Lynne Kiesling Megan McArdle offers an essay assignment: Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry has an essay question: Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex–agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, …
Michael Giberson …yes: cocoa market manipulation says Craig Pirrong. He comes to that conclusion after his examination of price movements in cocoa markets revealed all the fingerprints of a classic squeeze. In brief, Pirrong compared July London cocoa prices against September and November London prices and July New York prices over a period from January …
Cocoa Market Manipulation? The Evidence Suggests… Read More »
Michael Giberson From Michael Hiltzik, in the Los Angeles Times, “The false promise of Hoover Dam.” Hiltzik provides a good summary of the political promises and pretenses that allowed the dam to be built in the first place. He then examines the competing demands for the current and future use of the dam. I liked …
Michael Giberson From Aaron Smith, econoblogging at the Christian Science Monitor, speaking of government intervention into the economy and capping “excessive” salaries in particular. (Note that the first sentence is explicating typical arguments made by other folks, not Smith’s own view. The very good sentence is the one that follows.): The money saved from capping …
Lynne Kiesling Wow, Russ Roberts has a wonderful column in today’s Wall Street Journal about Hayek and the recent interest in his work (the link is subscriber-only, but if you Google for the article you should be able to get the whole thing to pull up from Opinion Journal). It’s an outstanding summary of why …
Russ Roberts on Hayek in the Wall Street Journal Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Last week the Maryland Public Service Commission rejected Baltimore Gas & Electric’s proposed project to install over 2 million digital electric or gas meters, change the retail electricity rate structure to incorporate time-of-use pricing and peak-time rebates, and recover the meter capital costs through a surcharge on residential retail bills. BG&E’s ambitious and …
What the Maryland Psc’s Rejection of Bg&e’s Smart Grid Proposal Reveals About Regulation Read More »
Lynne Kiesling David Warsh’s Economic Principals column this week is about complexity, and the study of complexity in economics. It is as informative and insightful as Warsh’s columns usually are, despite its selective coverage. He highlights some ideas that I think are important for the future direction of economics — the isolation of the twin …
Lynne Kiesling Like Mike the other day, I have been thinking about possibly Pareto-improving rule changes in international soccer; like Richard Epstein I have always thought about sports rules (and league organization and market structure) as interesting market design issues. Take, for example, the unintended changes in ice hockey and American football after the introduction …
More Rule/market Design Recommendations for International Football-soccer Read More »
Michael Giberson Hadn’t actually thought of the rules of professional sports leagues as a market design issue before, but Richard Epstein’s column in Forbes proposing rule changes for soccer suggests the idea. Epstein suggests a couple of changes, drawing on basketball and hockey for inspiration: First, he says goals scored in the run of play …
Lynne Kiesling An article in New Scientist is an excerpt from a new work on tacit knowledge. Harry Collins of Cardiff University is following Michael Polanyi’s treatment of tacit knowledge, but arguing that of the three categories of tacit knowledge he identifies (somatic, relational, collective). Collins argues that Polanyi characterized tacit knowledge as mysterious: To …
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