Connecting the Dots: The Common Themes Between My Three Recent Books

Tomorrow, the University of California Press will publish my Going Remote book.  In February 2021, Johns Hopkins Press published my Co-authored “Unlocking the Potential of Post-Industrial Cities” and in March 2021, Yale University Press published my book; “Adapting to Climate Change”.

Why did I write these 600 total pages of stuff?

The Ongoing Challenge faced by Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit

I spent two years working at Johns Hopkins University and I lived in downtown Baltimore for a year before the pandemic hit.  I wrote the Unlocking book because I recognized that I was living in a city that was stuck in a poverty trap. Very few people were actively thinking about the basic building blocks of economic growth namely attracting productive firms, encouraging private capital investment in firms, and upgrading old durable real estate capital. Young people were not investing in their skills because there were few local private sector jobs.  The basics of building a high quality of life city focused on improving school quality and safe streets and clean air and clean water were not being fully addressed as Baltimore’s officials showed little interest in experimentation and formal evaluation of different program’s effectiveness.  

Adapting to Climate Change

My book is an optimistic study as I synthesize what I have learned over my 15 years of researching and reading the climate change economics adaptation literature.   

Name any climate change challenge you can think of ranging from sea level rise, to extreme heat, to increased fire risk and I discuss how capitalism helps us to adapt to the challenge.  For capitalism to help us to adapt, prices must be allowed to signal scarcity. If drought occurs, water prices must rise. If real estate in a specific location faces new risk, then the price will decline and the new buyer will be a person with an edge in adapting to the risk.  Such an edge can be built up through developing skill or if there is sufficient demand to protect properties that can flood then it becomes profitable for firms to enter the “flood protection” business to protect such home owners.  As we learned from the development of the COVID vaccine, our economy features amazing adaptation potential.

Climate adaptation optimism is still viewed as politically incorrect stuff.  Why?  Through rising incomes, access to markets and rising educational attainment, our ability to adapt to new shocks increases every day.  

Going Remote

This is a book about the urban and environmental implications of the persistence of WFH in a post-COVID economy. I argue that the “experience good” effect that we enjoyed during COVID will offer huge medium term gains for our quality of life going forward.

Cities such as Baltimore will experience an influx of WFH workers as people who want to live in that city because they desire its affordable housing and culture and lifestyle can now live and have a good job as they work for a Amazon HQ2 or HQ3 of Google in a 2 hour drive in some direction.   The unbundling of where we live from where we work will help cities that have failed to attract modern companies to make a comeback if they offer good services and good quality of life.  If a Baltimore attracts more talent to live there, then this will stabilize the taxbase and increase the demand for the local Consumer City. This will create a service sector multiplier effect and increase opportunities for those workers who are not WFH eligible.   As young people foresee that they can be WFH workers if they have the skills, they will invest more in themselves and their parents will seek better schools for them. This will put pressure on the local public sector unions to teach!

So, there is a clear link between my Unlocking book and the Going Remote book.

The link to climate change adaptation is that a WFH eligible workforce can spread out. For those who seek to work for a Seattle firm but fear how climate change will impact Seattle, they are free to choose and “head for the hills”.  The permutations become huge when you can work for one firm and live elsewhere.  Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” becomes a more accurate description of our economy and this increases our wellbeing.

In 2019, the great jobs were in congested, expensive Superstar cities that faced increased climate risks.  WFH unbundles where we live from where we work and opens up many, many possibilities for how we configure our lives.  This represents a significant real pay raise!

I am not a modest man. I view my three books as creating a series of empirical predictions for how the urban system of cities will unfold over the next decades.  I would hope that my teacher Sherwin Rosen would respect how I have taken his hedonic equilibrium ideas and built on his edifice.