Environmental and Urban Economics

I missed this announcement 2 weeks ago that the Air Resources Board will take the revenue collected from California's Carbon Cap and Trade and give the $20 billion dollar a year flow back "to the people".

A couple of points:

1. California has a $20 billion dollar deficit.

2.

I was not aware that Larry Summers, Susan Athey and Brad Delong were leading environmental economists but REPEC knows all and Dr. Summers is #1. As #41 on the list, I have to believe that I would jump into the top ten if REPEC would count kahn book #1 or starting in fall 2010 kahn book #3 . I am a victim of this system. Please feel sympathy for this devil.

Now that my self esteem has been injured, I must admit that I had great time today giving this speech .

We all know that if we were identical, then President Obama would have an easy time shaping public policy. He could poll one person and ask her for her policy priorities and everyone would love the resulting public goods agenda.

Now that I know that I won't be named to be Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank nor will I be named as the Head Coach of the Oakland Raiders, I have decided to teach this one week course at the UCSB Bren School. I go tomorrow night and monday I will meet my 50 students. I haven't taught for several weeks now and I may be rusty but I'm looking forward to this.

My son should read People Magazine more carefully. He said that some dude had come by his class to talk about Haiti. After receiving this email from the School's Principal, I now know that my kid should have asked for an autograph.

"Yesterday actor Josh Duhamel visited the lab school to talk to students about "Runnin 4 Haiti," a unique fundraising event to support Haiti that will take place tomorrow in Santa Monica.

In this age of quantification, how do we judge a politician's performance? By doing before/after comparisons of public opinion dynamics? That sounds silly. By, calculating the change in the "misery index or murder rate"? In that case, you're assuming that the politician is very powerful in shaping events.

This New Yorker piece bemoans the death of "old-school" Walter Cronkite journalism. Back in the day (pre-Internet), reporters had all day long to drink and think and eventually file their story for the next day's paper. Such "time to build" has value added and this has been lost in the "24 hour continuous news cycle". While there is some truth to this claim, the author seems to have forgotton that nature hates a vacuum.

There is a good QJE paper to be written on explaining public opinion dynamics. I envision a paper that looks a little bit like the Fox News paper . Recall that when Rupert Murdoch arrives on your TV, your probability of voting Republican rises. But, returning to public opinion dynamics -- I'm especially interested in the case when there is set of policy issues that we must prioritize. To keep this simple, consider the 2 dimensional case of "jobs" and "climate change".