Environmental and Urban Economics

The NY Times has a nice piece  that quotes Glaeser and Moretti about the recent divergence in average human capital levels across U.S cities.   To quote the article;

"The winners are metro areas like Raleigh, N.C., San Francisco and Stamford, Conn., where more than 40 percent of the population has a college degree. The Raleigh area has a booming technology sector in the Research Triangle Park and several major research universities; San Francisco has been a magnet for college graduates for decades; and metropolitan Stamford draws highly educated workers from white-collar professions in New York like finance.

Metro areas like Bakersfield, Calif., Lakeland, Fla., and Youngstown, Ohio, where less than a fifth of the population has a college degree, are being left behind.

Glaeser has argued that they are complements while this NY Times Piece suggests they are substitutes.

Dear Diary:

METROPOLITAN DIARY

More Reader Tales From the City 

While sitting on a bench in Central Park on a recent Sunday afternoon, I started to experiment with my new iPhone. I was interested in Siri, the feature that allows you to ask a verbal question and get a response from the phone. To see if its answer would be correct, I would ask it something I knew.

Too many monkeys in New Delhi offers a great example of the Tragedy of the Commons.  The NY Times reports:    Aren't the monkeys cute?

Given the abundance of monkeys, some residents of New Delhi are "fighting fire with fire".  To quote the article;

"With the city’s trapping program a failure, some residents are getting a bigger monkey, a langur, to urinate around their homes. The acrid smell of the urine scares the smaller rhesus monkeys away for weeks.

This new piece of research confirms a long standing conjecture of mine.  Guys should drive rather than bike.   It appears that the serious bike riders are using some cream that has unintended consequences.    Here is the press release and I hope you know that my headline is meant to be funny.

My mother still wants me to quit being an economist and get a graduate degree in urban planning.  She had high hopes that I could be part of the solution in Newark, New Jersey as my ideas about the spatial distribution of roads, housing,industry and infrastructure would remake that city and improve its quality of life and raise the area's overall productivity.   As a friend of Hayek, I didn't think  that I had a bright future as a central planner.

A new report from the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization offers some specific historical trends over the last  50 years for states such as Illinois  and Ohio.    Now that we have received this trend information about the increased flood risk that such states face, what do we do as Bayesian updaters?  How do we adapt to this new reality?    As a Climatopolis optimist, I bet that we will see individuals, firms and local governments taking pro-active steps to reduce their risk from these floods.

Over the last two months, I gave away roughly 200 copies of my Climatopolis book to my UCLA students.  One of my students was kind enough to post it as a "Facebook Like".  If all "Facebook likes" are created equal, then my opus matches up well with her other likes that include; "Rihanna", "Confessions of a Shopaholic", "Harry Potter",  "Scrabble" , and "How I Met Your Mother".

The Wall Street Journal reports on a funny statistical exercise involving the search for life on a billion other planets.  Whether a planet has "life on it" is a random variable.  There are certain characteristics of the planet that are observable such as its distance from the closest star, its diameter and other attributes.

Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff merit the widespread interest in their work on the payoff of a good 3rd grade teacher.  I attribute my failures in life to the bad 3rd grade teachers I had at Scarsdale's Greenacres back in the early 1970s.   But, in today's NY Times a Notre Dame Philosopher takes aim at these scholars.   Gary Gutting asks; "How Reliable are the Social Sciences?"  Permit me to quote the philosopher:

"Consider, for example, the report President Obama referred to.