Lynne Kiesling Yesterday Google announced its purchase of Motorola Mobility, the device manufacturing half of the former Motorola. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a front page full of stories about this move, including “Bid Comes Amid Tougher Scrutiny” (You know how to read this even though it’s subscriber-only, right? Do a search at a news …
Google, Motorola, and the Effects of Vertical Integration Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Thanks to Tim Haab for pointing us to this excellent observation from Bjorn Lomborg about innovation, regulation, and environmental quality: Real reductions in carbon emissions will occur only when better technology makes it worthwhile for individuals and businesses to change their behavior. CFLs and other advances can take us part of the way, …
Lynne Kiesling Here’s another great video from Learn Liberty: Sean Mulholland introducing the “tragedy of the commons”, which, as he accurately notes, is more accurately called the problem of open access. If you teach a class where you talk about this problem, or want to learn more about this fundamental ill-defined property rights foundation of …
Lynne Kiesling One of the most beautiful aspects of market processes is how individuals create and take advantage of new profit and growth opportunities by creating value for others. Here’s a case in point that will resonate with many of you, given the outstanding diligence and insight of Mike’s fracking analyses here: clean water for …
Michael Giberson Colleen Haight examines the past and present of Fair Trade-certified coffee and wonders whether it has a future in “The Problem with Fair Trade Coffee,” published at the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The title probably should have been “Problems,” plural, as more than one problem gets explored in the article. I’ve argued in …
Lynne Kiesling In 2011, roughly fifteen years after the passage of the first state-level electricity regulation restructuring legislation (in states like California, Pennsylvania, Maine, …), retail competition for residential customers remains anemic in most of the 15 states + DC that have implemented restructuring and allow retail choice. Lots of possible theories exist for such …
Electricity Restructuring and the Failure to Quarantine the Monopoly Read More »
Michael Giberson Most of the current 18.4 cents per gallon federal gasoline tax is set to expire at the end of September, and there are some indications that it may become the occasion for the next big political fight in Congress. See Politico and Platts for background. Grover Nordquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, says …
Lynne Kiesling Too many people are writing and saying too many interesting things to digest on the debt actions in the eurozong and the debt downgrade in the US … and some people are saying some extremely misinformed and silly things too. But I’d like to highlight a few comments I’ve read today and over …
Lynne Kiesling A ruling last week from Minnesota’s Court of Appeals provides an interesting case study in using common law and legal liability (a la Coase) in an environmental case. As summarized in the St. Cloud Times, the issue at hand is pesticide drift — when pesticide spray on one field is carried over to …
Lynne Kiesling Today’s global stock market correction is a humdinger, and is almost certainly the result of multiple factors — expectations of minimal impact of debt ceiling deal, tepid domestic and international manufacturing data, tepid domestic unemployment data, expectations of tepid employment data tomorrow, and what’s really the 800-pound gorilla here, the eurozone debt and …
Blaming Obama for Global Equities Drops? Really? Read More »
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