Regenstein

I have been living in the Reg for days on end, working on a disastrously overambitious project for SOSC. It's kind of interesting, but what's more interesting is what I have learned about urban economics and the role of modeling in economics.

I've become interested in crime, gentrification, and urban matters, so the natural course has been to build a toy economic model, generate some hypotheses, and then test them by doing some regressions on crime and census data. Naturally, I've been investigating the discipline of so-called "urban economics." It's a fairly small subfield to be sure, but the vast majority of its theoretical foundation (from what I can tell from my humble researches) is centered upon a single model created in 1964. The model is incredibly simple, and I think I can understand the basics with nothing more than my six and a half weeks of the first quarter of UChicago economics. Practically every other model in urban economics is simply a derivative of this single primative abstraction. It's really amazing that someone hasn't created something more sophistocated.

I suppose all of our urban problems are really just that simple, right?