Should 100% of Berkeley employment away from the University be at Starbucks and Chez Panisse? If you say no, then what should the economy diversify into? One answer to this question would be to trust free market forces and allocate land to the highest bidder. Berkeley doesn't work this way. I'm in Berkeley this week studying how the invisible hand operates when it is being tickled by multiple interest groups.

This article from my local favorite highlights some of the political fights.

In case you missed my Wall Street Journal thing this week, take a look at this: forums.wsj.com/viewtopic.php?t=1874


Berkeley Daily Planet
West Berkeley Speakers Plead for Industrial Jobs
By Richard Brenneman 2008-03-25

Workers, residents and small business owners gathered Thursday night to hear planners and labor activists offer evidence and arguments for exercising restraint in making any zoning changes in West Berkeley.

Organized by West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies (WEBAIC), the meeting challenged proposed zoning changes now before the city’s Planning Commission.

“The (city) staff has put everything on the table ... on an extremely fast-track basis,” said WEBAIC Chair John Curl, a woodworker with his studio in the Sawtooth Building, a West Berkeley landmark.

With their final draft due to the City Council for action in June, Curl said, the process bears little semblance to the process that created the West Berkeley Plan, which involved lengthy deliberations among stakeholders.

Sitting in the back of the room and listening attentively throughout the session was Allan Gatzke, the city planner who drafted the proposals and presentations under attack from Curl and the panelists.

While the push for “zoning flexibility” comes from the City Council, with Mayor Tom Bates taking a prominent lead, one of Thursday night’s cautionary critics was the author of a report the city has been using as justification for its push for changes.

Raquel Pinderhughes said green-collar businesses offer the one sure job category that could provide living wages for those with minimal education and criminal records. Her word should carry some weight with the city since she is the San Francisco State urban studies professor who authored the city’s green-collar jobs report.

While the tour for commissioners sponsored by the city Planning Department which looked at the proposed zoning changes focused on high-tech companies, most of the business categories in Pinderhughes’ report are lower-tech, with college degrees optional for most jobs.

Businesses cited in her report range from landscaping and bicycle repair to energy conservation retrofits, recycling and public transit jobs.

Only one category in her report unequivocally matched the city report’s high-tech criteria, manufacturing jobs related to large-scale production of appropriate technologies.

The mayor and leaders in other East Bay cities have targeted the high-tech jobs that could result from two major “green fuel” projects now under way under the aegis of UC Berkeley and its Department of Energy-sponsored national labs.

Another panelist, Karen Chapple, a UC Berkeley associate professor of city and regional planning, has lived in West Berkeley for the past decade, said that zoning offers the best tool “to preserve the fragile industrial ecology” of the area from the economic pressures of housing, offices and retail uses, all of which command higher values when property is leased or sold than industrial and light manufacturing.

She called for a more focused approached to specific areas within West Berkeley, rather than an implementation of broader measures.

Abby Thorne-Lyman, another speaker, is a planning consultant with Strategic Economics, a consulting firm now working on industrial land policies in several California cities. While there is often a push to change land uses to allow more intense users that command higher prices, some cities are drawing the line because of the role industrial land plays in providing jobs with better pay and benefits than are offered in the commercial sector, she said.

Kate O’Hara of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a workers’ rights advocacy organization, said her organization did some of the basic work that paved the way for Berkeley’s living wage ordinance and advocates for worker rights.

Trade and logistics, a key non-manufacturing use of industrial land, offer a median wage of $19.85 per hour. In the East Bay, 65.9 percent of the positions offer health care benefits, and many are union jobs, she said.

The other major use, food manufacturing and processing, offers lower starting wages but rises at middle levels to a median pay of $20.40 an hour.

These industrial uses provide the main opportunities for workers with no higher education and even past brushes with the law to find work that pays wages adequate to support a family, she said.

All of the speakers urged the city to tread carefully before disrupting policies that offered the chief opportunities for minorities and those who are striving to rise out of poverty.


Shades of green

In his opening remarks, Curl said that one reason for the push for zoning changes in West Berkeley was the East Bay Green Corridor Partnership, an alliance of East Bay mayors who hope to attract “green tech” companies to their cities.

“Who could disagree” with the idea of a cooperative effort to lead the world in environmentally friendly technology? Curl asked rhetorically.

However, he said, there are already proposals afoot to have Berkeley industries relocate to Emeryville and Oakland, while West Berkeley would be opened up to offices—which other speakers noted would exert inflationary pressures on property prices.

Bernard Marszelak of the Inkworks cooperative printing firm in West Berkeley addressed the same issue one week earlier during a public forum on fuels derived from farmed crops held by critics of UC Berkeley’s $500 million Energy Bioscience Institute, funded by BP (formerly British Petroleum).

Marszalek said he was concerned how the push of agrofuels “affects all of us in Berkeley.”

He described West Berkeley as a habitat threatened by BP, agroindustrial giant Cargill “and other multinational giants that are trying to take over our zoning regulations in West Berkeley.”

Marszalek said he was concerned that the rush by Mayor Tom Bates and other regional political leaders to transform the East Bay coastline into a green tech corridor may displace the area’s smaller scale artisans and industries.

One company heavily involved in the farmed fuels program is now moving its labs from West Berkeley to Emeryville. Amyris technologies, headed by UC Berkeley professor Jay Keasling, has leased space downstairs in the same building that houses the Joint BioEnergy Institute, funded by the Department of Energy.

Critics of the biofuel programs say that will result in the displacement of small landholders from large areas of the Third World to make way for plantations of genetically engineered crops tailored to produce fuels for the cars and SUVs of the First World.

If critics of the West Berkeley rezoning push are right, the first to be displaced in the rush to synthetic fuels may be much closer to home, in the artists’ studios and small shops of West Berkeley.

Debra Sanderson, the city’s land use planning manager, told critics who spoke to the Planning Commission that there has been no move to change the plan itself.

But West Berkeley critics say that the kinds of changes to the zoning regulations now before the commission would have the same effect.
Quantcast

In California, it has been claimed that AB32 will not only help California to mitigate its greenhouse gases but that it will also create new jobs. I like this optimism but the skeptic inside me would like to see some good research on the role of environmental regulation as job creator. In the 1990s and early 2000s, researchers such as myself, Vern Henderson, Michael Greenstone, Arik Levinson were all investigating how footloose manufacturing employment varies as a function of a given geographical location's environmental regulatory intensity. In English, areas that were assigned to low regulation (Attainment status) under the Clean Air Act, did experience more "dirty job" growth than high regulation "non-attainment" areas. One novel study by Linda Bui and Eli Berman compared high regulation California to low regulation texas and I believe looked at oil refineries. They found that regulation actually did "create" jobs but I believe that the effect was small.

I understand the politics here that if climate change regulation actually creates jobs (or if people believe this) then "joe 6-pack" would be more likely to support Al Gore and his friends on their quest. But what is the evidence? Today the New York Times tries to offer some case study evidence.

The truth of the matter is that every job (including working at UCLA) has "green" and "brown" effects. A loose definition of a green job would be one whose output helps to produce or lower the price of products that offer positive environmental externalities. So a wind turbine maker increases the supply of such green things and this in aggregate , lowers their price.

This article highlights the issue of how we classify industry and occupation codes. While labor economists and trade economists have always taken this seriously, I haven't for exactly the reasons that this article highlights.

New York Times
March 26, 2008
Millions of Jobs of a Different Collar
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

EVERYONE knows what blue-collar and white-collar jobs are, but now a job of another hue — green — has entered the lexicon.

Presidential candidates talk about the promise of “green collar” jobs — an economy with millions of workers installing solar panels, weatherizing homes, brewing biofuels, building hybrid cars and erecting giant wind turbines. Labor unions view these new jobs as replacements for positions lost to overseas manufacturing and outsourcing. Urban groups view training in green jobs as a route out of poverty. And environmentalists say they are crucial to combating climate change.

No doubt that the number of green-collar jobs is growing, as homeowners, business and industry shift toward conservation and renewable energy. And the numbers are expected to increase greatly in the next few decades, because state governments have mandated that even more energy come from alternative sources.

But some skeptics argue that the phrase “green jobs” is little more than a trendy term for politicians and others to bandy about. Some say they are not sure that these jobs will have the staying power to help solve the problems of the nation’s job market, and others note that green jobs often pay less than the old manufacturing jobs they are replacing.

Indeed, such is the novelty of the green-job concept that no one is certain how many such jobs there are, and even advocates don’t always agree on what makes a job green.

“A green-collar job is in essence a blue-collar job that has been upgraded to address the environmental challenges of our country,” said Lucy Blake, chief executive of the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, labor unions and politicians seeking to transform the economy into one based on renewable energy.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, said: “A green job has to do something useful for people, and it has to be helpful to, or at least not damaging to, the environment.”

It can be difficult to parse the difference between green- and blue-collar jobs. Dave Foster, executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, a partnership between the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club, pointed to workers who mine iron ore in Minnesota and ship it to steel mills in Indiana. “Ten years ago, that steel was used for making low-efficiency automobiles, so those jobs were part of the dirty economy,” he said. “But now that steel is being used to build wind turbines. So now you can call them green jobs.”

But to Andrew W. Hannah, chief executive of Plextronics, a start-up in Pittsburgh, green-collar jobs often have little relation to their blue-collar counterparts. His company produces high-tech polymer inks that are used to make electronic circuitry for solar panels. Of the company’s 51 employees, 20 have Ph.D.’s in fields like physics, chemistry and material science.

It is hard to gauge the number of green-collar jobs nationwide. Welders at a wind-turbine factory are viewed as having green jobs, but what about the factory’s accountant or its janitors? Workers with Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit group that plants vegetation to keep the area cooler and reduce air-conditioning demands, would seem to fit the bill. But so would the employees of Tesla Motors, south of San Francisco, who are producing an all-electric Roadster that sells for $98,000.

In the most-often-cited estimate, a report commissioned by the American Solar Energy Society said that the nation had 8.5 million jobs in renewable energy or energy efficient industries. And Jerome Ringo, president of the Apollo Alliance, predicted that the nation could generate three million to five million more green jobs over the next 10 years.

Green jobs are especially good “because they cannot be easily outsourced, say, to Asia,” said Van Jones, president of Green for All, an organization based in Oakland, Calif., whose goal is promoting renewable energy and lifting workers out of poverty. “If we are going to weatherize buildings, they have to be weatherized here,” he said. “If you put up solar panels, you can’t ship a building to Asia and have them put the solar panels on and ship it back. These jobs have to be done in the United States.”

Many advocates of green employment say the jobs should be good for the workers as well as the environment. Two weeks ago in Pittsburgh, more than 800 people attended a national green-jobs conference, where much of the talk was about ensuring that green jobs provided living wages. Many speakers anticipated that the jobs would do so, because they often required special skills, like the technical ability to maintain a giant wind turbine (and the physical ability to climb a 20-story ladder to work on it).

“These jobs will be better for the workers’ future, for their job security,” said Ms. Blake of the Apollo Alliance. “These green technologies are making products that the world wants, like energy-efficient buildings and light fixtures.”

Not everyone, however, is enamored with green jobs. Take the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington group that opposes state mandates requiring that a certain percentage of power come from renewable sources. Myron Ebell, the institute’s director of energy and global warming policy, argues that creating green jobs often does not create jobs on a net basis.

“If you create jobs in wind power or ethanol,” he said, “that will take away jobs in other industries,” like building and operating conventional gas turbine power plants.

Mr. Ebell suggested that green jobs might not prove to be so great. “There will undoubtedly be a lot of jobs created in industries that are considered green or fashionable,” he said. “Some will last a long time, and some will go like the dot-coms.”

Twenty-eight states have mandates generally requiring that 10 to 25 percent of their energy be obtained through renewable sources in a decade or two. In response, many companies have rushed to build wind- and solar-power systems, and some are researching how to transform prairie grass into biofuel.

Joy Clark-Holmes, director of public sector markets for Johnson Controls, which manages heating and cooling systems in buildings nationwide, sees strong job growth in the green economy. Her company’s building efficiency business, she said, expects to hire 60,000 workers worldwide over the next decade.

“We see the market for greening our customers as growing,” Ms. Clark-Holmes said. She talked of demand for technicians who install and maintain heating and cooling systems, managers who oversee those functions and engineers who develop and design such systems.

With scientists voicing increased concern about climate change, some highly talented people have left other fields to help build the green economy. For instance, Lois Quam, who helped create and run a $30 billion division of UnitedHealth Group, a health insurer, has joined the renewable energy cause, becoming managing director for alternative investments at Piper Jaffray, an investment bank based in Minneapolis. She is setting up investment funds that focus on renewable energy and clean energy.

“The development of a green economy creates a broad new set of opportunities,” Ms. Quam said. “When I first started looking at this area, many people commented on how this will be as big as the Internet. But this is so much bigger than the Internet. The only comparable example we can find is the Industrial Revolution. It will affect every business and every industry.”

Mr. Jones, the head of Green for All, joined the green economy after graduating from Yale Law School. He became executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, using that position to start a program that trains low-income workers in how to weatherize homes and install solar panels.

Mr. Jones calls such jobs green pathways out of poverty. “The green economy needs Ph.D.’s and Ph.-do’s,” he said. “We need people who are highly educated at the theoretical level, and we need people who are highly educated at the level of skilled labor.”

He sees green jobs as providing a career ladder. Some workers might start at $10 an hour inspecting homes for energy-efficient light bulbs. Then they might become $18-an-hour workers installing solar panels and eventually $25-an-hour solar-team managers. Eventually they might become $40-an-hour electricians or carpenters who do energy-minded renovations.

“Right now we don’t have the infrastructure to train a sufficient number of green-collar workers,” Mr. Jones said.

As the green economy grows, states are vying for green investments — and green jobs. Pennsylvania has been especially successful, attracting German and Taiwanese companies that are building solar equipment factories, as well as attracting Gamesa, a Spanish wind turbine company. Gamesa has two factories in the state, employing 1,300 workers. Facing pressure from the United Steelworkers, which views the greening of the economy as a way to increase union membership, Gamesa agreed not to fight an organizing drive, and now many workers are unionized.

Pennsylvania’s efforts have been helped by the presence of many skilled manufacturing workers in the state and its commitment to having 18.5 percent of its power come from renewable sources by 2020.

“We have gone after this sector first and foremost because the green of the sector is important, because it is the green that goes into the pocketbooks and wallets of workers,” said Kathleen McGinty, the state’s environmental secretary. “They are good-paying jobs, jobs that often require advanced skills.”

Jim Bauer, 55, is delighted to work for Gamesa. There he leads a team that assembles parts for wind turbines, earning slightly less than he did at United States Steel, which laid him off from his crane operator’s job after 25 years. Now he earns $17 an hour in his job, while many assembly workers earn $13.50 an hour.

“It feels good working for a company that is bringing jobs into the country instead of taking jobs out of the country,” Mr. Bauer said.

He admits to feeling noble doing a green job. “We have to get away from fossil fuels and oil so we can tell the Saudis to take a hike,” he said.

I don't know Ben Bernanke but he doesn't seem to care much for guys like me. I'm a renter and taxpayer. I would like to see him and Rick Miskin explain in a press conference why home owners need to bailed out and protected from the loans whose terms they chose to accept. I would like to know how many of my tax dollars will go to this bailout of the Bear Stearns. If they like activism, they should go back to their home universities and attend a university wide faculty meeting. What's the matter with the world that Robert Schiller has predicted? Why can't prices fall? Yes there will be some losers if prices fall but somehow the winners from such an event are being ignored. Why? Are you suffering from a "crisis of confidence"? Are you considering making a "bank run" like back in Jimmy Stewart's "A Wonderful Life"? I see the distributional effects introduced by the Fed's Activist policies these days but I do not understand how it has convinced its self that these policies have "efficiency" benefits. Its actions feed potential panic by introducing extra uncertainty. The Fed's intuitive moves makes the "game theory" more complicated here.

My nasty question for Dr. Bernanke is the following. If he knew that he would be re-appointed as Fed Chair in the next 2 years, would be less of a activist Chairman right now? Put bluntly, is he fighting for his job? or for our jobs? Dr. Bernanke should have to go to the University of Chicago and take the first year of the MACRO PHD sequence again.

If Ben Bernanke wants to helicopter drop some $ then he should consider handing it out to renters in the Westside of Los Angeles who want to buy a modest home in nice areas such as Westwood. Dora and I want to minimize our carbon footprint. We would be able to walk to work from Westwood and we wouldn't drink milk to restore the calories we burn off.

While this has been an angry post, permit me to earn back your sympathy.

Each of these homes is about 1700 square feet on a 6500 square foot lot.


Price Beds Baths

$1,450,000 3 2.00
10362 LOUISIANA AVE LOS ANGELES
Ron Wynn
Yes Coldwell Banker-Westwood

Active 04/23/2007 $1,490,000 3 2.00
355 S THURSTON AVE LOS ANGELES
Jasmen Vartanian
Yes Calstar Realty

Active 01/24/2008 $1,495,000 3 2.50
349 S THURSTON AVE LOS ANGELES
Tudor Martin
No Coldwell Banker-Brentwood West

Active 03/21/2008 $1,500,000 3 2.00
10521 KINNARD AVE LOS ANGELES
Donald Plunkett
Yes Congress Realty, Inc.

Active 02/01/2008 $1,545,000 3 3.00
10446 WILKINS AVE LOS ANGELES
Gail Mintz
Yes Coldwell Banker-BH East

Active 03/17/2008 $1,550,000 3 2.50
10450 HOLMAN AVE LOS ANGELES
Rona Kaufman
Yes Worldwide Real Estate, Inc.

Active 10/25/2007 $1,569,000 4 2.50
2009 FAIRBURN AVE LOS ANGELES
Terri Elston
Yes Coldwell Banker-BH

Active 03/20/2008 $1,595,000 4 2.50
2034 FAIRBURN AVE LOS ANGELES
Terri Elston
Yes Coldwell Banker-BH

Active 03/05/2008 $1,595,000 3 3.00
10365 TENNESSEE AVE LOS ANGELES
Scott Tamkin
Yes Sotheby's Int'l Rlty-Brentwood
Looking for Backup 02/19/2008 $1,599,000 3 2.00
1833 PELHAM AVE LOS ANGELES
Alex Galuz
Yes Crescent Realty Corp.

Active 03/06/2008 $1,599,000 3 3.00
381 DALKEITH AVE LOS ANGELES
Laurence Young
Yes Prudential California Realty

Active 11/08/2007 $1,599,000 2 2.50
1427 WARNALL AVE LOS ANGELES
Kathy Fisher
Yes Coldwell Banker-Brentwood West

Have other bloggers wondered how random websurfers find their webpage? At google, if you type "urban economics" you will pretty quickly get pointed to my webpage. If you type "environmental economics" it takes a little bit more work to find me. Today, somebody searched for "ucla econ professor grumpy" and was directed to my site.

The asymmetry of the web interests me. Our readers know a lot about the bloggers but we know next to nothing about who visits. If you show up from a city or university we know, but I would like to know more about this specific visitor.

Now we all know that UCLA Economics currently has no grumpy professors. The grumpy professors have left the faculty in recent years to move to exotic places where I wouldn't want to live! All of my current colleagues are devoted teachers who seek to share our excitement and interest in economics with all of our students.
Our biorhythms at UCLA are like the local weather ; blue skies and sunny.

Despite Big Ben B's best efforts, we may be slipping into a recession. One way to increase national economic output is to increase the effective time that our workers are working. Assuming the typical worker has a 8 hour work day will these urine bags increase output per hour?

Union: Workers told to use urine bags

Union officials in Colorado say a Qwest supervisor tried to cut down on lengthy bathroom breaks by telling workmen to use disposable urinal bags in the field.

The manager distributed the bags to 25 male field technicians, telling them not to waste time leaving a job site to search for a public bathroom, the Rocky Mountain News reported Thursday.

"We deal with a lot of silliness in corporate America, but you've got to admit, it takes the freakin' cake," Reed Roberts, an administrative director at the Communications Workers of America District 7, told the newspaper.

Roberts did not return a message left by The Associated Press.

Qwest spokeswoman Jennifer Barton said, "There's no policy whatsoever" requiring field technicians to use the bags.

"They are there for convenience, and they are there because employees asked for them," she said.

The union has not filed a grievance, Barton said, and she could not discuss the details of the allegations from the communications company's field worker in the sparsely populated area near Montrose.

Roberts said he had complained to Qwest's corporate labor relations department. He said the company has made an issue of the amount of time wasted by workers returning to the garage or central office for bathroom breaks.

But he said it appears this manager "took it upon himself to cut down on the time technicians spend to go to the bathroom."

Neither Roberts nor Barton gave the name of the supervisor involved.

Qwest and other companies have for years offered portable urinal bags to workers who could find themselves in the field far from a bathroom.

The bag's manufacturer, American Innotek, said it provides the bags to various industrial companies, including electric utilities, municipal public works and telephone companies.

Ryan Hiott, a regional director for Innotek, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered 2.5 million bags after Hurricane Katrina.

UCLA researchers in our sociology department have generated a series of interesting facts about Mexican American assimilation. I'm not sure if they have nailed the causal mechanisms here but first steps first.

Apparently, immigration will continue to be a hot policy subject. For you nerds with too much time on your hands, take a look at this new George Borjas paper.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13887. Their debate with Ottaviano and Peri is an important one.


Mexican American integration slow, education stalled, study finds

UCLA report charts Chicano experience over four decades

Letisia Marquez


Second-, third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans speak English fluently, and most prefer American music. They are increasingly Protestant, and some may even vote for a Republican candidate.


However, many Mexican Americans in these later generations do not graduate from college, and they continue to live in majority Hispanic neighborhoods. Most marry other Hispanics and think of themselves as "Mexican" or "Mexican American."



Such are the findings from the most comprehensive sociological report ever produced on the integration of Mexican Americans. The UCLA study, released today in a Russell Sage Foundation book titled "Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race," concludes that, unlike the descendants of European immigrants to the United States, Mexican Americans have not fully integrated by the third and fourth generation. The research spans a period of nearly 40 years.



The study's authors, UCLA sociologists Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, examined various markers of integration among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas, including educational attainment, economic advancement, English and Spanish proficiency, residential integration, intermarriage, ethnic identity and political involvement.



"The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more are troubling," said Telles, a UCLA professor of sociology. "Linguistically, Mexican Americans are assimilating into mainstream quite well, and by the second generation, nearly all Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency."



"However," said Ortiz, a UCLA associate professor of sociology, "institutional barriers, persistent discrimination, punitive immigration policies and a reliance on cheap Mexican labor in the Southwestern states have made integration more difficult for Mexican Americans."



"Generations of Exclusions" revisits the 1970 book "The Mexican American People," which was the first in-depth sociological study of Mexican Americans and became a benchmark for future research. It found little assimilation among Mexican Americans, even those who had lived in the United States for several generations.



The earlier study had been conducted at UCLA in the mid-1960s by Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzman. In 1992, construction workers retrofitting the UCLA College Library found boxes containing questionnaires from the original study.



Telles and Ortiz pored over the questionnaires and recognized a unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American experience had evolved in the decades since the first study. The researchers and their team then reinterviewed nearly 700 original respondents and approximately 800 of their children. The vast majority of the original respondents and all the children are U.S. citizens.



In the foreword to "The Mexican American People," researcher Moore had written that she was optimistic that a subsequent study would find much assimilation among Mexican Americans. Telles and Ortiz, like Moore, were surprised to find that the third and fourth generation in this current study had not achieved more gains, particularly in the educational arena.



Key findings from "Generations of Exclusion" include:



· The educational levels of second-generation Mexican Americans improved dramatically. But the third and fourth generations failed to surpass, and to some extent fell behind, the educational level of the second generation. Moreover, the educational levels of all Mexican Americans still lag behind the national average.

· Mexican Americans attained higher levels of education when they knew professionals as children, when their parents were more educated and when their parents were more involved in school and church activities. Those who attended Catholic schools were much better educated than those who attended public schools.

· Economic status improved from the first to second generation but stalled in the third and fourth generation. Earnings, occupational status and homeownership were still alarmingly low for later generations. Low levels of schooling among Mexican Americans were the main reason for lower income, occupational status and other indicators of socioeconomic status.

· All Mexican Americans were English-proficient by the second generation. Spanish proficiency declined from the first to the fourth generation, showing that the loss of Spanish was inevitable. However, Spanish declined only gradually, and approximately 36 percent of the fourth generation spoke Spanish fluently.

· First-generation Mexican Americans were about 90 percent Catholic. By the fourth generation, only 58 percent were Catholic.

· Intermarriage increased with each generation. Only 10 percent of immigrants were intermarried. In the third generation, 17 percent were married to non-Hispanics, as were 38 percent in the fourth generation.

· Adult Mexican Americans in the third and fourth generation lived in more segregated neighborhoods than they did as youths. This was due to the high number of Latinos and immigrants moving into these neighborhoods, the researchers said.

· Most Mexican Americans identified as "Mexican" or "Mexican American," even into the fourth generation. Only about 10 percent identified as "American." Moreover, many Mexican Americans felt their ethnicity was very important and many said they would like to pass it along to their children.

· Third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans supported less restrictive immigration policies than the general population and generally supported bilingual education and affirmative action.

· In the 1996 presidential election, 93 percent of first-generation Mexican Americans voted Democratic. The percentage of Democratic voters declined in each subsequent generation. By the fourth generation, 74 percent voted Democratic.



Telles and Ortiz noted that some Mexican Americans were able to move into the mainstream more easily than other minorities. Mexican immigrants who came to the United States as children and the children of immigrants tended to show the most progress, perhaps spurred by optimism and an untainted view of the American Dream.



"A disproportionate number, though, continue to occupy the lower ranks of the American class structure," the sociologists said. "Certainly, later-generation Mexican Americans and European Americans overlap in their class distributions. The difference is that the bulk of Mexican Americans are in lower class sectors but only a relatively small part of the European American population is similarly positioned."



More than any other factor, Telles and Ortiz said, education accounted for the slow assimilation of Mexican Americans in most social dimensions. The low educational levels of Mexican Americans have impeded most other types of integration.



"Their limited schooling locks many of them into a future of low socioeconomic status," they said. "Low levels of education also predict lower rates of intermarriage, a weaker American identity, and a lower likelihood of registering to vote and voting."



Telles and Ortiz believe that a "Marshall Plan" that invests heavily in public school education will address the issues that disadvantage many Mexican American students.



"For Mexican Americans, the payoff can only come by giving them the same quality and quantity of education as whites receive," they said. "The problem is not the unwillingness of Mexican Americans to adopt Americans values and culture but the failure of societal institutions, particularly public schools, to successfully integrate them as they did the descendants of European immigrants."



The research was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; the Ford, Rockefeller, Russell Sage, and Haynes foundations; the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center; and various UC and UCLA sources.



The book can be ordered by calling the Russell Sage Foundation at (800) 524-6401 or visiting www.rsage.org.

In December 2008, Princeton University Press will be publishing at least two new good books. In case you slept through your PHD Macro classes the first time, Daron Acemoglu will be offering you 1,400 pages of the opportunity to make your comeback
(for a sneak preview see http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/books).

For those of you interested in the intersection of economics, history, sociology, and demography, Dora Costa and I have written a pretty good interdisciplinary book. While the New York publishing houses were slow to talk to us, we are very happy that the New Jersey (i.e Princeton) publishing house knew a good manuscript when they saw one. We had a great experience working with the Princeton Press and we believe that it is a stronger Press than other Ivy League rivals.





A PDF of the Costa and Kahn New Book Cover

For copies of some of the technical papers that the book is built from go to:

http://www.econ.ucla.edu/costa/papers.html

Harvard Law School has announced that it will waive the 3rd year of its tuition (a short term savings of $40 grand) for people who promise that they will enter public service for at least 5 years. Some question: who will take this offer? Liberal students will be more likely to accept this deal. Will women at HLS be more likely to take this offer? While I have no evidence for this claim, my intuition is telling me that the answer is yes.

So, suppose that you are smart woman at HLS and you accept this offer. After 5 years in public service, can you join a fancy NYC law firm and 8 years later be promoted to partner? I doubt it. Starting a family and other life considerations would also affect possible transitions here.

If women have a higher probability of accepting this new offer then men, and if once you pick this path you can't return to the private sector and make partner then my proof is complete that an unintended consequence of this new policy will be to reduce the number of women from HLS who get promoted to partner at the fancy NYC law firms. Other law schools are likely to imitate Harvard and so this policy could have "macro" consequences. Is it a big deal if fancy NYC law firms do not have many women partners? Some measure gender progress by whether such convergence does take place.

Now , you may counter that these women weren't at the margin. You might say that the liberal women who want to enter public law were never at risk to go to NYC and join the prestigious firms. You may be right but this subsidy doesn't help.

New Harvard Law School Tuition Waiver

A behavioral economist might also say that the pursuit of saving $40 grand now in waived tuition may lead too many hyperbolic people to choose public law!

It is certainly possible that a subsidy for public service furthers society's goals but it would interest me whether the Harvard Deans thought about whether the new incentive program would have differential effects by gender and political ideology? Who is most responsive to this new incentive? Whose behavior will not be changed by this incentive?

Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal OnLine Econoblog will offer some excitement. Before I turn to Tuscaloosa, I want to mention real estate prices at the Venice Canals in Los Angeles. Yesterday, we toured a $2 million home whose entire lot was 2,000 square feet. The home was 2300 square feet (it had 2 floors) and the lot was a mere 2,000. Why is the hedonic gradient demanding $1,000 per square foot of land? The Canals are Very pretty. . NO pollution, no noise, just blue canals and blue sky and cool air from the Ocean less than .5 miles away. The only disamenty is dog and duck poop. All of these dog walkers are out in force marching their wonderful creatures.

Here is my new favorite newspaper until the WSJ is published tomorrow.

Mar 17, 2008

Growing ‘greener’
Experts offer tips for conservation-minded cities

By Meredith Cummings
Community News Editor
TUSCALOOSA | Kermit the Frog was right. It’s not easy being green, though it can be sometimes.

For cities, being “green” — that is, reducing pollution and energy use — encompasses everything from protecting ecosystems to instituting recycling programs to getting people out of cars into public transportation, and that takes time and effort.

“Many groups will say you’re not moving fast enough,” said Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox. “And they don’t understand the progress that has been made in a short amount of time. Each one of our departments are charged with looking with ways they can be more environmentally friendly and putting those ideas in budget form. There are many things that will take time because there are definitely cost issues … but there are also things we can do pretty easy.”

Maddox is one of more than 650 mayors who have signed the 2005 U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Change Agreement, known as the “Cool Cities” agreement, which pledges to reduce emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. It was created in response to the U.S. government’s refusal to sign an international pollution-reduction accord.

Could Tuscaloosa be greener? Maddox thinks so. “I know there is much more to do,” he said.

The city of Hoover, for instance, was a finalist in a worldwide competition last year for excellence in environmental management in the category for cities with populations of 20,001 to 75,000. Among the city’s achievements were the creation of a facility that converts cooking oil into a fuel and the use of alternative fuels to run city vehicles and equipment.

The Tuscaloosa News asked some experts how Tuscaloosa could go green.

n Plant and protect urban trees. Ed Macie, regional urban forester with the U.S. Forest Service Southern region based in Atlanta warned of “urban deforestation” and said trees planted in medians for aesthetics are vital to the ecosystem, affecting everything from air quality to storm water runoff and energy conservation, even the prevalence of skin cancer.

“Even in a city the size of Tuscaloosa, you’re still getting strip malls and big-box stores,” Macie said. “As soon as there is a human footprint and we start putting in asphalt and concrete and changing drainage patterns, then you need to take action to mitigate that. Trees, by far, are one of the simplest things you can do to offset that.”

Macie said overdevelopment leads to “urban heat islands,” and trees of any size are better than no trees at all.

“When you talk about big box stores, the one thing that they do is put in parking lots that are large and flat and impact large numbers of trees. The single most important thing a city like Tuscaloosa can do is to have very strong standards to bring trees into parking lots. Parking lots are the ugliest things you can build in your communities. Plus, Tuscaloosa is a hot city. Who the heck wants to park their car in a parking lot with no shade?”

n Rethink development. “Start approving new housing without any parking and create and expand a car-free street into a car-free district,” said Richard Register, designer, builder and author in ecological city design and planning, who is organizing the Ecocity World Summit in April. “Go for higher density in the mode of very mixed-use with the sort of architectural features I talk about in my books: Rooftop and terraced gardens and cafes up there, bridges between clustered buildings.”

Register, president of Ecocity Builders in Oakland, Calif., pointed to other cities that work with their universities to create new spaces where there were previously none.

“The University of California at Berkeley has nine bridges linking 18 buildings, or in a couple of cases, the building is a bridge with a large open ground level passageway,” he said. “These features could be emphasized and buildings on campuses brought close enough together to create streetscapes in one part of town, and/or campus while opening up other areas for natural and agricultural activities.”

Move away from sprawl. Register’s group, Ecocity Builders, has a mapping system that helps identify “vitality centers” for more development where people can walk to conduct business.

“Write general plans for both city and campus that help the community find its centers and reinforce them with more development at higher density with what you might call fine-grained mixed-uses,” Register said.

An example of such a center is University Town Center on the Strip near the University of Alabama. Maddox said that while he supported the idea of building more, getting people on board isn’t easy.

Maddox said he would like to see more of that type of growth. “As someone downtown 14 hours a day, I would love to be able to walk to work,” he said, adding that after the city’s downtown revitalization plan is completed in 2010 or 2011, the “condominium market will grow for adults, and if gas is still expensive … it will almost start to have an economic benefit.”

Collaborate. Experts point to the need for a comprehensive “green” plan, both short- and long-term.

While neither the city nor UA have a comprehensive “green” plan for the short- and long-term, both have many facets of environmentally friendly growth in place. Experts suggested that the two work together to create such a plan for long-term growth so that environmentally important items don’t get overlooked.

At UA, Tony Johnson, director of logistics and support services, said he has added recycling areas on campus throughout the year, and the tons of recycled items reflect that. He recently parked a 16-foot moving truck by Coleman Coliseum to collect used cardboard — one of the most valuable recyclable items — from concessions at gymnastics meets and other sporting events. He has also instructed his employees to look for potentially profitable ways to recycle.

“They don’t mind going to a Dumpster and looking to see what’s in it. They don’t mind educating people,” Johnson said. “I think a lot more people are starting to realize that we’ve got to take care of our environment.”

Reduce emissions: In addition to signing the “Cool Cities” emissions-reduction agreement, Maddox has instituted testing on the city’s 700-plus vehicles.

David Willet, national press secretary for the Sierra Club, said the club’s guidelines encourage residents to prod city officials to do more, such as use more hybrids and other clean vehicles and provide better public transportation choices.

In Tuscaloosa, a city that uses half a million gallons of gas or diesel fuel a year, that would make an impact.

Maddox describes himself as a “moderate” environmentalist.

“I think sometimes there is a feeling that you have to be a, quote, tree hugger to protect and promote the environment,” he said. “The mainstream American wants to protect the environment. The things we are doing are a commonsense approach to protecting and enhancing Tuscaloosa’s environment. And many of the things that we do can have an economic benefit.”

n Control pollution. Matthew Kahn, a professor at the UCLA Institute of Environment and author of “Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment,” said cities like Tuscaloosa that have a strong manufacturing base, have a hard time controlling pollution. A lot of older cars on the road doesn’t help either.

Getting older pre-1975 [car] makes off the roads of Los Angeles has significantly reduced smog in this smog capital, despite the fact that Los Angeles’ population has grown and people are driving more than ever.”

If big cities can do it, so can smaller cities like Tuscaloosa, Kahn said.

”Electric utilities are major polluters,” he said. “Substituting electricity generation from dirty coal fired power plants to cleaner power plants that use renewables, such as wind and solar, would have a big impact.”

n Build sustainably. In Tuscaloosa, of the buildings being torn down to make room for new buildings — as well as green space — more than 70 percent of the materials are being recycled.

“One of the misconceptions with environmentally friendly initiatives is that it costs more,” Maddox said. “For the person that’s doing the demolition, there’s an economic incentive for them. There’s a profit to be made in recycling old materials. In many cases doing the environmentally right thing can actually be the economically wise decision as well.”

Tim Leopard, assistant vice president for planning design and construction at UA, said adaptability is the biggest challenge he has to avoid “a disposable building,” one that can’t be updated and must be torn down. The average UA building is over 60 years old, he said, but updates include higher-efficiency mechanical systems and recycled roofing.

The Sierra Club’s guidelines encourage residents to urge their cities to meet energy efficiency standards in appliance purchases and building and renovation projects and to use efficient combined heat and power facilities.

n Work with the system. Bureaucracy can frustrate conservation, as when a government requirement to accept the lowest bid gets in the way of the most environmentally friendly options for a project. Sometimes, like with the recent decision to use Alabama bricks in a UA new building, things work out.

Both Leopard and Maddox said they are beholden the taxpayers. “I’m out there to be a good steward of the university, taxpayer and student dollars,” Leopard said.

Kahn said something can always be done.

“In this age of concern about climate change, the first step should be a greenhouse gas emissions inventory,” Kahn said. “How much GHG is your campus creating? What are the key sources? Could electricity consumption and transportation be greened through public information campaigns or investments in more energy efficient products such as better lights and windows? Could any incentives, like free bus passes, be offered to green behavior?”

n Start early. The city’s best defense against bad environmental stewardship is children, which is why programs like ones promoting recycling in the schools are important.

Experts said children often help their parents learn green behavior. Maddox’s own 5-year-old, he said, recently reprimanded him for throwing an aluminum can into the trash.

Attracting other environmentalists should also be key, experts said.

“Cities that can attract more environmentalists to live there will also be greener,” Kahn said. “Environmentalists live a green life and this entails using public transit, recycling, using green space and demanding green space and voting for politicians who are willing to use the power of the state to green the area.”

UCLA has a healthy rivalry with UC Berkeley. We can beat them at basketball but can we beat them at economics? In a recent piece, David Warsh seems to think so. He is worried that UC Berkeley may soon be exporting some talent to the rest of the country. I've got other things to worry about such as hair loss but I'm optimistic that Berkeley will always be able to recruit and retain talent. There is something about that hippie place that draws talent.

Let me offer one example, my friend Max. Max keeps making the national news for his environmental research. That's a pretty rare skill. Here is an NPR quote:

"But Maximilian Auffhammer of the University of California, Berkeley, says things have changed radically since then. Since 2000, carbon dioxide emissions have been "off the charts," he says.

For example, in 2004, emissions from China grew by 14 percent — or the equivalent of an additional Germany or England.

Auffhammer and a colleague have used detailed information from within China to estimate what emissions will be like through the end of the decade. His forecast is being published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management."

And apparently, here is a tape of Max Talking (hopefully not in German).

Projections of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in China