Go to Google Scholar and search under economics starting from the most cited economist (Karl Marx) and descend down the food chain.   The point of this blog post is that I saw a lot of dudes.  I had to go 310 deep into the pool to reach the 10th woman.  To be this 10th woman in this list, you have to be a woman, have a very good citation trail and you have to register on Google.  Many women are well cited but why do so few women take the relatively low cost step of signing up for Google Scholar?     Is your explanation that dudes likes sports and Google citation counting is another baseball statistic?    If academic economists (regardless of gender) are equally likely to sign up for Google Scholar, then I would guess that women should be 15% of the top cited academics.  This 3% share looks way too small.   As Apple has shown, marketing is a big part of success in the modern economy.  Why don't many academic women "lean in" on Google Scholar?

Enrico Moretti highlights the beneficial role that the newly rich play in enhancing civic institutions in the cities where they live.   Johns Hopkins University must be grateful to Michael Bloomberg.   Which institutions would suffer if we adopt the 70% marginal income tax rate?   Would the opera decline in quality?  Would museums no longer have new exhibits?     Or would donations to these institutions soar as the tax accountants think of clever deductions?  

How would public universities such as UCLA fare in a new world with a more equal distribution of income and much higher marginal tax rates?  Would the new middle class favor investing in research universities using its state tax dollars?  Would the NSF and NIH still have impressive research budgets?  Would private small donations rise enough to offset the reduction in large donations from the very rich?   Would the middle class stomach higher tuition charges for their kids without the financial aid subsidies that are financed from the endowments built from past gifts from the very rich?  I don't know the answers to these questions but I sense that during these angry days that the benefits of the 1% have been ignored.    

Most kids and adults want a new environmental economics book for Christmas. This is why Amazon will give away for free ($0) my new book Fundamentals of Environmental Economics: Solving Urban Pollution Problems.    This deal is only for December 25th and 26th 2013.

Given the comments I received from my UCLA students this fall, I have rewritten the entire book and it is starting to look quite strong.  For those of you who have wondered about "Chicago Price Theory" and its applications to environmental and urban issues, this book offers an introduction.  In my humble opinion, it simultaneously introduces the material and shows the reader what are many of the open research questions in the field. It also teaches the reader what applied micro economists do all day long and the challenge of integrating statistical analysis with incentive theory.

My proof proceeds in two step.  Step #1: is this profile of Paul Oyer.  Until now, Paul was known for his work on the scarring effect of recessions on long run career prospects for investment bankers and for academic economists.  He has also made a number of other contributions in labor and personnel economics.   His new work on Internet dating will interest many.   Step #2: involves the debate about the future of San Francisco and whether the Techie influx has a positive effect on San Fran's quality of life.  I support the techies in this fight.

On October 25th 2013, I gave this talk about the "Future of Chicago" at the University of Chicago's Booth School for their annual real estate alumni meeting.  150 Chicago MBA alumni heard this talk and you can watch the video.  In my biased opinion, it was smart and funny.   I was born in Chicago, went to school there, and met my wife there so I certainly know a thing or two about the place.   The Future of the University of Chicago is also of great interest to me but nobody has asked me to speak about that!    

Here is a photo I took of the Chicago River near the Chicago Booth Downtown Campus.




Here is a photo of a photo of Kevin M. Murphy

I am with Julian Simon with regard to how our ingenuity will allow us to stay one step ahead of Mother Nature and "limits to growth".  Read this article  about "smart snowplows".  Why isn't this simple case a vision for how our future will play out in the face of climate change?  If we know "that we don't know" what climate change has in store for us, why aren't we preparing?  If you embrace behavioral economics and say that; "we are a bunch of Homer Simpsons" well then there is a fortune to made for the few entrepreneurs who are able to imagine the future (the small set of "rational expectations" individuals) who design solutions for our future headaches.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a chess puzzle that I'm able to solve.  This is why I buy the Chronicle when I live in Berkeley.  Today's edition also has several relevant urban pieces.

1.  The Cost of Municipal Services in San Fran ---  The "rules of the game" are changing so that municipal unions can no longer threaten to strike in order to get a better deal.

2.  The Culture Clash  --- between young, rich techies and "old school" San Francisco residents --- Exhibit #1  and Exhibit #2.

Either today or tomorrow, I will travel to San Fran to conduct a field experiment to test whether Chinese restaurants raise their prices when I walk in the door.

I have taken the many comments I received from my students on my environmental economics textbook and have done a complete re-write of the book.  You can now buy the revised book on Amazon Kindle for $6.   I know of no other undergraduate microeconomics text that discusses;  how to run a field experiment to measure the demand for seeing a hippo (named Harry) at the zoo, a regression discontinuity design for testing for whether California's regulation is why its energy consumption is lower than in other states, the root sources of environmentalism, why some companies choose to "go green", discrete choice models of where households and firms choose to locate, the implications of population heterogeneity on household self selection into neighborhoods and the implications of such sorting for estimating how the population's health is affected by air pollution (think of Superman versus the Average Joe).   I know of no book that discusses the political economy of whether government enforces regulation and the incentives of urban mayors to pursue the "green agenda".  I know of no book that carefully discusses information regulation and the intended and unintended consequences of government regulation and how to use basic supply and demand analysis to predict the general equilibrium effects of such policies.   This is not your typical textbook.   As the examples above show, I try to integrate into a consistent narrative both jokes, micro theory and "Big Data" freakonomics focused on environmental economics.    Articles from the New York Times are integrated into the text to give it a "real world" relevant feel.    Unlike other texts, the book has a long last chapter on the future of the world economy in the face of climate change. I contrast the behavioral economics worldview with the Chicago view of households and firms having rational expectations about the future but knowing that they don't know what climate change will do our agricultural and urban sectors. I argue that there is so much money for entrepreneurs to make to come up with solutions for us that by a law of large numbers green innovation will be spurred because of our fear of climate change and that this will help us to adapt to many of the challenges we have collectively unleashed.  

Along the way, the reader learns plenty about externalities, public goods, the Tragedy of the Commons, free riders, resource depletion, population dynamics and government solutions ---- this is the bread and butter of any environmental course and I cover these topics in my own quirky way.   For those who teach urban economics, my book has a clear urban focus with the pollution problems being produced in cities and most of the social costs being borne in cities. For example, there is a long discussion of dog poop in Rome.  This is serious stuff!

The NY Times reports that agricultural land can be used for its highest value! Comparative advantage can shift as climate conditions change. Yes, there are adjustment costs and new contingencies but this example shows you free markets adapt to changing "fundamental conditions". What is the future of wheat production?  Should you be buying land in Canada?   This is free market climate change adaptation. Is this a perfect substitute for strong mitigation efforts now?  No, but that was never the choice.  The real issue is how we allocate our scarce resources given the new realities we have created for ourselves.  This reorganization of economic activity helps to sharply reduce the impact of climate change.   How much is "sharply"? That's up to us to make that happen.

I will be in Berkeley next week.  After a tough teaching quarter where I taught one 116 person environmental economics class and one 18 person freshman seminar class on China's Pollution Challenges, it is time for me to do some writing.   One of my goals for next week is to finish a full revision of my Amazon e-book on environmental economics.    The book now has two Amazon reviews (neither written by my son!) and both tell the truth.