Lynne Kiesling The outright demagoguery from DC is disgusting but not surprising. More FTC studies of “price gouging”, more threats of “windfall profits” taxes, more ranting and puffery. Ladies and gentlemen (and I use that moniker to be polite, not truthful) of Congress, look within yourselves if you want a true explanation for the increase …
Lynne Kiesling Energy Economics 101 Spring 2006 Professor Kiesling Homework Assignment to Congress Suppose producers in an economy produce a good, G. Suppose further that the consumption of G creates a negative effect, E, that is borne by more people than just the person consuming G. Now suppose that to reduce E, the government passes …
Lynne Kiesling Rich Karlgaard has an interesting column in Forbes riffing off of Virginia Postrel’s book The Future and Its Enemies. He recasts her dynamists and stasists as “opportunity seekers” and “problem-solvers”, and then goes looking for examples of these iconic types among politicians. Postrel’s dynamists, or, as I call them, “opportunity seekers,” love charging …
Lynne Kiesling Eugene Volokh’s new paper on blogging and scholarship expresses a lot of my thoughts about the productive and consumptive values of the exercise. I particularly like his taxonomy of “discovering, disseminating, and doing” to analyze what it is we academics do. I might think that I get more discovery benefit out of the …
Eugene Volokh on Discovering, Disseminating, and Doing Read More »
Michael Giberson The Washington Post ran a good story on gasoline prices on the front page of today’s edition. But the following sentence caught my eye, and raised perhaps imponderable questions: “In the absence of a clear explanation, members of Congress have jumped into the fray.” After enough members of Congress jump into a fray, …
Michael Giberson There was a time when the economics of public utilities was probably the sleepiest of back corners of practical economics. People went into utility economics for the same reasons that widows invested in utility stocks: so they could sleep soundly at night. No so much anymore. As luck has it, retail price caps …
Electric Rates Keep the Wizards Up Late in Maryland Read More »
Lynne Kiesling In a full-information equilibrium in a liquid market, the forward price should exactly equal the spot price plus the carrying cost (storage cost plus foregone interest)[NOTE: I updated this to change the typo that the first comment caught, good catch!]. Thus you can explain the current increase in the crude spot price as …
Lynne Kiesling Oil prices today are the highest (nominal) prices ever, over $71. Some of the driver of this price increase is uncertainty surrounding Iran. But what’s really interesting from an economic perspective right now is that oil markets are in contango, and have been in contango since early this year. Wikipedia defines contango thus: …
Lynne Kiesling When Apple introduced its new Intel dual-core-powered computers, my first question to my soon-to-be-Apple employee student was “when can I dual-boot OSX and Windows on my Mac?” As everyone knows now, the anser is “as of two weeks ago”. While it’s still in beta, Boot Camp has lots of folks singing its praises, …
Two Mac/Windows Options: Bootcamp and Virtualization Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Thomas Dolby has a blog! And he’s touring. And the place he’s playing in Chicago is walking distance from my house. What a good way to start my morning. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link to Dolby’s post on “Freakonomics in action” and the speed of information (and mis-information) dissemination on the …
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