Lynne Kiesling Leave it to Will Wilkinson to put the point so clearly and succinctly: institutions are capital. They are capital with a very strong interaction with other inputs. One of Will’s commenters argues that institutions cannot be owned and are therefore not capital. I disagree. We have lots of examples of things we consider …
Lynne Kiesling With thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the mention on Sunday, I second his links to two recent Wired articles. One from September 2004 looks at the proposed development of several new pebble-bed nuclear plants in China over the next 20 years. Pebble-bed is an 80-year-old technology; in this post from September 2004 (in …
Lynne Kiesling There’s an interesting Slashdot thread today about EPRI’s offshore wave power demonstration project. What’s interesting to me about the thread is not just the feasibility report, but the information about various other “green energy” technologies that is contained in the comments. This commenter points out that all of those appliances that we take …
Lynne Kiesling Jonathan Wilde has this wonderful and annoying tendency to articulate things about which I have been ruminating before I have fully formed my ideas. In this post he does so about Neal Stephenson’s “radical libertarian views … he writes about libertarian themes – technological empowerment, data havens, free banking, polycentric law, anonymous digital …
Lynne Kiesling Happy vestigial-holiday-of-romance to one and all (sorry, I’m not particularly sentimental). Around the KP house Valentine’s Day is an excuse to eat better quality chocolate than we usually do. As in most of the past 8 years, this year it’s Chicago’s own Vosges Haut Chocolat. The brain child of two women, one of …
Lynne Kiesling Today the Wall Street Journal had a story about students writing poetry inspired by WSJ stories (subscription required) for Emily Farrell’s English class in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. The story included excerpts from some of the poems. My favorite: The thing about technology is A public with mobile cellphones That is Internet based and Googles …
Wsj’s Risky Proposals And Sweetheart Deals For Valentine’s Day Read More »
Lynne Kiesling If Splenda is made from sugar, won’t the sugar industry continue to benefit from sales of it because they are providing the crucial input? Clearly they are unlikely to get paid as much per pound for sugar as an input as at retail, so in order for their profits to stay up Splenda’s …
Lynne Kiesling Doug Bandow wrote a nice column on the sugar industry’s attack on Splenda last week: You can never get enough from consumers and taxpayers. That apparently is the sugar industry’s motto. Collect subsidies. Ban trade. Outlaw your competitors. Let the American people pay. I could go on for days about the deep and …
Lynne Kiesling While we’re in an earthy vein here, I recommend Alex’s recent post at Marginal Revolution on the purported dissent from the Copenhagen Consensus. So the mild dissent comes from concern that the person who did the study overestimated the costs of climate change. Interesting.
Lynne Kiesling In a new Reason study, Michael DeAlessi explores how private individuals and the organizations they form have provided beneficial wildlife and land conservation, and how they use performance measures to promote these incentives: Human ingenuity and the entrepreneurial spirit underlie most conservation success stories. Under private ownership and stewardship, problem-solvers become remarkably resourceful …
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