Lynne Kiesling

Don Boudreaux has a post on prices as the great equalizer that’s is very important. After looking at two of the different ways of rationing stuff (queuing and family connections), Don points out that

One great advantage of rationing by market prices is that they reduce to a minimum the role of arbitrariness. Price are, in other words, a great equalizer. Anyone who is willing to pay the market price for a good or service is just as likely to get that good or service as is the seller’s mother, neighbor, or bowling buddy.

I would go even further to say that regulation provides another form of rationing (of course I would say that, I work on electricity!), and is prone to much, if not more, of the same arbitrariness and favor that these other non-price methods are.

This is one important reason why retail electricity prices are so important. Not only do they communicate information about preferences and costs better than any alternative rationing scheme, and therefore lead to outcomes closer to efficiency, but they also are not prone to the arbitrariness and capriciousness of rationing by queuing, political favor, or ability to influence regulation or legislation.

Lynne Kiesling

Six degrees of Harry Potter … I think for British actors it should be changed to two degrees, which is apparently sufficient …

So last night the KP Spouse and I were trolling the tv after dinner/Cubs WIN in Montreal, and we caught the last hour and a half of The End of the Affair, one of Graham Greene’s more-tortured-than-usual novels turned into film. I love British period films, and if they have actors who are in my pantheon like Ralph Fiennes, so much the better, even if it’s not a great movie. That said, though, The End of the Affair ended up being a better movie than either of us expected.

I recognized the actor playing Father Smythe as Jason Isaacs, who does such a superb job playing Lucius Malfoy in the HP films. So this led me to do something I haven’t taken the time to do all summer — an IMDB check of the now-filming Goblet of Fire.

And who do I find will be playing Voldemort? Ralph Fiennes!

Brilliant casting, if only for the voice … mmmmmm.

Sorry, sorry. He also does icy cruelty well, which is a good match here. And, to add to my enthusiasm, Miranda Richardson as Rita Skeeter. Among her many roles is Queen Elizabeth I in Blackadder II, some of the best comedy ever. She can also do drama, as in The Hours. I think she’s fabulous.

This is going to be good.

Michael Giberson

One of the things that “everyone recognizes,” at least if you accept the conclusions of numerous government statements on the blackout, is that reliability rules for the grid must be made mandatory. An alternative approach is suggested in an editorial piece appearing in Power Engineering (Free registration required):

The investigation into [the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident] showed the nuclear industry it had fundamental problems not limited to one company or one valve design and that it needed to make some serious changes. To its credit, the nuclear power community honestly acknowledged those problems and took action. A lot of things changed. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission got a lot tougher with operating reactors. Many utilities cleaned up their own houses.

The most interesting development, and the most applicable to today’s transmission problems, was the creation of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. INPO was created to be a utility self-policing operation aimed at improving reactor performance. Still in operaton today, it sets performance criteria, evaluates individual plant performance, and judges the results. These ratings are not publicized, but the insiders know who’s letting down the industry and they don’t tolerate it. The financial stakes are too large. In a few cases critical INPO ratings have been leaked to the public to the extreme embarrassment of utility managements.

Michael Giberson

One of the things that “everyone recognizes,” at least if you accept the conclusions of numerous government statements on the blackout, is that reliability rules for the grid must be made mandatory. An alternative approach is suggested in an editorial piece appearing in Power Engineering (Free registration required):

The investigation into [the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident] showed the nuclear industry it had fundamental problems not limited to one company or one valve design and that it needed to make some serious changes. To its credit, the nuclear power community honestly acknowledged those problems and took action. A lot of things changed. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission got a lot tougher with operating reactors. Many utilities cleaned up their own houses.

The most interesting development, and the most applicable to today’s transmission problems, was the creation of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. INPO was created to be a utility self-policing operation aimed at improving reactor performance. Still in operaton today, it sets performance criteria, evaluates individual plant performance, and judges the results. These ratings are not publicized, but the insiders know who’s letting down the industry and they don’t tolerate it. The financial stakes are too large. In a few cases critical INPO ratings have been leaked to the public to the extreme embarrassment of utility managements.

Lynne Kiesling

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for this post about betting on physics research. I love the quote he pulled, and that the researcher is willing to go 6-1 on the Higgs particle. I’ve long thought that Robin Hanson was right, and that people putting money on things (i.e., walking the talk) would enhance our ability to focus on things that have higher ex ante probabilities of being correct.

Of course, there are always Type I and Type II error to contend with, so it’s more about getting a better read on the probability distribution than anything else.

Lynne Kiesling

I’m at the airport, on the way to give a talk at the Dallas Fed on a recently-completed research paper.

Shall we start the pool on how many minutes late my flight will be tonight? Or should I say hours?

Lynne Kiesling

I’m at the airport, on the way to give a talk at the Dallas Fed on a recently-completed research paper.

Shall we start the pool on how many minutes late my flight will be tonight? Or should I say hours?

Lynne Kiesling

Congratulations to the U.S. women’s soccer team, which won the gold medal on Thursday in Athens. The last five of the leading players from the 1991 World Cup team are retiring after this game.

I think C. W. Nevius in the San Francisco Chronicle got it right when he wrote about the silent revolution that the now-retiring leaders of this soccer team have helped bring about.

When I was in high school — and how fondly I remember those stagecoach rides to class, where we would study about our president Warren G. Harding — there were basically no sports for women. There was gymnastics, for a tiny hard core, and there was cheerleading. That was it. If you couldn’t do a back flip off a mat or execute a perfect bob flip with your hair you were out of luck.

Now certainly there are lots of factors for the rise of women’s sports, from Title IX to pushy parents. Hamm, Chastain, Foudy and Fawcett didn’t change that. But they made it cool.

I really appreciate what these women have accomplished, having always been “a jock” myself. Now, I’m not that old, so we had a pretty good complement of women’s sports in my high school. I played on the first lacrosse team we had (and scored the first goal in that team’s history, BTW) my senior year. We didn’t have hockey, which was what I wanted to play when I wasn’t playing soccer, but I think that was more of a regional thing in the early ’80s than anything else.

But even since then, things have changed, and I think these women deserve a lot of the credit. I do wish Nevius had mentioned Brianna Scurry, though, because she is an amazing goalie, and deserves just as much credit and acclaim as her teammates.

I also like Nevius’s conclusion, discussing U.S. soccer player Mia Hamm:

A few years ago Hamm was at a charity event at Harvard. It was a celebrity penalty kick competition. Among those kicking was (then) Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra. Hamm beat him. And then, not long afterward, they were married.

Garciaparra didn’t have a problem with a strong woman. In fact, it seems hardly anyone does anymore.

That’s the revolution.