Environmental and Urban Economics

My UCLA colleague Sandy Black wrote a great Harvard thesis. Google Scholar says that the paper has already earned 292 cites; Do Better Schools Matter? Parental Valuation of Elementary Education, SE Black - Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1999.

How do you judge quality in your field? If you make airplanes, quality may mean that your planes rarely crash or fall apart. If you make hotdogs, quality may mean that people like how they taste and rarely have stomach problems the next day.

Behavioral economics swept through UCLA yesterday. Richard Thaler was on campus to give a speech. Somehow inertia and procrastination affected the turnout. The event was held in a room that seats 400 people but only 60 people were there.

Does demand create supply? Europe is building more coal fired power plants but wants to be "green" and reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.

UCLA's Institute of the Environment is looking for a new Director. Mary Nichols was our director until summer 2007 but she has moved on to a very important policy job at California's Air Resources Board .

This job has several excellent attributes.

Free Riding isn't cool. The Nash Logic of relying on everybody else to do their share is looked down upon during Earthweek. In my role as intellectual middleman, I wanted to guilt you with 10 things you should be doing rather than reading this blog.

No lights were on this morning at my son's school. There was no blackout. Instead, the kids were learning a lesson in energy conservation. http://www.google.com/intl/en/earthhour/ .

Do we need a government sponsored "Manhattan Project" for natural resource related innovation when we have PETA leading the charge? Will people in Europe label the testtube creations "Frankefoods"? (see http://www.frankenfoods.org/).

Where is Lenin when you need him? Will there be a new cohort of populist politicians riding the commodity price spike to achieve a rise to power in poor nations? It would interest me if agricultural economists have convinced themselves of the relative importance of supply versus demand factors in ex

I'm in deep thought about the old debate between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon.

I was at the Haas School at Berkeley yesterday giving a real estate seminar. Very constructive place in terms of feedback and my paper will improve! The number of reviews of my book on Amazon has doubled (from 1 to 2) and I wanted to share this.

Today, the New York Times is filled with interesting stuff. You can click on the two links below but I want to talk about this glamorous plastic surgeon named Dr. Prasad. His interactions with strangers on planes are a little bit different than mine.

Is noise pollution in cities an important costly externality? Rich country cities' aren't very noisy. I do admit that 2am garbage pickup in Rome did wake me up but we did not have air conditioning at our apartment and in the summer our windows were open.

I am back from my talk at the Santa Fe Institute. I had a great time and met some fascinating people. SFI's scholars are in deep thought about complex system dynamics. A city can be thought of as a complex system.

I am going AWOL for a few days to participate in a sustainability conference at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico . Some of the core ideas I will talk about are here:

www.hks.harvard.edu/rappaport/downloads/policybriefs/greencities_final.pdf. I'm hoping that there will not be podcast.

Economists like policies where the winners win more than the losers lose. But, we often see cases where such "hicksian pareto improvements" do not become policy.

Recently, a number of people have been asking me about the prospects of "green job" growth. Could this be a "win-win" of helping to green our economy and giving the United States its next Silicon Valley? The happy scenario posits that both low skill and high skill jobs will be created.

King Solomon, what do you do in this situation? You can't cut this baby in half.

April 7, 2008

Trees Block Solar Panels, and a Feud Ends in Court

By FELICITY BARRINGER

SUNNYVALE, Calif.

Today was not a great day to be a UCLA professor. Yes, the sun was out and it was 70 degrees but we lost the big game.

NBER researchers continue to write some pretty good stuff. The "Curse of Natural Resources" is a macro literature that merits more attention.

I've been watching a lot of the Star Wars movies. My personal ranking of the movies (from best to worst) is 4, 3, 5, 6, 1, 2. I am now an expert again on Yoda and the Jedi Knights as they try to gallantly save the galaxy from the forces of evil. Somehow Ben Bernanke reminds me of Yoda.

While I was eating lunch today at a Brentwood restaurant, two women sitting nearby kept looking at me. I took my son to the toliet. My wife told me that while I was gone the women asked her if I was Quentin Tarantino . My wife assured them that I am a nobody and am certainly not QT.