These are exciting days to work on environmental economics.  Now that my son is a teenager, I'm feeling less guilt about attending more conferences. On a recent trip to China, I attended 3 conferences in 4 days and this weekend I participated in an environmental economics conference at ASU.  This excellent conference as organized by Kelly Bishop, Alvin Murphy and Nick Kuminoff. You can read about all of the details here.  For better or worse, I've reached an age where I'm now one of the wise "older people" in the room.  I must admit that I'm grateful to Kerry Smith and Michael Hanemann  both for being good friends of mine and for providing excellent comments on the paper I presented on Friday afternoon (and for being older than me!).

At ASU on a hot Phoenix late October day, there are about 35 people in the room.  Some of the best young environmental economists were there and we spoke about many issues. The papers were quite good.  ASU has made a major investment in environmental economics.  My Stanford Student Andrew Waxman is now a junior faculty member  and my new co-author Lucy Qiu also serves on the faculty at ASU.  Conferences are a good time for talk and everyone knows that I can talk about economics for dozens of hours.

Switching gears, I'm really happy that my China piece for The Conversation has been widely covered.  The economics profession doesn't reward book writers but I'm proud of what Siqi and I have achieved.  This book is less controversial than my 2010 Climatopolis book but as the whole world is now talking about the economics of climate change adaptation --- I take great pride that I presented the entire micro research agenda in a book that was published over 6 years ago.  Besides for one Gary Coleman joke, I wouldn't change a word in that book.

My December 6th 2016 Brookings Presentation will present my new ideas about urban adaptation. Stay tuned.

I live close to a major Mormon Temple in Westwood Los Angeles.  Take a look at the photo below.




The temple has ripped out its grass and is planting low water intensive plants.  According to Google, this has been a major new item.   To an economist like me, it is obvious that this adaptation would have occurred years ago if LADWP were to raise water prices.   The economics of urban adaptation to climate change are quite straightforward.  Simply let prices reflect scarcity.  My Climatopolis predictions are starting to play out. I feel like one of the witches in MacBeth.

In their 2006 JPE media paper, Gentzkow and Shapiro  begin their piece by contrasting how the New York Times and Al Jazeera report on the same foreign policy event. I experienced something like this today because "The Conversation" just published a piece I wrote. The title for my piece is:
"As Incomes Rise in China, so Does Concern About Pollution".    The New Republic has republished my piece but it has given it this headline;

As Chinese Incomes Rise, So Does Pollution

I will leave it to my readers to decide if my new piece for The Conversation delivers academic rigor and journalist flair or whether it really represents journalist rigor with academic flair.    I must admit that we made a strategic mistake publishing an optimistic book about China's urban quality of life in the middle of an ugly U.S Presidential Campaign.  

It appears that I will never enjoy the feeling (and the resulting royalties) of publishing a good book at the right point in time.  My critics might claim that I have always published bad books at the wrong time.  Yet, when I think about it each of my five books have explored subjects that I know something about and for which I think I have written something new.   I like the way Amazon displays them.

My mother worries when I stop blogging for a while but I must admit that I haven't had anything to say.  Here is a recent 6 minute video of me discussing my 2016 China book.  The China Daily wrote an unusual piece about our book today.

Fifteen years ago, Amazon's Pat Bajari and I started to work together on an urban economics paper studying household choice of housing type (i.e number or rooms, building year built) and neighborhood within major metropolitan areas.  At first, we assumed that a household head already had a job and then searched for a place to live.  This sequential approach would have greatly helped us because if people work in different locations, then the same neighborhood offers a different length commute for different people. This variation is very useful for allowing an economist to estimate the disutility from commuting. We ran into the challenge that our critics said that we couldn't assume that people found a job and then found a housing unit. While this makes sense for Professors and Investment bankers, it may not be true for high school graduates who may live in some neighborhood and then they find a job.

I tell this story because in today's NY Times sports section there is  a great story about the New Jersey Nets and how these NBA players know that they have a job in Brooklyn and because they want a short commute and because Brooklyn is on the rise, they are searching for housing in Brooklyn.   Since players are traded and the location of the 30 NBA teams are all well defined, the Bajari/Kahn original framework could have been used to study their preferences over commuting, structure and neighborhood.  

Back in 2005, I wrote down the names of 22 economists who I thought would win a Nobel Prize soon.  Nine on the list have now won.  My list must beat a random dart throw at the AEA's phone book?  For the technical discussion of the 2016 winners' work read this.  

Here is the Jane Jacobs biography review.  Here is the Judge Posner book review.   The Jacobs biography traces a "David vs. Goliath" story of Jacobs making the case during the urban renewal era of the 1960s that the incumbent real estate and neighborhoods had a charm and a vitality that would vanish if the "Central" urban planners built their towering mega-buildings and built out their highway plans.   The book review does a great job highlighting the merits of her points but also arguing that Jacobs didn't really appreciate the "general equilibrium" effects that her NIMBYism would translate into unaffordable center cities where only the rich can afford to live.  So, you could argue that Jane Jacobs' ideas hurt the middle class who seek to live in great cities because they can't afford to live there.

To repeat this point, if developers have the ability to purchase parcels of urban land and build them up at higher density then this shifts out the aggregate supply curve and helps to lower urban apartment prices.   Jacobs' historic neighborhood preservation essentially creates an inelastic supply curve and thus any demand increases translate into higher home prices.  This mainly benefits incumbent owners, so Jacobs' arguments are conveniently used by such incumbents.

Turning to Posner, there are several interesting features here.  The review is written by a Yale Professor who appears to be a pinch envious of Posner's life success.  The reviewer never discusses the U Chicago School of Economics.  The reviewer implicitly mocks the Coase Theorem in discussing Posner's thinking.  Here is  a direct quote:

"The idea of wealth maximization, however, is famously obtuse. Posner observed that his theory treated unproductive people as morally irrelevant (or worse) and viewed social resources expended on the poor as wasted. Questions about the distribution of a society’s wealth, he argued, were properly excluded from legal analysis altogether. Posner adopted his wealth-maximization theory at the same moment in which, as we now know, market-oriented public policies began to exacerbate socioeconomic inequality. Notoriously, Posner entertained the idea (though he thought it implausible) that it might be best not to punish the crime of rape if the rapist enjoys the act enough to outweigh the harm to the victim; the reason to criminalize rape, he argued, was to channel sex into forms like marriage, in which women are compensated like other sex workers. He suggested openness to the notion of selling babies."


Given that at the end of the day, an academic is his/her set of output (as measured by research and students generated), why is a biography of such an academic needed?  Would the world want to read a biography of Ken Arrow? Paul Samuelson or Gary Becker?   Academic economists would learn from the background stories but outsiders would learn little.

That said, why does the world need a Posner Biography?   I would guess the answer is that since he has been so prolific that there are many intellectual lawyers (who read and buy books) will be wondering "how did he do it"?    While there may be a demand for such information, at the end of the day does this matter?  He produced a mountain of scholarship. Time will tell which parts matter and are influential.   The reviewer didn't do a good job explaining how Posner's work has influenced thinking of lawyers today or how Posner's work influences the academic field of law and economics today.  For example, law and economics is now a highly empirical field --- which of Posner's studies influence this line of research?

Daniel Wilson of the Fed of San Fran has written a high quality panel paper available here.    His unit of analysis is a United States  county/industry/year/month and he is studying how employment in these units of observation are affected by the county/year/month's snowfall, rain and temperature as well as the weather in the previous 3 months.   Using data from 1975 to 2015, he explores how weather affects economic activity.  The novel feature of his analysis is that he can include many, many fixed effects.  His "identifying variation" is based on the fact that the same industry in the same place is exposed to different weather over time and that the same industry in the same year/month is exposed to different weather at a point in time (because industries are scattered across the country).

On the topic of adaptation, Dr. Wilson finds that we have adapted to snowfall but not to spring hot temperatures.  This is an interesting reduced form fact that merits more research.    

Carl F. Robinson has just posted a thoughtful review of my 2008 Heroes and Cowards book (joint with Dora Costa).   For reasons I don't understand, when our book was published Princeton Press filed it under "Sociology" and the broader community of economists and demographers didn't really engage with our book.

War time is high stakes.  One faces extreme death risk.  During a time when there was no "incentive pay" and little monitoring and accountability (there were no cell phones or proper information tracking systems) --- how does an institution avoid free riding?

Social capital and bonds between "brothers" provides the glue to keep men working for the greater good.  This book directly ties into environmental economics via the "Tragedy of the Commons".  When do people pursue their narrow self interest versus when are they willing to sacrifice and bear costs for others?

Due to the unique data that Robert Fogel created, we were able to examine these issues. Robinson never really delves into how the great data we could access allow us to play detective and learn about men who have now been dead for over 100 years.

Here is some good stuff from our Princeton University Press webpage.