Lynne Kiesling Fear is a strong motivating factor, having evolved over millennia as we have protected ourselves against predators. Fear supports self-preservation by making us risk-averse and cautious. But such a deep, visceral, evolved emotion does not always serve our long-term objectives of thriving; it leads to maximin outcomes, and it is often mismatched to …
How Fear Affects Policy: Adam Thierer on Technopanics Read More »
Michael Giberson Like the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, I’d like to see the Production Tax Credit for wind and other renewable energy technologies expire at the end of this year as scheduled. So policy-wise, I’m with them. Still, their editorial against the wind power policy yesterday was awful and it deserves public …
The Wsj’s Awful Editorial Against the Wind Power Industry Read More »
Michael Giberson The Spectator magazine in the U.K. announces the Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy: Matt Ridley has long deplored the wind farm delusion, and was appalled when a family trust was paid by a wind farm company in compensation for mineral rights on land on which it wanted to build a turbine. The …
Lynne Kiesling At PERC, Jonathan Adler has a trenchant post highlighting the environmental consequences of the eminent domain precedent established in the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision. In opposition to the Keystone pipeline, environmentalists are criticizing the use of eminent domain that could override their objections. Jonathan observes that “… the use of eminent domain for …
Michael Giberson At the end of a comment on Windfall, a new documentary on the effects of wind power development on a community in upstate New York, Michael Munger pulls out the key Pigou quote. Pigou is relevant because the best possible case to be made for subsidizing wind power production involves correcting for the …
A.C. Pigou, Public Choice Economist, on the Use of Government Read More »
Michael Giberson Slate‘s technology columnist Farhad Manjoo examines Honeywell vs. Nest from a tech consumer’s point of view. The Honeywell v. Nest lawsuit is being justifiably criticized as another black mark on our broken patent system. If Honeywell invented all these cool features, why didn’t it make something of them? … Honeywell seems to have …
Lynne Kiesling In the comments on Mike’s post yesterday about the Honeywell patent lawsuit against Nest, Ed asks in the comments how it is that patents stifle innovation rather than promote it. The theoretical answer is that, as a government-granted monopoly, patents embed both incentives — at the margin they increase the incentive to create …
How Patents Stifle Innovation, Honeywell Edition Read More »
Michael Giberson Economist Alex Tabarrok, author of Launching the Innovation Renaissance and Marginal Revolution blogger, worries that the proliferation of patents is stifling innovation, particularly patents for business processes. In an interview with Russ Roberts for EconTalk, Tabarrok remarked that large companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google building up massive numbers of patents mostly to …
Michael Giberson Speed blogging a few stories: “The ’100 mpg prize’: An idea whose time has passed?” by Ken Paulman Earlier this week, California GOP Rep. Dan Lungren introduced a bill that would offer a $1 billion prize to the first automaker than can put 60,000 cars achieving 100 mpg on the road. Only requirement …
Lynne Kiesling Ken Silverstein has a good article in Forbes on the business prospects for shale gas developers (and I’m glad to see him there, having followed his work for a very long time). Since he asks in the title whether low shale gas prices are a mirage, I think it’s useful to go through …
Shale Gas Glut, but Won’t Last? The Underlying Model Read More »
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