Knowledge Problem

I’m taking a page from Professor Bainbridge’s book and will start including wine reviews on this site. Let’s start with the trendy phenom that, at least here in the middle of the country, is “Three-buck Chuck”. Charles Shaw has recently released a 2001 Shiraz, and it’s got all of the features you want in a value-for-money New World shiraz: fruit (particularly black cherry and black raspberry), roundness in the mouth, full taste throughout. If you let it aerate in your glass for about 5 minutes, the tannic bite that you’ll get from any young wine dissipates, and the fruit comes out. While it is not as well-rounded or as nuanced a wine as the Cimicky Trump’s Shiraz 2001 that we had Friday night, it had the unmistakeable characteristics of the varietal. Speaking of which, the Cimicky Shiraz and Grenache-Shiraz are very good choices for when you are willing to spend $15.

Although the flavor is a little thin, it is an outstanding $3 bottle of wine. I think it’s the best of the $3-buck Chuck varietals, even better than their excellent Sauvignon Blanc.

The Heartland Institute, a policy think tank located in Chicago that focuses on issues of state and local policy, has started publishing a new telecom newsletter called IT Update. It’s got columns from a lot of knowledgeable telecom policy folks, including Alfred Kahn, Solveig Singleton, Sonia Arrison, and Clyde Wayne Crews.

The January issue has an article of mine that relates to the policy brouhaha in Illinois over the price that SBC is allowed to charge to CLECs for use of their facilities.

The fault lies in the misguided notion that regulators can measure or determine the costs of operating telephone networks. At best, they can get an approximate estimate of these dynamic and ever-changing costs. At worst, they will succumb to political pressures and set the rates too low. Our traditional cost-based regulatory approach is doomed to failure from the outset, because it is based on the false assumption that a political body can or would find the objective “true cost” of providing telephone service. …

Instead of demonizing SBC or its competitors, we should ask why the FCC and the ICC have the presumption to claim they can amass all of the cost knowledge, actual or hypothetical, needed to make this bizarre regulation work.

This article on students writing skills and blogging’s role in developing them, which features our own Kevin Brancato, makes some nice points about the skill development inherent in such an endeavor. For instance, I never thought about how the desire to connect to a network and the presence of public fact-checking can reduce plagiarism.

Personally, I find that having to make concise, relevant arguments for a wide-ranging audience is very good practice. I’ve actually never written like an academic economist, for better or worse, but I certainly find that writing for this outlet has sharpened my skills.

Here’s an interesting article about the expansion of hybrid vehicles at the Detroit Auto Show. The article has a couple of nice comments about issues that I think are important, namely the unpredictable pace of technological change and the role that consumer preferences play in shaping the decisions of the manufacturers.

Past auto shows have featured varying promises and predictions about greener vehicles. In 1998, for example, some automakers forecast that they would be ready to produce hybrids by 2001 and fuel cell vehicles by 2004. Now, hybrids are just making headway and widespread availability for fuel cell vehicles is probably a decade from now.

“There clearly is a desire to improve fuel economy,” said Mike Wall, an analyst for the forecasting firm CSM Worldwide. “The trick is consumers still want the high horsepower vehicles, the large vehicles.”

Still, though, environmental groups insist that consumers will be better off if we are forced to purchase vehicles that do not have the characteristics that we value:

“Overall, they’re not doing a good job,” said Brendan Bell, an expert with the Sierra Club’s global warming and energy program. “They’re creating a few vehicles. But at the same time under current fuel efficiency standards, when they build an efficient vehicle they can build another gas guzzler. That is really taking us backward.”

Also related are this post of mine from March 2003 on CAFE standards, and this Economic Scene column by Virginia Postrel on CAFE standards from December 2001.