Lynne Kiesling Mike Madison responds to my earlier post on wireless in Pittsburgh’s Market Square. I argue that the businesses would benefit from the wireless, and thus have an incentive to pay for it. Mike responds: The answer is pretty obvious, at least to me: The city, or some public authority, is the right entity …
Lynne Kiesling I am on the most recent “Glenn and Helen” Instapundit podcast, discussing oil prices with Glenn, Helen, and Roger Stern from Johns Hopkins. One of the several things I didn’t mention that I wanted to was the effect of exploiting the Canadian oil sands. Oil prices above $30-35/barrel make it economical to extract …
Lynne Kiesling Marcus Cole, a law professor at Stanford, is one of the smartest and nicest people I know. Happily, he is guest-blogging at blackprof.com. Sadly, the legal change to which he applies his considerable analytical skills is disturbing: On Tuesday, in addition to Mrs. King?s passing and Justice Alito?s elevation, the State of Illinois …
Lynne Kiesling Londonist has a fascinating little post on coal-hole covers in London. Ornate cast-iron plates to cover holes in the pavement for delivering coal into basements; now obsolete, but still there and subtly ornamental. I love pieces of urban history like this. Another example of such a thing is the fire insurance plaque, from …
Lynne Kiesling Mike Madison finds a great quote about Pittsburgh that invokes thoughts of Jane Jacobs, complete with a book picture and link. He quotes from some reader letters to the Post-Gazette’s architecture critic: Responding to New York architect and developer Stan Eckstut’s observation that Downtown Pittsburgh has too much public open space for a …
Lynne Kiesling It’s not exactly “markets for everything,” but it’s a close cousin … cozy pajamas that allow you to run around the house with gay and reckless abandon and still be cozy are a fond childhood memory of most people. In fact, in a former job I had a boss who, when we were …
Lynne Kiesling I’ve always wondered why there’s often a long stretch between buses, and then three show up at the same time. I just attribute it to the same kind of dynamics that you find in fractals that lead to “focal points”, but a November NBER working paper by Johnson, Reiley and Munoz use that …
Lynne Kiesling David Friedman recently had an interesting externality exercise post: If actions I might take would provide benefits for other people which I am not in a position to charge them for, I have too little incentive to take them. If my actions would imposes costs on other people which I am not required …
Lynne Kiesling When I heard this morning about the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, my initial reaction was what I characterize as a new institutional economics idea. One of the reasons why transparent democratic governance institutions lead to social stability (as opposed to stasis) and economic growth is that the combination of the transparency …
Lynne Kiesling I am enjoying the conversation in the comments on my prior post about wind subsidies. I forgot to include in that post a link to John Whitehead’s post on wind farms at Environmental Economics, building off of a recent John Tierney column in the New York Times. Tierney points out that, as some …
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