Win Quigley, from the front page of yesterday’s Journal, on the way New Mexico chooses to implement the Hartwick rule: New Mexico has amassed billions of dollars over the almost 100 years that we’ve been a state, mostly from oil and natural gas extraction, that is hoarded in rainy-day funds. The idea is that when …
Brad Delong on the news of the New York Times’ financing deal, which sounds a bit like the Gray Lady went to one of those brightly painted car title loan places you see in former gas stations: Good God almighty! 14% interest with short-term inflation at zero plus a share of the upside if the …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Economies of the Times’ »
Trouble’s brewin’ in the Wild West, on account of that climate changin’ thing, says Pat Mulroy.
Arizonans take their search for water seriously.
I totally forgot last week to link to Troy’s great pink iguana video:
Ryan Avent: I have become increasingly pessimistic about our ability to address the climate change crisis. The dynamics are simply deadly — the most dangerous effects begin arriving after it’s too late to do anything about them — which leaves as our great hope the chance that a strong enough intellectual argument can be made …
Continue reading ‘On the Possibility of Climate Change Action’ »
Talking dinosaurs and the false balance problem.
My friend Mark Boslough presented a fascinating analysis last month at AGU comparing the risks of climate change to big rocks from space hitting Earth: One objective way to compare the relative magnitude of the impact threat to that of anthropogenic climate change is to estimate the long-term worldwide fatality rate. For asteroids, the average …
Continue reading ‘Quantifying and Thinking About Climate Risk’ »
Discussing federal stimulus spending yesterday, a colleague and I were pondering how the New Mexico economy might go about absorbing the money the feds want to pump into it. One key question is the availability of a work force with the skills to build stuff. Some numbers, courtesy St. Louis Fed. The drop from the …
I have no reason to think Albuquerque will become a no-newspaper town, but the set of questions confronting civic life in Seattle as the P-I goes down and the Times teeters are nevertheless worth thinking about in our own context. In that regard, I’ve been following the discussions my old college chum Chuck Taylor and …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Affirmative Answer to a No-Newspaper World’ »