Linus Mattauch

Katharine Hayhoe @katharinehayhoe.com [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 21:18 UTC

Friends and colleagues in Potsdam, Berlin, Brno and Vienna—next week I'll be on one of my bundled trips in Central Europe. If you're in the area I'd love to see you at one of the 5 public events I'm doing (in addition to many others) - or you can watch the live streams! See below for more.

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:31 UTC

Summary: Urban transport should be much more about health because our societies are so unfit. Ours is the first attempt of policy instruments analysis in econ of that thesis!

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:31 UTC

...indeed there is some movement of especially US health insurance contracts to provide people with step counters, who then influence their insurance payments. If the health system stays a collective system,urban redesign is the most important lever to get people to do exercise.

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:31 UTC

(4) Is this paternalism? Sidestepping grand debates on welfare criteria, the implications for financing the huge costs for treating diabetes etc. matter. Freedom of choice not to exercise would imply that individuals have to pay the costs for their health problems themselves...

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:31 UTC

(3) Also no crowding-out effect detectable in the empirical literature on travel decisions - people do not substitute routine commuting time and dance lessons or dog walking! And no, travelling to the gym/football training by car is a negligible share of total urban car journeys.

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:30 UTC

(2) Economists new to this subject find the numbers hard to believe. But we academics are not representative of (low) fitness levels in our societies.

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:30 UTC

A few lessons learnt while working on it for years: (1) Is it surprising that lack of exercise is enormously expensive compared to env. damages? Brute fact: many more preventable deaths happen in Global North from heart disease, diabetes,dementia than from env. catastrophes now.

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:30 UTC

Our main result:once you account for the benefits of people getting a little bit fitter, the optimal fuel tax changes by about 40%.Why only 40% and not an order of magnitude?Well, fuel price increases are of course a very indirect way of getting citizens to be a bit more active.

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:28 UTC

We input public health data to an established model of optimal fuel taxes(Parry and Small AER 2005). Within our modelling we reproduce the public health finding that per mile travelled, the public health benefits dwarf all other social cost of transport by an order of magnitude.

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:27 UTC

The benefits from active travel change quantitative evaluation of optimal transport policy instruments. Basically, being unfit is very costly to societies: effects come from diabetes and heart disease, but also dementia and depression. Our economic modelling examines this:

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Linus Mattauch @linusmattauch.bsky.social [ View ] Oct 13, 2023 at 09:26 UTC

New research publication on public economics of low-carbon transport with S. Sulikova, I. van den Bijgaart, D. Klenert in
Economica
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/

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