In the past, I’ve called myself a forester, an economist, and a policy analyst. But sometimes it seems I am really mainly a writer. If that is my primary occupation, then 2009 was a great year.
At the beginning of the year, I wrote Gridlock, an 82,000-word book that is just now being published. Once that was done, I wrote three policy papers for Cato: How Urban Planners Caused the Housing Bubble (11,000 words), The Myth of the Compact City: Why Compact Development Is Not the Way to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emission (11,000 words), and Getting What You Paid For; Paying for What You Get: Proposals for the Next Transportation Reauthorization (9,000 words). I also wrote two Cato briefing papers: one on high-speed rail (4,000 words) and one on transportation reauthorization (6,000 words).