Lynne Kiesling Price Fishback is one of the best economic historians of the U.S. in the early 20th century, and he’s written a three-part series of posts on the current comparisons to the Great Depression at Freakonomics. Part 1, How Does the Current Crisis Compare to the Great Depression?, puts our current unemployment and GDP …
Price Fishback on the Great Depression and Today Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Johnson Controls and the International Facilities Management Association have released their third annual Energy Efficiency Indicator survey. As summarized in this GreenBiz article, More than 70 percent of respondents are paying more attention to energy efficiency now than they were in 2008. Eighty-five percent of executives believe significant legislation mandating energy efficiency and/or …
Michael Giberson Geoffrey Rapp, (“Gouging: Terrorist Attacks, Hurricanes, and the Legal and Economic Aspects of Post-Disaster Price Regulation”, Kentucky Law Journal, 2006) expresses concern that fairness-based advocates of anti-price gouging laws and efficiency-minded opponents of such laws have such different approaches to the issue that there is “no way to reach a shared understanding of …
Anti-price Gouging Laws and Economic Efficiency: On Rapp and Skarbek on Price Gouging Read More »
Michael Giberson From the New York Times City Room, “U.S. Won’t Auction Airport Landing Slots“: The United States Department of Transportation has canceled a plan to auction landing slots at New York City’s three airports, officials announced on Wednesday, bringing an end to a widely criticized effort by the Bush administration to use market incentives …
Administration Abandons Airport Landing Slot Auction Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I am in violent agreement with my friend Todd Zywicki’s commentary in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal on the Obama administration’s actions in the Chrysler bankruptcy. In particular, By stepping over the bright line between the rule of law and the arbitrary behavior of men, President Obama may have created a thousand new failing …
Todd Zywicki: the Commerce Clause is in the Constitution for a Reason Read More »
Michael Giberson The April 2009 Business Ethics Quarterly includes an article on price gouging by Jeremy Snyder, a response from Matt Zwolinski, whose article on the topic was published a year ago, and a reply from Snyder. (Zwolinski’s earlier article on price gouging was discussed here last March. See related links below.) Snyder (“What’s the …
Price Gouging: Is It Wrong? Should It Be Against the Law? Read More »
Michael Giberson I’ve been reading several price gouging articles lately. One, by G. C. Rapp in the Kentucky Law Journal, (“Gouging: Terrorist Attacks, Hurricanes, and the Legal and Economic Aspects of Post-Disaster Price Regulation”, 2006) makes a relatively novel reach to behavioral economics to try to justify an efficiency claim for anti-price gouging laws. In …
Price Gouging and Behavioral Economics – More Work Needed Read More »
Michael Giberson An example: The biggest reason the human brain will always remain irrational is because Wall Street wants it that way. Wall Street can control irrational Americans better using its high-tech neuroeconomic data, strategies and algorithms. I’d rate the whole thing as somewhere between car-crash bad and train-wreck bad. There might be a good …
This Anti-Neuroeconomics Screed on Marketwatch is So Bad You Have to Stop and Look Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Last year I worked on the project team for the Illinois Smart Grid Initiative, in which we brought together a wide range of stakeholders to discuss the opportunities, benefits, and costs of different models of investing in smart grid infrastructure and technologies. We also discussed the important regulatory institutional changes that would be …
Lynne Kiesling Last week Whirlpool announced that by 2015 all of their appliances would have embedded digital intelligence to make them responsive, transactive smart grid devices. There have been a few articles on this point, most recently this Reuters/GreenBiz one. Of course the crucial work here will be in developing open interoperability standards: The home …
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