Christopher Goodman's blog
Zotero is free and open source reference management software. It is incredibly popular inside academia (and outside) for the management of bibliographic information. Zotero is quite capable out of the box; however, when customized, it is incredibly useful. Prerequisites Zotero , obviously Required plugins (more or less) Better BibTeX ZotMoov Zotero OCR (also requires Tesseract) Obsidian Zotero…
I have been generating this figure, more or less every month, for six years. It helps us understand “Is the local government sector growing similarly to the private sector?”. Why should we care about that? If we were to pull back the timeline by a decade, a clear upward trend line would appear. When we are faced with a shock (COVID-19 in this example), we’re often interested in how quickly, if…
I was recently invited on WAMU’s 1A , a nationally syndicated radio talk show about current issues, to discuss preemption and what it means for local democracy. The show begins with a talk with Calvin Duncan, recently elected Clerk of the Criminal Court in New Orleans. His position was eliminated via state preemption shortly after he won. I and Katie Belanger of LSSC come on to give some context…
A couple of updates to my Uses page. Software : I went through the entire test period with iA Writer and decided it was too much for my needs (though, the fonts are very nice and freely available ; I use them in Obsidian). I have switched to Typora . I have also switched away from iTerm2 to Ghostty ; though, to be honest, I use the built in terminal in Positron far more than a standalone terminal…
I have a problem. I teach, more or less, the same course in both fall and spring semesters. And, it has been this way for most of my career. That means I have accumulated 14 years (gasp) of cruft in my teaching files. I did the thing that I now counsel every junior faculty member not to do: I didn’t put any thought into how I might use these files well into the future. So, as a result, I ended up…
A somewhat up-to-date listing of all the stuff I use to get things done. Inspired by Uses This and App Defaults . Hardware Item Notes AirPods Pro 3rd Generation, essential Apple Watch Ultra 3 iPhone 15 Pro Macbook Pro M1 Pro Steamdeck OLED or Switch 2 Distractions Desk Item Notes Logitech MX Master 3 Wireless mouse, the MX Master 4 is the newest version, but I haven't found a reason to upgrade…
The most recent version of Obsidian mobile ( 11.1.0 ), currently only available to Catalyst supporters , includes the beginning of a long planned mobile revamp with new widgets and shortcuts support. These aren’t necessarily things I am clamoring for; however, the latter (shortcuts) helps solve a problem I have with Obsidian–it is slow to open. In some ways, that’s understandable. The app needs to…
Some new evidence from South Africa on the effect of local governemnt amagamations (consolidations) on scale effects (operating spending) in Urban Studies . While the mechanism might be different due to the context, the results are surprisingly similar to those the US and elsewhere. Municipal amalgamations have been implemented for, among others, linguistic, cultural, geographic, service equity,…
It’s ineresting to see that population decline does not necessarily mean financial distress for local governments (in New South Wales). This work represents another example of the importance of testing assumptions with scholarly theory and evidence. As we have seen, the effect of population decline on organisational sustainability is not what some have imagined. Of particular importance, was the…
This website was previously compiled using Hugo . Hugo has a rather robust templating system, something I became fairly dependent on to create new blog posts, research pages, or class pages. It is a functionality that I sorely miss with the new version of this site that is built with Quarto . I have lived with this for a while, as I sorted out the finer details of this site—not everything…
It is always nice to see a piece on the consequences of local government fragmentation—particularly in ways that we know exist but have not been extensively studied. We have contributed to this interdisciplinary literature by documenting one consequence of the uniquely American combination of fragmentation and local revenue generation: the unequal distribution of taxable property wealth across…
I use Obsidian as my main note taking app (among many other things it does for me). I try to implement Andy Matuschak’s Evergreen Notes method when working through a particular concept in the literature (something close to but also distinct from creating a Zettelkasten ). This involve creating a densely linked series of notes, often with the express goal of connecting different concepts together…
Academia is a confusing place, especially for those who do not work there. Frankly, that is the fault of academics (or, more specifically, the leadership of universities, who are generally academics). We do not do a great job explaining how the job of being a professor works. So, let’s change that. Background First, a little background. There are numerous kinds of universities. 1 This sounds a…
Academics are content creators. This comparison likely annoys many academics; however, it is a comparison that resonates with “regular” people. Academics use their brains, accumulated experience, and creativity to generate new things that are interesting to an audience. This is the definition of creating . While the content creator space, in the modern usage, there has been attempting to develop…
I bought a Logitech Litra Glow key light for my home office during Amazon’s summer sale. I was previously using an upturned desk light bounced off the wall, so this is a great upgrade. However, Logitech’s software isn’t great. I suffer it for my mouse (it’s mostly set and forget), but it’s rather annoying to use for a light that’s constantly going on and off. I want to control the light via a…
Whenever I talk with public affairs faculty about student enrollment, I always hear some version of the same question: “Where are all of our students?” The general consensus is that COVID broke our typical recruiting pipelines; therefore, we have fewer students to market a public affairs degree to, leading to lower enrollments/completions. These conversations are anecdotal, but it’s clear that…
Below is my list of the six best or most interesting articles appearing in print last year. Some of these manuscripts are a bit long in the tooth, only just now appear in “official” print, while being online first for many years. Some of these are directly related to my research (special districts, preemption, municipal incorporation), while others are simply theoretically or empirically important…
LSE US Centre Blog The local government service delivery environment in the United States is complex. The number and kinds of local governments that provide essential services are large. Additionally, new local governments are created and dissolved each year. As such, the competition for who is primarily responsible for providing a particular service is relatively chaotic. In our recent…
LSE US Centre Blog The effects of rising inflation are being felt across people’s lives, and the costs of rental accommodation are no exception. But while many US cities and local governments would like to introduce polices to tackle this crisis, they are often restricted from doing so by state policies. Megan E. Hatch and Christopher B. Goodman look at why and how states use preemption measures…
Local governments in the United States generally overlap other local governments. It’s a feature of U.S.-styled federalism that’s difficult to escape. It similarly presents problems for researchers in demonstrating the exact extent of such overlap. Commonly, one might make a map that demonstrates the number of overlapping local governments aggregated by some base geography like a city or a parcel…