Environmental and Urban Economics

My mother reads this blog --- so  I wanted to show her a photo of myself looking serious and focused.  Most people think that I just sit around cracking jokes and not functioning.  That's true about 80% of the time but I can sober up sometimes. 

As you can see, Michael Greenstone is the focus of this picture and that is only fair since he leads the Hamilton Project.  Michael was kind enough to invite David Levinson and I to write a paper for the Hamilton Project.

This review does not encourage me to read Dan Gardner's book "Future Babble".  Gardner concludes that even the experts have trouble predicting the future.  Shocking!  What may be more surprising is that we have had great success in predicting the future.

A "small ball" example is the Zagat's restaurant guides.  The quality of a meal at a restaurant you have not been to is a random variable.

We know that there is always a "silver lining" of disasters.  At a minimum, new government jobs are created as the public demands "action"  and somebody must co-ordinate the rebuilding efforts.   Whether the shock is the Moscow Heat Wave of 2010, 2005 Katrina or 2011 Northern Japan, how much do we update our prior beliefs in response to a very salient shock?  Permit me to offer some quotes from this article.

I fly back from Rome to LA tomorrow. I have been in "old Europe" for 2.5 weeks now and it is now time to return.   My mind is clear and I'm eager to get back to work again.  I owe work for several co-authors and I apologize for being a bum.    To reduce academic leisure, I propose that everyone's tenure should be revoked and we should all have to earn our privileges again.

My dad always asks me; "what have you learned recently son?"  So,  What have I learned in Europe?

1.

REPEC provides an objective measure of who is "Royalty" in the economics profession.  The current list of the top 5% is here.   I am ranked #681 out of 27,365 economists so that's not bad (and my 3 books aren't counted here).  But, here is the interesting part.  There are 52 women who rank in the top 1000 and 0 of them blog.  Contrast that with the men.  Consider the top 100 men. In this elite subset; at least 8 of them blog.  Consider the men ranked between 101 and 200.

Fewer pregnant women now smoke than in the past.  What role has this fact played in recent crime declines?  Here is a cross post I wrote for the "Same Facts" blog.   In the clash of the titans, we now have "lead", "abortion" and "smoking" all dueling it out.  Note that 2 of these 3 are "environmental factors".

Tomorrow we travel to Holland's Maastricht for a Green Buildings conference. I have not been in Holland for 25 years so we will see whether it has changed or whether I have changed.   We have been in Europe for about 2 weeks now.  The contrast between Europe's dense walking streets, weird smells in the air, and its small bathrooms and apartments stands in contrast with the sprawled U.S.    I must admit that I like both.

Here is a copy of the slides for my thursday Climatopolis Keynote.

Investing in maintenance and repair of existing urban and transport infrastructure isn't sexy.  No politician attends a ribbon cutting for a bridge improvement. Yet the irony is that our cities have developed around existing infrastructure.  But, political challenges arise.

In one corner of the ring, we introduce Ed Glaeser boxing in a 3 piece suit and lit cigar.  He writes about the vibrancy of our center cities.  In the other corner, we have the ex-boxer Mike Tyson celebrating the peace and quiet that the Las Vegas suburbs offer.

Imagine if you were the proud parent of 35,000 different teenagers.  By a law of large numbers at least 1% or 350 of them will do something "wild and crazy" each year and the rest of your neighborhood will hear about this and say to themselves; "those crazy Kahn kids".   A University President faces this challenge.  He/she is the public face of the University and is supposed to keep "his house in order".  In this age of Facebook and Youtube, any "wild kid" has a microphone.