Economics

Does a Public Good Argument Justify Subsidizing Private Energy Production?

Economic history, Economics, Energy markets, Technology / By

Michael Giberson Yesterday I disputed the analysis by which the Breakthough Institute wanted to claim credit on behalf of the federal government for the shale gas boom; today I dispute their claimed broader implications for federal energy R&D policy. Late in their op-ed, the Breakthrough folks shift emphasis from a narrow drilling technology story to …

Does a Public Good Argument Justify Subsidizing Private Energy Production? Read More »

Did the Federal Government Invent the Shale Gas Boom?

20 Comments / Economic history, Economics, Technology / By

Michael Giberson In the Washington Post the folks at the Breakthrough Institute try to learn us some history about the shale gas boom. Maybe you think the shale gas boom was some big surprise suddenly made real after the decades-long work of a hard-headed oil and gas guy – George Mitchell – willing to spend …

Did the Federal Government Invent the Shale Gas Boom? Read More »

David Henderson on Crony Capitalism

Economics, Politics / By

The KP Chicago contingent is still on vacation, barely recovered from the end-of-term rush and grading, and the KP Texas contingent is still head-down-pen-moving over the aforementioned grading; thus the relative calm here. In the interim, I cannot recommend highly enough David Henderson’s recounting of his talk at Occupy Monterey. David’s notes contain substantive and …

David Henderson on Crony Capitalism Read More »

“Market Failure”: You Keep Using That Term. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

7 Comments / Economics / By

Lynne Kiesling Steve Horwitz’s column in The Freeman today is a great explication of why the phrase “market failure” is so problematic, and so often misused and abused in public policy analysis when employed to criticize market outcomes. Steve does a good job of explaining the origins of the phrase in the standard textbook case …

“Market Failure”: You Keep Using That Term. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means. Read More »

An Example of What Not to Do in Persuasion

1 Comment / Complexity, Economics / By

Lynne Kiesling Alex Tabarrok has an excellent post this morning at Marginal Revolution: David Warsh and Paul Krugman try to write Hayek out of the history of macroeconomics. … It is true that many of Hayek’s specific ideas about business cycles vanished from the mainstream discussion under the Keynesian juggernaut but what Krugman and Warsh miss is that …

An Example of What Not to Do in Persuasion Read More »

An Sea Meetings Coda

Economics / By

Lynne Kiesling John Whitehead already mentioned our joint AERE/USAEE session at the SEA meetings last week. It turned out well, a combination of carbon offsets analysis and electricity market design experiments. Rim Baltaduonis from Gettysburg College presented two different, interesting experimental papers, one on designing rules for enabling contracts for carbon sequestration in soil (which …

An Sea Meetings Coda Read More »

Cost Savings and Value Creation Are Different

2 Comments / Economics, Electricity, Technology / By

Lynne Kiesling The cost saving-focused mindset has prevailed in regulated industries for over a century, slowing innovation in the process. In electricity, regulation that bases firms’ profits on cost recovery erects market barriers by recognizing only a business model that involves providing a specified product (110v power to the home) transported over a monopoly network. …

Cost Savings and Value Creation Are Different Read More »

Hotelling Takedown

Economics / By

Michael Giberson One of the classics of resource economics is Harold Hotelling’s “The economics of exhaustible resources,” Journal of Political Economy (1931). The article gave us what is now called “Hotelling’s rule,” which links resource prices and extraction rates for resources in finite supply. The article was simple, logical, and pathbreaking. It also, by the …

Hotelling Takedown Read More »

Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive