A Triathlete’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoon
Lynne Kiesling The winning caption: “You’re in trouble when we get to the bicycles!”
May 2009
Anti-price Gouging Laws and Economic Efficiency: On Rapp and Skarbek on Price Gouging
Michael Giberson Geoffrey Rapp, (“Gouging: Terrorist Attacks, Hurricanes, and the Legal and Economic Aspects of Post-Disaster Price Regulation”, Kentucky Law Journal, 2006) expresses concern that fairness-based advocates of anti-price gouging laws and efficiency-minded opponents of such laws have such different approaches to the issue that there is “no way to reach a shared understanding of …
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Administration Abandons Airport Landing Slot Auction
Michael Giberson From the New York Times City Room, “U.S. Won’t Auction Airport Landing Slots“: The United States Department of Transportation has canceled a plan to auction landing slots at New York City’s three airports, officials announced on Wednesday, bringing an end to a widely criticized effort by the Bush administration to use market incentives …
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Todd Zywicki: the Commerce Clause is in the Constitution for a Reason
Lynne Kiesling I am in violent agreement with my friend Todd Zywicki’s commentary in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal on the Obama administration’s actions in the Chrysler bankruptcy. In particular, By stepping over the bright line between the rule of law and the arbitrary behavior of men, President Obama may have created a thousand new failing …
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Price Gouging: Is It Wrong? Should It Be Against the Law?
Michael Giberson The April 2009 Business Ethics Quarterly includes an article on price gouging by Jeremy Snyder, a response from Matt Zwolinski, whose article on the topic was published a year ago, and a reply from Snyder. (Zwolinski’s earlier article on price gouging was discussed here last March. See related links below.) Snyder (“What’s the …
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Price Gouging and Behavioral Economics – More Work Needed
Michael Giberson I’ve been reading several price gouging articles lately. One, by G. C. Rapp in the Kentucky Law Journal, (“Gouging: Terrorist Attacks, Hurricanes, and the Legal and Economic Aspects of Post-Disaster Price Regulation”, 2006) makes a relatively novel reach to behavioral economics to try to justify an efficiency claim for anti-price gouging laws. In …
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May is Bike Month and May 11-15 is Bike-to-Work Week
Michael Giberson I bike to work almost every day, but contrarian that I am*, I kicked off Bike-to-Work Week** by walking to work on Monday. * Actually, my bike was in the shop over the weekend, I had no idea it was ‘Bike-to-Work Week’, and I’m not really that contrarian.*** ** For less hearty souls, …
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Articles on Wind Power in Ontario Address Effects on Emissions, Other Issues
Michael Giberson Tyler Hamilton has a pair of stories in the Toronto Star addressing concerns about wind power developments in Ontario. The first article examines health-related claims and indicates that no scientific evidence yet finds evidence of adverse health affects, but research in the area in increasing. The second article considers a number of other …
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This Anti-Neuroeconomics Screed on Marketwatch is So Bad You Have to Stop and Look
Michael Giberson An example: The biggest reason the human brain will always remain irrational is because Wall Street wants it that way. Wall Street can control irrational Americans better using its high-tech neuroeconomic data, strategies and algorithms. I’d rate the whole thing as somewhere between car-crash bad and train-wreck bad. There might be a good …
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A Message to You Rudy
Michael Giberson Reading and writing about Jeremy Rifkind’s distributed energy proposal has been made much easier for me this morning because I’ve had Pandora running music in the background. More specifically, Pandora has been playing my “A message to you Rudy” station, and by clicking here you can listen, too. It has been a beautiful …