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Debate in California about the funding cuts for higher education has become quite perplexing, partly because some of the parties are not thinking very clearly about it, partly because the question is fairly complicated, partly because the politics of California budgeting have become so pathological. In response to relentless nagging from David Schutz (well, he [...]
Archive for the ‘Policy briefs’ Category
November 25th, 2009
Category: California Politics, Education policy, Policy Analysis, Policy briefs, Political Science, Politics and Leadership
September 5th, 2009
Category: Policy briefs, Reviews
I came upon a whiteboard marker with a foam eraser on its cap in one of our seminar rooms yesterday and entered a fugue state whose themes were “Wow, this is a big improvement!” and “What took them so long?”. Unfortunately, it’s too late for the most important design choice for these common items, which [...]
June 24th, 2009
Category: Policy briefs, Politics and Leadership
An environmental colleague I respect says throwing ILUC (and the federal Low Carbon Fuel Standard, which I care about much less) and I infer, the coal utility certificate giveways overboard for a climate bill was “a deal they had to make”. Had to? How do we know? Assuredly, one of the ways [...]
June 12th, 2009
Category: Macroeconomic Policy, Policy briefs
How to be a progressive and worry about inflation at the same time.
May 29th, 2009
Category: Policy briefs, Sotomayor
One of Sonia Sotomayor’s lower-candlepower remarks was the one about a Latina judge making a better decision yada yada, [UPDATE: this is too flip, as Brad Delong notes and I discuss in this post] to which the franticosphere has clung as to a slippery rock in a Class V river, and with as little success. [...]
May 9th, 2009
Lenore Skenazy, a writer not previously known to me, has captured my head and my heart. She understands statistics and risk, psychology, perception, and kids. She has her feet on the ground and her eyes open. Money quote from an interview in Slate (h/t Andrew Sullivan):
we’ve started to think of our kids as the [...]
May 6th, 2009
Category: Energy and Environment, Policy briefs
The argument that an effluent charge on greenhouse gasses would be economically disruptive and politically infeasible and that therefore we should prefer a cap-and-trade system is incoherent. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: either one, done at the appropriate level, will lead to dramatic changes in relative prices and require political heavy lifting.
April 24th, 2009
Jon scooped me on this last night because I got home so late from the all-day meeting of the Air Resources Board that adopted the LCFS. I was there because my team at Berkeley (with another group at Davis and a subcontract to Purdue) did a large part of the supporting research for this [...]
February 20th, 2009
The horrible idea of replacing the gasoline tax with a vehicle-miles-traveled tax.
