Environmental and Urban Economics

While we have trouble adapting to the Fed's feints and hints about where its inconsistent policy is going, we will have less trouble adapting to future heat waves.  It turns out that Mother Nature is more predictable than Janet Yellen.  The NY Times reports that "deadly heat waves" can now be predicted two months in advance (see source).  You don't have to be too much of an adaptation optimist to predict that thanks to this "Paul Revere" type early notification that death rates caused by heat will sharply decline.  We are increasingly able to take a punch.

Of course, the poor have the least ability to protect themselves from such punches. How do we protect this group? First, the price of air conditioners continues to decline.

It appears that Dr. Krugman will not be the head of the Trump CEA.   This creates an opening for Delong, Summers, Kahn, Hubbard, Thoma, Lucas, Mankiw and Wolfers.   When I saw the lead for this piece, I thought it was going to be great.  Dr. Krugman points out a  "reversal of fortune".The republicans are now the party with more "anti-free trade" thoughts.

In my humble opinion, my piece for the Chronicle had more ideas packed in than this NY Times piece arguing that we should measure water use.  Of course we should, the interesting economics arises regarding how we use these data to run incentive experiments to encourage conservation.

Shanjun Li, Rhiannon Jerch and I have released a new NBER Working Paper.   This paper is a sequel to our 2015 Journal of Urban Economics paper.    This new paper presents evidence on the role that unions and privatization play in determining the average cost of providing a standardized government service (a bus mile).

Here are some quotes from Nick Kristoff's NY Times Opinion Piece titled; "Overreacting to Terrorism?" 

"The basic problem is this: The human brain evolved so that we systematically misjudge risks and how to respond to them."

The reason seems to be — how do I put this politely? — that we evolved in ways that leave us irrational.

The NY Times has published an impressive obituary for a Harvard Philosopher named Hilary Putnam. As a C+ philosophy student at Hamilton College (but something of a late life intellectual), I sat down to read about some of his best work.  He was clearly a very highly cited scholar.

I will now reproduce a direct quote from the obituary and then I will present an economic analysis of the idea.

As the economics job market concludes, I would like to share a comment that I offered on the American Economic Association's Job Openings for Economists survey.    In an age where economists do not have secretarial support, it is fantastic that the JOE makes it easy for me to load a letter of recommendation for a young Ph.D. who seeks an academic job.  The JOE then distributes this letter  to all interested employers.

Since 2006, California has enacted new regulations to sharply reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions. I have argued (see this 2010 interview) that such a "green guinea pig" effort is great as California runs a field experiment to reveal what policies are cost effective.   Back in 2008, I argued that these policies are not a "free lunch".

Read today's Room for Debate on Free Trade ,  why weren't two academic economists asked to debate?  Do "think tank" economists offer better debate partners than academic economists?   Or, does the NY Times view all workers to be perfect substitutes so any two economists can debate?  If we are all perfect substitutes, then any wage premium a worker earns is a "rent" that can be taxed without efficiency consequences and redistributed to someone else.  

Both authors appear to miss the main point.

Last summer, I bought (and read) Dani Rodrik's Economics Rules .  I thought it was a great book on a number of levels.  Dani anticipated that his readers would be a mixture of economists (both pros and students) and skeptics.  He presents an honest debate in which he points out the strengths and weaknesses of our dark art (science).  He is a sober optimist as he argues that  economics is a great field of study but there is much work to do.