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I am at UC Berkeley and had expected to see RBC readers but nobody recognized me at Caffe Strada. This is “Energy Camp” week at the UC Energy Institute so 30 faculty and students have gathered to talk about energy economics. This is exciting stuff. Now that I’ve retired from active research, I’ve devoting all of my time to [...]
Archive for June, 2011
June 29th, 2011
Category: Higher education
I was eating dinner the other night, and the phone rang. It was an undergraduate classmate noting that I had yet to contribute to our class’s annual giving. She’s a nice person. I also have warm feelings towards Princeton, which opened valuable opportunities and treated me well. So I gave seventy-five bucks. I gave, not [...]
June 29th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
… turns out not to be quite an empty set. Found a great Korean place near BWI in Glen Burnie.
June 28th, 2011
Category: Climate change, Popular Culture
Australian climate scientists rap–the clean version. You read me right: the clean version. Not super clean either. It’s not clear this would meet Tipper’s approval. But I bet Al likes it anyway.
June 28th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Google relies heavily on McKinsey’s US Low Carbon Economics Tool to write this optimistic report. It boils down to the claim that enacting carbon pricing will trigger a “free lunch” for our economy and the environment. I wish this could be true but is it true? While the McKinsey team have all attended Ivy League [...]
June 27th, 2011
Category: Gay marriage
Governor Cuomo is getting well-deserved praise for his active leadership in passing gay marriage legislation in New York. President Obama’s supportive but basically passive stance on the same issue has received somewhat lower marks. I’m all in for marriage equality. I’ve criticized the president for his timidity regarding other issues. Still, I believe he’s getting [...]
June 27th, 2011
Category: Airline Industry and Travel
Every person has a secret vice. Some people emit global-send tweets of racy pictures they intended to reach merely one inappropriate recipient. Others have drug or gambling issues. My vice is less extreme, but sometimes more annoying. Through an ineffectual combination of parsimony and disorganization, I make cockamamie travel plans vulnerable to implosion.
June 27th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Asymmetric information and fundamental uncertainty raise interesting issues in economics. Suppose that a natural gas company owns 10 plots of adjacent land and reports the “provable” quantity of natural gas that it can access at one of the plots. It is tempting to multiply this by 10 as optimists extrapolate that all of the plots [...]
June 26th, 2011
Category: Politics and Leadership
Like many who live in or were raised in West Virginia, I am grieving the sudden death of Larry Border, the Republican Minority Whip in the House of Delegates. He was the gentlest Whip I have met in my life, and was known among his fellow Republicans as the “Den Mother” because of the time [...]