Environmental and Urban Economics

Some people actually do work in Los Angeles.  Today, the NY Times writes about our major growing employment sector.   More people are getting jobs to drive tour buses that go around and look at celebrity homes and places where celebrities such as Brittney and Lindsey have gotten into trouble.

Here is what the bus looks like and in West LA, there are many of these.

If you hang out in Little Holmby Park, one of these will pass every 20 minutes as folks want to drive by the Playboy Mansion and Aaron Spelling's mansion on Mapelton Drive.

Daniel Aldrich has published a politically correct and thought provoking piece in the NY Times about the beneficial role that social capital plays in helping affected individuals to cope with natural disasters.  As you know, Dora Costa and I have published in the AER on the benefits of friends in stressful situations (i.e surviving war time POW camps).

Sean Lennon may not remember the one time we were 10 feet from each other.  I was a young Asst. Professor at Columbia and he was an undergraduate there sitting on the Low Library steps being cool.   I spotted him and gawked and then kept walking.  Today, we were reunited as I read his piece about rural environmentalism.  We have some things in common but surprisingly we disagree on some issues.

Behavioral economists are studying how framing issues and the setting where we are located affects our willingness to absorb information and how it affects our actions in markets (see Laibon's paper on cue-theory).   For those Cambridge Ph.D. students seeking a dissertation topic. I suggest that they go to the zoo.  This NY Times article  discusses that zoos are now educating attendees about climate change issues.

In today's Sacramento Bee, Andrew Chang has some tough things to say about California's AB32 and about Bo Cutter and myself.  He omits some details that are worth mentioning.   First, some background.  Last week, Bo Cutter and I published this OP-Ed in the Sac Bee.  Chang's response was published today.

Point #1:  We were not paid to write our OP-ED and we collect no payments at all from the Air Resources Board.

My wife and I just walked from our house to Westwood Village for a Saturday lunch.   Here is a photo of what it looks like on a typical Los Angeles day in Westwood.

Doesn't it look nice!  It is 75 degrees and sunny and blue skies 310 days a year but there is one disamenity.  The numerous public buses stop every 100 yards in Westwood and idle for long periods of time creating noise, pollution and just feeling of a Greyhound bus station "blah".

The New York Times' reporters  need to take a refresher course on supply and demand.   It publishes article after article about the drought taking place throughout the U.S but it manages to never discuss why we don't allow water prices to rise to reflect this scarcity?  How much would water prices rise by?  Would we stop flushing our toliets?  I don't think so.

Today, there are plenty of farmers growing water intensive crops and our suburbs are covered with green grass.

In 2003, Dora Costa and I published a paper on desertion and loyalty during war time.   How does an organization reward loyalty? How does it punish disloyalty?   For a data point about how NYU rewards loyalty read this.   Today, I learned how Southwest Airlines rewards loyalty.  As a frequent flyer, I was sent four coupons for free beer on their flights. I must use them before August 2013.  This isn't a binding constraint.

A NY Times OP-ED piece by Jermiah Moss bemoans the gentrification taking place along the Manhattan side of the Hudson River.   He is upset that this public investment has attracted people and private investment and has transformed a  decaying and outdated set of structures and turned it into "Disneyland".

Los Angeles is quite a town.   Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield Assemblymember, 40th District  just sent out the following news item.  

More than 300 people attend hearing on helicopter noise

At the request of Congressman Howard L. Berman, the Federal Aviation Administration held a recent hearing in Sherman Oaks at which Angelenos voiced their complaints on helicopter noise – a huge problem in the Valley and across all of Los Angeles that has gotten out of control.