Economic history

Coasean Taxes and Other Energy Economics Stories

Michael Giberson Of note. Daniel Cole, “Thinking About an Optimal Coase Tax” “Economists have spilled a lot of ink trying to specify what an ‘optimal’ Pigou tax would be… Haven’t any of these people read Coase (I mean read him carefully)? One of his explicit aims in ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ (1960) was to correct an …

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A Proposal for Fisk Power Plant: Museum of History and Industry

Lynne Kiesling After a long and contentious series of battles over the past three decades, two of the original coal-fired steam turbine power plants in Chicago powered down at the end of August. The Fisk plant and the Crawford plant were the last two coal-fired power plants in operation within a major U.S. city, and …

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India’s Electrical System Produces Largest Power Blackout Ever

Michael Giberson From the New York Times: 2nd Day of Power Failures Cripple Wide Swath of India It had all the makings of a disaster movie: More than half a billion people without power. Trains motionless on the tracks. Miners trapped underground. Subway lines paralyzed. Traffic snarled in much of the national capital. On Tuesday, India suffered the …

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Should Ice-making Be a Regulated Utility?

Michael Giberson Lynne’s post on early commerce in ice reminded me that ice making has made other appearances in economic history. For example, some U.S. states once required a state license to make and sell ice. The question of the reasonableness of such licensing requirements reached the Supreme Court in 1932 in New State Ice …

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Prices, Property Rights, Profits … and Ice?

Lynne Kiesling The history of the commercialization of the ice market is a multi-layered case study in market processes. Who knew? This Freeman article from David Hebert, an economics graduate student at George Mason University, tells the economic history of the origins of the long-distance ice industry in the U.S. in the early 19th century: …

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Rob Bradley’s Edison to Enron

Lynne Kiesling Consider the preconceptions that surface in your mind when you read the name “Enron”. What are they? Chances are that they are negative, and not particularly nuanced — fraudulent business activity, tarnishing the idea of free markets by trying to manipulate them using the political process, and so on. If that’s true for …

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Skwire at Cato Unbound: “Bonfire of the Clichés”

Michael Giberson We ought not let Sarah Skwire’s second hit-and-run posting here at Knowledge Problem slip by without mentioning that she is also lead-off essayist in the current month’s Cato Unbound. The teaser from Cato: Literary scholar Sarah Skwire asks us to revisit the western canon’s portrayal of business and commerce. Mainstream scholars and libertarians both …

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Michael Graetz’s “The End of Energy” Surveys 40 Years of Energy Policy Making. It Isn’t Pretty.

Michael Giberson Michael Graetz’s The End of Energy is a fascinating run through 40 years of U.S. energy policy making. Engaging and at times even entertaining if you are at all interested in energy issues. In Graetz’s telling it is mostly a story of 40 years of failure, though he notes a few successes along …

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