Environmental and Urban Economics

Here is the twitter page for 21CC at Johns Hopkins. I encourage you to follow our activities.   

The 21st Century Cities Initiative (21CC) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) is the campus hub for research, education, engagement, and outreach related to expanding economic opportunity for urbanites in developed and developing nations. Urban economic growth and quality of life hinges on the skills and health of the local populace. In the age of “big data”, the ever increasing abundance of data allows for a precise investigation of the causes and consequences of both urban economic growth and urban poverty.

The Nobel Laureate James Tobin makes a number of wise points here about the challenge that Yale faced in the 1970s and 1980s for building up a cross-campus economics community.  These sound familiar.

Source

I felt that there were some problems related to the then new School of Management, and these may be continuing problems. One problem was, is, that SOM hires economists.

When John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded Imagine, I doubt that they imagined a West Coast without any land use zoning restrictions.   In this blog post, I will imagine exactly this scenario.   My imagination was triggered by this piece written by three friends of mine.   Paavo, Michael and Michael have written an important short paper.

Imagine if land owners in California, Oregon and Washington State could use their land for any purpose they wanted.

This podcast was recorded back in 2010.     This is a recording of a talk I gave in Culver City about the economics of climate change adaptation.   I focus on the system of cities and the system of neighborhoods within cities and how they compete for economic opportunity.  In the spatial equilibrium, firms and households are re-optimizing and responding to emerging anticipated risks.  For two of my pieces on the "big ideas" here,  please read  essay #1 and essay #2.

UC Berkeley's Dan Farber has written a very nice piece about the challenge that climate change will pose for today's 20 year olds in the year 2100.  As both a concerned citizen and as the father of a 17 year old, I take such informed predictions quite seriously.

The year 2100 is 81 years from now.  Think back 81 years ago to 1938.   FDR is our President and World War II is underway in Europe.   Only 2 million (of the 132 million Americans) lived in Florida at that time.

A constant debate in sustainability circles revolves around whether there are "limits to growth".  Going at least as far back as Kenneth Boulding, some have argued that the I=P*A*T formula holds and that the cumulative impact of 7.4 billion people achieving the American Dream will devour all of the world's resources.   I was surprised to learn today that Amazon's Jeff Bezos embraces this point of view endorsed by Paul Ehrlich.

I will soon attend an event that will honor Professor Robert Willis of the University of Michigan and Stanford University.  Here are my brief remarks;

"During my graduate studies at UChicago,  I worked for Bob as a TA and as a Research Assistant.  He served on my dissertation committee.   I greatly admire his love of economics and his love of a good joke.  He is now my friend and I greatly value that.

Cooking recipes provide a blueprint for how to make a cake that serves 4 people.   Given that there is a market for cake inputs such as sugar and eggs,  you can use this blueprint to make 1 cake for 4 people or 2 cakes for 8 people.   A doubling of the inputs yields double the output and the quality of the output is roughly constant.  This is the constant returns to scale case.