Environmental and Urban Economics

Does this strike you to be distinctive research? It is pretty freaky!  UCLA is a special place with special minds working on PG-13 research questions.  I will stick to my research on climate change adaptation.  This work discussed below by Meg Sullivan is a little too much for me.

Contact with dads drops when women ovulate

Evidence of evolutionary protection against inbreeding in women?

Meg Sullivan, msullivan@support.ucla.edu

Through an innovative use of cell phone records, researchers at UCLA, the University of Miami and Cal State, Fullerton, have found that women appear to avoid contact with their fathers during ovulation.

In the new Chronicle of Higher Education,  Michael Ruse takes a look at a large number of new climate books including Climatopolis.

First he talks about everyone else's new books;

"Secular apocalyptic thinking continues; indeed, it thrives. The cold war may be over, but the world is not right.

Derek Jeter is in the midst of some tough negotiations.  Will he accept a real pay cut?  The market says that he better but his sense of fairness and his past compensation are nudging him to be a pinch unrealistic here.     Now, $19 million a year averages out to $117,000 per game. Not a bad wage or $29,000 or so per at bat.   At $29,000 per lecture, how many lectures would my friends in academia be willing to give a year?  I'd supply 10 and call it a year.

Robert B. Daugherty's life offers a classic example of an economist's optimism that ideas can substitute for natural capital.   "The breakthrough for Mr. Daugherty came in 1953, when he bought the rights to manufacture a new irrigation system, the brainchild of a Nebraska farmer, Frank Zybach. The new system came to be called center-pivot irrigation. It involved a long pipe on wheels that rotated around a point at the center of a field, spraying water as it went. "

"Robert B.

I will be speaking about Climatopolis at the Claremont McKenna College Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Thursday December 2nd.  As a warm up, I gave a lecture to my UCLA undergrads about the economics of climate change adaptation.  They pushed me on the broad issue of international migration.  Especially in the developing world, it will help us to adapt to climate change if people can move from a Bangladesh to Southern China.

The Wall Street Journal has provided Joel Kotkin with the space to sketch the tradeoffs of living in megacities (such as NYC or Tel-Aviv) vs. living in smaller cities such as Raleigh.  His thesis boils down to "Smaller, more nimble urban regions promise a better life than the congested megalopolis."  Is this correct? Will Don Trump and Derek Jeter read his column and move to Nashville?   These immediate counter-examples highlight that we need to be a pinch nuanced here.

Norfolk, Virginia  is facing more flooding risk these days.  Whether climate change is the cause of this problem remains an open question. But, FEMA is spending over $20,000 per home to raise them to protect them from the next flood.

"We are the front lines of climate change,” said Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.”

Politics aside, the city of Norfolk is tackling the sea-rise problem head on.

I wrote Climatopolis because I wanted to nudge forward the discussion of how diverse urban households and firms will adapt to climate change.   Unfortunately for me, there are so many other pressing issues right now (war, Bernanke's QE2, airport nude body scans, Michael Vick, the Royal Wedding, the Miami Heat's losing streak, the fake Taliban leader, Bristol Palin's dance moves, etc) that the world has refused to engage with my book's core ideas about the microeconomics of adaptation.

In my new Journal of Urban Economics paper , I use data for California's cities and argue that the answer is "yes".   Within the San Francisco metro area, have you noticed the boom in development in Emeryville?  An unintended consequence of next door Berkeley's and Oakland's restrictive land use policies is to nudge growth to more builder friendly Emeryville.

For those who follow my work, I hope you see the common theme of the role of political ideology in affecting economic outcomes.

David Leonhardt has increased his carbon footprint to study Consumption in China.  If David had asked me to co-write this long article with him, I would have suggested that we focus on a couple of families and look at their actual consumption patterns. I know some very successful academic economists in Beijing.