I was wondering why everyone looks so good in Los Angeles? Is it selection? Attractive people move here to try to make it big in various entertainment industries? Or is it treatment? This article below emphasizes the second theory. The treatment isn't the sun and fresh air! Instead, the treatment is every piece of specialized investment one could make to look young and fresh. Adam Smith should forget the boring pin factory and study specialization and the extent of the market in the "beauty production" industry. Note that these highly specialized fields could only be offered in a rich, large city that can guarantee high expected demand for such services.

Note that the article doesn't quote any dudes. Could guys really be investing zero in beauty upkeep? I see a lot of dudes with perfect white teeth and full heads of hair in Los Angeles? I must again --- selection or treatment?

It is true that this article is published in the fashion section of the Times and most dudes don't read this section but I'm looking for "fair and balanced" coverage in my newspaper!

Economists seem to care less about their physical appearance than other people. Maybe we are wrong -- maybe we have the wrong status function valuing general journal publications much more than being thin? We write down signaling models but many of us are sending some funky signals about our priorities. I'm now thinking of doing some situps!


June 28, 2007
Skin Deep
Beauty Regimens Reach for the Gold Standard
By NATASHA SINGER

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

IN a city that considers 25-year-old actresses aged and those over 45 practically ready for pasture, a woman who spends 10 hours and $1,000 a week on beauty treatments to maintain her looks does not view herself as unusual.

“I get my hair blown out every two days, I get a manicure every week and I have just started this new electrical-current thing twice a week for my thighs,” said Ginger Grace, a real estate agent here who was having her hair colored last month at The Salon by Maxime on North Rodeo Drive.

Tall, blond and toned, Ms. Grace, 40, said her maintenance routine also includes frequent facials, eyebrow waxing, a personal trainer, a hiking coach and the occasional Botox injection or tanning parlor session, a beauty program that she considers to be minimalist by local standards. “I am probably the only person in Los Angeles who doesn’t see a chiropractor, an acupuncturist or a nutritionist, but it’s so youth-driven here that maybe I should.”

For a coterie of professionals like Ms. Grace in major cities across the country, the standards of upper-middle-class beauty upkeep are moving stratospherically higher. Although women have long engaged in grooming activities to attract romantic partners and to compete in the work force, the increased availability of nonsurgical options like wrinkle injections and skin-smoothing devices — along with the explosive proliferation of nail salons and spas — has shifted the beauty norms, making grooming routines more elaborate, more time-consuming and more expensive.

“We have more procedures than we did 10 years ago to help you maintain your appearance and to undo some of the damage you did to yourself by sitting in the sun,” said Dr. Flor A. Mayoral, a dermatologist in South Miami. Dr. Mayoral said that she asks every new patient the size of her yearly beauty budget and works within the limits. She estimated that many of her patients spend $2,400 a year on facial injections and $2,000 a year on hair coloring.

Lisa Oliver, the head colorist at The Salon by Maxime, calculated that her clients spend even more on grooming.

“Depending on how much Botox and the pricier stuff you get done, when you add in hair care, nails, face and body, it’s got to be between $2,000 to $3,500 a month,” Ms. Oliver said. In Los Angeles, she added, such grooming is considered basic maintenance.

“If you are high maintenance, you could spend a lot more money,” Ms. Oliver said. “I can think of a couple of people where $3,500 a month might be low.”

It may seem shocking that some women are prepared to spend as much — or more — a month to try to keep the physical signs of age at bay as other Americans spend on rent. But beauty spending is not limited to business executives.

In a survey conducted for her forthcoming book, “Going Gray,” to be published in September, Anne Kreamer found that women who earned $25,000 to $50,000 a year spent an average of $60 a month just on hair color.

Manisha Thakor, a financial analyst and co-author of “On My Own Two Feet: A Modern Girl’s Guide to Personal Finance,” said that because beauty treatments are intangible purchases — they don’t stack up in the closet like shoes — women may not notice them mounting.

“If you took that $100 a month you are spending on manicures and pedicures and invested it starting at age 25 in stocks that went up 10 percent a year, you would have over $500,000 by the time you were 65,” Ms. Thakor said. “That makes the monthly $100 look like phenomenally expensive manicures.”

But Dr. Mayoral in Miami said that, for many professional women, beauty upkeep is a business expense.

“Some women feel that they can’t look older and unkempt, that they have to look groomed,” she said. “You are competing with other women who are doing exactly the same thing.”

Following is a sampling of women in different cities who agreed to share their beauty regimens.

Ginger Grace Before Ms. Grace moved to Santa Monica from New Mexico 17 years ago, her beauty routine involved no more than coloring her hair every six weeks. Now she says she has several facials a month, a weekly manicure and twice-weekly eyebrow grooming.

“L.A. is very ageist and very beauty-driven,” she said. “I think anybody here would do anything to look young.”

Sitting under a dryer last month at The Salon by Maxime in Beverly Hills with her hair sectioned off in foil, Ms. Grace calculated that she now frequently spends 10 hours and $1,000 a week on personal grooming.

She is not just driven by social pressure, she said. Beauty treatments like Botox and hair color help her maintain an advantage as a real estate broker.

“My field is highly competitive,” Ms. Grace said. “Clients pick you more or less for your style and appearance.”

The facials and thigh treatments help boost self-confidence, but it is the thrice-weekly hair blow outs that are nonnegotiable, she said.

“If I have a client I’m showing a lot of houses or if I am in escrow, I will drop all the beauty stuff except for the blow out, which I will get no matter what,” she said.

Ms. Grace said her immaculately kept hair, skin and nails are intended to convey to clients that she is well groomed but not high maintenance.

“I try to appear like I am not trying too hard, to look like a relaxed natural,” Ms. Grace said. “But of course, I am trying very hard.”

Maria Eugenia Blanco For Ms. Blanco, 47, an architect from Coral Gables, Fla., who designs high-end homes, Miami is a city with high expectations for physical appearance.

“In other cities, winter is wonderful because you wear a big coat and a hat and a sweater and nobody knows whether you are overweight because all they can see is your eyes,” Ms. Blanco said. “In Miami, there are a lot of Latin women who are very concerned about how they look, and there are a lot of beaches and bathing suits and you are naked half of the year.”

Running from one construction site to another, Ms. Blanco said, she does not have time for an elaborate beauty routine that involves a lot of different weekly appointments.

And her work environment, which leaves her splattered with mud and paint samples, does not require a glossy self-image, she said. But when she turned 45 and noticed her face begin to change, she found herself at Dr. Mayoral’s office for nonsurgical cosmetic procedures.

“After you hit 45, things start changing from one day to the next,” Ms. Blanco said. “It is like an avalanche you never expected.”

She now opts for the occasional dermatological treatment like Botox injections and Thermage, a radio frequency device that is supposed to tighten the skin, she said.

Ms. Blanco said the treatments help maintain her self-confidence.

“I want to look healthy and feel good about myself,” she said. “I want to look refreshed, but not in an exaggerated way.”

Amy Krakow Twice a week, Ms. Krakow, 57, who owns a public relations company in New York that specializes in design and food, visits a sports medicine clinic on the Upper East Side for a 30-minute session in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.

She believes the oxygen inhalation treatment, originally developed for deep-sea divers with decompression sickness, helps keeps her skin baby soft, she said.

“I’m convinced that the hyperbaric chamber is better than an oxygen facial because the oxygen is going internally,” she said last week as she clambered into a hard-sided blue capsule that resembled a coffin. “It also speeds up your metabolism so you lose weight faster.”

Ms. Krakow said treatments like the hyperbaric chamber, along with plastic surgery procedures that she underwent on her face and torso, help her stay competitive in a youth-driven profession.

“I am in an image business,” said Ms. Krakow, a petite blonde with an eclectic style that embraces both Fendi handbags and Yohji Yamamoto backward jeans. “Plus I am up against people a lot younger than me, and that is critical.”

To make time for manicures, hair straightening and Botox injections, she gets up daily by 6 a.m., she said.

Expenses for the treatments can add up.

“I just spent $411, an astounding sum of money, on a facial and skin care products, but my skin looks spectacular,” she said. “I have nice skin, so why not keep it that way?”

Ms. Krakow said the effects of the procedures have been noticed.

“It’s nice to have a guy in his 40s tell you you look hot, because you don’t necessarily feel that way as you get older,” she said.

Ms. Krakow said that she stopped getting artificial nail tips a few years ago because she found them too time-consuming to maintain. But she is considering other beauty treatments.

“I’m thinking seriously of tooth veneers,” she said. “I think that’s next.”

I am in Berkeley at an energy conference at the UC Energy Institute. The 5 day meetings are called a "summer camp" and the weather and group spirit makes it feel this way. The meetings are making me feel mildly youthful and enthusiastic about this subject matter. Given the importance of energy issues, it is surprising that not more economists have been working on the topic.

Some top economists such as Severin Borenstein, Michael Greenstone and Frank Wolak have been participating and it has been great to talk to these guys about energy issues. In addition, this conference has attracted many young stars presenting their current work. This camp is a little bit like the NBER Summer insitute but its scale is smaller and everyone is focused on energy issues while the NBER meetings are intellectually sprawled across many subjects even within a specific category such as "Labor Studies" or "Aging".

On friday, I will speak for 20 minutes about a new paper of mine melding some ideas from behavioral economics with some work on energy consumption. I'm ready to take my beating because this idea is clever!

In the good old days, all jobs were downtown and all people lived downtown close to the jobs because transportation costs were too high to allow people to live further from employment centers and enjoy cheaper land. This society would have a small ecological footprint but its residents would be exposed to plenty of air, water and noise pollution and risk of disease from contagion. Transportation innovations allowed population to suburbanize. Information technology innovations have allowed major chunks of firms to suburbanize. In an age of google and other companies located in suburban campuses and hedge funds based in the suburbs, who must work downtown? Why does it matter if high amenity downtowns such as Vancouver's transition to being all residential homes?

One serious answer to this question is that people won't be able to walk and bike to work if they live downtowns and their jobs are in the suburbs but concerns about the sustainability impacts of such job trends can be addressed through congestion pricing and encouraging a greener vehicle fleet.

Somehow, not everyone agrees. Here is a blogger who thinks that some of my ideas come from my rump!

http://www.pacificmetropolis.com/2007/06/on-power-lunche.html

This gentleman would have to explain to me what is the negative externality (that threatens Vancouver's quality of life) that is exacerbated by more condo growth? What are the urban benefits from subsidizing commercial activity? In New York City, does Goldman Sachs or the New York Yankees really need a subsidy to stay at their current location?

Why is this dude afraid to live in a "consumer city" that celebrates its identity and doesn't pretend to be an epi-center of any specific industry such as car making or movie making or oil refining?

Last Wednesday morning I left Los Angeles to fly up to Vancouver. The flight was easy but when I was in the Vancouver airport trying to pass through customs I got stuck in a 2000 person line. Apparently, it is cruise ship season and every person trying to take the Love Boat to Alaska was there with me. How did I respond to this congestion? I called my wife and asked her to read me my email over the phone. She was more than happy to do this because I think she was looking for an opportunity (and my password) to see what silly stuff I receive in the mail. Unfortunately for her, she found my inbox filled with boring stuff. Fortunately for me, the crowd of people waiting to clear customs was getting angry like a crazy mob. Finally, they added many more customs agents and I got through.

On wednesday night in Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, I participated in a 200 person event that featured Will Strange, myself and Brent Toderian. Brent is an important guy. he is Vancouver's director of planning. I told him the truth that my mother had always hoped that I would be a city planner and perhaps become Newark New Jersey's head planner. I guess I haven't lived up to her hopes.

To Brent's credit he made a number of reasonable points at our debate. The debate was about the question of what Vancouver's downtown should look like in 20 years. Does it matter if people love to live and play with Vancouver but that there are few employers downtown? In this age of employment suburbanization and reverse commuting should commercial employers receive rent discounts and special zoning to keep them downtown?

Brent thinks the answer is yes and I think that the answer is no. I was shocked by the statistics people were quoting that 60% of downtown vancouver people walk to work. That's pretty green!

The next day I participated in a 2 day urban/real estate conference at UBC. Some of the world's best urban researchers were there and it was great to see them and to receive comments on a new crazy paper of mine.

That night, I went out to West Vancouver and saw a great new house that my friend Jack has built at the base of a mountain. Jack and I went to the LSE together 20 years ago and were in the same econometrics study group. He told me that the Vancouver housing market has experienced so much appreciation that many guys have quit their jobs to work 100% of the time on upgrading their homes since this earns a higher rate of return than merely working for the man!

After the conference, I have now flown to Berkeley. Like Berkeley, Vancouver is proud to be a "nuclear free zone". I'm not sure what that means but it is good to be here. The figs I bought at the farmer's market were a lot fresher than what you can buy for twice the price at Whole Foods!

Why am I telling you all of this extraneous detail? (and why are you reading this?)
I view this as a diary that I'm hoping my son will read when he is older and I'm too senile to remember any of this stuff that I saw and did. I wish my father had kept a blog but he is a key doctor in new york city and his time was better spent taking
care of patients rather than scribbling.

As a young man, I was on Wall Street Journal Asia's Television channel being interviewed on how New York City's ban on smoking would affect the flow of asian tourists to NYC. Today, I made my radio debut on Vancouver's http://www.cknw.com/. In truth, when I was a student at Hamilton College I was a DJ playing classical music and sometimes classic rock at WHCL in Clinton but I didn't talk much on the air. I just played the albums assuming that nobody lived within 25 miles of Hamilton College and even if they did live there --- they weren't listening to my groovy show.

Tonight, I was interviewed by a smart guy named Michael Smyth. He must be a versatle thinker because he has to jump from topic to topic. Once he was done talking to me about condos versus commercial land use in downtown Vancouver he had to do a segment on the murder of a local popular athlete.

A friend of mine at UCLA's media office has asked me to consider doing some television media segments but if you could see me you'd know why I prefer radio as my medium!

I have a new favorite newspaper. My only regret in this article is that I didn't do a good job discussing "Superstar" cities and San Francisco. Even I know that San Francisco's middle class is being hollowed out by gentrification. You would have to be quite open minded about what the words "upper middle class" mean below.

Tonight at 8pm pacific time, I'll be on
The World Today & Nightline BC CKNW NewTalk 980

to discuss these issues. I have a face for radio ---- let's see if I make any sense!



Get ready for a new-look downtown
Sauder Business School arranges 'Condos versus offices' debate

Frances Bula
Vancouver Sun


Tuesday, June 19, 2007


Vancouver's 19th-century downtown is on the way out.

Instead, the city's 21st-century downtown is very likely to be a mix of residences for highly skilled local professionals and second homes for rich people from elsewhere, along with a tight core of office space for high-end dealmakers and a scattering of services for all those groups of people.

That's the provocative future UCLA economist Matthew Kahn is going to discuss this week in a debate the University of B.C.'s Sauder School of Business has put together on the controversial question of "condos versus offices" in downtown Vancouver.

"There's certainly a possibility that there's been a resortification in Vancouver," said Kahn, in an interview from San Francisco. "But why is that bad?"

The city currently has a moratorium on residential development in part of the downtown next to the central business district that was put in place after rising concern from business groups and commercial brokers that office space was under threat.

But Kahn said Vancouver could be evolving into what San Francisco already is -- an attractive downtown that is largely a home to the upper middle class.

"In San Francisco, no one is worried about its health."

He also pointed out that Vancouver is experiencing the same trends that have been documented in other North American cities. As the price of land goes up, firms leave their deal-makers downtown but move the bulk of their back-office work out to the suburbs.

Some cities, like San Francisco or New York or Vancouver, are then able to attract people to live in their "consumer downtowns."

And there's nothing wrong with that, says Kahn.

From an urban economist's point of view, it's an advantage to be able to attract skilled professional people to your downtown. Those people will then either accept slightly lower wages in order to work close to where they live, and firms that can save money on wages will be willing to spend it on the cost of space downtown. Or they will reverse commute to the suburbs.

From a public-finance economist's point of view, having about 15 per cent of residential space downtown taken up by second homes for wealthy people from elsewhere is also a benefit.

"It's a free lunch, with these people moving in, paying taxes, and demanding no services at all."

The businesses that remain downtown will be those that can survive with a minimum of space or the ones that keep their high-ranking people downtown while the rest of the work moves out to the suburbs.

"There's still a demand to be downtown for the power lunch," says Kahn. As well, there will be many jobs in the arts, culture and retail sectors that serve that downtown community.

Along with Kahn, others debating the future of Vancouver's downtown will be UBC professor Robert Helsley and Vancouver's planning director, Brent Toderian. It will be held Wednesday at UBC's Robson Square campus from 5 p.m to 7:30 p.m.

Tsur Somerville, the UBC professor who organized the panel, said he decided to tackle the topic because "people are concerned about what the downtown is going to look like." However, at the moment, the debate has been limited mostly to business groups arguing for more office space and residential developers arguing for more room to build condos.

"Urban economics tend to have a long view and a different perspective."

fbula@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2007


Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

Suppose that investments in renewable energy plants such as wind power or solar is costly requiring large sunk upfront investments (think of wind turbines). Would a profit seeking business person make such an investment if she is unsure about who will win the 2008 Presidential election? To make things simple, suppose that the business person is sure that if a Democrat wins the Presidency in 2008 that there will be "green subsidies" while if a Republican wins in 2008 that there won't be subsidies for renewables in 2008.

You don't have to be Dixit or Pindyck to predict that firms will delay investing until the uncertainty has been resolved. Are their social consequences to such individually rational delay? Would renewable progress and learning by doing have been greater had government sent clear signals to energy sector executives contemplating what investments to make?

As an empiricist, I don't know how to test this conjecture so I figured I should simply blog about it. The key counter-factual concerns; "would there have been greater green investments in renewables now if business thought that incentives for green power would be offered by the federal government consistently over the next 25 years?"

June 18, 2007
Democrats Press Plan to Channel Billions in Oil Subsidies to Renewable Fuels
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON, June 16 — Senate Democrats are seeking a major reversal of energy tax policies that would take billions of dollars in tax breaks and other benefits from the oil industry to underwrite renewable fuels.

The tax increases would reverse incentives passed as recently as three years ago to increase domestic exploration and production of oil and gas. The change reflects a shift from the Republican focus on expanding oil production to the Democratic concern about reducing global warming.

On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee will take up a bill that would raise about $14 billion from oil companies over 10 years and would give about the same amount of money on new incentives for solar power, wind power, cellulosic ethanol and numerous other renewable energy sources. The bill is one of the signature issues this year for Democrats, along with immigration and the war in Iraq, and one in which they hope to clearly distinguish themselves from the Republicans.

But Senate Democrats are expected to go beyond the $14 billion in tax changes in the draft bill. Democratic officials said the committee is all but certain to adopt a proposal by Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico that would raise $10 billion from companies that drill for oil and gas in federal waters but do not currently pay royalties to the government.

“We are cutting back subsidies for the oil and gas industry and using that money to finance the development of new and cleaner sources of energy,” said Mr. Bingaman, who plans to attach the entire tax package to the energy bill on the Senate floor next week.

It is unclear how much President Bush or Republicans in Congress will fight the proposed tax shift. The ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, has already endorsed the $14 billion package.

But the plan could easily founder because of opposition to any one of many hotly disputed provisions in the broader energy bill. Just last week, a threatened filibuster by Republicans forced Democrats to postpone a floor vote on requiring electric utilities to produce 15 percent of their power from renewable fuels. The White House, meanwhile, has threatened to veto the bill if lawmakers do not drop a provision intended to prosecute what Democrats call “unconscionably excessive” gasoline prices.

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York has proposed that oil companies be prohibited from using an accounting method called “last in, first out” for inventories that saves them as much as $5 billion in taxes a year.

Because Senate Democrats want to offset the cost of any new tax breaks with tax increases elsewhere, many lawmakers are pushing for even more tax raises from oil companies.

Oil executives are protesting loudly, saying that the proposed changes would take money away from exploring and drilling in the United States and increase the nation’s dependence on imported foreign oil.

“They talk about our companies as if they’re owned by space aliens,” said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association. “They talk about energy security, but these provisions could have the opposite effect in terms of reducing our production here and increasing our imports.”

The oil industry has ample reason to worry. With consumers seething about gasoline prices increasing to more than $3 a gallon and oil profits reaching record highs, oil companies would be short of friends in Congress regardless of the party in power.

Beyond the immediate jockeying, however, lies a bigger question: Is Congress putting taxpayers at risk by funneling billions of dollars in subsidies into alternative fuels that are still a long way from being profitable?

Indeed, industry experts said the Senate bill greatly understated the true cost of incentives for renewable fuels. Most of the incentives are set to expire at the end of 2009 or 2010, but Democrats in both the House and Senate have called for an increase in the production of such fuels by 2022. As a practical matter, the vast majority of “temporary” tax breaks are routinely extended once they are passed for the first time.

In addition to higher taxes for oil companies, House and Senate Democrats are hitting at the oil industry in other ways. The Senate bill would give the federal government more power to prosecute companies that engage in “price gouging” on gasoline prices, which is broadly defined in the bill as charging “unconscionably excessive” prices that reflect “unfair leverage.” A similar measure is moving through the House.

Separately, the House Natural Resources Committee passed a bill last week that would, among other things, crack down on companies that cheat on royalties they pay for oil and gas pumped on publicly owned land.

In effect, the various bills would transfer billions of dollars from oil companies to producers of renewable fuels.

The Senate bill would offer $5.6 billion in tax credits over the next three years for companies that produce electricity from renewable fuels like wind and geothermal power. It would offer tax-free bonds for new power plants with renewable or clean energy. It would offer tax credits totaling about a dollar a gallon to producers of cellulosic ethanol, and even bigger tax credits for “biodiesel” fuel. It would extend and expand tax breaks for plug-in electric cars and other vehicles that use alternative energy sources, and it would provide tax breaks for gas stations that offer renewable fuels.

In a nod to the politically powerful coal industry, the bill would also provide $1.5 billion in tax-free “clean coal bonds” for advanced coal-fired electricity plants and $332 million in tax credits for plants that make diesel fuel from coal.

Democrats in the House are moving with similar legislation. The House passed a bill earlier this year that would raise about $14 billion over 10 years from oil companies, and the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to mark up a new tax bill that would offer rich incentives for alternative fuels and increased efficiency.

The Democratic bill contrasts sharply with the energy bill that the Republican-led Congress passed in 2005. The Senate bill offers less than $1 billion in incentives for coal, no tax breaks for nuclear power and tax hikes for oil. But two years ago, Congress approved $11 billion in additional tax breaks, of which $7 billion went to oil, coal and nuclear power.

“It is a dramatic change in policy, targeted at the big oil companies,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “It will show the country the kind of things we can do by taking away subsidies for fossil fuels and putting the money into new sources of energy.”

Privately, some Democrats say it is payback time: the oil industry’s political contributions have overwhelmingly gone to Republican lawmakers and President Bush, and many Democrats say they have little sympathy for the industry now.

It is unclear whether Republicans or Mr. Bush plan to protect the industry.

In stinging criticism earlier this month, the White House Office of Management and Budget said the proposed price-gouging measure amounted to price regulation that would jeopardize investment in oil production and ultimately hurt consumers.

In 2005, Mr. Bush threatened to veto a one-year measure that blocked oil companies from using the “last in, first out” accounting method for inventories. The Bush administration, echoing charges by the oil industry, said the measure amounted to a one-year windfall profits tax that would frighten investors by raising the prospect of further tax raises whenever oil prices jumped sharply.

Mr. Schumer’s proposal is similar to the 2005 proposal, except that his measure would be permanent.

The oil industry still has persuasive clout in Washington. Exxon, Shell and trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute have hired former Democratic lawmakers and Democratic lobbyists to help press their case.

They have carefully positioned themselves, picking their fights on selected issues that attract fairly little popular interest but affect potentially large amounts of money.

The effort is mostly defensive — fending off tax increases — but also has offensive elements. Royal Dutch Shell and other big companies hope to be big players in coal-based liquid fuels. And the industry in general is still pushing for Congress to open up more areas on the outer continental shelf for deepwater drilling.

But industry executives hold out little hope for emerging unscathed.

This books sounds interesting. I've blogged before about the NIMBYism versus green power proponents going at it in Cape Cod. This book provides a detailed case study contradicting a pet theory of mine. Recently, I've grown interested in the idea that environmentalists are often "guinea pigs" for new green products. Their willingness to be the "first on the block" to try out a product offers social benefits in a world featuring learning by doing on the producer side and risk averse consumers on the buyer side. If there are enough green guinea pig buyers then producers can learn from their experience selling the 1st generation of the product to them (think of the first hybrid vehicles in 1999 versus today) and non-green consumers can wait and learn from observing the first generation of green products and reading "consumer reports" to see whether they are high quality.

In the case of wind power, Cape Cod could have been a leader demonstrating to the rest of the U.S the possibility of spreading this "green" option to other windy places but many Cape Cod residents are not interested in providing costly leadership here.


New York Times Book Review
June 17, 2007
Air Power
By ROBERT SULLIVAN

CAPE WIND
Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound.

By Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb.

Illustrated. 326 pp. Public Affairs. $26.95.

If HBO is looking to develop a series based on environmental politics, then “Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound” is a natural for the option, with the Kennedys sitting in for the Sopranos, Nantucket Sound for the Meadowlands and phrases like “environmental impact statement” replacing “swimming with the fishes.” Cameos will include Elizabeth Taylor as the former wife of the anti-wind-farm Senator John Warner; Warner’s former mother-in-law Bunny Mellon, the nonagenarian Listerine heiress who decorated the Kennedy White House (behind the scenes) and helped establish the Oyster Harbors Club; and Walter Cronkite, who, as the co-authors Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb have it, starts out on the side of darkness only to turn toward the light, or in this case, the wind. The setting is Horseshoe Shoal, about five miles off the coast of Cape Cod, where, in 2001, an energy developer named Jim Gordon proposed what he still hopes will be America’s first offshore wind farm, an array of 130 turbines, 440 feet tall, that would create 468 megawatts of electrical energy, the only dangerous fumes being those emanating from the mad-as-hell multimillion-dollar homeowners on the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

Williams, a Cape Cod-based journalist, and Whitcomb, the editorial page editor of The Providence Journal, have set out to show the political machinations behind the gale-force resistance to the project. Offshore wind farming is not a particularly radical endeavor; like inner-city congestion pricing (to name another proposed measure that has raised a loud cry of opposition, in this case in New York City), offshore wind farms have been successfully implemented in Europe. In March, Spain managed to get 27 percent of its total energy supply from wind. Criticism of wind power has been mitigated by increasingly efficient turbines and more bird-sensitive placement. Considering the acid-rain-laced option of coal-fired energy and the lingering fear of nuclear power, wind would seem poised to become a major player in America’s alternative energy plans.

But not off Cape Cod, if the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound can help it. A great summer beach read about longtime summer beach communities, “Cape Wind” describes how the alliance managed to raise $4 million in one ballroom meeting at the Wianno Club, where the “grass-roots” campaign against the “industrial complex” of offshore “Cuisinarts” was kicked off by Douglas Yearley, a copper mining executive whose company was fined for killing birds in an acid runoff mishap in 2000, among other infractions. (With a 7,700-square-foot home on Nantucket Sound, Yearley, the 1993 Copper Man of the Year, was a sitting duck for wind-farm supporters when he praised “sustainable living” to a Massachusetts newspaper columnist.) Maneuvering quietly behind each anti-wind-farm maneuver, despite his often green legislation and his labor backers’ support of the energy project, is the senior senator from Massachusetts, who is accused of bogging down the wind farm in Congress, where today, having been approved by Massachusetts, Cape Wind is going through its last regulatory review hurdles. When told that the turbines would be only barely visible on the horizon from Hyannisport, Ted Kennedy is quoted (secondhand) as replying, “But don’t you realize, that’s where I sail.” Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted environmentalist, makes a bizarre appearance on a radio talk show, lumping the wind power proponents in with “polluters.” (If built, the wind farm could provide up to 79 percent of the energy for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, and cut down on the oil barges that have polluted the shores of Rhode Island.) The best the alliance can come up with are poorly disguised Nimby-isms that declare other places worthier of what the Martha’s Vineyard-based historian David McCullough calls “visual pollution.”

“Cape Wind” is less an argument for wind power than an indictment of our money-soaked political process, but the indictment suffers when Williams and Whitworth match the snarkiness of the alliance with snarkiness of their own. “It seemed as though the pastels crowd, normally adherents to the green-slacks-with-little-blue-fish craze, had dressed for war,” the authors note in describing an appearance by Mitt Romney, then the governor and now a Republican presidential candidate, at a press event in March 2005. Romney is portrayed as a tool of the alliance, a fallen would-be environmentalist who is hard on polluting power plants but ends up speechifying for the public’s beaches even though the beaches along Nantucket Sound are mostly private. Even for a wind book, there’s too much about Romney’s unrufflable hair.

And then there is their near-hagiographical portrait of Jim Gordon, the entrepreneur behind Cape Wind. “He would go for the sunshine, opt for the high road, take his case to the nation’s journalists and make sure everyone knew what was going on,” the authors gush. But painting the working-class, Boston-raised green power advocate too clean makes the reader wary, for no good reason. Besides, something about Gordon’s public relations strategy was obviously off, or maybe it’s a matter of public priorities. As The Boston Globe noted two years into the six-year (and counting) battle, the Danes brought in wind power as more of a public trust, with a farm just off Copenhagen’s harbor, the Danish government promoting it, subsidizing it, splitting ownership between the municipal utility and 8,500 individuals.

Scandinavians have also pointed out to the fossil-fuel-addicted public that wind power has been with us before, even in New York, where opposition is beginning to build to a wind farm on Long Island, off Jones Beach State Park. A few of the old windmills on Long Island are still there, antiques among the Hamptons’ over-air-conditioned mansions. There used to be one in Lower Manhattan too, on the site of what became the World Trade Center.

Robert Sullivan is the author of “Rats” and “Cross Country.”

Next wednesday there will be some real excitement in Vancouver. I'm coming to town to speak for at least 10 minutes on the broad issue of gentrification and the balance between residential land use and commercial land use in a "Superstar" city.

http://cuer.sauder.ubc.ca/CUER_roundtable_event.html

I hope to see you there.

Plenty of papers have been written about the rise of poor nations as pollution havens
as international trade grows. Less has been written about environmental problems suffered in richer importing nations if the products we import are of lower quality and can cause potential health problems because they of the materials used to make them.

Recently there was a scandal with pet food from China. If I remember correctly, the pet food that was imported by the U.S had dangerous chemicals in it. In this article below, children's play toys imported here have lead paint.

In both cases, the product maker in China knew that it is difficult for U.S consumers
to learn "the truth" about the product's quality. This asymmetric information provides an incentive for a business person to choose a low cost option. If lead paint is cheap, a business person may choose to use this input (rather than the higher cost safer paint) if he/she doesn't think she'll be held accountable.

The interesting issue here is whether in the pursuit of "low prices" have U.S consumers increased their exposure to low quality products that threaten their environmental health? If this is the case, what can government do to "protect" us?
Or is this task impossible to really do?



"Thomas and Friends" railway toys recalled Thu Jun 14, 10:28 AM ET


More than 1 million of the popular "Thomas & Friends" wooden railway toys made in China are being voluntarily recalled because some may contain lead paint, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said on Wednesday.

About 1.5 million wooden vehicles, buildings and other train-set parts for young children are being recalled, the CPSC said in a statement. The toys were sold in the United States from January 2005 through June 2007, the statement said.

Lead is toxic and can pose a serious health risk to young children who often put objects in their mouths. Children under 6 are most at risk.

The CPSC and RC2 Corp., the Oak Brook, Illinois-based company that imports "Thomas & Friends" toys, said there had been no reports of illness or injuries linked to the recall.

The recall of toys made in China follows a series of health scandals in the United States involving food, drugs and other products imported from China, from poisoned cough syrup to tainted toothpaste and pet food.

"Consumers should take the recalled toys away from young children immediately and contact RC2 Corp. for a replacement toy," the CPSC said.