Lynne Kiesling As a celebration of impending spring, I give you economics journalist Olaf Storbeck’s sound analysis of the economics of bike lanes. His prompt for writing was a rant from John Cassidy in the New Yorker about the tradeoff between bike lanes and “free” street parking spaces. Storbeck’s analysis is thorough, and goes beyond …
Lynne Kiesling Will Wilkinson is sick of talking about the broken windows fallacy (as are we all …), and has instead written a very nice overview of the academic literature on the economics of disasters. He gives some good pointers to articles to read, and points out that we simply don’t know the likely economic …
Michael Giberson Last September I asked, “Will faking a consumer cartel help make power markets more efficient?“, “Does FERC really want to go down this path?” and “Do they really think that faking a consumer cartel will help make wholesale power markets work more efficiently?” The answer to the first question is “no, it won’t make markets …
Update on “Will Faking a Consumer Cartel Help Make Power Markets More Efficient?” Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Two good articles on misguided government intervention and energy policy at Reason recommend themselves. Ron Bailey’s written a really excellent, clear, analysis of improved, safer reactor technology, and argues that the best response to the Fukushima accident is not a ban, but rather is innovation: One hopeful possibility is that the Japanese crisis …
Michael Giberson From the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard, “Critics say BPA drops ball while juggling its power“: So much electricity flooded Pacific Northwest powerlines last spring — thanks to rainy, stormy weather powering hydroelectric and wind turbines — that this spring, a federal agency wants the option of turning off wind turbines to keep the system from …
BPA Still Won’t Pay Negative Prices to Get Wind Power Producers to Curtail Read More »
Michael Giberson ABC News last week tackled the question, “Are Gas Stations Price Gouging?” (2:23 min. video) Surprisingly, I liked this story, though (and probably because) they mostly sidestep their question about price gouging and instead go in pursuit of “the highest priced gasoline in America.” They find it at a convenience store just outside …
Michael Giberson Rob Harmon gave a TEDx talk last fall in Seattle on a market mechanism that links willing buyers and willing sellers in a way that protects in-stream water flows and helps restore stream ecosystems. Harmon was formerly with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) in Portland, Oregon, where he was a developer of the …
Rob Harmon at Tedxranier: How the Market Can Keep Streams Flowing Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As you energy gurus know, CERA is one of the leading consulting firms in the energy space, and hosts an increasingly popular event called CERA Week — rather like the Davos of the energy world! In support of the event this past week, CERA has splashed out for two large advertising sections in …
Michael Giberson As previously mentioned here at KP, I cringe when I see Hayek’s “knowledge problem” insight wielded as a rhetorical club. Yet when wielded with subtlety the knowledge problem is, like a rapier, a quite delicate and forceful weapon. Carefully deployed it is the editorialist’s scalpel. So, contrary to the sidebar chatter, I did …
Hayek’s Knowledge Problem Wielded Like a Scalpel Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As an update on my post yesterday morning about Japan, Larry Summers, and the broken window: here’s Russ Roberts weighing in on Summers and the broken window fallacy, from Friday afternoon. Russ’ post also has some links that are worth following, and the comment thread has a worthwhile conversation in it.
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