Lynne Kiesling When I think about climate, greenhouse gases, carbon policy etc., I always worry about the certainty that people (typically politicians) want to attach to models (actually, that statement holds for macroeconomic models too, for the same reasons). The global climate is an incredibly complex system, comprising many individual agents and local systems that …
Lynne Kiesling I am listening to an NPR story right now on the conflicts over the construction of the new pipeline to bring Canadian heavy crude oil from the tar sands to the US. Steve Inskeep introduced the story by observing that as Canadian tar sands production increases, US consumers will “become more dependent on …
Michael Giberson Texans who have drawn there water supplies from the vast but shrinking Ogallala Aquifer are engaged in a complex process of clarifying and/or renegotiating a more exact notion of just what rights they have to access the resource. A story in the Sunday Lubbock Avalanche-Journal provides an update. Some clever “enviropreneurs”, to invoke …
How Can Property Rights in Subsurface Water Work in West Texas? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Alex Tabarrok made some comments on the proposed ATT/T-Mobile merger that reflect my own thinking on the subject: a la Williamson, the benefits of the cost savings from the merger may well exceed the reduction in consumer surplus from any price increase arising from going from 4 national competitors to 3. Alex also …
Michael Giberson At AidWatch, an interview with Dierdre McCloskey, author of Bourgeois Dignity: “Don’t be snobbish towards merchants & entrepreneurs, and you’ll develop.” Short, and to the point, so likely worth a few minutes of your time to read. Here is a shorter and even more to the point summary of her message: History shows …
Dignity and Liberty for Ordinary People Brings Social Growth and Development Read More »
Michael Giberson Christopher Mims explains a “A Web Scam that Makes $500,000 a Month” in MIT’s Technology Review. In essence, a web programmer set up websites to generate revenue off of pay-per-click or pay-per-impression online advertising. That isn’t the interesting part, since many folks have tried to scam money this way. The interesting part is …
Michael Giberson The Spring 2011 issue of Regulation magazine carries my article, “The Problem with Price Gouging Laws.” One bit: Economists and policy analysts opposed to price gouging laws have relied on the simple logic of price controls: if you cap price increases during an emergency, you discourage conservation of needed goods at exactly the time they are in …
Michael Giberson A fool and his money are soon parted. –Thomas Tusser. Potassium iodide supplies in the United States have run low and the price shoots up. What sold for $10 or $20 dollars a week ago is now priced from $30 to $75 and more. Some cry “price gouging!” Regulation magazine has just published an …
At http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/marginalrevolution/feed/~3/ycq8YZirYR0/is-economics-a-science-liquidity-trap-edition.html Marginal Revolution today, Tyler Cowen asks this question, does some research on empirical analyses of the existence (or not) of liquidity traps, and comes up with a conclusion in which I concur: economics is not a science of the researcher cares about the outcomes of the analyses. By the way, apologies for any …
Is Economics a Science? (liquidity Trap Edition) Read More »
Lynne Kiesling For your weekend intellectual stimulation and viewing pleasure … I cannot recommend this highly enough: Deirdre McCloskey’s recent talk at George Mason University about her new self-recommending book Bourgeois Dignity, the second in what’s likely to be a 4-volume re-examination of Western economic history. I guarantee you will learn more, and think more, …
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