In February 2025, I started curating letters alongside Tom Ough for a journal run by a society of techno-optimists, the Society for Technological Advancement (SoTA), established by some of my friends in London that runs hackathons and publishes SoTA Letters.
In June 2025, Tom committed full-time to his new editorial position at UnHerd and I have been solely responsible for SoTA Letters since then.
Housing Policy
During a gap year in 2022/3, I founded the Better Planning Alliance (BPA) to research the potential of supply-side housing policies in Ireland. I modelled a number of proposed policies, including Street Plans and Accessory Dwelling Units that could help ease Ireland's housing shortage. This was inspired by the Housing Theory of Everything which states the developed world's ailments are easily treated by solving housing shortages, an idea due to John Myers, Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood. Reforming planning in Ireland has the potential to turn development from a zero-sum to a positive-sum game.
Along the way I met so many interesting people and I acquired a co-founder Seán O'Neill McPartlin.
Researching such policies from a farm in the West of Ireland involved extensive use of Google Earth, Google Maps, and spreadsheets in addition to giving me exposure to civic hacking, fundraising, and alliance building. I was fortunate to receive extensive mentorship from John Myers, Freddie Poser, Ben Southwood, Sam Bowman and Arnaud Schenk. I am grateful for the support from Tyler Cowen, Nick Whitaker and Tamara Winter.
I wrote an essay on this project that appeared in The Fitzwilliam, an Irish journal of ideas.
The BPA's activities are now run out of Progress Ireland, a think tank backed by the Collison Brothers, since Seán O'Neill McPartlin assumed the Director of Housing Policy position there in February 2024.
