Lynne Kiesling

Alex Tabarrok on Innovation, Barriers to It, and the Warfare-welfare State

1 Comment / Economics, Regulation, Technology / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling I was glad Mike mentioned Alex Tabarrok’s recent Launching the Innovation Renaissance in his recent post on the Honeywell-Next patent lawsuit, because reading Alex’s new TED book was on my to-do list for this past weekend. Alex’s focus in this book is U.S. innovation policy and ways that we could improve the institutional …

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One Nation, Under Guard

5 Comments / Liberty / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling This TechDirt article pulls together a lot of the various strands that are worrying about the growth of the U.S. police state — extralegal detention, the militarization of local police at the hands of the DHS, surveillance, increased imprisonment despite an all-time low crime rate, punitive immigration policy, the war on x where …

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Dynamic Pricing and Technology in Different Markets

1 Comment / Economics / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling Dynamic pricing has long been a topic of great interest here, in large part because digital technology is increasingly making it feasible to implement dynamic pricing in retail electricity markets in ways that can be acceptable to consumers. But dynamic pricing is fraught with challenges, and not just in retail electricity markets. Dynamic …

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New Paper: Knowledge Problem

3 Comments / Complexity, Economics / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling I have a new paper that may be of interest to KP readers, since the subject of the paper is the same as the name of this site: Knowledge Problem. I am honored to have been invited to contribute this paper to the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Austrian Economics (Peter Boettke and Chris …

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Online Privacy is Like Portfolio Diversification

Technology / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling You know the down-home advice on investing — don’t put all of your eggs in one basket? That advice also holds for maintaining your online privacy in the face of Google’s impending “service integration” to use all of the information you provide in all of their services. This Wired article on how to …

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How Patents Stifle Innovation, Honeywell Edition

3 Comments / Economics, Electricity, Technology / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling In the comments on Mike’s post yesterday about the Honeywell patent lawsuit against Nest, Ed asks in the comments how it is that patents stifle innovation rather than promote it. The theoretical answer is that, as a government-granted monopoly, patents embed both incentives — at the margin they increase the incentive to create …

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Qotd:ron Bailey on Cheap Natural Gas

2 Comments / Economics, Energy markets / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling Ron Bailey gets the quote of the day from this post about how cheap natural gas is roiling various energy markets, including renewables and nuclear: Can an energy source be all that bad if it scares the two most heavily subsidized sectors of the electric power generation industry?

Shale Gas Glut, but Won’t Last? The Underlying Model

5 Comments / Economics, Electricity, Energy markets / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling Ken Silverstein has a good article in Forbes on the business prospects for shale gas developers (and I’m glad to see him there, having followed his work for a very long time). Since he asks in the title whether low shale gas prices are a mirage, I think it’s useful to go through …

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Soul Searching in Economics, Davos Division

4 Comments / Economics / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling In Davos on Friday, the FT’s Martin Wolf chaired a panel discussion of economists including Peter Diamond, Joe Stiglitz, Robert Shiller, and Brian Arthur. His summary of the discussion is very well worth reading, because he highlights 10 important ideas that arose in the conversation. I’m going to summarize them here, which is …

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A Friday Flash

1 Comment / Economics, Liberty, Technology / By Lynne Kiesling

Lynne Kiesling I found a lot of interesting and insightful thoughts in my morning reading today; here’s a synopsis: Election year linguistics 1: The New York Times has an analysis of the language used by Obama and the four presidential candidates; at Cato at Liberty, David Boaz points out how different Ron Paul’s emphasis is …

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Author name: Lynne Kiesling