Lynne Kiesling In one of the most incredible pieces of fortuitous timing, after I recommended Richard Epstein’s Simple Rules for a Complex World in my post on our regulatory thickets, here’s a new video of Richard discussing this exact topic! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUr-MbPUl5M] A clear 22-minute discussion, well worth your time (and the time of any Congressional …
Lynne Kiesling This week’s Economist has an article that points out what many US residents, and readers of this blog, know full well: But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a …
Lynne Kiesling I am pleased to announce my first video in the Learn Liberty series — “Regulating Monopolies: A History of Electricity Regulation“. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=430OAJuh0nk&feature=player_embedded] It’s a brief overview of the economic history of the origins of the electricity industry and its regulation, and points towards the extent to which in the 21st century we are …
Lynne Kiesling I was glad Mike mentioned Alex Tabarrok’s recent Launching the Innovation Renaissance in his recent post on the Honeywell-Next patent lawsuit, because reading Alex’s new TED book was on my to-do list for this past weekend. Alex’s focus in this book is U.S. innovation policy and ways that we could improve the institutional …
Alex Tabarrok on Innovation, Barriers to It, and the Warfare-welfare State Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Dynamic pricing has long been a topic of great interest here, in large part because digital technology is increasingly making it feasible to implement dynamic pricing in retail electricity markets in ways that can be acceptable to consumers. But dynamic pricing is fraught with challenges, and not just in retail electricity markets. Dynamic …
Dynamic Pricing and Technology in Different Markets Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I have a new paper that may be of interest to KP readers, since the subject of the paper is the same as the name of this site: Knowledge Problem. I am honored to have been invited to contribute this paper to the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Austrian Economics (Peter Boettke and Chris …
Lynne Kiesling In the comments on Mike’s post yesterday about the Honeywell patent lawsuit against Nest, Ed asks in the comments how it is that patents stifle innovation rather than promote it. The theoretical answer is that, as a government-granted monopoly, patents embed both incentives — at the margin they increase the incentive to create …
How Patents Stifle Innovation, Honeywell Edition Read More »
Michael Giberson If you follow price gouging headlines, you become accustomed to seeing price gouging stories around big sports events: the Rugby World Cup, NASCAR races, NCAA basketball finals, and always the Olympics (a selection: Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Salt Lake City 2002, Athens 2004, Vancouver 2010, London 2012, and finally this extreme example). All of …
Lynne Kiesling Ron Bailey gets the quote of the day from this post about how cheap natural gas is roiling various energy markets, including renewables and nuclear: Can an energy source be all that bad if it scares the two most heavily subsidized sectors of the electric power generation industry?
Lynne Kiesling Ken Silverstein has a good article in Forbes on the business prospects for shale gas developers (and I’m glad to see him there, having followed his work for a very long time). Since he asks in the title whether low shale gas prices are a mirage, I think it’s useful to go through …
Shale Gas Glut, but Won’t Last? The Underlying Model Read More »
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