Berkeley, California Rules!
Did you know that every 8th vehicle in Berkeley is a Toyota Prius? Rather than attend the NBER Summer Institute Environmental meetings or the Real Estate meetings, I’m counting cars and getting some exercise walking the Berkeley Hills. The abundance of hybrids in Berkeley supports my core claims in new paper Do Greens Drive Hummers or Hybrids? Environmental Ideology as a Determinant of Consumer Choice. I will post that paper soon.
I would have enjoyed seeing my old friends at the summer institute but I must admit that I have trouble sitting still and listening to 45 minute presentations. Given how fast people can read, a better system would be to require that attendees read the paper ahead of time and then participate in a group discussion about the paper. My method would save time and people would learn more than in a setting where the paper presenter drones on barfing back the content of his power point slides.
I think the NBER summer institute’s great attraction is that it makes everyone feel like a young graduate student again. Even non-Harvard, MIT types can convince themselves that they are “Cambridge graduate students”, there to learn, mix and network. I attended one day of the economic history meetings and one day of the industrial organization meetings. Enough is enough.
San Francisco has offered a recent test of the law of unintended consequences. What happens when you offer free rides on BART, the rail transit system, on hot polluted days? The well meaning officials hope that car commuters substitute to BART and hence reduce urban smog pollution.
What really happened? The San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier & Ross report today that “The highly touted spare the air days spelled financial relief for thousands of bay area commuters and help for the environment but for BART, this summer’s experiment with 6 days of free rides also brought so much grief that the system’s police chief is calling for the program to be limited to just commuters in the future. The free rides brought an extra 25,000 patrons to the already taxed system during the spare the air days, an increase of 10% over normal. There were packed cars, blaring boom boxes, food and drink containers (which are banned) being tossed everywhere --- even reports of homelss people flocking in to beat the heat.”
I am not riding the BART. Instead, when I’m not hiking around I’m writing. Sunshine without humidity allows one to think clearly and I’m functioning!
I would have enjoyed seeing my old friends at the summer institute but I must admit that I have trouble sitting still and listening to 45 minute presentations. Given how fast people can read, a better system would be to require that attendees read the paper ahead of time and then participate in a group discussion about the paper. My method would save time and people would learn more than in a setting where the paper presenter drones on barfing back the content of his power point slides.
I think the NBER summer institute’s great attraction is that it makes everyone feel like a young graduate student again. Even non-Harvard, MIT types can convince themselves that they are “Cambridge graduate students”, there to learn, mix and network. I attended one day of the economic history meetings and one day of the industrial organization meetings. Enough is enough.
San Francisco has offered a recent test of the law of unintended consequences. What happens when you offer free rides on BART, the rail transit system, on hot polluted days? The well meaning officials hope that car commuters substitute to BART and hence reduce urban smog pollution.
What really happened? The San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier & Ross report today that “The highly touted spare the air days spelled financial relief for thousands of bay area commuters and help for the environment but for BART, this summer’s experiment with 6 days of free rides also brought so much grief that the system’s police chief is calling for the program to be limited to just commuters in the future. The free rides brought an extra 25,000 patrons to the already taxed system during the spare the air days, an increase of 10% over normal. There were packed cars, blaring boom boxes, food and drink containers (which are banned) being tossed everywhere --- even reports of homelss people flocking in to beat the heat.”
I am not riding the BART. Instead, when I’m not hiking around I’m writing. Sunshine without humidity allows one to think clearly and I’m functioning!
posted by Matthew Kahn at 12:56 PM
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