Lynne Kiesling I’ve scheduled this to post while I’m out on one of my long rides … this interesting Outside magazine article explores why women’s sports attract so little attention. The article focuses on cycling: The Giro d’Italia Femminile is the biggest race you’ve never heard of. Covering 961.4 kilometers of Italian countryside over nine days, 127 …
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 …
Lynne Kiesling In the wake of the “you didn’t build that” discussions of the past few days, David Brooks writes The Romney campaign doesn’t seem to know how to respond. For centuries, business leaders have been inept when writers, intellectuals and politicians attacked capitalism, and, so far, the Romney campaign is continuing that streak. One …
Romney Should Defend the Morality of Capitalism … Here’s an Example Read More »
Lynne Kiesling If you’re a Direct TV subscriber, you know that they are embroiled in a contract dispute with Viacom over subscriber fees, which means you haven’t been able to watch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or SpongeBob SquarePants for the past week or so. But is cable/satellite TV becoming an “if it died would …
Lynne Kiesling [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJeuoMh46JY&feature=player_embedded] Matt Zwolinski’s new Learn Liberty video addresses that question, and he does a masterful job of it. He starts with the “compared to what?” question — what’s the likely alternative to voluntary exchange in free markets? It’s regulated and politicized exchange, which is frequently not voluntary. Ask yourself: which of these is …
Lynne Kiesling This Babbage column from the Economist is full of interesting information about the air conditioning that we have enjoyed over the past 110 years. Invented 110 years ago in Brooklyn by Willis Carrier, air conditioning has made indoor climate control of temperature and humidity first possible and then ubiquitous. Such is the now-typical …
Creative Destruction (with Emphasis on the Creative), Air Cooling Edition Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Adam Thierer has a lovely post that’s a good tribute to Fred Kahn, the legendary regulatory economist who, among other things, did the politically unthinkable: he recommended the closure of the agency of which he was head at the time (Civil Aeronautics Board), thus ushering in airline deregulation in the late 1970s. His …
Lynne Kiesling Another entry in the annals of creative destruction … If you’re a bricks-and-mortar retailer, showrooming has the potential to be a real threat to your revenues — you incur the costs of operating a store, but some of your foot traffic is there only to see items in meatspace before ordering them online, …
Michael Giberson Recently the Brattle Group submitted a study of resource adequacy issues within the ERCOT power system and the policy options available to ERCOT and the PUC of Texas, the regulatory authority overseeing the ERCOT system. As the Brattle report points out, ERCOT has so far stuck with a so-called “energy-only” market design while …
Hayek’s Knowledge Problem As an Issue in Electric Power Market Design Read More »
Michael Giberson In the comments on yesterday’s post on the Jevons Paradox, Rick Lightburn notes an article on the rebound effect by the Rocky Mountain Institute, “The ‘Rebound Effect’: A Perennial Controversy Rises Again” (and see a follow up on the RMI blog). The RMI article links to and responds to, among other things, a comprehensive …
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