Environmental and Urban Economics

This morning you could have seen me on the 903am San Bernardino Line train from Los Angeles Union Station to Claremont. If I missed that train, the next train was at 1103am and my seminar at CMC started at 1030am.

UCLA teaching starts on thursday. There are plenty of students now here on campus.

I'm trying to start some research on the demand for solar paneled homes.

Suppose you want to plant 1 million trees in your city and your name isn't Johnny Appleseed, how are you going to get this job done? The Los Angeles "solution" is to give them away for free and hope that the gift receivers actually plant the tree somewhere.

UC Berkeley is an ambitious university.

Today, I won a "silver medal" in the contest for whose writing does yahoo news view as popular. The "Gold Medal" (see below) does look kind of interesting but in my biased opinion, the world quality of life rankings is the most interesting story.

This is an interesting case study related to the recent literature in urban economics on how zoning laws shape land use patterns. In Mexico City, a developer wants to build a huge skycraper near a major park. He has bought the land up cheaply and now wants to build a "Green" building.

The Internet is filled with great stuff. It amazes me that anyone gets any work done with all of this posted excitement. While Google Scholar is a productive tool for finding papers I should read before I write a paper, most of the Internet is just plain old fun.

I wonder what John, Paul, George and Ringo would think of this NYT editorial today? It is a little bit too deep for me. My son has a book about the field of astronomy. There is a section on a potential manned flight to another solar system.

A sociologist at NYU wrote a whole book on the Chicago Heat Wave in the 1990s that killed dozens. As I recall, most of the victims were poor and black.

Today's Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece focused on the surprise that Southern California has "surplus" water despite the fact that the region keeps growing.

How many minutes a day do academic economists read? I posit that we talk more than we read.

Permit me to add to your long list of "unread" materials that you earnestly mean to read at some point.

1. Kahn's Readers Digest Debut

2.

At 11am Pacific time on thursday 9/13, I'll participate in an hour long discussion on Green Cities on Bloomberg radio. I hope that somebody will listening! If you have a low value of time, you can listen in at this

Radio Station.

In the spring of 2006, I came close to signing on as a faculty member of Washington University at St. Louis. Thus, I could have been a member of this student's PHD committee. So, permit me to offer him some comments.

His causal story is pretty clear.

I made my Public Radio debut today. I participated in an interesting hour long program exploring why Eugene, Oregon is one of the Greenest Cities in the United States and also exploring what Santa Cruz, CA is doing right in terms of environmental sustainability.

Gary Becker has recently blogged about the environmental causes and consequences of China's growth. Becker and Posner have been thinking about what coalition of interest groups could work together to encourage China's leaders to mitigate their economy's emissions.

This article provides an interesting case study of urban renewal. After 9/11, I had thought that Wall Street job sprawl would accelerate due to the perception that downtown Manhattan would experience more attacks.

The October 2007 issue of Reader's Digest has a cover story on "The Magic Power of Sleep". It also has articles on "Catching a Serial Sniper", "The 3-Second Risk that can Kill" and Martina McBride. My favorite part starts on page 128.

Most social scientists are interested in causality. Today's New York Times highlights a fascinating question.

My 6 year old son enjoyed reading this article. The park service must have conducted a cost/benefit test to determine that it wasn't good public policy to have a helicopter land on a canyon to clean up hiker poop. Now hikers are supposed to clean up after themselves.

Whose expert opinion can you trust? I trust book reviewers.

The obituary section and the sports section are my favorite parts of the New York Times. Below, I offer you Nikita Khrushchev's 1971 obituary. While he has been dead for a while, his rise and fall represents a cautionary tale for ambitious people everywhere.