The socioeconomics of jogging
The reflection of socioeconomics in Strava’s running heat map for my town is striking. It’s sort of Tiebout sorting?
Archive of posts filed under the economics category.
A reminder to be careful how you think about “wasted” water
A team out of Wyoming, including my Colorado River Research Group colleague Kristiana Hansen, has a new paper that reminds us that we need to be careful about how we thinking about conserving water that is being “wasted.” Their case study is an area on the New Fork in Wyoming, a tributary of the Green, …
Continue reading ‘A reminder to be careful how you think about “wasted” water’ »
Changes in municipal water use under pandemic shutdown – a neat case study
A colleague sent me this neat paper by Nicholas Irwin and colleagues at the University Nevada Las Vegas about how water use patterns shifted under initial COVID lockdowns. As you would expect, home water use went up while institutional use went down. But was it just a one-for-one offset? No… [W]e find an initial and …
Continue reading ‘Changes in municipal water use under pandemic shutdown – a neat case study’ »
In which I write about manure
The latest product of my eclectic new academic career – a paper about manure. Manure disposal is a growing problem as agricultural specialization leads to ever-larger concentrations of farm animals. Animals and crops were once grown on the same farm, creating an easy path for manure disposal on cropland in a cycle from animals to …
The “Colorado River Simulation System” and Elinor Ostrom’s “authoritative image of the problem”
Burnishing my notes for UNM Water Resources class this afternoon to talk about Elinor Ostrom, I spent a bit of my morning going back through the underlined bits in my copy of her seminal book Governing the Commons. I first read it in the fall of 2009, when she won the Swedish prize. My initial …
Many thoughtful comments on my musings on California groundwater regulation and agricultural land value
Many thoughtful comments on yesterday’s breakfast musing on the implications of rising California ag land prices, here and over on the twitter, provide yet another reminder that my readers are far smarter than I am about this stuff. The most important point, which quite a few people made, is that a single California number hides …
“the market” doesn’t seem particularly worried about California’s groundwater law
New US Department of Agriculture report out this week shows the dollar value per acre of irrigated California cropland continuing to rise: Above is a quick plot of the data for six of the seven states included in the Colorado River Basin. THIS IS NOT COLORADO RIVER BASIN IRRIGATED ACREAGE. Large areas of many of …
When the Rio Grande goes dry
Long story short, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque has dropped to its lowest levels for this time of year since the 1980s. The flow at the Central Avenue Bridge when I stopped to look on this morning’s bike ride was just 108 cubic feet per second. The last time it’s been that low at this …
Elephant Diaries Revisited: the end of McClatchy
My memory is vivid of the moment I realized newspapers – my vocation, my dream, my way of life – were fucked. I think it was the spring of 2008. Prices for oil and related commodities were spiking. To help write about it for the Albuquerque Journal, I’d signed up for UNM economics professor Jennifer …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries Revisited: the end of McClatchy’ »
Moving beyond the “water wars” frame
To speak of ‘war’ is to invoke images of militaries, violent conflict and destruction on a grand scale. Although we do not deny that water can be a factor – one among many – in some conflicts and mainly at intra-state level, we question why this drift towards water ‘securitisation’ at this time? To align …