Category: Uncategorized

The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are the laws that led to the creation of a system of land-grant colleges in the United States. As per Wikipedia, land-grant colleges are universities whose “mission … is to focus on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science and engineering … as a response to the industrial revolution and changing social class.”

I have greatly benefited from the Morrill Act,* as have many of my friends and colleagues. In the state of New York, the designated land-grant institution is Cornell, where I went to grad school. In the state of Minnesota, that institution is the University of Minnesota, where I work. I spent most of–and the most fulfilling of–the last 15 years at land-grant institutions.

Is it time for a new Morrill Act? Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist who chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, thinks so:

That is the title of my most recent article (co-authored with Chris Paul, Erika Weinthal, and Marc Jeuland), which is now published in Global Environmental Change. Here is the abstract:

Climate change is expected to have particularly severe effects on poor agrarian populations. Rural households in developing countries adapt to the risks and impacts of climate change both individually and collectively. Empirical research has shown that access to capital—financial, human, physical, and social—is critical for building resilience and fostering adaptation to environmental stresses. Little attention, however, has been paid to how social capital generally might facilitate adaptation through trust and cooperation, particularly among rural households and communities. This paper addresses the question of how social capital affects adaptation to climate change by rural households by focusing on the relationship of household and collective adaptation behaviors. A mixed-methods approach allows us to better account for the complexity of social institutions—at the household, community, and government levels—which drive climate adaptation outcomes. We use data from interviews, household surveys, and field experiments conducted in 20 communities with 400 households in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia. Our results suggest that qualitative measures of trust predict contributions to public goods, a result that is consistent with the theorized role of social capital in collective action. Yet qualitative trust is negatively related to private household-level adaptation behaviors, which raises the possibility that social capital may, paradoxically, be detrimental to private adaptation. Policymakers should account for the potential difference in public and private adaptation behaviors in relation to trust and social capital when designing interventions for climate adaptation.

“If you know a good story, tell it from time to time.” — Noah Smith.

Actually, I know two related stories, which I will recount in this post because both stories need to be understood much more widely than they currently are given how often their affiliated problems crop up in the manuscripts I read.

Take the most basic theoretical problem in microeconomics: A producer has to choose how much labor ℓ to use in order to maximize its profit from producing and selling some output q whose production is dictated by the production function q = f(ℓ), where f(.) is the technology available to the producer. The output q sells at price p, and labor ℓ sells at wage w.

Setting the maximization problem, taking the first-order condition, checking that the second-order condition is satisfied, and solving for the profit-maximizing quantity of labor will yield a labor input demand ℓ* = ℓ(p,w). In such a problem, we say that ℓ is an endogenous variable–it is determined within the context of the problem–while p and w are exogenous variables–they are predetermined, that is, they are given, and they do not depend on the problem. (Alternatively, we also say that p, w, and f(.) are the primitives of the problem, but that is neither here nor there for the purposes of this discussion).