… a question unrelated to areas of economics and policy with which I am familiar. Today the U.S. House of Representatives voted down their farm bill proposal. Brad Plumer helpfully provides a pie chart summarizing the spending that the proposed bill would have authorized: What do you notice? The proposed funding for the SNAP program …
Lynne Kiesling The Economist recently did one of their periodic debates, this time on the pace and effects of technological progress. Moderator Ryan Avent framed the debate thus: This leads some scholars to conclude that accelerating technical change is an illusion. Autonomous vehicles and 3D printers are flashy but lack the transformative power of electricity …
Lynne Kiesling One of my favorite political theorists is Algernon Sidney (1623-1683). Sidney’s most famous work is Discourses Concerning Government (1698, published posthumously because Sidney had been executed for treason by Charles II). In addition to his motivation to write in response to the absolutism and authoritarianism of both Oliver Cromwell (whom he considered a …
Algernon Sidney on Absolutism and Political Power Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday I posted a roundup of some of the media’s reporting on the NSA’s collection of domestic communications metadata. I concluded the post thus: But the most striking commentary is from the editors of the New York Times, who state that “the administration has now lost all credibility”. If you follow the link you …
Lynne Kiesling Today has seen a flurry of information in the wake of Glenn Greenwald’s breaking the news in the Guardian last night about the National Security Agency’s (dubbed in the Washington Post the “eavesdropper in chief“) collection of Verizon phone customer metadata on a daily basis. Here’s a roundup of the resources I have …
America’s Surveillance State: Can You Hear Me Now? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling [vimeo 67808322 w=500 h=281] The Marginal Revolution in Economics from Lynne Kiesling on Vimeo. A fundamental question in economics is value theory — where do prices come from, what determents the value of a commodity, product, or good? The classical economists operated with a labor theory of value, but in the mid-19th century, …
Course Video 5: The Marginal Revolution and Carl Menger Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As is his wont, Mike Munger speaks vast amounts of sense in this month’s Cato Unbound, focusing on the political economy of recycling. I’ve never seen a better articulation of the various energy and economic tradeoffs associated with recycling than Mike’s presented here. For example, Mike does a great job of pointing out …
Lynne Kiesling The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson parses Mary Meeker’s annual state of the Internet presentation, which includes some nifty and insightful analyses of data. Here’s my favorite: Note that this is in percentage terms, so it doesn’t show the overall increase in the number and variety of digital devices used — the number of devices …
Lynne Kiesling As Megan McArdle noted on Wednesday, fracking in the US is causing dissension within OPEC; couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of cartel members. Megan’s analysis is dead on, well worth reading, and reveals how different the ideal strategies are of the different OPEC members. At some level, this is not new — …
Lynne Kiesling As a follow-up to my previous post about cutting down trees for biofuels, here’s some interesting news about the unintended consequences and perverse incentives embedded in regulations to promote the use of biomass as fuel: a BBC investigation reveals trees cut from swamp forests in the US being used to fuel electricity generation …
More on the Purported Environmental Benefit of Cutting Down Trees Read More »
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