Books

A Wal-mart Long-haul Truck Has More Intelligence in It Than a Typical Water System

1 Comment / Books, Economics, Environmental policy / By

Michael Giberson At the Freakonomics blog, guest Charles Fishman explains “Why water will never be the next oil.” A sample: If you leave aside the somewhat silly world of bottled water, there has been almost no innovation in the industry of water for decades. A water facility today uses the exact same technology it did in 1973. In what …

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Review of Kiesling and Kleit (eds.) Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story

Books, Electricity / By

Michael Giberson In the current issue of Regulation, Tim Brennan reviews Electricity Restructuring: The Texas Story, edited by Andrew Kleit and our own Lynne Kiesling. After a lengthy introduction discussing how deregulation came to the electric power business (mostly it hasn’t, but parts of the industry have been reorganized), Brennan gets down to the book …

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The Mongoliad

1 Comment / Books / By

Lynne Kiesling Speaking of Neal Stephenson, he’s involved in a new, online, serialized novel called The Mongoliad. Set in 1241, it’s an adventure journey story with the Mongol invasions of Europe as a backdrop. There are some stories you can read on the site for free, but to receive the weekly chapters you have to …

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Per Capita Energy Consumption Has Declined in the United States

5 Comments / Books, Electricity, Energy markets, Environmental policy / By

Michael Giberson At the Freakonomics blog, James McWilliams offers a review of sorts of Robert Bryce’s new book Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.  McWilliams reports that the book is “a sustained attack on our irrational infatuation with wind and solar power.” Part of Bryce’s “sustained attack” …

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Modern Renditions of Pride & Prejudice, Humor Edition

Books, Humor / By

Lynne Kiesling I’ve been reading, thinking about, and watching lots of Jane Austen lately, and I’ve found two funny renditions of my favorite book, Pride and Prejudice: Austenbook, a Facebook-style retelling of the story, and Pride and Prejudice in emoticons. I guffawed out loud in an unseemly manner ill befitting a lady, but I suspect …

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The Amazon-macmillan Ebook Kerfuffle: an Ode to Price Discrimination

6 Comments / Books, Economics / By

Lynne Kiesling [I love the word kerfuffle] Price discrimination is the basic economics question in the current iPad-induced Amazon-Macmillan kerfuffle, even more basic than the DRM/property rights issues and the antitrust/resale price maintenance issues I discussed in my last post on the matter. Lots of people have weighed in on the subject in the past …

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