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 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 …
Lynne Kiesling Why is it so difficult, in terms of politics and transaction costs, to define and enforce property rights in fish? If we fail to do so, some important fish species are likely to go extinct due to overfishing, such as the bluefin tuna. Migratory fish like the bluefin pose the biggest policy challenges, …
Overfishing and the Impending Collapse of Fisheries Read More »
Lynne Kiesling On Friday at Environmental Economics, Tim Haab wrote about the implications of New Source Review for innovation in a regulated industry, and how to represent it in the standard Pigouvian model (do go read the whole post, it’s very useful). The basic question is this: does the stifling of innovation that results from …
Electricity Generation, New Source Review, and Waste Read More »
Lynne Kiesling If you like to cook and to eat well in Chicago, you can’t avoid chef Grant Achatz (nor should you want to!). His signature restaurant, Alinea, was recently named the best restaurant in the U.S. and one of the best restaurants in the world, and he is a creative, if controversial, innovator of …
Dynamic Pricing for Foodies … and for Electricity? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday Google announced that their ever-growing sustainability strategy now includes investing in wind generation. Although they pursue these opportunities through their philanthropic arm, they claim that they are looking for meaningful returns on their investments in addition to their sustainability impact: To reach a clean energy future, we need three things: effective policy, …
Lynne Kiesling I’ve seen two interesting things today in the ongoing debate between Apple and Adobe over Apple’s refusal to allow developers for the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad to develop Flash-based applications. First is an open letter from Steve Jobs with an extensive discussion of Apple’s long relationship with Adobe (including an ownership share …
Apple and Adobe: It Depends on What Your Definition of “Open” is Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I was intrigued last week to read Bruce Yandle’s short piece in Regulation discussing Pigou and his ideas about taxation in the context of modern “Pigouvian” policy proposals. I recommend his essay highly; it communicates eloquently how Pigou’s ideas are currently being used as a justification for a variety of forms of taxation. …
Pigou As Public Choice Economist, Not a Pigouvian Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’ve been meaning to write about the libertarian paternalism series at Cato Unbound for a week or so, but have been too busy to pull it off. Happily, Ilya Somin has a good post that touches on a couple of the themes I wanted to raise (and I second his recommendation to read …
Lynne Kiesling I love this story; it’s like Knowledge Problem + Aguanomics = individual choice, efficiency, conservation, and elegance. Water conservation is a large and growing concern, in large part because our public policy does such an abominable job of creating a framework/market design to send good scarcity signals to diverse individual users, and to …
Technology + Dynamic Pricing Conserves Water Too (duh) Read More »
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