Environmental and Urban Economics

In New York City, Hong Kong, Shanghai and London and Paris,  rich people live in apartments.  President Trump owns several apartments in Manhattan.  Poor people also live in apartments.  These apartments are of different sizes, located in different areas and in different buildings and apartments are of different quality levels as well.  In the United States, the vast majority of people live in spread out single family homes.

The majority's choice to not live in multi-family apartment buildings has social consequences.  If more of us lived in apartments in multi-family buildings, then we would walk more and use public transit more and our most productive cities would offer greater economic gains for more people. 

In this blog post, I want to sketch out a thought experiment.

The protests in France over raising gasoline taxes there highlights that middle class people understand that higher carbon taxes have income effects.  If you drive 15,000 miles a year and if your vehicle achieves 30 miles per gallon and if the price of gasoline increases from $4 to $4.40 due to a 10% increase in the gas tax, then your disposable income declines each year by (15000/30)*.4 = $200.

The New York Times published an interesting piece about how U.S energy infrastructure might be affected by climate change.   At the end of the piece, there is a nuanced quote about whether the energy companies will experience large profit losses due to climate change.  For some, this would be a delicious irony but Sarah Ladislaw argues that this is wishful thinking.