Friday, July 8, 2011

UCB Professor Michael Hanemann

Professor Michael Hanemann is an economist who works on environmental policy. He is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

Dr. Hanemann’s research interests include non-market valuation, environmental economics and policy, water pricing and management, demand modeling for market research and policy design, the economics of irreversibility and adaptive management, and welfare economics.


He is an expert in the economics of water, the valuation and the demand of water. I would be more interested in applying his techniques to other material resources, though. On the one hand, according to standard environmental economics analysis, my drive to reduce the use of other material resources is to minimize the negative externality of pollution or climate change. However, I feel it is more than that. I suppose that fundamentally I feel that exponential increases in material resource use is a problem. I also think that improving supply chain is an insufficient solution. It only seeks to make resource use efficient, but there is no mechanism to ultimately constrain it. Even so, it's a necessary first step.

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