Lynne Kiesling
I am attending an electricity markets workshop that we are holding here at Northwestern, about which I’ll have more to say later, but for now I wanted to capture a quotation of the day (apologies to Don Boudreaux for using his meme):
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.
-John Maynard Keynes (1936)
Hung-po Chao from ISO New England used this quote in his talk, with reference to what I think of as the crucial need to clear the overgrowth in the regulatory underbrush, and the perverse incentives that underbrush creates (and the special interests that perpetuate it).
Lynne,
Couldn’t agree more. The trick is convincing regulators to change their mindsets. They need to learn that they can best serve the public when, in the words of Hayek, they act as gardeners rather than craftsmen when designing market mechanisms.
The challenge lies in differentiating the good ideas from the bad ideas, new or old.