Lynne Kiesling Today’s Hayek’s birthday, a worthwhile landmark for reflection on his work and why it’s important to read. I assign “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in every class I teach, and I recommend it if you haven’t yet read it. Here Hayek argues that the fundamental economic problem societies face is not the allocation …
Lynne Kiesling [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYO3tOqDISE] Are you a fan of Leonard Read’s I, Pencil (see video above)? Hayek’s argument the “The Use of Knowledge in Society” about how prices coordinate the decisions of anonymous individuals with diffuse private knowledge? Adam Smith’s tale of the making of a woollen coat? Pietra Nivoli’s book on the global travels of …
Lynne Kiesling Regulatory capture is one of the defining phenomena in the political economy of regulation. What is regulatory capture, exactly? In a Tech Liberation post from 2010, Adam Thierer offers this definition: “Regulatory capture” occurs when special interests co-opt policymakers or political bodies — regulatory agencies, in particular — to further their own ends. …
Lynne Kiesling Happy New Year! Here’s a little dose of technology optimism to start your year off: 2012 was a good, solid year for innovation, and there’s room and opportunity for even more. This TechCrunch article describes some burgeoning innovation opportunities in health care, education, transportation, and entertainment. Here’s one thing to bear in mind …
New Areas for Innovation Push Back Against “The Great Stagnation” Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Remember the first time you bought a mobile phone (which in my case was 1995). You may have been happy with your land line phone, but this new mobile phone thing looks like it would be really handy in an emergency, so you-in-1995 said sure, I’ll get a cell phone, but not really …
Over the past week professional cycling has been thrown topsy-turvy by the fallout from the US Anti-Doping Agency’s report on their investigation into performance-enhancing drug (PED) use in the U.S. Postal Service team, 1998-2006. The focus of the dossier is, of course, Lance Armstrong, and the eyewitness testimony is extensive and not very surprising to …
In my remarks the other day about this year’s Roth/Shapley Nobel, I said that I thought the work was important and useful because it led to the implementation of better institutions in situations in which prices are unlikely to emerge organically. A post from Andrew Coulson at Cato at Liberty fleshes out some reasons why …
Lynne Kiesling I have little to add to today’s congratulations to Al Roth and Lloyd Shapley for this year’s Nobel; Peter Klein has a useful roundup of links to good commentary, with a namecheck to us, in his link to his discussion of market design back in 2007 (thanks!). Mike’s frequent posts on price gouging …
Lynne Kiesling For the past year and a half the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating the potential anti-competitive effects of Google’s search-based business model. The European Union has also been pursuing antitrust complaints against Google. The main accusation is Google search bias — Google’s algorithm prioritizes links both to paid advertisers (which are shaded …
Lynne Kiesling You may have seen the article in Sunday’s New York Times on how “wasteful” data centers are — they use large amounts of electricity to enable the level of redundancy required to achieve the degree of reliability and uptime that consumers expect from their Internet activities. I put the word “waste” in quotes …
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