econlife – What Covid Teaches Us About a College Town by Elaine Schwartz

When the media talk about the schools and Covid-19, they focus on primary, middle, and high school students. If the kids are home, then they learn less while their parents have a tough time working.

For college shutdowns, though, many of the worries are different.

College Towns

A recent Boston Federal Reserve study took a look at the towns located near New England’s 208 colleges and universities. They concluded that higher education is responsible for an average of 3.4 percent of all employment while in certain areas, a whopping 38 percent is a possibility.

Below, the darkest shades are for communities where more than 10 percent of the jobs come from local colleges and universities:

Meanwhile, with Maine at the top, there are 57 New England communities that are heavily dependent on the nearby college or university:

Covid-19 Shutdowns

Let’s assume that a college or university responds to Covid-19 by teaching remotely.  At the school, revenue could drop because of student departures, tuition discounts, and eliminated fees. The employees that are laid off or furloughed spend less locally and could lose tuition grants given to them and their children. From there, we can look at the town where rents might not be paid and the stores, restaurants, and bars that lose student, faculty, and staff business.

In addition, when sports are cancelled, the impact can be huge. Texas A&M has said that each football game generates $20 million in consumer spending. The 60,000 (or so) people who attend Texas Tech games bring millions of dollars to Lubbock. On game days, a Lubbock sporting goods store selling team merchandise hires 35 extra employees. Baylor athletics has said they generated $373.3 million for Waco’s economy.

Our Bottom Line: Externalities

An economist might say that when employment, wages, and student driven consumption shrink, Covid-19 is creating a slew of negative externalities. Defined as the harmful impact of a contract or decision on an uninvolved third party, a negative externality can ripple through a community. My favorite example is when fumes from a hot sauce maker reputedly gave its neighbors heartburn. It really happened to Sriracha.

Somewhat similarly, the impact of college shutdowns from Covid-19 travel beyond their source. The school itself, its employees, and its students buy goods and services at local establishments that range from bars to dry cleaners. Football alone is a multi-million dollar activity.

So, what does Covid-19 teach us about a college town? That the jobs and wages that spillover from the schools fuel the local economies. When the schools shutdown, local communities suffer.

My sources and more: A Boston Fed paper says the most about Covid’s impact on college towns. Then, there is more in The Washington Post, and the Caller Times.

Our featured image is from The Daily Pennsylvanian at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - How Garlic Relates to Coronavirus by Elaine Schwartz

If you’ve traveled to China during the two weeks before boarding, a cruise ship will send you home. For a similar reason, Apple’s revenue will be less than projected and Hong Kong’s restaurant traffic is down.

But garlic?

The Coronavirus Impact on Garlic

It is likely that the two pounds of garlic you ate this year were from China. The source of as much as 80 percent of the world’s garlic supply, China provides much of our garlic. It is also possible that when you visited Gilroy, California, you smelled garlic, an aroma said “to engulf” the city. As garlic growers, China and Gilroy have had a very different reaction to the U.S. China trade war and the coronavirus.

California’s garlic farmers were delighted when a 10 percent tariff on garlic went to 25 percent because of the trade war. Now, China’s response to the coronavirus has locked down transport arteries. Agricultural workers and processors have not been at work. The result has been a continued march upward of the price of garlic. During the first two weeks in February, it ascended by 13 percent.

We’ve been eating Chinese garlic for awhile. Below is a sign in a NY gourmet supermarket during 2013:

Our Bottom Line: Externalities

An externality refers to the impact of an activity or a contract or a decision on an uninvolved third party. Good and bad, externalities can be positive and negative. A vaccine is a typical example of a positive externality while water pollution creates the negative ripple.

You can see with garlic that the Chinese are experiencing negative externalities as are consumers who are paying more. Meanwhile, Gilroy’s garlic farmers are benefiting.

My sources and more: Thanks to Tracy for alerting me to the garlic update. That took me to the LA Times for the cruise ship ban and to CNBC for its Apple news. Unexpectedly, it also relates to the trade war now and in the past. And here are the USDA stats and facts about Gilroy, California, the garlic capital of the U.S.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - Where a Traffic Light Could Cut Noise Pollution by Elaine Schwartz

Habitual car horn honkers could have a problem in Mumbai. If they keep honking when a traffic signal is red and the decibel levels exceed 85, the signal will reset. Rather than turning green, the red remains. Cars will have to sit for double the time and maybe more.

Some suggest that the decibel punishment will diminish noise levels in the city. Others worry that it will only get better at the five signals where the lights get longer. Elsewhere, drivers will keep honking.

Where are we going? To the tragedy of the commons.

Noise Pollution

On April 7, 2008, Mumbai had a No Honking Day. Between January 2009 and September 2019, there were just 1293 honking offenses. Now, recognizing the danger of loud noise, the city is trying harder.

Below, you can see a decibel hierarchy:

Knowing that 85 dB or more is harmful, India’s noise pollution rules include (I suspect unrealistically) a maximum of 55 dB during the day and 45 dB at night for residential areas. After all, a nearby siren can be as loud as 120 to 140 dB. A bit lower but still harmful, power lawn mowers and subway trains can be in the 90 dB range. With higher decibel levels, the downside is high blood pressure, sleep problems, stress. Birds have displayed lower birth rates and caterpillars, accelerated heart rates.

In a report on noise pollution, the World Health Organization summarized how people could be affected:

Our Bottom Line: Tragedy of the Commons

We have a tragedy of the commons when a public resource is overused or abused. Because the land or water or street has no private owner to oversee its care, individuals harm it. The result is a loud city, an overfished ocean, polluted air.

Political scientist Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) won the economics Nobel Prize for her approach to the tragedy of the commons. Calling it the problem of the commons, she said communities do voluntarily get together when they share the same goals. Her examples ranged from a pasture in Switzerland to the refrigerator at work.

Elinor Ostrom:

Meanwhile, British economist Arthur Pigou (1877-1959) proposed targeted fines that could be win win. If successful, they were supposed to create the incentive to pollute less at the same time that the fine would be used to benefit society. His key was cost. Someone had to elevate the cost of the behavior.

Arthur Pigou:

Yet another solution was offered by Nobel laureate Ronald Coase (1910-2013). He thought individuals could negotiate a mutually satisfactory solution. They just had to be aware of when each benefited.

Returning to that Mumbai traffic signal that gets longer when people raise the noise level. someone could have called it a Pigovian solution to noise pollution.

My sources and more: Thanks to Marginal Revolution for alerting me to Mumbai’s street noise problems. From there, The Times of India and the Hindustanitimes  had more of the story. Then for noise pollution facts National Geographic, WEF, and this WHO 2011 report were helpful. And finally, always ideal for economist bios, econlib had more on Ostrom, Pigou, and Coase.

Our featured image is from Pixabay.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - The Hidden Side of Amazon Prime by Elaine Schwartz

Last week I realized that I immediately needed a tiny stapler. So, like you probably would have done, at my kitchen table, I spent $5.95. Two days later, Amazon Prime deposited the stapler (with 100 staples) on my doorstep.

My decision involved so much more than instant gratification.

Amazon Prime Problems

With the average Prime member placing two orders a week, Amazon wouldn’t want to curtail our impulsive shopping. Instead, almost 1.25 million U.S, shipments (2017) directed their attention to packaging and transport:

Packaging

Because of multiple Prime orders, Amazon has had to think more about packaging. Recognizing some customers’ “wrap rage,” they are using more bubble envelopes. Aware that the excessive space occupied by smaller inexpensive items increases transport costs, they’ve been developing algorithms that match box size to contents to avoid “over-boxing.” And they want manufacturers to know that online packaging needs to be compact rather than attractive.

Transport

In addition, Amazon reputedly wants us to bundle our items. If we choose one “Amazon (delivery)  Day,” then they can combine what we order. Similarly, those Amazon stores and “lockers” are a single destination for many purchases.

Environment

Then, to all of this, we can add environmental concerns. My new mini-stapler brought a white van with the delivery to my quiet neighborhood. Then, further adding to congestion and pollution, Prime requires a fleet of medium and large trucks. But it’s not that easy. To truly know an environmental impact, we shouldn’t forget how many trips we make to comparison shop before placing an online order, the volume of orders in our area, the parking spaces, whether the trucks are “stuffed.”

This is an Amazon NYC delivery during last February:

Our Bottom Line: Externalities

Defined as the impact on an uninvolved third party, an externality can be a plus or a minus. It can be positive or negative. A vaccine is the perfect example of a positive externality. When someone gets a flu shot, the transaction is between patient and doctor. But many of us benefit because that individual does not get sick. On the negative side, we could cite the loud music in a dormitory that stops a faraway student from studying. The music is the negative externality that leads to a low grade for an unknown individual.

Somewhat similarly, Amazon Prime generates externalities that range from the time we save to the orders we create for corrugated boxes. In ways that are rarely obvious, they affect us, other businesses, and our environment.

My sources and more: These WSJ articles, here, and here, were the perfect complement to Vox, here and here and to a Fast Company look at Amazon Prime. The article that I found most fascinating though was on urban congestion from Wired.

Please note that my externalities definition was in a past econlife.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - When To Ignore Your Email by Elaine Schwartz

Whenever my friends and family discover that I have 117,000 (or so) unopened emails, with genuine horror, they condemn rather than compliment me. Now though, a Georgetown computer scientist has explained how my habits could help the entire economy.

Digital Distractions

I should start by saying that I do read my email but I don’t use up time or energy deleting what I don’t read. I just decide which emails to open and when to read them. According to this Georgetown scholar, which and when are crucial.

When the Washington Post took a look, it concluded that we consistently divert ourselves from other tasks to read our email. In a lifetime of work, we use more than 47,000 hours:

In his book Deep Work, Georgetown’s Cal Newport hypothesizes that distraction free concentration pushes our “cognitive capabilities to their limit.” In other words, we think best when we focus. He warns us that even just a peek at email eliminates our optimal cognitive focus. And then, because of our “attention residue,” it takes awhile to regain our previous concentration.

From there, the Bank of England blog takes the malady to the next stage. When we fall prey to digital distraction, it can only get worse. Unable to resist, we experience “continuous partial attention.” The ultimate result could indeed be less productivity and less satisfaction for each of us.

Below, you can see the correlation between diminished productivity growth and increased Smartphone shipments:

But Dr. Newport does have a solution. He believes we should schedule long blocks of time when digital peeks are prohibited.

Our Bottom Line: Market Failure

In her guest blog, my former student Michaela Markels insightfully said that digital distractions were the result of market failure. Markets fail when the cost of a negative externality–a negative impact of the activity–is ignored. As a result, the price is too low.

In the following graph, you see that the second supply curve, the one that does not exist, reflects the high cost of the digital distractions. That second curve elevates the “price” and thereby diminishes the quantity demanded. However, the market is at P1. It failed to select the appropriate “price” for a digital distraction:

Just a final thought that reflects the timelessness of distractions. I can’t help but think of Odysseus. Sailing past the irresistible Sirens, he knew he had to be tied to the mast. What is the digital equivalent?

My sources and more: Thanks to the Hidden Brain podcast on Deep Work for introducing me to Georgetown associate professor Cal Newport. Next, my search for some statistical validation took me to The Washington Post and to The Economist. From there this Bank of England essay added some substance to the argument.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - When Cars Have To Decide Whether to Kill Grandma by Elaine Schwartz

Imagine for a moment that an out-of-control streetcar is hurtling toward five people. Sitting at the controls, the driver can do nothing and assume those five individuals will die. He can though flip a switch and instead hit a single person.

Doing nothing results in five fatalities. Acting will cause one person’s death. What to do?

It might all depend on where you live.

But first, the reason we need to know.

Autonomous Vehicles

A group at MIT wanted to identify what people believe is ethical because self-driving vehicles will have to make decisions. Yes, most involve the everyday traffic rules we (are supposed to) observe. However, especially in emergencies, some will be about life and death. A machine will have to decide whether to strike someone who is old or young. It could have to choose between harming men or women, more or fewer people, animals or humans. An autonomous vehicle can act or do nothing.

The Study

To see the ethical driving decisions that should be made by self-driving vehicles, those MIT researchers created a survey. Called the Moral Machine, 13 scenarios were presented to millions of people in 233 countries. All had situations in which someone had to die. Their task was deciding who.

The geography of the Moral Machine:

The Results

Among the participants, there was general agreement about three moral dilemmas:

• humans over animals
• save many rather than a few
• preserve the young instead of the old

However, it wasn’t quite that easy. Moving from general preferences to specific answers, researchers uncovered much more division.

Geographically, the responses to the Moral Machine questions divided into three groups:

• The Western Cluster: Values that related to Christianity characterized the answers from North America and some of Europe.
• The Eastern Cluster: People with a Confucian or Islamic heritage from places that included Japan, Indonesia, and Pakistan tended to have similar opinions.
• The Southern Cluster: The third group, not explicitly tied to specific religious roots, was from Central and South America, France, and former French colonies.

Nature Magazine illustrated the differences through a moral compass:

In addition to geography and religion, ethics varied by gender, age, education, income, and politics. Institutions mattered. In more affluent countries with established institutions (like Finland and Japan), survey participants were more likely to condemn an illegal jaywalker. As for age, respondents in the Southern Cluster tended to spare the young rather than the aged.

Our Bottom Line: Externalities

For self-driving cars, ethical programming has become a reality. Necessitating countless choices, the decisions will create externalities. Defined as the impact on an uninvolved third party, the externality can be positive or negative.

Now though we can see that what people call positive or negative will vary.

I wonder if that means having self-driving cars with a Western, an Eastern, or a Southern personality.

My sources and more: I recommend taking a look at Nature’s article on The Moral Machine Experiment.  From there, you might also enjoy this 99% Invisible podcast and this German Ethics Commission report, and do be sure to take MIT’s moral machine quiz.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - A Dilemma: How Much to Pay for Our Privacy Protection by Elaine Schwartz

There is a doll whose name is Cayla. She has a pink skirt, a denim jacket, and a bluetooth connection. Like many toys, she can have a conversation with us.

While these dolls are all Caylas, their manufacturer says you can program in a new name:

But you won’t be the only one who knows her name.

Whatever we say to Cayla can be stored on a central server and then sold to anyone or any intelligence agency. The German government banned her because she violated their privacy laws.

For us also, Cayla is more than a toy. She takes us to the cost of protecting our privacy.

Privacy

Privacy History

We could say that we were concerned about privacy from people during the 19th century, from government in the 20th century, and now, from the corporation. Before the mid-19th century, privacy was not even a concern. The reason could have been that we had limited photography, no telegraph, no telephone.

The following Google Ngram search shows the word was not used very much in books until the 1960s:

Contemporary Privacy

A Google search, Amazon’s Siri, and a Facebook like all add to a data supply chain that lets corporations collect and sell data about our behavior. So too do our Smart phones, Smart cars, Smart dishwashers.

However, when told how much we share, our response to privacy protection is tepid. In a recent survey, 80% of the participants said they would want to protect themselves from their everyday technology but only 26% said they would pay for that protection. Asked if they would pay to see fewer online ads, 50% of the survey’s participants said no.

Our Bottom Line: The Cost of Privacy Protection

To understand why many of us are minimally concerned with privacy protection,  it might help to see its cost (economically defined as sacrifice) from two perspectives.

Collectively, the cost of losing our privacy is immense. Through our elections, our businesses, our personal and professional relationships, we can corrupt our basic institutions.

As individuals though, when we lose our privacy, life becomes easier. Our appliances work better, we remain in touch with our world, and toys are more fun.

So “bad” things happen as a society when we lose privacy but “good” things happen personally. You can see why we won’t pay to preserve our privacy. One by one, we cannot even fix the problem.

And perhaps that is why Germany banned Cayla. The only way we can and will pay for our privacy is together.

My sources and more: Thanks to a Crazy/Genius podcast on privacy for a good walk yesterday morning. Because of Crazy/Genius, I learned about Cayla the talking doll from the NY Times. As for the survey, it was reported by MarketWatch. And finally, you might enjoy (as did I) pondering what Justice Brandeis said about privacy.

Our featured image is from Pixabay.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - The Unintended Consequences of Plastic Bag Bans by Elaine Schwartz

When I walk with my friend Eli and her dog Dosa, we take our plastic bags. Originally from ShopRite or the local farm stand, the bags were filled with groceries. Now, handy for dog poop, they reside in a bin under my sink until I grab one.

In more than 240 U.S. municipalities, California, and soon New York, those bags have disappeared. Because of bag bans or bag fees, many fewer people are re-using them.

And that could be the problem.

Plastic Bag Ban Surprises

Through a DCB (disposable carryout bag) fee or a ban, we shop with many fewer lightweight plastic bags. Because paper bags and fabric totes replace them, our plastic waste plunges by millions of pounds.

But there is a problem.

Those paper bags and fabric bags have a substantial carbon footprint–more than what it took to make the DCBs. Just think of how a tree becomes paper. You are eliminating an environmentally benevolent plant, using toxic chemicals, and then doing some hefty processing and transporting. It gets even worse with a tote bag. To have a smaller global warming impact than a DCB,  your cotton bag has to be reused more than 131 times. Then, if those DCBs had become garbage hags at home, you have to use your tote as much as a whopping 393 times to offset a DCB’s global warming potential.

These are the amount of use numbers from a 2006 U.K. study that compared the global warming potential of DCBs (aka HDPEs) to reusable bags:

Furthermore, when there are no DCBs, we need more plastic garbage bags. Using data from California, one researcher reported a surge in demand for four gallon garbage bags while sales of other sizes also increased. The result was a massive consumption shift as we bought 11.5 million more pounds of garbage bags and used 40 million fewer pounds of DCBs.

You can see the pop in garbage bag sales just after the DCB ban:

At this point you could be thinking there’s got to be more and there is. We just have to look beyond the carbon footprint from greenhouse gases. When we consider all of the waste generated by plastic, we could arrive at a new conclusion. As always in economics, we have tradeoff. A ban creates more emissions but less non-biodegradable litter.

So, if you care about non-biodegradable litter, then the DCB ban is for you.

Our Bottom Line: Pigovian Taxes

A bag ban or fee could be called a Pigovian tax. Arthur Pigou developed the idea to cope with negative externalities. Defined as the harm done to an uninvolved third party when, for example, someone plays loud music in a dormitory or pollutes a stream, a negative externality needs an incentive to discourage its use. Dr. Pigou said the solution was a tax. When something becomes more expensive, people do less of it.

On a graph, the higher cost looks like this:

Bag bans and bag fees create a higher price. That price might not be in dollars but they do necessitate some costly inconvenience.

My sources and more: This Planet Money newsletter had all we need to know about the downside of the plastic bag ban. But for more detail, this paper and this U.K. study look more precisely at ban “leakage.” Lastly, the NY Times showed the regulatory side through New York’s new bag fee.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - Why It’s Tough to Plan Congestion Pricing by Elaine Schwartz

It might cost me $11.52 to drive south of 60th Street in Manhattan. And that’s after paying $12.50 at the Lincoln Tunnel and a Jersey Turnpike toll.

That extra $11.52 (I’m not sure how they got that amount) would be the congestion pricing fee. Now that the New York State legislature said yes to the plan, NYC will become the first U.S. city to use downtown congestion pricing.

Here an economist might say that the law of demand kicks in. When price rises–it’s free now–the quantity people are willing and able to purchase decreases. So, if you charge to drive in a certain area like below 60th Street in Manhattan, then you wind up with fewer cars.

Yes?

It’s not quite that simple. Today, let’s look at the details. Then, we can consider the externalities.

Congestion Pricing Plans

The NYS legislative just said yes to congestion pricing and a commission to figure it out. All they know is that there will be a charge and the revenue will go to mass transit.

Why

Because the average speed in midtown Manhattan is between 4.5 and 9 MPH, congestion pricing advocates want cars to move faster. With fewer cars, air quality could improve. Space also could be used differently when fewer cars occupy the streets and we don’t need as many parking spaces. It all could add up to a more efficient, less aggravating, and healthier city.

How Much and Who

The basic concept involves charging a fee to people who drive in the “cordoned” area. The question though is how much and who. You could have one amount or it could be variable, depending on traffic volume. It could apply to all vehicles or depend on the type. After all, people drive commercial, passenger, and emergency vehicles. They ride on motorcycles and mopeds. They take taxis, Uber, Lyft and other ride-sharing options. There are horses leading small carriages.

We also have different categories of drivers to consider. There are the disabled. You have low income households.

Where

We know the targeted area is below 60th street. But we have to consider the vehicles that want to move from lower Manhattan to above 60th Street. On the east and west sides of the city you have the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway. Along those roadways, there could be no charge. But what about the exits? How to monitor who enters midtown? Also, you have drivers who live in the priced area that need to move their cars from one parking space to another because of alternate side of the street parking rules.

When

The fee could apply only during businesses hours. From there, we could ask about weekends and evenings. Do holidays count? Or, it could relate to the number of vehicles.

Technology

If we look way back to 1975, Singapore had people purchase paper decals for its congestion pricing plan. When the Hong Kong system started, drivers were to install an Electronic Number Plate under a vehicle. Then, electronic loops under streets read the plates so drivers could be charged. For Manhattan, planners object to EZPass transponders because they require gantries. It appears they hope someone will invent an app or a GPS device that simplifies the revenue side.

This is a gantry:

Our Bottom Line: Externalities

As economists, we could say it is all about externalities. Defined as the impact on an uninvolved third party, an externality can be negative or positive. People want congestion pricing because too much traffic creates negative externalities. You know what they are. We waste huge time, the air is more polluted, the noise is irritating. Congestion slows business and diminishes pleasure.

As you might be thinking, the gargantuan number of details that compose a congestion pricing plan will surely lead to a slew of new externalities. Who you are and what you do will determine whether the impact is positive or negative or both.

However, I can be sure that my hour’s drive to and through NYC will certainly change.

My sources and more: With NYC’s congestion pricing almost a done deal, the articles are everywhere. Politico, WSJ, Medium, the NY Times, Curbed, AMNewYork, and City Lab are some possibilities.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.