Region: International
US Food Aid Rules: If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention
The Obama Administration announced yesterday that it wants to change US food aid rules to allow for more “local procurement” of food aid in the countries that need it. Predictably, the special interests are aghast. But the administration is right: current food aid rules are among the most egregious special interest legislation in the world …
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CONTINUE READINGClear Views in the High Desert
If you are looking for a politically progressive city, Lancaster, California would not make it on your list. Located in the deeply conservative Antelope Valley of north Los Angeles County, it has attracted attention by, inter alia, 1) electing Pete Knight, one of the most vicious anti-gay politicians in the country, to a series of state …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Adaptation and the Two Chinas (and the Two Brazils, and the Two Indias….)
The world used to be divided into developed countries and developing countries, but a third group has now taken the stage: emerging economies like China, India, and Brazil that are growing very rapidly but haven’t yet attained developed country status. But development in these countries is uneven. In China, for example, there has been explosive …
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CONTINUE READINGRemedial Education for Berkeley Law Faculty
Or at least for John Yoo, who argues: Courts award damages based on the harm to the victim and the harm to society. Suppose you thought that the Iraq war was a mistake. If so, isn’t the proper remedy to restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq? If you are …
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CONTINUE READINGCongress Increases Climate Research Funding!
…even if they didn’t intend to. The Republican War on Science has morphed into a more general war on knowledge. As Dan has pointed out previously, the GOP has now declared war on social science funding, and particularly on political science. Last night, the Senate accepted the amendment of Senator Tom Coburn (R – Olduvai …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Impact of China’s Bullet Trains
Siqi Zheng and I have just published our bullet trains paper in PNAS. Here is the gated paper. Our empirical paper is based on the following piece of deep math; distance = speed*time. Given how fast bullet trains move relative to cars and conventional trains, the time cost between cities that are 80 to …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Sandwich and Urban Pollution Progress in China
The principal-agent problem is a classic issue in modern economics. Consider the case of a Chinese Mayor who must choose whether to enforce regulations on a local steel plant. Pollution would decline if this regulation is enforced but the profits of the firm might fall and this could affect the local economy if the …
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CONTINUE READINGWhale Wars in the Courtroom
Earlier today, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an anti-whaling activist group—and the only environmental group with its own reality television series—petitioned the nation’s highest court. In its petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sea Shepherd seeks review of a December 17, 2012 injunction from Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski that prevents the Sea …
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CONTINUE READINGMexico as a Lead Pollution Haven
The New York Times has published a piece about the unintended consequences of U.S environmental regulation. The Times focuses on how U.S lead battery disposal regulation has contributed to our exporting dead batteries to Mexico. If Mexico has more lax disposal regulation and if more people live close to areas where dead batteries are …
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CONTINUE READINGAirpocalypse Now: China’s Tipping Point?
The recent run of air pollution in China, we now know, has been worse than the air quality in airport smoking lounges. At its worst, Beijing air quality has approached levels only seen in the US during wildfires. All of the comparisons to London, Los Angeles, and New York in the last century are beside …
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