Lynne Kiesling On Monday the Chicago Tribune published an editorial about electricity policy in Illinois (registration required). We’ve got a lot of electricity policy issues on the table right now. Nine years ago, the political bargain struck to allow wholesale market competition in electric power was a ten-year retail rate freeze, at a discounted rate …
Chicago Tribune: Enable Free Markets in Electricity in Illinois Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I am in Jackson, Wyoming, attending the Western Conference of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. This afternoon and tomorrow morning my colleague Bart Wilson and I are running experimental economics workshops for the commissioners and staffers attending. We got very fortunate yesterday flying in; from the right side of the plane …
Lynne Kiesling Welcome to those of you who found your way here via Brad DeLong’s very kind link to my earlier post linking to the Weiser-Atkinson “third way” paper. Some comments in response to the comments on Brad’s post: I am as skeptical of the FCC’s ability to engage in correct antitrust enforcement as anyone …
More on Net Neutrality: Can the Fcc Be a Good Antitrust Enforcer? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling In discussing the involvement of Russian politicians in economic decisionmaking in the natural gas industry, Tim Worstall says something that I think is key: I’d prefer that such a politician had nothing whatsoever to do with whether the gas kept flowing or not. With purely private companies you know that decisions are made …
Getting Politics, and Politicians, Out of Decisionmaking Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The attention paid to the “net neutrality” debate is reaching a crescendo. In addition to the posts here over the past month and the links contained therein, see these sources: The Wikipedia entry on net neutrality; a commenter asked earlier for a general overview, and this one’s OK Greg Mankiw’s entry on the …
Michael Giberson Virginia Postrel has an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on kidney donations and methods to encourage donations. Postrel favors legalizing financial incentives for live donors, though the idea of paying people to give up a kidney makes some folks squeamish. In fact, the National Kidney Foundation doesn’t even think people should talk …
Life on the Kidney Queue in the Land of the Market Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I will apologize in advance to Sturt for the fact that I am going to use his comment on my recent Australian wine post to illustrate a crucially important point about economic logic: It’s overstating it to suggest that the Australian winegrape industry exists purely because of subsidies. Winegrapes are an ag commodity …
Think Like an Economist: Marginal Vs. Total Thinking Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Regular KP readers might have noticed my reticence to opine on the current net neutrality roilings (which is why I am grateful to Mike for picking up the slack). There’s a good reason for that: I don’t find either of the polemic, binary, extreme positions that are being argued and memorialized in legislative …
Lynne Kiesling Tim Worstall alerts us to a manifestation of government distortion of decision-making in Australia: a glut of grapes has pushed down grape and wine prices, and small producers are in danger of going out of business. The Telegraph article that Tim cites says that The problem is so severe that the industry said …
Wine Bankruptcies in Australia: More Ill-advised Government Policy Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on a manifestation of the plenitude of capitalism: Wal-Mart is selling customized World Cup gear in the various countries where it operates around the world (US, Germany, England, Mexico, for example). My favorite: Garden gnomes in England kit. If that’s not culture-specific marketing, I don’t know …
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