Environmental and Urban Economics

The Economist Magazine has changed its tone since its new ownership took over.   Another example is presented here in a piece that argues that applied microeconomics is a mess.   The article makes some reasonable points as it highlights that teasing out cause and effect is difficult.  The piece throws a strange punch at Gary Becker as the author enjoys playing the role of the critic.

Sherwin Rosen said many things to me. One thing he said was "Don't be an assassin".    For the field of economics to make progress, we must focus on constructive ideas that improve our existing machinery. We are not going to throw away our machinery.

I want to make several points;

1.

Glen Weyl gave a great talk at USC yesterday. He presented ideas from his new co-authored book Radical Markets.  Here is one of his recent videos.    I own two copies of the book and I'm reading one of them!  The book is filled with ideas.  It presents an intellectual history of economic thinking as it openly debates the left/right views on the inequality challenge we now face.

One of his thought provoking proposal is for there to be common ownership of all assets.

Let's play this Bertrand pricing game,  I have the set the price of my e-book at $0.    Will Greg and Austan lower their books' prices to compete with me?  This book's title is:  "An Introduction to Empirical Microeconomics".   I wrote this because I think that most early economics courses are a pinch goofy in the following sense.

INET has partnered with several leading academics to create a new documentary video series exploring the boundaries of economics and philosophy.  A preview is available here.

The NY Times has written a very good piece about the high costs of public sector defined benefit pension plans.    Given that governments face budget constraints and have trouble raising taxes, if a local government "overpays" its retirees then there will be less $ to hire new public workers to provide essential services and there will be less $ to purchase capital (think of the low quality of New York City subway cars) that is key to providing public goods such as public transit.

When Mark Zuckerberg testifies this week in front of Congress, I hope that he agrees to share data to allow for a non-experimental test of whether FB helped Trump to win the election.  Here is test.

For every voting precinct in the United States, a researcher can easily observe the count of registered voters who voted in the 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 Presidential elections and the count of the precinct who voted for each party's candidate (Democrat, Republican, other).

Given that the NY Times Upshot has written a very interesting piece about the geography of eviction and given that I am teaching graduate urban economics this fall at USC, permit me to make a few points about the economics of housing eviction.

First we need to make some assumptions.  Jill owns a house and Matt wants to rent her house.  Jill has an opportunity cost. She can live in her own house or rent it out to someone else. Matt has an opportunity cost. He can rent or buy another house.