politicians what the public doesn’t like but since the public are not policy experts, they can’t generate solutions, she says.
This matches Hooton’s experience as a lobbyist. “In politics, if you want to prevent something from happening you can probably succeed if you know what you’re doing,” he says. “But if a client wants to make something positive happen, that’s very hard – even if it’s in the interests of the country.”
People who are brave enough to research, think and learn, might like to compare the article with this:
https://res.cloudinary.com/rampi/image/upload/v1695301863/merz-et-al-20…
The contrast is stunning.
Add in this: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/88-robert-sapolsky
And maybe we understand the cognitive dissonance.
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