Category Archives: Environment
Romer, new theory of economic growth theory, and patent wars
One contender for this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics is Stanford economist Paul Romer, son of a Colorado governor. You should note that Romer is the developer of “Aplia,” a homework, quizzing, and practice software system that he sold a few years ago to Cengage. Aplia is the homework and quizzing software that is currently [...]
Governor calls with last minute reprieve for California drivers
Just as many California drivers thought they were being sent to their doom with prices nearing $6 a gallon at some stations, California’s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has called on California’s air quality regulators to allow an early switch to the less strict winter blend of gasoline, a blend that produces smog more easily than the [...]
Mess in Disposable Diapers
Disposable diapers have almost completely replaced cloth nappies in the U.S. and in many other developed nations. There seems to be a high likelihood of a price increase in these convenient diapers after a recent explosion in Himeji, Japan, shut down a Nippon Shokubai chemical plant as we see in this article from ABC. [...]
Gasoline prices in L.A. approaching $6 a gallon
Gasoline prices in L.A. are now approaching $6 a gallon as is reported here by CBS in LA. Obviously, prices in the rest of the country are considerably lower than that. Even in California, prices in northern California, as in San Francisco are a bit lower, but there are also supply problems in the San Francisco [...]
UN considers global taxation
Yesterday I posted a comment on the World Health Organization’s attempts to place a global tax on cigarettes here. Today, I read here that the UN is attempting to tax billionaires, carbon, airline flights, minerals, currency trading in dominant currencies (the dollar, the pound, the euro, the yen), and in financial transactions. In yesterday’s posted [...]
Breaking windows, destroying cars and creating jobs
Bastiat, in one of his best-known essays points to the lack of logic of those who suggest that we can become better off through destruction, a fallacy that has come to be called the “broken window fallacy.”. In 2006, in this inaugural post on Bastiat’s Bastions, Norbert Michel and I suggested that the notion that [...]
Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics, dead at 78
Yesterday, Professor Elinor Ostrom passed away as is reported in this article in the Washington Post. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel prize in economics for her work on how people are able to manage the “tragedy of the commons,” the overuse of resources that are not protected by private property rights, without government [...]
Looking beyond GDP to measure prosperity
Here is another interesting article, Measuring Prosperity: Maryland’s Genuine Progress Indicator by Sean McGuire, Stephen Posner, and Hans Haake, from the same issue of Solutions Journal. This is about how Maryland has implemented a measure called the General Prosperity Index as a step away from the commonly used Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Gross State Product [...]
Water, water, not quite everywhere
Last year, I posted “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” borrowing the famous line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. What I wrote about there was how residents of the southwestern Louisiana town of Sulphur had little incentive to economize on their use of water because they paid a flat fee for [...]
Waste and corruption in competing for special favors in renewable energy
This New York Times article describes the federal government’s huge subsidy program in renewable energy as a gold rush. Perhaps, a better analogy is a land rush, like the competition to get land when the Oklahoma territory was opened up. There, something was being given away, and there really wasn’t anything new being created, as that land in Oklahoma [...]