Environmental and Urban Economics

I am happy to read that UCLA has swapped out its diesel buses and now purchased clean buses (from China's BYD) but the entire fleet consists of 16 buses.  This article ignores the fact that probably 75% of UCLA's employee transport miles commuting to campus take place in private vehicles.   These vehicles emit CO2 on each trip.  I know a thing or two about bus economics because I wrote this paper.    The article quotes  Renee Fortier  .  

I bet that she doesn't remember a meeting she had with me back in February of 2007.  I was a brand new UCLA Professor and I entered her office and made the following presentation.   I said to her;

"Using UCLA Administrative data, we can geocode where every UCLA worker lives and thus calculate the mileage distance to campus.

Times change.  USC Football is now ranked below both its College (#15) and its Economics Department (#24 based on REPEC productivity measures).    The WSJ ranking places USC where it deserves to be.   I have taught USC undergraduates for 3 semesters now and I will testify under oath that my students are just as good as the students I taught at Columbia in the 1990s and better than my UCLA students in recent years.  I taught for 3 years at Harvard and Stanford.

Harvard's Ken Rogoff appears to embrace a Keynesian demand side view arguing that China's economy is slowing and that this will drag down the growth of the rest of the world's economy.   While he may be right in the short run, I disagree with his medium term view.  China is making an enormous investment in human capital, skill and R&D research.

The writers for the NY Times are a consistent bunch.  In the Book Review section today, there is a short discussion by Kim Tingley reviewing a new book called Eruption by Steve Olson.   See if you can spot the "behavioral economics" mindset that we are fools who are ignorant of the risks we have imposed on ourselves.  The book author and the reviewer are concerned that  "we don't know that we don't know" what climate change will do to us in the future.

First, a disclaimer.  I ride the Expo Line from Westwood to USC several days a week.   This Line extension to the beach cost over  1.5 billion dollars.    The new ridership numbers suggest that the monthly ridership has increased by 13,000 since the opening of the extension (which goes from Culver city to Santa Monica).   Roughly 45,000 trips are being taken on the Expo Line each day. Let's be generous and round that up 16 million trips per year.  Let's assume the system lives for 50 years.

Ellen Barry has written an excellent piece that would leave Marx and Engels scratching their heads.  In Bangalore, India young rural women are moving to the big city to work in the factories.  The article sketches a highly optimistic arc that these women enjoy great improvements in their quality of life as they celebrate their independence and their ability to earn and learn.  The article also hints at an active urban marriage market far from their rural parents' supervision.

The economics of boycotts is pretty straightforward.  Customers who vote with their pocketbook and choose not to purchase a product can reduce the profits of their target if there is a consensus to boycott the "bad guy". If there is a neutral economic agent who does not have a taste for dealing out such punishment (think of China purchasing resources from the "bad guy") then the boycott won't harm the "bad guy".

Professor Mark Curtis of Wake Forest University has written a kind, fair and balanced review of my new China and pollution book.

In this uncertain age, I admire both economists and journalists who acknowledge that we know that we don't know certain risks that we face.  Such humility leads to better public policy.  With this preamble, read the following lead sentences from this Opinion Piece about SUNY's admissions process in the New York Times.

This blog post will expand on my recent blog post on breaking the political gridlock over carbon pricing.  As I have explained before, liberals and conservatives disagree over the "property right" concerning whether we have the right to produce GHG emissions for a price of $0.  Conservatives say "yes" and Liberals say no and they want to use collective action to increase the price of carbon dioxide per ton to $35 and to let people know that this price will rise over time.