The LA Times today has some fascinating stories and maps looking back at the events of 20 years ago and asking some big questions.
The LA Times has published a long obituary for my UCLA colleague Professor Rick Brown from the School of Public Health. He was a national leader in creating new data sets such as the California Health Interview Survey.
This NY Times OP-ED reminds us that we can't forget about "time to build" when contemplating models of investment and long run economic growth. Both NYU and Columbia are land locked. Columbia has a plan to build in parts of the city (north of 130th street to the west) that used to be nasty.
I have been on jury duty all week. This has caused me some anxiety because I am teaching this quarter and I have many responsibilities related to research, advising and teaching. Peter Gordon told me that information technology (IT) has greatly reduced the inefficiency caused by our democracy.
As a fan and reader of "Why Nations Fail", I have a question for Daron and Jim. I know that "inclusive institutions" are good.
Gary Becker has posted a blog entry on U.S manufacturing trends. Harvard's William Julius Wilson has long argued that manufacturing offered "good jobs" for low skill workers.
Allsyia Finley provides Joel Kotkin plenty of space to give California greens a beat down. The WSJ also offers a sequel as Arthur Laffer breaks out his napkin to provide another round of "Laffer Curve" advice for California with its proposed 13.3% state tax rate.
Tomorrow will be an exciting day at UCLA Econ. Leah Boustan and Dora Costa have organized an impressive economic history conference that will bring Ed Glaeser, Dave Donaldson, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal to campus. UCLA's own Chris Dipple will also present.
Modern economics has a few repeated themes; "no free lunch", "Coase Theorem", "Time Consistency", "Ricardian Equivalence", "Rotten Kid Theorem", and the Modigliani-Miller Theorem. This last theorem posits that how you cut up a pie into pieces doesn't affect the size of a pie.
I taught at Columbia University from 1993 to 2000 and I have several friends at the World Bank, so I'm always interested in news articles about Columbia University economists who seek to lead the World Bank! This article delivers.
100 tornadoes in 24 hours? The NY Times reports that Oklahoma was repeatedly shocked over the weekend.
The NY Times is embracing a spatial tale of "Two Americas". Here is an article about the rising NYC real estate market. You don't need to be an expert on causality to wonder whether there is a link to the rising Dow Jones Industrial Index.
Tonight, my son and I will go out to the hottest new restaurant in Westwood Village. TV crews have been showing up at 800 Degrees to show the mob scene waiting for their pizza. We will arrive at 5pm to beat the rush.
How do you reduce the cost of cholera? Be pro-active.
An interesting debate is playing out. The Center for American Progress (CAP) has put out a policy brief that argues that green energy purchase mandates do not raise local electricity prices.
Your tax dollars paid for the 2009 NHTS micro data. Let's take a look at it and see what we learn about gasoline consumption in the U.S. I took the micro data and used the household identification number and calculated total miles driven by each household in the data set.
Tanya Mohn contrasts the quality of the cross-ocean Titanic ride versus taking a modern ocean liner. One fun fact. The first class bedroom on the Titanic was 120 square feet while today's ocean liner is 282 square feet and offers 24 hour room service.
I'm back at UCLA after spending several days in Manila. During my time there, I learned that I like their food. After a while, I wasn't bugged that their policemen use machine guns to patrol close to my favorite Starbucks.
As a fan of the White Stripes, I was happy to see that the NY Times will publish a long piece about Jack White this Sunday. But, I must admit that I didn't find this piece that interesting. It turns out that you can separate the artist's day to day life from his production of art.
You don't read that many articles about the vehicle stock in Yangon Myanmar but this article is worth reading. The article points out that this city has extremely old vehicles on its roads and that barriers to importing foreign new vehicles is a major reason for this fact.
As a fan of competition, I must acknowledge that there is a serious new energy economics blog run by my friends at UC Berkeley. The researchers are doing a great job blending readable posts about their recent research and touching on topical energy policy issues.
Tom Friedman and I have at least one thing in common. We both really like the new Acemoglu and Robinson book Why Nations Fail. Here, I would like to offer a few random thoughts as I work away in a Manila hotel room.
