Environmental and Urban Economics

The Professor Watchlist has been posted and I see that a brilliant co-author of mine is on the list.  While he would "shoot from the hip" and say witty but controversial things, I have always viewed him to be an open minded debater and I always enjoyed speaking to him.  

While I'm uncomfortable with webpages "naming names", I do believe that the nation's best universities have swung too far in minimizing student exposure to conservative/libertarian thinking.  Today, there is widespread "group think" taking place at our universities.   How many conservative intellectuals teach at the University of California?   Jerry Brown would be too comfortable there if he were to go back to school.

Six years ago, I published Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in Our Hotter Future.  I'm on record arguing that urbanization will allow us (especially those who live in richer cities) to adapt to climate change.  Cities will compete to be resilient and footloose people will vote with their feet to achieve their own conception of the good life.  The net result of this competition will be a resilient population.

With this in mind, I recently read this nice UCLA blurb.

This post represents a sequel to this recent popular post.    In that post, I argue that an unintended consequence of stringent local zoning in the progressive states of California, Oregon and Washington is that these states created a near vertical housing supply curve and priced out middle class people who moved to Texas instead.  This dispersal of the population cost Hilary Clinton dozens of electoral votes.  Now some data.  Go to this IRS state to state migration gross flows data.

As I read this NY Times piece,  I had a premonition.   President-Elect Trump will play the following strategy in his attempt to make America Great Again. He will withdraw from the  COP 21 Carbon Mitigation treaty and intentionally enrage the rest of the world. These nations will respond by enacting the carbon tariff that the NY Times piece discusses.  

As this tariff goes up, President Trump will respond by raising U.S tariffs.

This blog post will pick up on my post from yesterday.  I have now read Matthew Yglesias' recent Vox piece and his case study of Pepsi and Trump.  Recall the game of Telephone. One person whispers a message to the next person in the chain who then whispers it to the next member of the chain. There is a last member of the chain who reveals the message. The message has mutated into something else and everyone laughs as the first message is compared to the original message.

Skimming this NY Times graphics, I had the following thought.  A new group of "Move To Opportunity" scholars should approach recent graduates of UC Berkeley and other progressive schools and randomly assign large numbers of them to live in Red States and neighborhoods (areas where Trump carried the vote).   There would also be a randomly assigned control group who would live in progressive areas.  As time passes, I would be interested in the following outcome measures;

A.

Prof. Wang Feng of UC Irvine has written an important piece about demographics and China's medium term economic growth.  He argues that Taiwan's recent history provides a preview of China's likely future dynamics.  He stresses that Taiwan's urbanites choose to be consumers rather than savers.

Permit me to approach Prof. Feng's core question from the standpoint of economics.  First, here is a recent NBER paper using state level data arguing that aging lowers economic growth.

Has the NY Times made it impossible to cut and paste from its articles?  I wanted to grab a paragraph from Friedman's piece today but I'm not able to.  I ran a test and I can cut and paste from the NY Post (a close substitute).  In his piece, Friedman makes an interesting claim. He posits that President Trump will trigger a rebellion by the young in both the USA and Europe if he doesn't stick to vague terms of the COP 21 Carbon Mitigation treaty.

Years ago, I read a piece arguing that the Internet was slowing down progress in theoretical physics.  If young physicists didn't have access to the Internet, they wouldn't know what the leaders were working on.  Such "ignorance" would mean that the young would pursue their own independent thoughts and wouldn't herd.  The Internet allows easy diffusion of what the Nobel Laureates are working on.

As the Director of Undergraduate Studies at USC Econ, I am trying to get to know more of our students.  Last night, I took five smart young people to dinner.  The  group consisted of three first year students, a senior and a junior transfer.  It turns out that not all Economics majors are the same.  One is actively engaged with the rock climbing club while another enjoys yoga and a third is into ping pong while a fourth plays music and debates and the fifth plays tennis.