Reading List 11/01/2025

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a new semiconductor lithography startup, how to make batteries more like bombs, AI and real estate listings, a monastery being built in Wyoming, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.

A few housekeeping items this week:

• The Amazon listing for Origins of Efficiency seems to finally be fixed; as of this writing its listing 4-5 day shipping time.

• I was on Odd Lots talking about construction, housing, and the book.

• ADL Ventures, an energy technology and infrastructure incubator, is hiring for a role for someone who can do economic modeling for industrialized construction.

British shipbuilding reading list

The decline of British shipbuilding has been extensively studied, and there doesn’t seem to be all that much disagreement as to the causes; any book you pick up will probably tell a similar story. Here’s the ones that I found most useful:

• British Shipbuilding and the State Since 1918, by Lewis Johnman and Hugh Murphy, 2002 — This book is a very thorough look at the involvement of the UK government in the shipbuilding industry since the end of WWI, but it’s also an extremely good broader survey of the British shipbuilding industry more broadly and the various challenges it faced over the course of the 20th century. If you pick one book on the recent history of British shipbuilding, make it this one.

• The Economics of Shipbuilding in the United Kingdom by JR Parkinson, 1960 — This has some good information on British shipbuilding from the late 19th through the middle of the 20th century, and is a good “snapshot” of what the industry looked like right as things really started to turn.

• Economic Decline in Britain: the Shipbuilding Industry by Edward Lorenz, 1991 — This is a good articulation of the basic “rational actor” thesis of British shipbuilding decline (which is implicit in a lot of these other discussions).

• Sunrise in the East, Sunset in the West, by Dan McWiggings, 2013 — a PhD thesis on the rise of Korean shipbuilding and the decline of British shipbuilding, written by someone who (I believe) formerly worked in shipbuilding, this had some useful information/perspective.

Substrate