Many of you are probably already familiar with Leonard Read’s famous 1958 story I, Pencil. Told through the eyes of a pencil, it describes the process of producing a pencil and how many people are involved in doing so, but without ever having met or consciously, deliberately set out a plan under the control of …
Pencil or Peach, Either Way, a Marvel of Decentralized Coordination Read More »
Today in my antitrust and regulation class we talked about natural monopoly theory and what drives the natural monopoly cost structure. A lot of times in practical conversation with regulators and industry we talk about economies of scale, the decrease in average cost of production as the quantity produced increases, as being the main factor …
I think we could use some good news this week. According to an article in the Baltimore Sun, the current blue crab population in the Chesapeake Bay is one-third larger than it was at the same time in 2015: There are more than 550 million blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay, an increase of more …
Institutional persistence creates some of the thorniest problems in public policy, including electricity policy. Institutions change more slowly than technology and markets, because of both design and status quo bias, which means that dynamic processes of economic and technological change can make regulatory institutions outdated. This mismatch is showing up right now in the electricity …
My R Street Policy Study: Electricity Market Alternatives to Regulatory Net Metering Read More »
The Adam Smith Institute has published a research report I wrote for them, Power Up: The framework for a new era of UK energy distribution. From the press release: The report … argues that new technologies such as smart grids and distributed energy production can revolutionise old models of energy distribution and pricing, in the …
Power Up: The Framework for a New ERA of UK Energy Distribution Read More »
Angus Deaton is the worthy and deserving winner of this year’s economics Nobel. The arc of his work, from theory to data to empirical application, has been consumption, measuring consumption, and consumption as an indicator of well-being, poverty, and inequality. His analyses also incorporate political economy as a factor influencing those relationships and incentives. If …
Technological change is disruptive, and in the long sweep of human history, that disruption is one of the fundamental sources of economic growth and what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment: In 1800 the average income per person…all over the planet was…an average of $3 a day. Imagine living in present-day Rio or Athens or …
Technological Change, Culture, and a “Social License to Operate” Read More »
Back in 2001 I participated in a year-long forum on the future of the electricity distribution model. Convened by the Center for the Advancement of Energy Markets, the DISCO of the Future Forum brought together many stakeholders to develop several scenarios and analyze their implications (and several of those folks remain friends, playmates in the …
We live in interesting times in the electricity industry. Vibrant technological dynamism, the very dynamism that has transformed how we work, play, and live, puts increasing pressure on the early-20th-century physical network, regulatory model, and resulting business model of the vertically-integrated distribution utility. While the utility “death spiral” rhetoric is overblown, these pressures are real. …
The New York Rev and the Distribution Company of the Future Read More »
As the consequences of the FCC vote to classify the Internet as a Title II service start to sink in, here are a couple of good commentaries you may not have seen. Jeffrey Tucker’s political economy analysis of the Title II vote as a power grab is one of the best overall analyses of the …
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