London's Policy Exchange will publish a good book next week. It is titled "Living for the City". I know its good because the book includes an essay of mine that builds on some of my Green Cities' book key themes.

Here is their blurb (for more details see http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/)

LIVING FOR THE CITY: A new agenda for green cities

Michelangelo claimed he loved cities above all, finding no salvation in nature. For many people today, though, cities mean the social problems of pollution, congestion, overcrowding and robbery. They are a fact of life, to be accepted rather than questioned, endured rather than understood.

Climate Change mitigation and adaptation policies are in the news. Below, I give a link for a long UK report. Today, the New York Times has a long front page article about the challenges for achieving "green innovation" to reduce greenhouse gases per dollar of world GNP.

The Times article is interesting but I was surprised by the lack of discussion of how we are judge what is "good public policy" here. Very few economists were quoted here yet this looks like a classic incentives issue.

Usually, I am bored by the New York Times editorial page. It is too predictable and negative for my tastes. But, on saturday I found a rare interesting unsigned editorial that I reproduce below.

The Times is asking the Bush Administration to provide some global leadership by allocating more $ to fight the flu. Clearly this is a classic issue of world free rider problem. Everyone would benefit if some rich nation paid the resources to come up with a vaccine.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, polluters need incentives encouraging them not to pollute. A credible global carbon trading market would provide such an incentive encouraging innovation and adoption of emissions reducing techniques.

This article claims that empirical researchers discovered that only 83% of adults wash their hands after going to the bathroom. I hope the remaining 17% don't live in Boston! While urban economists celebrate the positive externalities offered by density, we can't forget that public health threats sometimes still lurk.

As an environmental economist, what interests me in these quirky case studies is what we learn about how we share common space.

A couple of years ago a talented Tufts University PHD student named Kayo Tajima wrote her thesis on the market for "night soil" in Japan long ago. Urbanites would sell their waste to farmers who used it as a nitrate input in growing agricultural products. Now that was a closed loop general equilibrium! Ecological economists always talk about reducing waste by turning this "output" into another "input" in another production process.

This article on yahoo today tells a similar story.

In his research on social capital, Robert Putnam has made the distinction between bridging and bonding. If I might quote our new authority on all topics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

"Putnam speaks of two main components of the concept: bonding social capital and bridging social capital. The former refers to the value assigned to social networks between homogeneous groups of people and the latter to that of social networks between socially heterogeneous groups.

Behavioral economists have not devoted enough attention to the self control problems of type 2 diabetics and people at risk to become type 2 diabetics. Intuitive lifestyle modification (exercising more, smoking less, losing weight) could reduce the likelihood of diabetes. Conditional that one is a type 2 diabetic, this person

is told upon diagnosis that terrible complications such as amputation and blindness await them unless they make lifestyle changes.

Can a 160 page book be boiled down to a 45 minute lecture? I doubt that Hollywood is going to call me to turn my new book Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment into a movie so its up to me to make this book a "multi-media" experience.

I've now presented this book's core content at Harvard and at Tufts. Both times, I was happy about how it was received. To reward my millions of blog readers, I wanted to show you my powerpoint notes.

New York City is the last U.S city that looks "monocentric". A majority of the metropolitan area's jobs are still downtown but this New York Times article suggests that NYC's employment is sprawling. People are now reverse commuting and heading in all sorts of strange directions from home to work and vice-versa.

Ed Glaeser and I and Nate Baum-Snow and I have written papers about employment sprawl's causes and consequences.

post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/glaeser/papers.htm

http://www.econ.
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