Lynne Kiesling
Here’s a great new source from the Wall Street Journal: Energy Roundup, an energy economics blog. Excellent! Welcome to the party.
HT to Environmental Economics for the link; now let’s persuade Mr. Gongloff that KP should be on his list of “blogs we’re reading” …
Michael Giberson
XM and Sirius, two satellite radio networks, announced plans to merge yesterday. Amusingly, in the New York Times the story begins with “The nation’s two satellite radio services, Sirius and XM, announced …”, while in the Washington Post leads with ”XM and Sirius, the two satellite radio companies ….” In each case the hometown company goes first.
Both stories highlight the apparently high antitrust standard the two companies must overcome to gain approval for the merger. The Post:
The FCC bars a single company from controlling the satellite radio market, but FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin recently noted that such rules can be changed. Martin said yesterday that the hurdle “would be high. . . . The companies would need to demonstrate that consumers would clearly be better off with both more choice and affordable prices.”
As the Times explains:
An army of merger and antitrust lawyers for both sides worked several marathon weeks of conference calls and trips to Washington to gauge the political climate for the transaction before opining that the deal should pass regulatory muster. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Wiley Rein are representing Sirius; XM is being advised by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Jones Day; and Latham & Watkins.
Doesn’t it seem a little silly that federal regulators are suggesting somehow the world would be worse off with one satellite radio company (for the time being) where as of a few years ago there were none? Do consumers have a right to two money-losing national music, talk and news services? Doesn’t the FCC know that by raising barriers to exit, they create barriers to entry for some future satellite radio rival?
I’m not a subscriber to either service — in fact I just barely had a CD player put in to my car a few months back when I started commuting to an office. The CD player also plays mp3 files and has an audio imput so I can plug in an iPod. I don’t really need more options for in car entertainment, but I’ve been tempted to go satellite after conversations with a few passionate fans.
You know, just maybe if they called up Texas Fred, the Zydeco Cowboy and put him on coast-to-coast, I might have to do it.
Lynne Kiesling
This Houston Chronicle article on human eggs highlights how markets can lead to mutually beneficial solutions:
As more older moms look for help getting pregnant, younger women have become increasingly willing to part with their eggs. Some do it to help relatives and friends, or from a sense of altruism, but others openly acknowledge money is a big factor in their decision, prompting critics to worry that they’re helping drive an unregulated market for human tissue.
In 1996, women in federally monitored programs donated eggs just over 3,800 times. That number has risen steadily, to more than 10,000 in 2004, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control has compiled data.
A decade ago, Dr. Joel Brasch, a fertility specialist in the Chicago area, had to work hard to recruit five or 10 young women for his own practice’s donor pool — but not anymore.
The money is seen as compensation for time and trouble. Among other things, donors learn to inject themselves with hormones and, eventually, have a needle inserted through their vaginal wall so eggs can be harvested.
“Everyone does it for the money,” says Dziura, the egg donor in New York. “No one would do that for free — maybe for your sister, but not for a stranger.”
If we can do this for human eggs, why not for kidneys?
Lynne Kiesling
This week Congress held hearings about patent reform; here’s the Wired article on the hearings. Members of Congress claim to be more in unison on this topic than usual, and yet, reform is slow, and when it happens the unintended consequences tend to swamp the purported benefits.
This CNET article provides a good overview of the variety of industry and academic positions on the issues. I like the closing quote:
Although many politicians speaking at Thursday’s hearing indicated they were eager to enact new legislation, some suggested hasty action could do more harm than good.
“No situation is so bad that Congress can’t make it worse,” said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.). “We have to be careful.”
Lynne Kiesling
While we’re in the “how cool is this?” department, pro cycling team CSC has announced that we’ll be able to track all of their riders on the upcoming Tour de California using GSM cellular technology and Google Earth:
During this year’s edition of the pro cycling race, the Computer Sciences Corporation, or CSC, will outfit seven contenders with specially designed tracking devices. Information about the riders’ locations and relative positions in the race will be made available as a map mashup during each of the tour’s eight daylong stages. …
“This is more than just GPS,” says CSC’s Identity Labs chief technologist Dan Munyan. “This is object field tracking. We want to be able to focus on a field of objects in motion, looking not only at where they are on the route, but also where they are relative to each other.
Yay, a whole new way to cheer on Zabriskie and Julich! How cool is this? Amazingly cool. And it helps the riders to prep for the race:
Julich says the devices will also help the riders study the route more closely and better prepare for the race. But after rolling across the start line, turning in a winning performance is totally up to the rider.
Lynne Kiesling
I’ve often wondered how nanotechnology can contribute to increased efficiency, load factor, and conservation of energy. My first thoughts were probably wrong; we don’t need nano-scale devices to perform remote monitoring and automated repair and self-correction within the wires network itself. Regular small-scale devices can do just fine for that.
But here’s some very interesting nano research that holds some promise for the holy grail of electrical energy, which is storage: self-assembling nanotech batteries.
Self-assembly is attractive because it could potentially reduce manufacturing costs and allow molecular-level control of the structure of the batteries, leading to materials and devices not easy to make using conventional manufacturing methods. Self-assembly has already been used to create a number of materials and a handful of simple devices, including half a battery.
This is pretty cool for a lot of reasons. Many people worrying about power storage worry at a much larger scale — ways to store megawatts of wind-generated power, for example, for later use — while this technology would enable more power storage at lower levels within devices themselves, in teeny weeny crevices. It’s also cool at a pure science level, because to achieve this outcome the researchers developed a deeper understanding of how the materials they used exert small forces on each other at extremely small distances, and how they could exploit these short-range forces to create potential, which is what you need for storage. [OK, you scientists out there, remember I am not a scientist, so don't rip me apart for that one -- ed.]
The researchers used lithium cobalt oxide and microbeads of graphite for the electrodes–materials commonly used in lithium-ion batteries–pairing them with a carefully selected liquid electrolyte. The electrolyte serves as an insulator, allowing ions to shuttle between the electrodes but forcing electrons to move through an external circuit, where they can be used to power a device.
In the researchers’ prototype battery, the graphite microbeads pack together to form one electrode and connect to a platinum current collector, all the while staying clear of the lithium cobalt oxide that forms the other electrode. The researchers tested the battery and showed that it could be both discharged and recharged multiple times.
As you would expect, at this time self-assembling batteries are not competitive on either storage intensity or on cost. But they do use space more efficiently than existing batteries, so these batteries would be likely to find their first uses in applications where the relative value of space is high.
Lynne Kiesling
We’ve had almost a foot of snow in Chicago this week, which means that the informal social norm for the decentralized definition of property rights has kicked in:
Chairs, boards, cones, fans, are all fair game for staking your claim to the space you so carefully dug out. I think this norm appeals so much to human fairness because it is so well grounded in Lockean property theory: you combine your labor with the environment to create something, you earn the right to that something. One reason that some institutions persist and are evolutionarily stable is that they simultaneously appeal to human nature and provide efficiency benefits.
Richard Epstein at the University of Chicago argued this in a paper in the Journal of Legal Studies in 2002. He argued that the Chicago parking property rights norm
… do better in an economic sense because they tend to reduce the dead time associated with these spaces. The system of incremental modification of parking places, however, is undermined by a political process that tends on balance to be more responsive to the interests of particular groups than to the overall carrying capacity of the commons.
Lynne Kiesling
Welcome Instapundit readers, and thanks to Glenn Reynolds for his link to my recent post about price controls in Venezuela. I hope you find thought-provoking and interesting economics content here. I’m glad you’re here.
Lynne Kiesling
Four years of Chávez’s price controls have led to serious food shortages.
Such shortages have sporadically appeared with items from milk to coffee since early 2003, when Chávez began regulating prices for 400 basic products as a way to counter inflation and protect the poor.
Yet inflation has soared to an accumulated 78 percent in the last four years in an economy awash in petrodollars, and food prices have increased particularly swiftly, creating a widening discrepancy between official prices and the true cost of getting goods to market in Venezuela.
”Shortages have increased significantly as well as violations of price controls,” Central Bank director Domingo Maza Zavala told Unión Radio on Thursday. “The difference between real market prices and controlled prices is very high.”
Authorities on Wednesday raided a warehouse in Caracas and seized seven tons of sugar hoarded by vendors unwilling to market the inventory at the official price.
Major private supermarkets suspended sales of beef earlier this week after one chain was shut down for 48 hours for pricing meat above government-set levels, but an agreement reached with the government on Wednesday night promises to return meat to empty refrigerator shelves.
I find this exercise of government hubris and arrogance so sickening that it literally nauseates me. Think of the harm that he’s doing to the very people who he manages to demagogue into voting for him. The cumulative effects of this type of policy and his destruction of capital assets in Venezuela’s oil industry make me feel very, very sorry for the Venezuelan people.
Thanks to Phil Miller for the link.
Lynne Kiesling
This NY Times article from Daniel Gross is very exciting! Highway congestion pricing becoming a reality … pinch me, am I dreaming?
Advances in technology and the successful experiments in Europe and the United States lead many economists to view the present as an ideal time to apply the theory to traffic control. Since February 2003, when London introduced a system that charged a fee to motorists entering the central city on weekdays, “congestion has been reduced noticeably,” said Edward L. Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard. “People are using the roads less, and there have been remarkable upticks in speeds.”
Beyond that, congestion pricing holds out the possibility of harnessing people’s innate economic rationality and self-interest in order to promote a series of public goods. Every time a driver turns onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, she slows down the travel speed of all the other drivers, imposing a cost — or, as economists say, a negative externality — on countless fellow citizens. “Everybody wants fewer people to drive, and everybody wants people to use less gas,” said Gregory L. Rosston, deputy director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research in Palo Alto, Calif.
But my favorite part is at the end, where Ed Glaeser debunks the idea that congestion pricing harms the poor:
The notion of charging people for a good or service generally regarded as free — driving on highways — also instills political opposition. In New York, many elected officials argued that charging fees to drivers would be a burden for poor and middle-income people.
Professor Glaeser disagrees.
“The greatest beneficiaries of reduced congestion on roads in New York would be people who ride buses to get to and from work, who would find their commutes shortened.”
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