Environmental and Urban Economics

By clicking here, you can download all of the lecture notes, filmed videos, notes, homeworks and readings for my fall 2013 Undergraduate Environmental Economics class at UCLA.  Roughly 116 students will receive a grade.  That's a big class and I didn't have a graduate Teaching Assistant to help me.  One receives no extra "credit" for teaching such a big class.  Instead, there are more papers to grade, and more administrative emails to read.  The only glory of teaching such a big class is that the law of large numbers guarantees that I can identify some students who really want to excel and understand why the subject matter is exciting.   There were many seniors in the class this quarter who appear to be more focused on their job search than on the core material that I find so interesting.

The NY Times would make King Solomon blush.  On the front page today is a story from Los Angeles' West Hollywood neighborhood.   This tolerant community (located six miles east of my UCLA neighborhood) is feeding the homeless.  When offered a "free lunch", many homeless are showing up to eat and they are hanging out before the meal and after the meal.   People who own homes in the neighborhood feel under siege and threatened not knowing which homeless may pose a danger to their own families.

This blog post is a product endorsement.  No more taxi cabs for me.  Uber is now my Los Angeles car service company.   My wife, son and I have all downloaded their App which provides you with a map of how minutes away is its closest car.  You select its type (I suggest the Lincoln Towncar) and wait for your limo to pull up to the curb. No cash is needed because you have prepaid.   I pay a few dollars more as an extra tip.

In Econ 101, we teach that U.S dollars (not backed by gold) will be accepted as payment because the seller expects that somebody else will accept payment with the currency.   Where does this expectation come from?  What would chip away at this "confidence" in holding cash?  The short answer is expected inflation.  With Bitcoins, the producers are promising to mint a finite set and thus commit to no hyperinflation.   This will create value if there is demand for these coins.

Soon, I will go to the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to present a new paper of mine.    I went to the UW-Madison webpage to see what's going on at that Department and I read through this newsletter.  UWM has made the wise decision to appoint an economist as Chancellor (Rebecca Blank) and to appoint an economist as Dean of Social Sciences (Karl Scholz).  This is an interesting experiment that West Coast public universities should think about implementing.

We know that we shouldn't drink and drive but should economists drink and lecture?   On Wednesday November 20th, I ran a field experiment.   I was given the opportunity to speak to a large number of Emeritus faculty members of UCLA.  I was the after dinner speaker and roughly 80 people remained to listen to my talk.  I focused on my 2014 book on pollution progress in China.  This is joint work with Professor Siqi Zheng of Tsinghua University.

It looks to me that the President is showing the Chicago economists (Lars, Gene and Grace) his collection of JPE journals.  The third Nobel Laureate is hiding out in back.

The market will price this output.

Here is a novel ranking of U.S "smart colleges".  Why is UCLA ranked #61?  Note that UCSD is #23, UC Berkeley is #31 and USC is also ranked #31.     There is a question of whether the sampled population is representative of all students at each school but this is an interesting approach.  I also don't fully understand how the authors collapse the five Lumosity Brain Areas: Speed, Attention, Flexibility, Memory and

Problem Solving into a single index.

While I am not a good physicist, I have great hopes that my son will be.   As a regular reader of the NY Post, I'd like to share one physics lesson for you.