I consider the business model that supports my journalism a great privilege. But I understand that a big part of the benefit offered by news production is a classic case of what economists call a “public good“. That is to say, civil society as a whole benefits, even if you don’t have the time to …
At the peak of the housing bubble in January 2006, when the annual pace of new home construction hit a blistering 2.29 million units, an estimated 14 percent of laborers in the construction sector were undocumented immigrants, including 20 percent of carpet, floor and tile installers, 28 percent of drywallers, and 36 percent of insulation …
Just the blog equivalent of thinking out loud here. It’s not that this data was surprising to me, so much as that I wasn’t sure what to expect. Four cities in the western United States with some similar characteristics – arid climate, water supply challenges, growing populations. Each of the four is the dominant population …
Continue reading ‘nota bene: population growth in the West’s urban archipelago*’ »
The folks on the Inkstain Economics Desk point to an intriguing puzzle, in the form of 22 shipping containers out behind the neighborhood MegaWalMart this morning. We’ve long used the Cheap Shit From China index (CSFC) here at Inkstain as a crude but useful economic barometer. The premise is this: WalMart has better data than …
At the 2010 census, about 70 percent of the population of Nevada lived in the greater Las Vegas metro area. The comparable Phoenix/Arizona percentage is something on the order of 68 percent. “The west” as a conceptual framework for thinking about those lands beyond the hundredth meridian has some utility. But rather than probing John …
Continue reading ‘Are Phoenix and Las Vegas in “the west”?’ »
Lauren Morello at E&E has a fascinating piece about research into the views of US farmers regarding climate change: “Most of the farmers will admit that climate change is happening,” he said of the growers he advises in western Kentucky, on the Corn Belt’s eastern fringe. “What they don’t want to hear is that it’s …
Here’s a counter-intuitive result from Lucija Muehlenbachs and colleagues about the effect of shale gas drilling on neighborhood property values: While shale gas development can result in rapid local economic development, negative externalities associated with the process may adversely affect the prices of nearby homes…. We find that proximity to wells increases housing values, though risks …
Continue reading ‘Shale gas, groundwater and real estate values’ »
Consistent with Friday’s dismal US jobs report, the latest Inkstain CSFC Index, my key indicator of local economic health, does not look good. On the morning bike ride, I swung by the local Walmart Superstore and counted just two big storage containers out back.
There’s this old joke. Two economists are walking down the street when one points to the ground and says, “Look, a ten dollar bill!” The second economist replies, “That’s crazy. If that was a ten dollar bill someone would have picked it up already.” I love it because there’s a really interesting dynamic in it …
Another tidbit from the National Research Council’s new report on the problems of the California Bay-Delta: By assigning to water a scarcity value of zero, many current policies signal consumers that water is available without limit, even while the limits imposed by scarcity are intensifying. As a result, more water is used than would be …
Continue reading ‘National Research Council on the scarcity value of water’ »