Housing's Holy Grail- August 13, 2008 Here is HUD's new version of a housing affordability index. But it's actually a housing+transportation affordability index. Urban economics is all about the trade-offs between rents paid for housing and accessibility savings. The authors note that, While housing costs are well-understood, transportation costs are often dramatically underestimated or ignored, creating an urban information gap.http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/08/housings-holy-grail.html No reports of widespread fainting spells- August 12, 2008 The legislative and policy-making process has been likened to a sausage factory, so no one knows how this will come out. But in light of the discussion of applying economic principles to public policy problems (exotic and even sinister for some, but not for others), here is today's WSJ editorializing on peak-load pricing at airports. No reports of widespread fainting spells yet. Fixing thehttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/08/no-reports-of-widespread-fainting.html Ideology and economics- August 10, 2008 The Economist of August 9 cites the petition by 100 or so U. of Chicago faculty opposing the the naming of a campus instititute after Milton Friedman ("One great brain v. many small ones ... The trouble with Friedman"). The signers were concerned over the "ideological and disciplinary preference" that the naming carried with it. One's opponents are always the ones weighed with the ideologicalhttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/08/ideology-and-economics.html Inexplicable- August 5, 2008 Much has been said and written on the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Today's WSJ reprints his speech at Harvard in 1978: Very well-known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: We cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteriahttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/08/inexplicable.html That's why they call them cliches- August 3, 2008 Jobs-housing "balance" is often invoked by urban planners and others as if it had meaning. It is presumed that commuting can be minimized if the balance is somehow achieved. But the idea has problems. First, at what geographic scale Second, there is more to life that commuting, which is traded off against many other priorities. Third, a certain amount of balancing will occur naturallyhttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/08/thats-why-they-call-them-cliches.html New York- August 2, 2008 I have several times cited to Bumsoo Lee's findings re employment in U.S. metros. In 2000, the New York metro area included about 9.42 million jobs and about 10 percent were located in the two CBDs of Manhattan. Thanks, to Martin Kaplinsky, I just came across a gem of a report (not online) titled Residence and Employment in the New York Metropolitan Area, 1950 (State of New York, Department ofhttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/08/new-york.html Good to know- August 2, 2008 Commons problems are everywhere, often right before our noses. This week's Economist includes "Commons Sense ... Why it still pays to study medieval English landholding and Sahelian nomadism". The piece cites Elinor Ostrom's work and the many examples of spontaneous cooperation to resolve commons abuse. (My own favorite is Robert Ellickson's Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes.) Andhttp://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/blog/2008/08/good-to-know.html |