Environmental and Urban Economics

Back in the "bad old days" before we discovered how to cook, ape/humans had to spend a fair bit of energy digesting the raw food and meat we ate. Once we learned/lucked into starting to cook ---- we didn't need to use as much energy to digest our food. The cooking took care of that. The cooking must have knocked out some nasty diseases as well. The energy we used to use to digest now went to our brains and we were able to develop above the neck.

Dear Los Angeles DWP,

I would like to suggest a new incentive structure that will simultaneously

raise revenue for your organization and end the "water shortage" in Los Angeles.

Scrap your strange current tiered water pricing system and replace it with the

following simpler tiered water pricing system.

Choose a bimonthly quantity of water that each household should be allowed

to purchase cheaply. This will protect the poor. Suppose that each person

"needs" 10 gallons of water a day.

There is serious drought in the West. Higher prices could encourage a demand side conservation. Los Angeles Department of Water & Power is not doing its part to "solve" the problem. What if I told you that the LADWP charges households different prices for a gallon of water depending on what season it is, how large their lot size is and how many people live in their home? The first criteria sounds reasonable. The next two are insane.

Planning ahead is always a wise move. In this spirit, UCLA has announced its new 10 Year Plan . I suggest taking a look at the comments being posted there by faculty. Bill Zame offers some smart thoughts. I would like to offer a few thoughts for the Campus Leaders to consider.

There is a fundamental incentive problem related to intellectual "sprawl". Every leader when his/her time is done wants to be able to point to something lasting and say; "My legacy is that I created the "XX" and the "YY".

The Internet offers some interesting information. Do you get paid $10,000+ to give a talk? This website "names names" and prices to see some of the big stars on your stage! Here is one data point of a well known economist making Good $ per talk .

When I was a graduate student, my famous macro teachers would say that a recession is a good time to take a vacation. We laughed but we wondered what the "real unemployed" were doing during recessions. Since the key models featured no geography and zero migration costs across islands (i.e. cities), it was puzzling why anybody was actually unemployed.

I live 100 yards away from an elementary school. Each morning frantic parents pull up and park their cars in front of my house to deliver kids to school. The precious children impose an externality on my household. The kids and their drivers stomp on the nice plants we have planted in the soil between the street and the sidewalk. This is a fairly large rectangle measuring perhaps 70 feet by 10 feet.

I like this Grist Article from 5/18/2009 !