Economists sometimes get a bad rap – the unfair belief that they worship at the alter of markets above all else, ignoring real problems as a result. In fact, a great deal of contemporary economics is focused on the opposite – understanding the places where markets fail, and helping craft policies that can make up …
Food, according to the Economist, is now 10 percent cheaper than it was a year ago.
Tony Davis had a story last week on Tucson’s approach to meeting (or not meeting) the water needs of new developments on its perimeter: A city water policy that had been described as “trick-or-treat” for new developers has been replaced by a tougher stance in which City Hall has denied service to four projects in …
Jim, your check’s in the mail: I often disagree with the Albuquerque Journal. Some say they kill good trees to make a bad paper. But frankly, I don’t know what I would do with out them informing me of real news every day. (Don’t worry, if you click through you’ll see I stripped out most …
Before I came here – before I even thought about coming here – I read Hillerman’s Fly on the Wall. It was my first introduction. After I got here, I used The Great Taos Bank Robbery as my formal introduction. We were a degree of separation apart, and I treasure the fact that the guy …
David Strahan in the Independent: A falling oil price has real short-term benefits. Petrol has dropped below £1 per litre for the first time in almost a year; domestic heat and power bills should eventually follow; food prices and inflation should also ease, giving the monetary authorities greater freedom to cut interest rates. But these …
David Henderson on energy independence: [T]he case for being “dependent” on other countries for oil is the same as the case for being dependent on other countries for bananas or coffee. At some tariff-protected price, the United States could be self-sufficient in bananas or coffee. If the price were high enough, someone would grow bananas …
Continue reading ‘The Rhetorical Attractiveness of “Energy Independence”’ »
My friend Jim Belshaw, who writes a newspaper column and has long had a love-hate relationship with blogging, sent along an Atlantic essay by Andrew Sullivan about blogging. Sullivan was one of the first bloggers I read who deserved the label, as it has now come to be known. But before blogging was the thing …
On the cost of nuclear power.
I still do write about science now and then: In an unused alcove at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Stanford physicist Giorgio Gratta and his colleagues have built a high-tech lab to try to measure the weight of what scientists call “the little neutral one,” one of the most mysterious of the tiny subatomic particles …