Economics from a people first point-of-view

A decade or so ago, the hue and cry over SUVs (“urban assault vehicles”) finally forced Ford and other auto companies who buried their patents for electric vehicles in their vaults in the early 20th century to pull them out.

Competition from foreign electric vehicle makers impelled American automakers to start manufacturing hybrid and electric vehicles. Now there are even hybrid buses on city streets.

But while this trend may reduce greenhouse gases and global warming, what about more obvious problems related to cars, such as traffic congestion, accidents, and the disparate gas tax-rate impact on different socio-economic groups of Americans?

Let’s start with federal gasoline taxes

In 2015 The [San Jose] Mercury News wrote that in California, the lead state in creating lower pollution vehicles, that about 85 percent of federal gas tax goes to highways and 15 percent percent for public transit.

The state got around $5 billion and spent 57 percent on highways, 36 percent on roads, and 7 percent on public transportation.

Nevertheless potholes are the number one problem in this rainy season state. The cost in blown tires, suspension systems and our backs to car owners comes out of our own pockets.

In addition, government subsidies out of local and federal taxpayer monies go to businesses such as Whole Foods when they do not pay employees enough to be able to live near the place where they work.

This impels workers to commute (currently in older gas powered vehicles) long distances—up to as many as two or more hours each way to get to work.

Not only do these long commutes by more and more cars create more pollution, they also tear up highways and streets. And each year traffic congestion grows worse.

The Mercury News even advised long-distance commuters to avoid the slow lanes on federal Highway 580 where “trucks have chewed up the freeway”. Continue reading →

Sitting outside on the back patio of my condo in late October, shivering under the weight of two sweaters and a jacket trying to finish work for a client on my computer, in the waning afternoon on a Friday I decided I had to leave the home I’d saved years to buy.

My partner and I had been sleeping on floors and mattresses of friends and family, housesitting, and finally tent camping in the East Bay California hills.

In the campground where we slept each night after finishing work at home, trees grew more barren and the ground grew colder. Each morning, car after car pulled out of the park, leaving only a caravan of gypsies, and two men in a truck who arrived at two a.m. every night after work to sleep for a few hours.

There was no alternative left. I called our homeowner insurance company and let them know we wanted to take them up on their offer of three months rent for a temporary place to live. I was quickly issued a bank card at Wells Fargo bank to use for expenses. Continue reading →

Grupo feminista – Spain

“How I survived as the only woman in business school” in the Financial Times on September 1, 2017 is an interview with emeritus Professor of International Accounting, Jöelle Le Vourc’h. It’s a story I really resonated with!

Professor Le Vurc’h’s interviewer, Emma Jacobs, tells us that in 1970, “Jöelle Le Vourc’h contemplated giving up her place at business school in the very first term. The problem was not the course, which she enjoyed, but the isolation and occasional discrimination from students and professors.”

My experience as the only woman in the class of 1970 at the Graduate School of Economics at University of Wisconsin, Madison was quite similar—although it was the preceding year in the graduate school English Department that really set the stage for my alienation from academia.

This was in spite of my deep love for learning, the UW campus, its students, libraries, lakes, and the city of Madison. Continue reading →