Michael Giberson Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Julia Child, and surprisingly, it was a blog post on economic theorizing reminded me of the famous cookbook author this morning. I’m sure it wasn’t quite the metaphor Rajiv Sethi had in mind when he posted “On Prices, Narratives, and Market Efficiency,” but the …
Lynne Kiesling Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institution and Kip Viscusi of Vanderbilt University have a new Mercatus working paper that is a careful and thoughtful critique of the rationale, the methodology, and the outcomes of federal energy efficiency regulations. Using standard Pigouvian externality theory, most environmental regulations are based on the “market failure” rationale …
A few weeks ago President Obama made his now memorable “you didn’t build that” remark. Most of the resulting political exchange has been pretty thoughtless. Extremely rare have been the thoughtful reactions. Here are two of the best.
Michael Giberson The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled today that pesticide drifting across property lines onto an organic farmer’s crop does not constitute a trespass under state law. The court dismissed the trespass claim as well as accompanying claims asserting nuisance and negligence under laws that govern organic farming. The organic farming laws regulate what a …
Minnesota Supreme Court Rules Pesticide Drift is Not a Trespass, but Might Be a Nuisance Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Several people have pointed out the remarkable fact that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion have fallen almost to 1995 levels. As the Institute for Energy Research noted, The Energy information Administration reports that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in the United States are 2.4 percent less in 2011 than they were in …
Co2 Emission Reductions: Fracking, Recession, Renewables? Read More »
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: …
Lynne Kiesling Matt Ridley helpfully points out something that’s grossly underappreciated in the sturm und drang over financial market competition and regulation in the past five years — the lessons of evolutionary biology apply to human-designed systems too, including financial market institutions and regulatory institutions: What is the cure? A change of personnel will not …
Lynne Kiesling Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation have collaborated on a series of short videos about free markets and their consequences and implications. I found Tyler Cowen’s video contribution to the series particularly valuable and pretty much right about the morality of voluntary exchange, how exchange embodies cooperation, globalization, etc. I intend to …
Lynne Kiesling Friday night’s PBS Newshour had a feature story on the protests in California over the installation of digital electricity meters in the PG&E distribution monopoly service territory. These protests focus on two separate issues: one is a claim that the wireless communications from the meters create electromagnetic fields that harm health, and the …
Lynne Kiesling Seth Goldman is one of the entrepreneurial founders of the beverage company Honest Tea, which makes fresh-brewed, organic, low-sugar teas and sells them in a global industry standard bottle: 500ml, or 16.9 ounces. You’d think that such an entrepreneurial activity and such a beverage would be attractive even to Nanny Mayor Michael Bloomberg. …
Bloomberg’s Bureaucratic “Big Gulp” Rule, More Unintended Costs Read More »
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