Environmental and Urban Economics

The New York Times has published a very good piece on urban adaptation to natural disasters.   Note its implicit optimism that New York City is making investments to make it more resilient against the next shock. In this sense, the marginal damage of a given shock declines over time due to small ball investments made by households, firms and local governments.   While the NY Times wants more Federal Aid to pay for this defense, this makes no sense.  Urban defense is a local public good while national defense is a national public good.   Make individual neighborhoods and cities pay for their own defense and the investors will make better choices.  Other people's money is too easy to spend and leads to waste.   The point the article doesn't make is the counter-factual.

Cass Sunstein suggests that we aren't scared enough of climate change.  He should consider distinguishing public action (i.e carbon pricing) versus private action (i.e individuals and companies moving away from flood plains).

I was shocked that I  didn't have Internet access last night on my 4 hour flight from Chicago to Los Angeles.  Now that I have read this article I see that United is lagging far behind other airlines including Southwest.  I was ready to buy the $8 Internet access but they wouldn't sell me this product. What happened to complete markets? Can I contact Arrow or Debreu?  

Let's do some economics here. Suppose that a typical United Airplane flies 3 times a day and has 200 seats.

Katie Couric says that her ratings are down because of this.   Rick Flyer and Sherwin Rosen investigated the long term consequences for public school teacher quality as women chose to leave the the public education sector to enter the private sector.    Dora Costa and I studied the intended consequences of this trend in our work on power couples.

Paul Krugman has written an excellent review of his first mentor's new book.  Dr. Krugman is a consistent thinker.  He devotes merely two paragraphs in his long review to climate change adaptation.   Below I supply it.

"How much harm will this do? Nordhaus draws a contrast between what he calls “managed systems”—things like agriculture and public health, which are basically human activities affected by climate—and “unmanageable systems,” like sea level, ocean acidification, and species loss.

On Thursday October 24th, I gave a lecture at the Harris School at the University of Chicago co-sponsored by the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago and the Confucius Institute.  My talk was titled; "Blue Skies in China?"  You can download the relevant material here.    Today, a Forbes blogger wrote a nice piece about my remarks.  Sudden impact!   Today, I gave a talk for 180 graduates of the University of Chicago's Booth School.

Yesterday I took my longest trip on Southwest Airlines as I flew 3.5 hours from Phoenix to Chicago.   I give the airline an A-.   On the plus side, we did land after a 1 hour delay and there was free TV on the flight so I caught up on my Law & Order watching as I watched the cops part of 4 different episodes (I skipped the law stuff -- given that I am  Professor at UCLA Law --- I don't need to watch that stuff).   On the plus side, the cranapple juice they serve is good.

Hurricane Sandy threw quite a punch at NYC.  This article makes a number of reasonable points but then it ends on a funny and revealing note.

Meanwhile, Con Edison says it’s made more than $400 million in improvements to substations and other technology to ensure that Sandy-level flooding would never again cut power for days to half of Manhattan.

I was born in Chicago. I met my wife there and I will be there on Thursday and Friday.  On Thursday, I will given this talk at the University of Chicago.   My remarks will provide some "big think" on two recent academic papers of mine including this one and this one.   The UC Energy Policy Institute didn't exist when I was a graduate student.  On Friday, I will speak at a UC Booth School of Business Real Estate Conference. My talk's title is "The Future of Chicago".