Research & publications

Principal Investigator: Wilson Prichard

Digital systems are central to sustainable property tax administration, but many lower-income countries are still overly reliant on manual processes or highly imperfect digital systems. Existing digital systems often lack key functionality and cannot integrate effectively across government, while procurement of new systems has often resulted in overly costly software that lacks the flexibility to respond to these governments’ actual needs. This project seeks to generate applied research into how to design digital systems that fit and meet the specific needs of lower income countries. The goal is to translate these findings into publicly accessible, practical research outputs and technical tools to help governments procure, develop, and deploy fit-for-purpose digital systems to streamline their property tax systems. 

Principal Investigator: Bruce Schneier

The modern constitutional democracy was designed in the mid-1700s, using mid-1700s technology, and optimized for the Industrial Age. This system, as well as modern capitalism, leverages conflict to solve problems. This made sense in the mid-1700s: cooperation was expensive and conflict could be cheap. Today, those costs are reversed. This project examines how we might redesign democracy today, with mid-2000s technology. Would we have elections, or even representatives? Would we organize geographically, or in some other way? How could technologies like AI make both government and economic systems better in all the ways we want? Unless we can imagine the future we want, we are unlikely to ever get there. 

Principal Investigator: Tom Kemeny

Across North America, one explanation for the housing affordability crisis has become close to consensus: restrictive zoning has choked off new construction, and deregulation will bring prices down. It has been embraced by politicians on the left and the right, by bestselling books like Abundance, and by both the Biden and Trump administrations. Tom Kemeny and his collaborators argue the diagnosis is wrong, and that pursuing it draws attention away from what would actually help. They show that the links between regulation and construction, and between construction and prices, are far weaker than the consensus assumes. They then run a simple test: suppose deregulation did produce a construction boom at the very top of what any American city has achieved, sustained year after year. How long until the typical worker without a college degree could afford a one-bedroom apartment? In the San Francisco Bay Area, under the most generous assumptions available, roughly twenty years. Under more realistic ones, over a century. The housing market is not misbehaving: housing costs have closely tracked average incomes for decades. What has changed is how those incomes are distributed. As the highest earners have pulled away and concentrated in a handful of large cities, the median household has been left bidding against neighbours whose incomes bear no relation to its own.  The problem, in short, is not that too little is being built. It is that too many people have been left behind.