Lynne Kiesling We don’t write much about health care economics here, but in many respects it does raise some of the same issues that I find fascinating in electricity, telecom, and technology industries. David Zetland has a good post today about how third-party payer health care rules lead to cost increases and overconsumption of health …
Lynne Kiesling Want better information about your electricity consumption, even if your premise does not have a utility “smart meter”? Do it yourself! Here are some examples, using in-home power meters and the home’s broadband connection to collect the electricity consumption data at WattzOn, an online energy tracking and monitoring tool. The idea is straightforward; …
Want Better Electricity Information? Do It Yourself! Read More »
Lynne Kiesling … But wait, there’s more! Greentech Media’s Green Tech Grid channel lists all of their smart grid Q&A interviews (from Jesse Berst and Michael Butler), including the two that I mentioned in my post earlier today. There are also links to other resources, worthy of your perusal.
Lynne Kiesling Greentech Media has a couple of really good smart grid Q&A articles, one with Peter Fox-Penner and Ahmad Faruqui, and one with Fred Butler. Fox-Penner and Faruqui are two leading economists (with the Brattle Group) in analyzing consumer behavior and price responsiveness in electricity, and Butler is on the New Jersey Public Service …
Lynne Kiesling My article on smart grid from the June print edition of Reason is now available online. Here’s the conclusion for a bit of a teaser: The obsolete electro-mechanical electric power network, built by and for a monopoly industry, cannot support the kind of growth experienced during the last 20 years in so many …
Lynne Kiesling I talk to a lot of different folks with different backgrounds in economics. Perhaps it’s because of the specific and arcane nature of “utility economics”, but many of the folks I meet think of economics as being very focused on forecasting, financial analysis, and quantitative estimates of various investments, rate/tariff policies, etc. Frankly, …
Lynne Kiesling Here are a couple of interesting and related articles on urban dynamism and what economists call economies of agglomeration. Digital communication technology was supposed to reduce those economies of agglomeration, right? We can work from anywhere, don’t have to be physically co-located, and that includes developing countries too … so, as Ed Glaeser …
Glaeser and Florida on Urbanization, and Nashville’s Lure Read More »
Lynne Kiesling In today’s Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg has one of the clearest articulations of the bootleggers and Baptists dynamic in carbon policy, and nails one of the fundamental reasons why the Waxman-Markey bill is bad policy: Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to …
Lynne Kiesling Even if it doesn’t end up being the disruptive innovation that these articles suggest, Verizon’s MiFI personal wifi hotspot device makes my little Schumpeterian heart go pitter-pat. Released yesterday, the Verizon MiFi (device by Novatel) is a credit-card sized 3G wireless router that can provide wireless Internet connection for up to 5 devices. …
Perennial Gale of Creative Destruction, Personal Wireless Division Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Price Fishback is one of the best economic historians of the U.S. in the early 20th century, and he’s written a three-part series of posts on the current comparisons to the Great Depression at Freakonomics. Part 1, How Does the Current Crisis Compare to the Great Depression?, puts our current unemployment and GDP …
Price Fishback on the Great Depression and Today Read More »
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive