Upcoming Trip to Beijing

To augment my sharply cut UC salary, I will be moving to Beijing for September. I will take a job as a barista at a Starbucks in Beijing. It remains an open question whether I will return. Whose future is brighter; Los Angeles or Beijing? Last year, I told my environmental economics students that I was thinking of moving to China and they believed me. So, maybe it is true. Convergence is slowly taking place between UCLA salaries and Tsinghua Univ. salaries. There must be a date t such that a professor's salary and quality of life will be equalized in Los Angeles and Beijing. Is that year going to be 2010 or 2050 or 2090? Some of us have been debating whether by 2075 will China have the world's best Universities. Will the U.S keep its edge in higher education? Or to ask my question again, do Cambridge UK and Oxford UK today give us a sense of our high quality Universities' future? The UK schools are still quite good but 80 years ago they were the best. Given China's scale and capital, will its nerds enjoy a great leap forward?

Playing devil's advocate -- I have argued that footloose faculty want to live in high quality of life cities. If China's cities become "green cities", I am more optimistic that their universities will jump up the world rankings. Their universities are hiring more faculty who have PHDs from U.S schools or have visited U.S universities.

I am excited about visiting for a few weeks, giving some lectures and looking around. My trip there will help me write a chapter of my new book on climate change and cities. There will be a China chapter.

But , on top of that I'm hoping that I can meet some policy people who have the ambition and the interest in running some field experiments to see how incentives affect behavior on topics at the intersection of urban and environmental policy. For example, we could randomize what color traffic lights are at intersections (i.e yellow, red, green) and see how many traffic accidents are caused. So this would answer the question, how useful are well functioning traffic lights in a nation where private vehicle use is skyrocketing. (I am kidding about this idea). I do have some ideas for some more substantive field experiments about how to test for how incentives can be designed to encourage carbon mitigation and reduced electricity consumption by the residential and commercial sectors.