The Gas Tax Holiday

Posted by on

An economist has finally come forward with a cogent argument in favor of the gas tax holiday. In today’s New York Times, Bryan Caplan points out that voters are demanding that Congress do something. There is nothing Congress can actually do to help the situation. But since they’re likely to do something, the gas tax is the least damaging among a number of options:

The tax holiday is a relatively cheap symbolic gesture that makes truly bad policies less likely.

An argument robust to idiocy. I love it.

Food Prices Flatten

Posted by on

Global food prices have leveled off, according to the Economist food price index out today. It’s settled at 251.5, down 0.6 percent from a week ago and up 61.3 percent from a year ago. I don’t understand it well enough to know for sure, but I’ve got to assume that 0.6 percent over a week is noise, and therefore this is essentially unchanged from last week.

Also on the food front, a blog comment from Paul Collier on how truly fucked up the global food market is, and the way policy failures are bleeding into the food market in the form of people rioting because they’re hungry:

Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our new-found environmental romanticism. In the United States fears of climate change have been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely inefficient subsidies for bio-fuel. Around a third of American grain production has rapidly been diverted into energy production. This switch demonstrates both the superb responsiveness of the market to price signals, and the shameful power of subsidy-hunting lobby groups.

Good Scientific Communication

Posted by on

Writing on drought, I have had many occasions to draw on the research done by Richard Seager’s North American Drought research group at Lamont-Doherty. While their work often merits a news release from Columbia’s press office (as with the Dust Bowl paper I’m currently writing about), Richard and the other members of his group also have written a series of excellent web pages on various facets of their work.

For example, they’ve done a page on their new Dust Bowl work that offers a more technically sophisticated explanation of the research. It’s written with a few notches more technical sophistication than the actual GRL paper on which the research is based, offering an accessible but more technically rigorous outline of the work, midway between the paper itself and the news release.

Another excellent example: Causes and consequences of nineteenth century droughts in North America.

By one good measure, this approach is working: The group’s main page is the number one hit on A Commonly Used Search Engine (ACUSE) when you search on “drought research”.

Awareness of the Price of Gas

Posted by on

From Tuesday’s New York Times:

“It clearly evokes a visceral response because we’re the only industry that has our prices in two-foot-high letters on the street corner,” said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute. “We’ve seen other things go up in prices, like milk, but if you ask 10 people on the street what’s the price of milk they may not know. All of them will know the price of gas.”

(Previously on this topic)