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Category: Policy

Published August 1, 2012

Ethanol and High Food Prices

It is not often that a stroke of a pen can quickly undo the ravages of nature, but federal regulators now have an opportunity to do just that. Americans’ food budgets will be hit hard by the ongoing Midwestern drought, the worst since 1956. Food bills will rise and many farmers will go bust.

An act of God, right? Well, the drought itself may be, but a human remedy for some of the fallout is at hand — if only the federal authorities would act. By suspending renewable-fuel standards that were unwise from the start, the Environmental Protection Agency could divert vast amounts of corn from inefficient ethanol production back into the food chain, where market forces and common sense dictate it should go.

From an excellent New York Times op-ed by Colin Carter, from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the UC Davis, and Henry Miller, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Here is a telling series of numbers from the same op-ed:

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Published July 16, 2012

Contributing to Public Goods: “How Should a PhD Student Be?,” Part 1 (Updated)

Last week, two of my colleagues and I were invited to a professional development workshop held by the PhD students in the Sanford School of Public Policy on the topic of getting the most out of a PhD.

Specifically, the PhD students wanted to know what we had done (and when) in years 1 to 5 of our doctoral studies, and how we had navigated the process leading to our first publication.

Here are my slides for the workshop, and here is the audio, which you can also stream below. I speak from the beginning until about 16:00, when Nick Carnes takes over. Amar Hamoudi starts at around 28:00.

Continue readingContributing to Public Goods: “How Should a PhD Student Be?,” Part 1 (Updated)
Published June 27, 2012

Chen Guangcheng on Cities and Development in China

Chen Guangcheng (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

The New York Review of Books published a fascinating interview with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng yesterday. For those of you who are interested in development, here is the best part:

Do you think urbanization is beneficial to people? They can move to the city and earn more money.

No, I don’t think it’s beneficial. Right now it’s a blind urbanization. Cities grow up naturally over time. Now they’re trying to do it all at once. The main thing about urbanization now is to make the economic statistics look good—to build and pump up economic activity.

There’s nothing positive about urbanization?

I think for those who go to the city and work there’s a benefit. But the current way of villages being turned into towns—I don’t think there’s an advantage to that. People in the village often rely on ordinary kinds of labor to earn a living, like working in the fields, or raising geese or fish and things like that. So now what happens? They turn a village into one high-rise apartment building and that’s all that’s left of the village. Then the land is used for real estate projects controlled by the officials. Where are the people supposed to work? How is that supposed to function?

Continue readingChen Guangcheng on Cities and Development in China