Environmental and Urban Economics

It may not be the David Letterman Top Ten list or the New York Times Book Review's top 15 list, but I'll take it! I salute Planetizen for its good job judgment and I'm glad they liked my new book.

"Planetizen is pleased to release its sixth annual list of the ten best books in the planning field. With titles covering some of the most timely issues in planning -- such as the role of planning in the aftermath of disasters, along with the contentious and continuing debate over sprawl and smart growth -- the list gives readers an overview of the best ideas and writing in the field.

Logical consistency has never been one of my strengths. Today, I wanted to blog about three different unrelated items. First, I wanted to note for the historical record that my Green Cities Amazon.com Sales Rank is slowly improving

# Amazon.com Sales Rank: #16,266 in Books (See Top Sellers in Books). I've been benchmarking my book relative to other recent economics books such as Janet Currie's, Acemoglu and Robinson and David Warsh.

Time is our scarce commodity. Have you wondered where the time goes? This e-mail below offers an answer. Would you fill out their survey? I think I will.

On an unrelated note, my wife and I are getting ready to move from Boston to Los Angeles but last wednesday we had a nice experience that one can't have in the sunshine out west. We were eating lunch at the Legal Seafoods near MIT and we spotted Paul Samuelson eating lunch with his wife.

Given the importance of cities in the modern economy, it is surprising how little academic blogging there is focused on cities. There seem to be zillions of environmental blogs but few urban blogs. So, I was happy to learn about the birth of a new blog published at http://urbaneconomics.blogspot.com.

These are exciting days in academic urban economics. I've been told that the recent regional science meetings in Toronto were a great success.

New York City is wrestling with the question of how to increase its supply of land that can be developed. As this article below stresses, brownfields offer one source of land that can be revitalized.

I find this article interesting and I'm impressed that the NYC political leaders are thinking ahead. I wonder about how Tort lawyers will wait for the first cancer case to emerge from some unlucky family living in a new housing complex built on top of one of these brownfields.

The Stern Report has generated world wide headlines. A leading economist argues that climate change will be quite costly perhaps costing us 5% of world GNP each year in the future. In this interesting report on the Stern Review, Bill Nordhaus argues that many of the Stern Report's findings are driven by its implicit assumption of a 0% interest rate in calculating the present discounted value of flows of benefits and costs associated with climate change.

“Most economics departments are like country clubs,” said James J. Heckman, a Chicago faculty member and Nobel laureate. “But at Chicago you are only as good as your last paper.” This quote is from Milton Friedman's obituary in today's New York Times.

see http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/business/17friedman.html

I am not an expert on "deconstructionism" but it is still interesting to think about what this quote means. I've never been a member of a country club.

I entered the University of Chicago’s PHD program in Economics in the fall of 1988. Milton Friedman had moved west more than ten before that. His ongoing impact on that Department was clearly visible in the subject matter taught by Gary Becker, Sherwin Rosen, and Bob Lucas. The unique Chicago seminar style must have been inherited from his and George Stigler’s workshops. In such seminars, the speaker must fight to be heard as multiple seminar participants have points they urgently want to make.

Don't ask how I found the story I reprint below. Another guy named Matt Kahn who currently lives in Los Angeles was assaulted as he made the mistake of supplying replacement workers in the middle of strike. The "law of small numbers" claims that we are not good bayesians. When we update our priors about something such as "Is Los Angeles a safe city", that we place too much weight on salient data points.

Below, I report a concise punchy editorial in today's Harvard Crimson. The unsigned authors are pretty good economists thinking through different policies and their likely cost effectiveness. This editorial raises the bigger issue of adoption of greenhouse gas policies by Universities in general.

Universities are non-profits and cutting greenhouse gas emissions requires upfront expenditures.