Back to School: My Return to Hamilton College
To misquote Cher, "I can turn back time". While Hamilton College has received a serious makeover since I was last here in 1995, some things do not change. Do you recognize this iconic building? I speak there tonight.
While on campus today, I have had the opportunity to meet with my favorite professors including Jeff Pliskin, Jim Bradfield and Alfred Kelly. To my amazement, Professor Kelly has kept his records for all students in his classes from 1981 until the present. He read to me my grades on my paper, final exam, oral discussion for each of the two classes I took with him. I was not an "A" student. I had forgotten this point.
Returning to Climatopolis: I acknowledge always that I'm an economist not a climate modeler. I believe in comparative advantage. The climate scientists will do their work and present their predictions and then self interested households and firms will have the opportunity to respond to this information. As an economist, I'm mainly interested in this last step and I'm optimistic that we do respond to "new" trusted news and take actions that protect ourselves. I never said that moving to "Fargo" is sufficient for adaptation. That is a caricature. Migration to the "right" city -- once the climate scientists have made more progress identifying such areas --- is just piece of the adaptation effort. You will also have to choose where to live within that city, what type of materials to build your home out of, how to protect your family if heat waves, or illness epidemics break out.
No city will ever be completely risk free. There are murders in NYC every week but people want to live there. We learn to manage risk and take pro-active actions to protect ourselves. Some carry a gun, some do not go out at night. I would ask the climate scientists to explain why climate change poses different risks for cities than the vague threat of crime. Do people like Joe Romm really believe that not a single square mile of Los Angeles will be habitable in the year 2100? He should be selling short the Case-Schiller house price indices for those cities.
The climate scientists will identify the inhabitable parts of our land mass and over time -- we will rebuild our cities at higher densities in those areas. This is not a free lunch -- it will be costly but there will be benefits from such pro-active adaptation efforts in our hotter future.
I'd suggest taking a look at: IPCC's 4th Wave Regional Assessments's report. These regional assessments look quite crude and highly aggregated. In reality, different parts of a specific city such
as Seattle or San Diego will face different threats but this report treats these land parcels as perfect substitutes. As we learn, we will make better decisions. Clearly, the climate scientists have much more work to do and there is certainly a market for the information they will generate. Self interested people will want to know which cities will have an absolute and relatively high quality of life in our hotter future.
These reports also engage in a type of geographical determinism. If a city does experience more 100 degree days, is there nothing its mayor and residents can do to protect the population? There is no "siesta" or other institutions or architecture for protecting the "victims"?
While on campus today, I have had the opportunity to meet with my favorite professors including Jeff Pliskin, Jim Bradfield and Alfred Kelly. To my amazement, Professor Kelly has kept his records for all students in his classes from 1981 until the present. He read to me my grades on my paper, final exam, oral discussion for each of the two classes I took with him. I was not an "A" student. I had forgotten this point.
Returning to Climatopolis: I acknowledge always that I'm an economist not a climate modeler. I believe in comparative advantage. The climate scientists will do their work and present their predictions and then self interested households and firms will have the opportunity to respond to this information. As an economist, I'm mainly interested in this last step and I'm optimistic that we do respond to "new" trusted news and take actions that protect ourselves. I never said that moving to "Fargo" is sufficient for adaptation. That is a caricature. Migration to the "right" city -- once the climate scientists have made more progress identifying such areas --- is just piece of the adaptation effort. You will also have to choose where to live within that city, what type of materials to build your home out of, how to protect your family if heat waves, or illness epidemics break out.
No city will ever be completely risk free. There are murders in NYC every week but people want to live there. We learn to manage risk and take pro-active actions to protect ourselves. Some carry a gun, some do not go out at night. I would ask the climate scientists to explain why climate change poses different risks for cities than the vague threat of crime. Do people like Joe Romm really believe that not a single square mile of Los Angeles will be habitable in the year 2100? He should be selling short the Case-Schiller house price indices for those cities.
The climate scientists will identify the inhabitable parts of our land mass and over time -- we will rebuild our cities at higher densities in those areas. This is not a free lunch -- it will be costly but there will be benefits from such pro-active adaptation efforts in our hotter future.
I'd suggest taking a look at: IPCC's 4th Wave Regional Assessments's report. These regional assessments look quite crude and highly aggregated. In reality, different parts of a specific city such
as Seattle or San Diego will face different threats but this report treats these land parcels as perfect substitutes. As we learn, we will make better decisions. Clearly, the climate scientists have much more work to do and there is certainly a market for the information they will generate. Self interested people will want to know which cities will have an absolute and relatively high quality of life in our hotter future.
These reports also engage in a type of geographical determinism. If a city does experience more 100 degree days, is there nothing its mayor and residents can do to protect the population? There is no "siesta" or other institutions or architecture for protecting the "victims"?
posted by Matthew Kahn at 8:04 AM
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