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 …
Lynne Kiesling I found a lot of interesting and insightful thoughts in my morning reading today; here’s a synopsis: Election year linguistics 1: The New York Times has an analysis of the language used by Obama and the four presidential candidates; at Cato at Liberty, David Boaz points out how different Ron Paul’s emphasis is …
Michael Giberson Yesterday I disputed the analysis by which the Breakthough Institute wanted to claim credit on behalf of the federal government for the shale gas boom; today I dispute their claimed broader implications for federal energy R&D policy. Late in their op-ed, the Breakthrough folks shift emphasis from a narrow drilling technology story to …
Does a Public Good Argument Justify Subsidizing Private Energy Production? Read More »
Michael Giberson In the Washington Post the folks at the Breakthrough Institute try to learn us some history about the shale gas boom. Maybe you think the shale gas boom was some big surprise suddenly made real after the decades-long work of a hard-headed oil and gas guy – George Mitchell – willing to spend …
Did the Federal Government Invent the Shale Gas Boom? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The cost saving-focused mindset has prevailed in regulated industries for over a century, slowing innovation in the process. In electricity, regulation that bases firms’ profits on cost recovery erects market barriers by recognizing only a business model that involves providing a specified product (110v power to the home) transported over a monopoly network. …
Michael Giberson Paul M. Barrett, for Bloomberg, has written up a pretty good introduction to natural gas from shale. The article delves a bit into the history and geology of the subject, but focuses more on the business efforts that turned a modestly interesting rock into a significant economic resource and the environmental politics that …
Michael Giberson If you believed what politicians say about green energy and jobs, you probably think they fit together like peanut butter and jelly squished between layers of bread. Has there been a renewable power subsidy announcement or ribbon-cutting ceremony where the word “jobs” was not featured in the first two or three sentences uttered …
Wherein the Jobs Jobs Jobs Rhetoric Hampers Solar Power Development Read More »
Michael Giberson Brief notes about other energy stories in the news. Flywheel energy storage company Beacon Power has filed for bankruptcy. News stories have highlighted the point that Beacon was a recipient of federal energy technology loan guarantees, which will give an additional boost to Solyndra critics, but I predict the apparent lack of high-level …
Michael Giberson Inventor James Dyson is a fan of Thomas Edison and making lots of mistakes. From the November 2011 WIRED UK: Thomas Edison, the American inventor, is synonymous with trial-and-error innovating. He would build a prototype, test it, watch it go wrong, tweak the design and build another. Over and over again. … Dyson has …
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