By now you’ve probably heard that last week the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission passed a rule stipulating that automobile sales in the state cannot be direct-to-consumer, and must instead take place via dealer franchises. Tesla Motors was the clear target of this regulation, with its innovative electric vehicles and direct-to-consumer sales model. New Jersey …
Rent-seeking Diary: State Dealer Franchise Laws and Tesla Read More »
The United Nations has declared March 3 to be World Wildlife Day. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on the problems of wildlife poaching, which, as Ashok Rao wrote recently, is a moral, social, and political problem. But, as Virginia Postrel pointed out in her then-NYT Economic Scene column in 2000, it’s also an economic …
Were you surprised to hear of Google’s acquisition of Nest? Probably not; nor was I. Google has long been interested in energy monitoring technologies and the effect that access to energy information can have on individual consumption decisions. In 2009 they introduced Power Meter, which was an energy monitoring and visualization tool; I wrote about …
John Cochrane’s commentary in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, What To Do When Obamacare Unravels, provides a strong and thoughtful analysis of what a free health care market could look like. In his argument he accomplishes two important tasks: he lays out the extent to which the U.S. health care market is not a free …
Cochrane on Aca’s Unravelling: Parallels to Electricity Read More »
My friend and colleague Joel Mokyr talked recently with Russ Roberts in an EconTalk podcast that I cannot recommend highly enough (and the links on the show notes are great too). The general topic is this back-and-forth that’s been going on over the past year involving Joel, Bob Gordon, Tyler Cowen, and Erik Brynjolfsson, among …
Joel Mokyr on Growth, Stagnation, and Technological Progress Read More »
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about the use, overuse, and misuse of the word “innovation” in modern business, particularly with respect to consumer products. The number of instances of S&P 500 CEOs using the word in their earnings calls has doubled since 2007. Sadly, this misuse and overuse threatens to remove all meaning …
The above is a quote from Duke political economist (and friend of KP) Mike Munger, who also blogs at Kids Prefer Cheese and Euvoluntary Exchange, and is a frequent guest on EconTalk. Mike’s written a thoughtful and interesting reflection in the Freeman on what libertarians stand for. In many ways it’s a riff on Toqueville …
Freshly returned from a few months spent with his new baby (congratulations!), Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic wonders why gas prices are falling in the US. He notes that the national average is the lowest it’s been in almost three years. He identifies a few factors that influence gas prices, most notably world oil prices. …
Alexis Madrigal: Why Are Gasoline Prices Falling? Read More »
Popular Mechanics magazine headlined an article with the question, “One year after Superstorm Sandy, has anything changed?” Well, sure: over the last year the state governments in New York and New Jersey have put a lot of time and money into punishing a few businesses that provided shelter and gasoline to people whose lives were …
One Year After Superstorm Sandy: Charities, Price Gougers and the State Read More »
A careful comparison of Saudi Arabia’s oil production behavior with rest-of-OPEC production provides a way to see the consistency in Saudi behavior where many analysts have missed it, according to the authors of a report forthcoming in the journal Energy Policy. Sometimes Saudi and rest-of-OPEC production movements are positively correlated and other times negatively correlated–a …
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