economics
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How employers can encourage happy, healthy bike commuters
This is the sixth column in a series focusing on the economics of bicycling. Miles Craig of Portland, Oregon applied for an hourly call center job at movie rental by mail empire Netflix last January. “My phone interview went incredibly well,” he said. “And the lady said, ‘Well, let’s get you in for a face-to-face […]
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Green doesn’t sell to mouth-breathing Americans, says CEO of GE
GE is making billions of dollars selling the world wind turbines and energy-efficient technology, so it's a little surprising to hear that the biggest regret of its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is all that hippy-dippy talk at the center of the company's Ecomagination campaign. "If I had one thing to do over again I would not […]
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How to profit from the coming ecopocalypse
While a quarter of Americans have a net worth of zero, Jeremy Grantham controls a hedge fund worth $107 billion, and he has a message for the world: Resource scarcity, peak oil, and climate change could mean big bucks for those who can get out ahead of the disaster. Well, okay, not BIG bucks — […]
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Building the economic case for climate action
The Economics for Equity and the Environment Network convened a recent meeting of economists [PDF] at the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to discuss the role of economics in building support for climate action in the U.S. The economists who convened view climate change as a civilizational challenge that demands immediate action to […]
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Why the ‘coming housing calamity’ shouldn’t have to be calamitous
The housing market is changing. It’s time to move on from sprawl development.Photo: jcbonbonLast week, I wrote about the mind-bending case of a developer who is giving away cars in order to convince people to buy houses in a far-flung exurban development. It’s kind of like giving away cigarettes to sell funeral plots. The absurdity […]
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What’s the matter with elasticities? (Answer: maybe nothing)
Price-elasticities — dimensionless parameters that express the extent to which a price increase triggers a usage decrease — are central to policies that aim to reduce a harmful activity by internalizing its damage into its price. The efficacy of carbon fees, congestion tolls, cigarette taxes, and the like turns on the proposition that the toll […]
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Home tweet home: Twitter chooses the city over sprawl
I spent the last couple of days at a conference about climate, cities, and behavior. One topic that kept coming up among the municipal officials there — from places like New York, Denver, Vancouver, Richmond, and San Francisco — was the importance of walkable downtowns to attracting business and investment. Amenities like good transit, bike […]
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Want people to get on board with a shift to clean energy? Shield them from economic insecurity
Some risks are more immediate than others.Photo: A SynYesterday I ran across a pair of posts that got me thinking about risk and resilience. (Confession: Almost everything these days makes me think about risk and resilience.) First there’s this extremely smart piece from economist Jason Scorse. It makes an argument that I wish had gotten […]
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Desperate sprawl developer gives away cars with houses
Desperate measures.My head nearly exploded at the breakfast table on Saturday morning. I was reading a piece in The New York Times about an Illinois developer who has finally found a way to unload the new houses he has built some 50 miles from downtown Chicago, in a place he has seen fit to dub […]