How Consumers Respond to Electricity Prices, with Jesse Buchsbaum

Notable Quotes

• Electricity demand depends on habits and investments in appliances: “A lot of electricity demand is tied to two things: One is the habits that you form, things like whether you’re turning on or off the lights when you leave a room, or what level you’re setting your thermostat to; two is investment in these big appliances that go in your home, things like your water or space heating and cooling, refrigerators, dishwashers, et cetera. Both of those things—the habits and the investment in appliances—can take a long time to adjust.” (5:41)
• Consumers are responsive to electricity prices over the long term: “For a 10 percent permanent increase in electricity prices, we would see a 22.4 percent decrease in electricity consumption, which is, of course, quite large … in the short run, consumers are much less responsive … [C]onsumers seem to be about 16 times more responsive in the long run than they are in the short run.” (14:45)
• Pricing electricity accurately is crucial for carbon pricing policies to be effective: “The big policy implication here is the importance of getting prices right. Economists love price-based policies like carbon taxes that can take an externality like carbon dioxide emissions and directly price it, so that the bills consumers pay account for those damages from that externality. But in order for that to be an effective solution, you need consumers to respond to those prices; otherwise, there won’t actually be a difference in emissions.” (23:35)

Top of the Stack

• “Are Consumers More Responsive to Prices in the Long Run? Evidence from Electricity Markets” by Jesse Buchsbaum
• How Long ’Til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin
• The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
• Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

The Full Transcript

Kristin Hayes: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I'm your host, Kristin Hayes. My guest today is RFF's newest fellow, Jesse Buchsbaum, who joined RFF in August after completing a postdoc at the University of Chicago's Energy and Environment Lab. Jesse earned his PhD in agricultural and environmental economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and we're absolutely thrilled to have him here with us at RFF.

Our regular listeners may recall that we always like to get new RFF researchers on the show early in their tenure so that you folks can get to know them. Today, Jesse and I are going to be primarily talking about one of his key papers, looking at whether and how consumers respond differently in the long run to electricity price changes than they do in the short run. We'll go into that in some details. This question—it really does have a lot of importance for policies and incentives that last for multiple years. So, this long-run timeframe matters.

Importantly, Jesse put some real-world data to use in teasing out causal relationships between prices and behavior changes over these longer timescales. I'm looking forward to introducing you all to Jesse, who is super great. Stay with us.

Hi, Jesse. Welcome to Resources Radio. It's great to talk with you today.

Jesse Buchsbaum: Thanks so much for having me. I've been a big fan for a long time, so it's exciting to be here.

Kristin Hayes: You've mentioned that you've been a listener, so it's always great to have a listener now as a guest. I think it’s great—you know all of our tricks—but that's okay. Let me start. We love to introduce our guests, generally, and this feels particularly important for you. So, tell us about you, your interests, and your career trajectory. I also would love to put you in particular on the spot and ask you if you could share just a little bit about why you chose to join us here at RFF. What drew you to the institution?

Jesse Buchsbaum: I guess I should start by saying how I got interested in the environment, because I know you always ask your guests about that. As I grew up—my dad was an environmental lawyer—dinner table conversations growing up were always about the environment, climate change, and conservation. It played a big role in my childhood. We spent a lot of time outdoors. My mom was in academia, so it was like a natural melding of the two things that drew me to energy and the environment in academia.

When I was in undergrad at University of Michigan, one of the most formative experiences I had was taking a class at University of Michigan's geological station in Wyoming. This was a class about all different types of energy. We visited 11 different energy facilities—a uranium mine, a coal power plant, a coal mine, a solar farm, a wind farm—and learned all about the science, the technology, the policy, and the economics of each of those different types of technology. I was, of course, really drawn to the economics and the policy side and sort of came back from that experience knowing that this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

After that, I did a couple years at an environmental nonprofit in Chicago, learning more about the field broadly, and eventually, I decided I wanted to get more depth into some of the specific issues in energy and the environment. So, I went and got my PhD at Berkeley.

It's always been the reason I got a PhD—to really dig into the issues in a policy-relevant way. I want to do research that informs and impacts policy. That's really what drew me to RFF. I admired RFF from afar for a long time—partly listening to the podcast, also talking to folks in my department at Berkeley, and hearing about all the amazing work that folks here are doing. So, it's really exciting to be here and participate in the mission of doing impactful research for the purposes of policymaking and informing policy.

Kristin Hayes: That's awesome. Side note—that no one's really going to care about except for me—my very first job, I worked with Jesse's dad. That probably ages me more than I wanted to; nonetheless, when I saw Jesse's last name, I thought, "Oh, that's weird. I wonder if he's related to Andy Buchsbaum." The worlds have melded. I know how much your dad was passionate about these issues, and it's always great to hear how much that translates across generations.

Jesse Buchsbaum: Yeah. He was at the National Wildlife Federation, which actually used to share a building with RFF. So, there are fun connections in my past here.

Kristin Hayes: That's great. Today, we're going to talk about something we often refer to in the world of new PhDs—your job-market paper. Feel free to explain what exactly a job-market paper might be. By and large, we're going to be talking about the substance of that work, which is where it really matters. As I mentioned, it's about residential electricity prices. I'm going to turn it over to you to give us an overview of what that recent work is all about and why it matters.

Jesse Buchsbaum: There's a big question that's really hard to answer in economics—that's how consumers respond to incentives, particularly in the long run, and how it differs from the short run. Oftentimes as economists, we see a change in prices, we can observe how consumption or demand reacts, but it can take time for learning to occur. It can take time for investment decisions to be made. It can lead to really different outcomes after several months or even years after that initial change. This is particularly a big issue in the world of electricity—and energy more broadly.

As a society, we have big goals around reducing carbon emissions, electrifying the grid, and decarbonization broadly. We often think about how to use incentives to meet those goals, especially in the electricity space. It's really tricky when we think about residential electricity, because a lot of electricity demand is tied to two things: One is the habits that you form, things like whether you're turning on or off the lights when you leave a room, or what level you're setting your thermostat to; two is investment in these big appliances that go in your home, things like your water or space heating and cooling, refrigerators, dishwashers, et cetera. Both of those things—the habits and the investment in appliances—can take a long time to adjust. Looking at the immediate reaction of customers to a change or difference in incentives might not capture the full level of variation.

So, when we think about the big policy questions in the world of energy right now—how are we going to get people to change their behavior in a lasting way, or invest in things that'll drive the clean energy transition—understanding how consumers interact with their bills and prices is really critical. Figuring out what are the right policy levers to push and pull relies on our understanding of that relationship.

In the project I'm talking about today, I'm mainly focused on this question of how residential electricity customers are responding to prices and, particularly, the difference between the short run and the long run, so that we can think about those right policy levers.

Kristin Hayes: Awesome. I want to ask you just a little bit, when you talk about incentives—I'm sure many of our listeners will be quite familiar with thinking about that term in general—but I wondered if there's any more color commentary you can give on what you mean by incentives; in particular, what form can those take? When I think of an incentive, I think of someone paying me to do something, but incentives work in lots of different fashions. Can you just give a little bit more color commentary around that term as applied to this study?

Jesse Buchsbaum: This is a great question. What I'm mainly talking about here is prices—the electricity prices that people are facing. Now, there can be policy that drives what those electricity prices are in the forms of subsidies or taxes. As economists, we love to talk about carbon taxes. Carbon taxes can play a role in driving electricity prices higher or lower. There are also subsidies that often are present for low-income customers in particular that allow a more affordable bill for the same level of consumption.

We can think about electricity prices being influenced by those factors, but we're mainly talking about electricity prices here. I'll note that we could think of electricity prices as a form of policy, as well. These are often set by regulators in a state, and so the utility is sort of required to follow the prices that the regulator is allowing them to charge, I guess.

Kristin Hayes: That's a really good point. When we think about prices, we think about fluid markets—matching supply and demand. It is a little bit different with electricity markets which are more heavily regulated, and there is more of a policy lever just built into that price from the beginning. That's a good piece of context.

I always like to ask about data, particularly when we're talking about a research study like this. My understanding is that you actually were able to exploit some pretty interesting data sets … “spatial variance” is the right way to put it. You look at some of these differences and to tease out some of these more causal relationships. What sort of data did you put to use, and how did you get it?

Jesse Buchsbaum: Maybe I'm first going to talk about the source of variation that I'm using, and then I'll talk about the data used to estimate. To figure out how consumers are responding in the long run, you need a persistent source of price variation that lasts for a very long time. We often call this a permanent source of price variation. We want something that divides customers in a persistent way—into a high-price group and a low-price group.

So, the first step was finding one of those. This involves digging through the California electricity rate–tariff documents. What the California Electricity Commission, the California Public Utilities Commission back in 1982, realized was that different customers in different areas of the utility service territory require a really different level of heating and cooling in order to maintain a basic standard of living. The average summer temperature in Fresno is, like, 90°F. In San Francisco, it's 65°F.

You can imagine there's a really different level of electricity use required to maintain the same standard of living across those two different areas. What they did is they divided each of the utility service territories into these regions—I call them “baseline territories” in the paper—that basically determine how much electricity you're allowed to use before a higher-tier price kicks in. So, there are these boundaries all through the utility service territories. I focus on Pacific Gas and Electric, which is one of the largest investor-owned utilities in California.

In Pacific Gas and Electric, there are these 10 different baseline territories and these borders running all through the service territory, where households directly on either side of these borders face different prices by virtue of these lines that were drawn in 1982 and have stayed the same ever since. It's this persistent source of price variation that has persistently divided these customers into a high-price regime and a low-price regime.

I guess I should talk about the data next. I use Pacific Gas and Electric data. I worked with the utility company to sign a nondisclosure agreement and a data use agreement—to get access to a very large amount of data on monthly billing records for all customers within Pacific Gas and Electric service territory between the years of 2008 and 2020. This is a very large amount of data. For a subset of customers, I also receive access to data on their addresses.

The idea here is I need to really zoom in on these borders to understand who lives directly on either side of the border, because what I'm going to do is compare households directly on either side of the borders to one another, who are the same in terms of all observable characteristics, including the actual temperatures that they face. But because the utility had to draw the border somewhere, these households directly on either side of the border look the same on everything that we can observe, except for the electricity prices that they face.

So, I have this data on electricity usage, on prices, on the programs that households are enrolling in, including whether they adopt solar or energy-efficiency programs, as well as the baseline territory that they're assigned to, in order to really understand the prices that they face.

I'm going to pair that with data on weather, so I can spatially match and figure out what the weather patterns are for each household in my data set. I use census data, as well, to look at some broad demographic traits. And then, I also do some matching with property-assessment data, to understand some of the property characteristics and housing values of households that I can see in the electricity data.

Kristin Hayes: This is why I love asking these data questions, and it's always interesting to note the wide variety of data sources that come together in a study like this. It's great to hear about the different layers of data that you put together, in order to be able to look at control groups and understand and really be able to tease out the question that you're looking at. I like the setup, but I want to move rapidly to findings, too, which is always the most interesting part of the conversation.

When you got into this analysis, you've got this border here, where, as you mentioned, you've really got households that look alike—I feel like I'm about to quote Shakespeare—but two houses both alike in all things except electricity prices. So, when you were able to really exploit that, what did you find in terms of how they responded? One set of households responded to these higher prices over the long run. You mentioned it was 12 years of data that you had? 12 or 13.

Jesse Buchsbaum: Yeah. I should note, let's talk about time horizons quickly. When I talk about the short run, I'm talking about month-to-month variation. This is month-to-month bills, and I can see fluctuations and prices that occur month to month—that's what we're talking about in the short run. When I talk about the long run, we're talking about a 30- to 40-year time horizon.

The idea is these territories were drawn in 1982, and they've stayed exactly the same since then. I'm looking at data 30 to 40 years later on electricity outcomes. We can say that these differences in electricity consumption that are occurring 30 to 40 years later are driven by this difference that was drawn in 1982.

Kristin Hayes: Got it. Great. Jesse, what did you learn?

Jesse Buchsbaum: First, I just want to give you a sense of how big the price differences are. Because I think that's helpful to inform the findings here. I find that households on the high-price side of the border face prices that are persistently between 1.5 and 2 cents per kilowatt-hour higher than the low price side of the border, which is about a 10 percent difference—you can think of this as like 40 kilowatt-hours a month, give or take. With that framing of the size of the price differences in mind—10 percent—I find that consumers are extremely responsive to these price differences in the long run.

I find an elasticity of –2.24, and to put that in non-econ speak, for a 10 percent permanent increase in electricity prices, we would see a 22.4 percent decrease in electricity consumption, which is, of course, quite large.

Kristin Hayes: That's a lot.

Jesse Buchsbaum: In contrast, I also look at how consumers respond in the short run. I look again at how people are responding to price variation over time. We have these fluctuations that affect people differently on either side of this border, because they're in slightly different price regimes.

I find that, in the short run, consumers are much less responsive, with an elasticity of –0.14. That is, to say again, a 10 percent increase in price, only a 1.4 percent decrease in electricity consumption. So, all that is to say, consumers seem to be about 16 times more responsive in the long run than they are in the short run, if you take the point estimates seriously.

Kristin Hayes: Sure. That makes sense for all the reasons that you were emphasizing before. Ways in which one can reduce one's consumption actually really do require a little bit of—no pun intended, but—rewiring. Either rewiring your brain to make habit changes or to switch out appliances over time. So, on one level, it seems intuitive, and yet I think there has been a lot more work on these short-run elasticities than there has on these long-run elasticities. This really was one of the first studies where you actually were able to quantify that difference. Is that right?

Jesse Buchsbaum: You're right. We shouldn't be surprised that people are more responsive in the long run than they are in the short run. It takes time for people to recognize that prices changed, to develop new habits, and to make these new investments. Like I said, a lot of electricity consumption is driven by these big appliances, and it takes time for those to turn over and be replaced.

I think the magnitude of the difference is really striking and has surprised a lot of people. It suggests that people are really responsive to prices in the long run, and that means that it's really important to get the prices right, because these investment decisions that are going to be locked in for a long time are going to be impacted by these prices to an extent greater than economists previously thought. I'll also mention an interesting result is that how people respond depends a little bit on what their income levels are.

I find that consumers … I should say I use a couple different proxies for income. I don't observe income data directly, but consistently across all the proxies that I use, I find that low-income households are a little less responsive to prices in the short run than higher-income households, but in the long run, they become much more responsive.

This is maybe a little bit counterintuitive, but it makes sense when we think about rising prices making a bigger difference in whether low-income households are able to afford to either turn their air-conditioning up or even invest in something like air-conditioning in the first place. So, I think it's really important to think about this heterogeneity across the income dimension as we think about these results.

Kristin Hayes: Interesting. One brief tangent here—I'm curious if these folks across the street from each other actually know about these price differentials—do they know that their neighbors are paying more or less than they are?

Jesse Buchsbaum: It's a really good question, and I don't know the answer. My guess is that people don't know the prices that their neighbors are facing, but they do know in some sense what their own prices are, or at least what their own bills are. You could imagine a scenario where someone is talking to their neighbors and saying, "Man, my utility bill is really high. Was yours really high?" And they may compare bills. My guess is that's going to be relatively rare, but you could imagine it happening.

The place where you might potentially see something is when people are thinking about buying houses, they often get sample utility bills for the house prior to living there. You might think that in making the house-purchasing decision, people might have the opportunity to look at the utility bills and understand a little more about the prices. For any economist listening, this is maybe a concern for identification. We might be concerned that people are self-selecting to one side of the border, and that's driving the results.

I do a decent amount of work to try to pick apart whether this is happening using property values and property characteristics to understand the characteristics of households that live on either side of the border. I don't find any big differences that would seem to explain the magnitude of the results there.

Kristin Hayes: Interesting. You mentioned other choices that people might make in response to these higher electricity prices. I think you also looked at some of those. For example, did folks paying higher prices invest more in rooftop solar? Did they adopt more energy efficiency? What did you find about choices that consumers might have made in response to these higher prices?

Jesse Buchsbaum: With solar and energy efficiency, surprisingly, I didn't find much. I was expecting to see a big increase in solar adoption as you cross from one side of the border to the other. When households are on the high-price side of the border, there's more adoption of solar where the electricity prices are higher. You're trying to offset that cost by investing in solar, or similarly, you would see increases in energy-efficiency adoption. I don't see either of those things. If anything, I see small decreases in solar adoption and energy-efficiency adoption on the high-price side of the border is a surprising result, but I think it's statistically insignificant and relatively small.

I can rule out that solar and energy efficiency are playing a role in driving the magnitude of the long-run elasticities that I observe. I can't pin down the precise effect of solar and energy efficiency, but it doesn't seem to be particularly large. That was surprising.

So, I've dug a little bit into some of the other potential mechanisms that might be driving the magnitude of the results. While this hasn't made it into the working paper yet, I'll give a sneak peek of what I'm finding so far, when it comes to air-conditioning adoption. I have imperfect data here, and results are preliminary.

What I'm finding so far is a couple of things. First, there seems to be a drop in air-conditioning adoption on the high-price side of the border, which is sort of what you would expect and could explain some portion of the results that I see. But second, households that have air-conditioning seem to be much more responsive in the long run to their prices than those without air-conditioning. There's a dramatic difference in the long-run elasticities that I can estimate among those two groups.

Again, this shouldn't be that surprising. When you have air-conditioning, you're able to make adjustments depending on price—in terms of what you're setting your thermostat to—and that's going to have a bigger impact on electricity consumption. These are only preliminary results so far, but this does seem to explain some portion of the long-run elasticity that I observe.

Kristin Hayes: Fascinating. I have a number of follow-up questions. I'm going to try to rein them in. My first one is, when I think of energy efficiency in some ways, I think of just turning down your thermostat, turning off the lights; and yet I feel like that is one type of energy efficiency, whereas perhaps what you're talking about here is investing in those more energy-efficient appliances over time. Can I just make sure I have my terminology right in that context, too?

Jesse Buchsbaum: Yes. This is a great clarification that I should have mentioned. What I observe when I talk about energy efficiency are energy-efficiency program enrollments. The utility Pacific Gas and Electric has a program that you can enroll in that gives you subsidies for energy-efficient appliances, or allows for the utility to come and do things like weatherization, fixing your insulation. What I'm looking at is enrollment in that program, which is the full suite of energy-efficiency programs that the utility offers.

That's where I don't see a drop. You're right that there's a whole lot of other stuff that I'm not observing here that you could call energy efficiency—someone buying the more efficient refrigerator on their own and not getting a utility subsidy for it would be one of those, or doing the behavioral things that you're talking about in terms of changing their habits. Those could also be potentially thought of as energy efficiency. I'm not quantifying any of those. The only thing that I observe here when I'm talking about energy efficiency is those program enrollments.

Kristin Hayes: Thank you for that clarification. I really appreciate it, and I hope we can come back to this. I hope we don't run out of time—although maybe this will be the subject for a future podcast. On some level, reduced electricity consumption from a carbon perspective is great, but when that reduction in electricity consumption comes from people just sitting around being too hot in their houses, that's obviously less than ideal. Maybe we can come back a little bit, either today or in a future conversation, and think a little bit more about those equity questions, too. But I am cognizant I'm going to run out of time before I have a chance to ask you everything.

I want to come back to the policy. You mentioned at the very beginning this kind of intersection of research and policy is what drew you to RFF in the first place. Obviously, we really want that to be a part of what happens here. So, let's talk about for a second, examples of specific policies in addition to these regulatory frameworks that are built into electricity prices in the first place, but policies that could be either in effect or that could be designed to manage residential electricity demand and maybe help consumers be more responsive even than they necessarily are. Talk to me about the policy implications or the policy realities here.

Jesse Buchsbaum: The big policy implication here is the importance of getting prices right. Economists love price-based policies like carbon taxes that can take an externality like carbon dioxide emissions and directly price it, so that the bills that consumers pay account for those damages from that externality. But in order for that to be an effective solution, you need consumers to respond to those prices; otherwise, there won't actually be a difference in emissions.

Prior to this work, most papers showed that consumers don't really respond to electricity prices, because they were very focused on the short run. It wasn't clear how effective price-based policies could be in driving reductions in emissions or consumer behavior. The results that I'm finding suggest that there is hope for price-based policies, like carbon taxes, to drive real change. And carbon taxes are in place in a couple of different places in the United States. California has one, the Northeast has one, and, of course, overseas in Europe, there's a carbon-tax system, as well.

With that said though, I'll also caution against prices potentially being too high. Because consumers are so responsive, you could think that if prices are too high, that can crowd out investment in things that society wants like electric vehicles, like heat pumps—these broad levels of electrification that are energy intensive in the near term—but will actually reduce emissions in the long term as the grid gets cleaned up.

So, we would really like to see broad adoption of these things, as a society. Prices being too high can crowd out investment, particularly among those low-income communities who are most responsive in the long run to electricity prices. The other thing that I'll note from a policy sense here is that it's not clear that consumers will respond in the short run. My work doesn't really give a good sense of the time horizons in which we would expect consumers to start responding. We know they don't really respond in the short run. We know they do respond after 30 to 40 years.

But that intermediate timeframe really matters, especially when you think about policy, when we're trying to drive rapid change in electrification in the electricity sector. So, there's a little bit of tension here in figuring out what the right time horizon is in which we can expect people to respond to these investments that they're making that my work currently does not speak to, unfortunately. I guess there's more work to do here from a research sense, but I think also from a policy sense, in trying to get some of these incentives more right and see if that's making a difference for consumers in terms of their behaviors and the investments that they're making.

Kristin Hayes: Interesting. Really good point. Every Resources Radio, I'm pretty sure, ends with something like, "Well, more research is needed." So, you're in good company on that one. Thank you for flagging that, too.

Speaking of more research, and this is my last kind of substantive question I'm going to ask you, but I do want to give you a chance to introduce yourself a little. We've obviously spent a lot of time on this particular piece of work, which is awesome, but it's one of a number of things you have going on. So, let me turn it back to you to say a little bit more about some of the other research efforts that you've been thinking about and that you'd like to pursue here, whether some of the follow-ons that you've mentioned here, or whether it's completely different stuff.

Jesse Buchsbaum: Maybe the first thing that I'll say is there are a couple different elements of electricity prices that we as economists don't understand particularly well how consumers respond to. One of those is fixed charges. A big debate in several places around the country right now, including California, is whether your bill should be mostly a per-unit charge—that's per unit of consumption that you have. You get charged a price like 10 or 15 cents a kilowatt-hour in many places—40 cents a kilowatt-hour in California. Or whether it should come in the form of a monthly customer charge. The challenge here is that a lot of the costs, especially in California, are fixed costs, where we're building transmission infrastructure, we're building distribution lines, and we're doing wildfire-risk mitigation.

Kristin Hayes: Hardening the infrastructure that you have built.

Jesse Buchsbaum: Absolutely. If all of those costs are put into this volumetric rate that's charged per unit, that challenge is that it's a very regressive way to recover those costs. So, thinking about how consumers respond to prices, whether it's fixed versus the volumetric piece, is really critical as we think about this debate around what portion of the bill should be recovered in different ways. That's one area.

Time-varying rates is another big policy question right now. There's a little bit more evidence about how consumers respond to time-varying rates. This is electricity rates that vary hour by hour, so that change over the course of the day. There's a little bit of work in the economics community about how consumers respond to those, but we don't understand particularly well. So, a couple of, How do consumers respond to x? sorts of questions that I'm hoping to work on in the next year or two.

I'll flag a couple more projects very quickly. One is the role of information in driving people's responses to prices. This is getting at what we talked about where people aren't particularly responsive in the short run. Are there ways that we can use information to make people more aware of their bills, so that they become more responsive in the short run? I'm working on one project right now in the water-utility space to try to understand the answer to that.

The final thing that I'll say is about bill affordability. Particularly as electricity prices are rising, we're seeing higher and higher levels of debt owed to utility companies from residential customers. So, understanding some of the drivers of that, as well as some of the things that utilities and policymakers can do to make bills more affordable and make consumers more able to pay their bills and utilities and more able to recover the revenues that they need to recover is really important.

Thinking about a more holistic consumer–financial health picture if we can. I have a project where I'm looking at other types of debts that consumers owe as well and seeing how affordability programs in the electricity space can impact the payment of those other types of bills as well. So, just a few projects that I'm excited to work on moving forward.

Kristin Hayes: That's fantastic. Lots to discuss. There will be many more opportunities to have you on Resources Radio to talk about those other things, but for now I'm just, again, very grateful for the chance to introduce you to our listeners. This is not the last, dear listeners, that you'll have heard from Jesse. Please be on the lookout for his publications.

As I mentioned, I know you're at least a semiregular listener to Resources Radio. You know how this ends, so I'm going to turn it over to you—Jesse, what's on the top of your stack?

Jesse Buchsbaum: I'm going to give you two things. First, I'm a big fan of fantasy and sci-fi books, and so I just finished a short story collection by N. K. Jemisin called How Long 'Til Black Future Month? She's one of my favorite fantasy authors. The Fifth Season, if you haven't read it, is one of my favorite fantasy books. It's amazing. This is a collection of mostly speculative fiction, short stories, several of which eventually became full-length novels. It's cool to see the origins of these stories moving forward.

I'm not normally the biggest short story fan, but I found all of these really thought-provoking and interesting. They're often from the perspectives of marginalized characters and thinking about power dynamics, and at least a couple of them were related to climate or other environmental outcomes. So, there is a tie to Resources Radio.

The other book that is literally the top of my stack right now that I'm about to start and haven't yet is Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. He's a sociologist. He wrote Evicted—it was his very famous book previously, and that book is phenomenal, as well. My understanding of Poverty, by America is that it sort of tries to take a fresh perspective on some of the causes of poverty in the United States and especially think about the role of affluent Americans who perhaps unintentionally maintain the systems and the institutions that keep poor people poor. I've heard good things, and I'm excited to read it. It's literally the top of my stack right now.

Kristin Hayes: Awesome. All right. Thank you for those recommendations, and it's been great to talk with you.

Jesse Buchsbaum: Great. Thanks so much, Kristin. This was really fun.

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