Economics

This OpinionJournal editorial by George McGovern is an incredibly eloquent statement of how ridiculous and unthinking airport security bureaucracy has become. Read it, tell your airlines that you’ll avoid flying and they are more likely to go out of business because of this static, backward-looking approach to making us feel safe that instead just makes …

Common Sense Is The Victim Of Unthinking Bureaucracy In American Airports Read More »

This article from Wired News gives a nice, concise description of the implications of Covalent’s (open-source Apache server’s) decision to support Microsoft’s .Net technology. This decision will create more choice in the web server market, and also bodes well for the good experimentation consequences of pluralistic technology use and development. However, this NYT article suggests …

Pluralistic Technology Platforms? Read More »

Honda announced today that they have secured a license from the US and California governments to sell fuel cell vehicles in the US. The article does a nice job of describing the realistic timeframe for the diffusion of fuel cell vehicles, including the pesky issue of the network infrastructure for hydrogen refueling. Is this cool …

Honda Takes The Lead, Quelle Surprise Read More »

Run, don’t walk, to Megan McArdle’s house for a superb analysis of why Canadian prescription drug prices are lower than in the U.S., and the likely consequences for pharmaceutical R&D. I can vouch for the business reality of her argument; when I worked as a tax consultant I had clients that confronted this painful reality.

It’s always refreshing to get a little perspective on these accounting and corporate governance issues. Amity Shlaes’ column from Monday does so, with reference to both the history of the Industrial Revolution and Trollope, one of my favorite authors. Given my background in economic history and technological change and diffusion, this really resonated with me. …

With the Bad Comes Good Read More »

This good TechCentralStation article by Duane Freese lays out the economics and the policy dynamics of nuclear fuel reprocessing as an alternative to schlepping it to Yucca Mountain. Very interesting and thought provoking.

Last night Brink Lindsey picked up on the 100th anniversary of air conditioning, on which there was an article in Wednesday’s Washington Post. Certainly, as he says, a triumph of “the Baconian project of power over nature.” I hate heat and humidity, and the confluence thereof, so I fully agree, and celebrated yesterday. My only …

Air Conditioning Read More »

There’s a lot of good stuff today, including this article by Arnold Kling on the predictive power of Moore’s Law and the future of telephone companies, and this article by Ed Driscoll on the opportunities and roadblocks in the dissemination of wireless networks. A lot of folks, including Virginia Postrel, have thought carefully about the …

Read TechCentralStation Today Read More »

This three-article series on TechCentralStation (first article second article third article) connects the science behind renewables and technological change in energy to policy issues, much along the lines of my earlier post. And Sallie Baliunas is one of the most insightful and articulate physicists I’ve ever met (and my husband is a physicist, so that’s …

Renewable Energy and Technological Change Read More »

When Napster was active and we were all downloading songs like fiends, recording industry revenues and record sales went up. This Wired story from June reports on a recently released study indicating these results: The Ipsos-Reid study found that 81 percent of music downloaders reported that their CD purchasing either remained the same or increased. …

Why Doesn’t the Recording Industry Get This? Read More »