City Economics

Amazon.com Price: $58.41 (as of 11/10/2019 09:49 PST- Details)

Description

This introductory but innovative textbook on the economics of cities is aimed at students of urban and regional policy in addition to of undergraduate economics. It deals with standard topics, including automobiles, mass transit, pollution, housing, and education but it also discusses non-standard topics such as segregation, water supply, sewers, garbage, fire prevention, housing codes, homelessness, crime, illicit drugs, and economic development.

Its methods of analysis are primarily verbal, geometric, and arithmetic. The creator achieves coherence by showing how the analysis of more than a few topics reinforces one another. Thus, buses can let us know something about schools and optimal tolls about land prices. Brendan O’Flaherty looks at almost the whole lot through the lens of Pareto optimality and potential Pareto optimality–how policies have an effect on people and their well-being, not abstract entities such as cities or the economy or growth or the environment. Such traditionalism results in radical questions, alternatively: Must cities have police and fire departments? Must tax preferences for home ownership be repealed? Must public schools charge for their products and services? O’Flaherty also gives serious consideration to such heterodox policies as pay-at-the-pump auto insurance, curb rights for buses, land taxes, marginal cost water pricing, and sidewalk zoning.


Recent Products