Lynne Kiesling This may be the beginning of what I’ve been arguing for over the past decade plus … today in Smart Grid News, Jesse Berst reports that Constellation Energy has teamed up with Best Buy to enable customers to come into the store, switch their retail provider, and buy home energy management devices (see …
Innovative Retail Competition: is It Finally Starting … and in Chicago? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Over the weekend Mike praised the Institute for Humane Studies teaching workshop he attended last summer. I’ll add to that an IHS recommendation for students: attend as many IHS summer seminars as you can while you’re a student! More than ten week-long seminars sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies apply classical liberal …
Lynne Kiesling While we’re at Learn Liberty, and in light of today’s Congressional Republican federal government budget proposal, here’s economist Antony Davies on the implications of our government’s indebtedness. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID4xay5RITY&feature=player_embedded] When we covered this in my intro macro class this winter, it was sobering for my 18-20-year old students to realize that they are the …
Lynne Kiesling Got two spare minutes and want to spend it enriching yourself? Then watch this great Learn Liberty video from Aeon Skoble. Aeon’s a philosopher who also reads a lot of economics, so he’s in a distinctive position to make this important point — both economists and philosophers use the word “value”, but we …
Lynne Kiesling Fear is a strong motivating factor, having evolved over millennia as we have protected ourselves against predators. Fear supports self-preservation by making us risk-averse and cautious. But such a deep, visceral, evolved emotion does not always serve our long-term objectives of thriving; it leads to maximin outcomes, and it is often mismatched to …
How Fear Affects Policy: Adam Thierer on Technopanics Read More »
Sarah Skwire The “most modern man” in Dickens, John Wemmick from Great Expectations, makes much of the importance of separating what Deirdre McCloskey calls the P-values of prudence from the S-values of sociability. “The office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle [his home] …
Lynne Kiesling A couple of weeks ago, a few friends and I had some fun making this promotional video for Students for Liberty: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M7iW4n_OHpg] If you are a student and want to get more involved in creating a future in which our civil liberties still exist, economic freedom prevails, and we interact with others through …
Students: A Message from the Elderly — Join Students for Liberty! Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Have you been tempted to nudge? Persuaded by arguments in favor of default opt-ins for things like retirement savings plans? Or do you think behavioral economics is largely about committing the Nirvana fallacy by holding out for some perfection that is only possible in theory? Regardless of your familiarity with or persuasion by …
Michael Giberson The “green power paradox” grabs Hotelling by the ankles, turns him upside down, and shakes the change out of his pockets. Harold Hotelling’s classic article, “The Economics of Exhaustible Resources,” observes that the owner of an exhaustible resource stock always is making choices in the shadow of the future. If the owner produces …
Michael Giberson At the end of a comment on Windfall, a new documentary on the effects of wind power development on a community in upstate New York, Michael Munger pulls out the key Pigou quote. Pigou is relevant because the best possible case to be made for subsidizing wind power production involves correcting for the …
A.C. Pigou, Public Choice Economist, on the Use of Government Read More »
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