We know that no Presidential candidate in 2008 will campaign on raising U.S gasoline taxes. While such a tax would induce green innovation, it wouldn't play well outside of Cambridge, MA.

Below I report an interesting case study of a public/private partnership that appears to have achieved its two goals of greening a big chunk of center city Atlanta and creating urban economic development.

Events such as Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, 9/11/2001 focus attention on an issue that people in their busy day to day lives may not have thought much about. Media coverage keeps the story "in the news" and it becomes cheaper for readers to become educated about the issue.

A movie about a politician giving "great man talks" about climate change will surely become a bestseller. My question for you is whether any movie like this can be a policy catalyst? There are 3 groups of people. Group #1 are people like al gore.

The Fletcher School's graduation starts in 45 minutes. So, I'm sitting in my office in Phil Cagan's old University of Chicago graduation gown (he gave it to me) waiting for the fun to begin. I'm actually in the middle of a reflective moment.

Tufts University's graduation day is this sunday May 19th 2006. I hope to see you there. The biker Lance Armstrong will be our graduation day speaker. Is he the right guy for the job? What is "the job"? When I was a student at the University of Chicago, I noticed Chicago asked nerds to speak.

Urban interest group politics is always interesting. Today burried deep in the New York Times is an interesting case study of the battle between "green" gentrification and ugly, dirty auto-parts stores in Queens, NYC.

Suppose you own a car that travels 25 miles per gallon and you drive 10,000 miles per year.

I predict that we will soon see a large number of papers written about adaptation in the face of climate shocks. I read one interesting paper that argued that rural to urban migration will accelerate in LDC nations where farmers are not able to adapt to climate change shocks.

If you are a U.S university professor who sometimes envies colleagues at richer universities, the New York Times article reported below will cheer you up.

The French have done it again.

Now that classes are done, I have more time to blog and to scribble academic stuff. One new paper of mine (joint with Joel Schwartz) that I'm mildly excited about is titled: "Urban Air Pollution Progress Despite Sprawl: The “Greening” of the Vehicle Fleet".

Below, I report an interesting book review published in today’s New York Times.

I would like to ask Professor Daniel Gilbert a few questions.

1.

Today in Cambridge roughly 250 labor economists gathered for the annual SOLE meetings. While I retired from labor economics a long time ago, I keep an eye on what goes in labor economics. Today, I discussed two high quality papers at the meetings. I want to discuss one of them.

If you are asked, "are you happy?" "how healthy are you?" On a scale from 1 to 5, please answer these questions. Should academics take your answers seriously? Or is this just "cheap talk"?

The revealed preference part of me says that this can't be important stuff.

Reading John Kenneth Galbraith's long obituary in today's New York Times got me thinking about whether academics should aspire to being public intellectuals. We teach comparative advantage and we teach methodological rigor but when we go "public" we seem to ditch both.

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