Environmental and Urban Economics

Gov. Jerry Brown has announced some even "greener" medium term GHG reduction goals.  No economists are cited in the NY Times article so permit me to fill the void.   Recall the facts. California is unilaterally deciding to sharply reduce its GHG emissions.  Acting alone, this will have no aggregate impact on climate change.  California is too small  a player in the world economy to make a difference but its effort represents a "green guinea pig" field experiment to signal to the rest of the world how costly it would be to reduce global emissions. Ideas are public goods. Those "good ideas" (such as the nascent cap and trade market) can be adopted elsewhere.

Richard Baldwin's Vox is an excellent platform for spreading economic research ideas.  My eleven pieces on Vox have been downloaded roughly 160,000 times.  My mother can't have downloaded all of those copies?  Dora Costa and I have just published a new Vox piece.   Our Death and the Media piece melds ideas from media economics research and urban economic history.  If you read it, you'll see some creative thought.

The NY Times argues that California's economy will crumple because of drought.   Its reporters sketch a tail of the rich fighting the poor over an essential resource (water) resulting in class warfare.  The NY Times wants to kill two birds with one stone as it attempts to focus attention on inequality between the 1% vs. the 99% while also pointing out the dangers of climate change. This is intellectually quite an impressive bundling feat but the doom and gloom is off the mark.

The WSJ reports some optimism  about aggregate water demand by California golf courses. Recall that golf courses are well watered but California is in the midst of serious drought.  Is golf "doomed" in California?  Of course not.  

A direct quote:

"Most of California’s 900-plus golf courses, particularly those in the dryer southern half of the state, have been working on conservation for years with their local water districts.

Each morning I read the NY Times backwards as I start by reading the Sports Section. In the print edition on most days, the Sports Section is in the back of the Business Section.  My eye immediately spotted Orly Ashenfelter's name in this piece about labor versus capital income.  I did not see David Neumark quoted nor were any University of Chicago labor economists quoted.

In many blog posts I expressed disgust at the failure of Econ 101 teachers to convey some of our most important ideas.  Since people sleep through intro micro, many go on to not anticipate the unintended consequences of bad policies such as raising the minimum wage.  In today's NY Times, there is a ray of sunshine.     Some actors are opposing raising the minimum wage because they anticipate that the "show won't go on" because negative profits will lead plays to shut down.

In 1972,  Issac Ehrlich and Gary Becker wrote an important JPE paper on Self Protection and Insurance.  An ungated version is available here.   To provide some intuition, consider a random variable such as your house catching on fire.  If this event occurs, you suffer both financial damage and perhaps a loss of life.  Ex-post insurance will offer you some relief if this horrible state of the world takes place.

Today the NY Times has a front page piece on the mistreatment of specific dogs in China.  The Times reports that you don't want to be Tibetan Mastiff.  Here is a memorable quote: "

"There once was a time, during the frenzied heights of China’s Tibetan mastiff craze, when a droopy-eyed slobbering giant like Nibble might have fetched $200,000 and ended up roaming the landscaped grounds of some coal tycoon’s suburban villa. But Tibetan mastiffs are so 2013.

When I was a teenager, I would listen to Cream and Led Zeppelin nonstop.  I was not a productive teen.  Now that I'm no longer a teenager, I've returned to listening to 1970s rock.  On Google Play, I just keep looping through the same 5 Led Zeppelin albums over and over again and it really helps my paper writing and editing.  Why? It acts as a commitment device so that I don't check my email incessantly and I actually focus on the task at hand.