September 10, 2009

Toby Considine on Retail Electricity Issues

Lynne Kiesling Toby Considine is a must-read on the conceptual issues underlying this challenge: how do we use communications technology and data standards at interfaces to enable decentralized coordination and emergent order in electricity distribution and retail electricity markets? Seriously, he’s been my go-to guy since I met him at the GridWise Architecture Council constitutional …

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Choice and Competition Protect Consumers of Healthcare … and Electricity

Lynne Kiesling Matt Welch does a sharp and thorough textual exegesis of parts of President Obama’s speech to Congress on healthcare (health care?) last night, in his article on the accusations of lying that are flying around Washington these days. Matt’s final paragraph struck me, not just because I think he (and President Obama, in …

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Emergent Orders Are All Around Us, Especially in Cities

Lynne Kiesling Ron Bailey’s Hit & Run post, Ant Hills=Brains=Cities, reminded me of some really important, fundamental ideas that tend to get lost as we natter about financial regulation, health care regulation, climate regulation … Emergent orders abound, and occur at all sorts of different scales — molecular, cellular, all the way to complex social …

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Jane Smiley: “All I Need to Know About Economics I Learned in Kindergarten”

Michael Giberson Or rather, as Smiley explains in a HuffPost piece, in “Mrs. Ticknor’s Social Studies class in 1962, when I did my report on ‘The Communist Manifesto’ and kept misspelling the word ‘bourgeois’.” She began the essay by complimenting Paul Krugman’s piece in the New York Times Magazine about the sorry state of economics …

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