On the U.S. President’s Role in Economic Highs and Lows
Michael Giberson SMBC on the president and the economy: [HT to Rick Weber for the heads up.]
Economics
Catch Shares and Sustainable Fishing
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday was Earth Day, and here’s a good way to observe it: Andrew Langer and Iain Murray argue for catch shares as a sustainable free-market fisheries policy. The idea is simple: give fishermen an ownership stake in a particular fishery through the assignment of quotas, which can be traded. The quotas give individual …
Nhl Suspends Torres for Hossa Hit; Have We Achieved Incentive Compatibility?
Lynne Kiesling This year’s NHL Stanley Cup playoffs are in the first round, and so far the violence has been horrific: “The most vicious and, perhaps, disgraceful first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs” was the verdict of Stu Hackel, the former director of broadcasting for the N.H.L., and this is now close to a …
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Reasons to End the War on Drugs. Now.
Lynne Kiesling Today in Forbes Art Carden has an essay arguing that we should end the War on Drugs and make marijuana legal, now. He’s right. Here’s why. As Art argues, the War on Drugs is a policy poster child for unintended consequences, because the inelastic demand for the regulated good means that stronger enforcement …
Zwolinski: “Is Price Gouging Immoral? Should It Be Illegal?”
Michael Giberson Five minutes of Matt Zwolinski on price gouging (from Learn Liberty). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9QEkw6_O6w] If you think price gouging should be against the law, watch this video. Are you persuaded by Zwolinski? Let me know in the comments. MORE: Zwolinski has written serious philosophical works on price gouging,which makes the clarity of his position in …
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Smart Meter Cybersecurity and Moral Panics
Lynne Kiesling In March I wrote about Adam Thierer’s paper on technopanics — “a moral panic centered on societal fears about a particular contemporary technology” — and I argued that we should bear the moral panic phenomenon in mind when evaluating objections to smart grid technologies. In the past two weeks we’ve seen news articles …
How Green is Your Ev?
Lynne Kiesling On Monday the Union of Concerned Scientists released an analysis estimating the MPG equivalence of electric vehicles. The point of the analysis is this: taking as given an objective of greenhouse gas emission reduction, how do electric vehicles compare to internal combustion vehicles in that dimension? To do such an analysis requires comparing …
NYT Energy For Tomorrow Closing Plenary Video
Lynne Kiesling Last week the New York Times hosted a conference called “Energy For Tomorrow”, and they have made video from all of the sessions available; there are several sessions discussing energy efficiency, natural gas, renewables, etc. I watched the closing plenary on Friday, for which the topic was subsidies in any or all energy …
Hitting the Big Time, Living the Econoblogger Dream
Michael Giberson From the Inbox earlier in this week comes news that Knowledge Problem is one of the blogs monitored and excerpted from time to time by EconAcademics.org, a blog aggregator being run by the Economic Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. You can skip the noise and get right to …
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David Zetland Speaking Words of Wisdom
Lynne Kiesling From the wish-I’d-said-it file (actually, I have said it, just not so eloquently), at Aguanomics: The problem with planners is that they cannot be as flexible or accurate as individuals making their own choices when those choices do not affect each other or can be coordinated at a low cost.