Environmental and Urban Economics

Chapter Five of my new Fundamentals book  is titled; "Where Do People Choose to Live Across and Within Cities?".  The chapter begins by introducing the key concept of revealed preference.  Intuitively, economists learn about your desires and priorities from the costly choices that you make.

The joint decision over what city and neighborhood to live in plays a key role in determining your household’s exposure to a variety of environmental indicators ranging from climate, to access to the coast, to water and air pollution.  Unfortunately, there is no "free lunch". If you seek to live in a city that scores high on all set of "green city" criteria such as clean air, clean water and access to green space, you are going to pay high rents (think of San Francisco).

This will be a blog post about durable capital, expected present discounted value calculations and endogenous depreciation and the efficient markets hypothesis.  My point is that only real nerds will want to read this.  But, I will be talking about $60 Trillion Dollars.  This article  offers the following "teachable moment".  Here is a quote:

"And what of Miami? It contributed $263 billion to gross domestic product in 2010, according to the Bureau of Economic Advisors.

Whether the price of my book is $0 or $2 tomorrow, you will still gain some consumer surplus if you buy my new "classic" Fundamentals of Environmental Economics.   In this post, I will talk about the book's chapter four titled; "Where Do Dirty Factories Locate"?

Erin Mansur and I recently published a paper on this topic in the Journal of Public Economics.

Take a look at this article about the demand for safe baby food by Chinese parents.  The NY Times wants to tell a "limits to growth" story about the general equilibrium effects of how China's growing urban middle class' demand for safe high quality products raises their demand for European imports of milk and this drives up the price of this product.  Yes, supply and demand matter.

The law of demand will be tested today.  You can get my Fundamentals of Environmental Economics for a price of $0 today at Amazon.

In this post, I preview chapter 3 of my new $2 Amazon book; Fundamentals of Environmental Economics.   Chapter 3 takes a sober look at the role that government plays in determining urban quality of life and mitigating urban environmental externalities.

The chapter begins by discussing the television show The West Wing.  "The West Wing staring Martin Sheen as the avuncular President of the United States.   He was an ideal figure who knew right from wrong.

This blog post sketches the contents of Chapter Two of my new book; Fundamentals of Environmental Economics.  This $2 e-book can be read as a "popular book" about free market environmentalism or as a textbook.  At the end of 2013, I will be posting power point notes, exams and homeworks based on this book.  I will be using this book as my main textbook at UCLA in my Fall 2013 undergraduate class.

Now that I've sold 31 copies of my $2 Amazon book Fundamentals of Environmental Economics,  I'm going to try a little bit harder to market this book.  I've set the price extremely low in order to attract some readers and to set a precedent in disrupting the expensive textbook market.

In this post, I discuss chapter one.    The chapter starts with a brief history of my teaching environmental and urban economics. I keep this section short because I realize that readers won't care.

I made my first trip to Singapore last July and at the end of August I will return as I will be spending some time visiting NUS.  I look forward to seeing my old friends and talking to more people about what's new in Singapore.   For folks looking for me, you will be able to find me here in late August.

In the NY Times, Yale's Nicholas Christakis presents some new ideas for shaking up the social sciences at leading universities.  He writes;

"It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science.