A book signing with Yoram Bauman (the world's only stand-up economist)

Earth Date: 2014 July 10th
Location: Powell's books on Hawthorne, OR

One of my colleagues from the economics department at Whittier (hi David!) had mentioned Yoram to me once before. Yoram has a PhD in economics, but likes to educate the world through comedy instead as well as more traditional academic means. For those that are not easily offended, Yoram has a video on the Economics of Sh*t [youtube link], which describes different economic systems. He has also made quite a popular book called The cartoon guide to Economics.

The book that Yoram was talking about today was The cartoon guide to Climate Change. This book was interesting for a few reasons:

• Yoram has taught introductory climate change classes, but his focus is as an economist rather than a (physical) scientist. His talk focused more on how to put incentives in place to encourage  the lower emissions, and less on the climate models.
• He is not a fan of California's cap-and-trade, preferring a system in which Carbon tax is revenue neutral (i.e. any money gained from the Carbon tax must be offset by lowering taxes in other areas, as this makes the proposal much more attractive to financial conservatives)
• He is asked to give talks by groups across the political spectrum (including, as I later discovered, Whittier College)
• Last, but not least, there is a question of the economic viability of the book itself. The publishers of the Cartoon guide to Econ had a fair amount of success, but there are a lot of students per year taking an introductory economics course. Because of the relatively low number of students taking climate change, the publishers passed on this book. Instead it was crowd sourced via Kickstarter [1], and Yoram quite candidly admitted that the jury was still out on whether or not the publisher was correct to pass on the book.

Overall it was an evening well spent. I picked up a few economics jokes (I am not telling them here -- go see his show!) but nothing heavy in terms of climate change soundbites. When I went to get my book signed we chatted briefly, and it turns out that one of our students, Meg Oka, had gotten him to come and give a talk at Whittier. He could not remember Meg's name, but she is well known for not wearing shoes around campus, and it was this oddity that enabled us to identify her. Hopefully I will be able to get him out to Whittier again in the near future.

[1] If you have never seen Kickstarter, you make a pledge to a project (usually tied to various rewards). Every project will have a  funding goal, and if they reach their goal they take all the pledges. If they fail to reach their goal, you don't pay your pledge.

Here is the Kickstarter page for the climate change book:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/326721047/the-cartoon-introduction-to-climate-change
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