The Uk Smart Meter Transition: Industry Structure, Market Power, and...
The UK government started an energy digital smart meter rollout in 2008, an “… £11bn scheme to put 53m devices in 30m homes and small businesses by 2020” to yield an estimated gross benefit of £16.7bn....
View ArticleRichard Rhodes, “Energy: A Human History”
Richard Rhodes has written an amazing book. He aspired to tell the tales of energy transitions over the past 400 years. His Energy: A Human History accomplishes that task. The book is daunting in size...
View ArticleTexas Price Gouging Law is Backfiring
Halea Walker and I have an op-ed appearing in the Dallas Morning News explaining that Texas’s anti-price gouging law comes with some unintended consequences. What I most want to say about price gouging...
View ArticleAlchian and Allen, Opportunity Cost, and the Kid in the Candy Store
The new Alchian and Allen book Universal Economics is out. The publisher reports the authors have collaborated to produce a ”fresh, final presentation of the analytical tools” contained in their famous...
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Job Change, and a Blogging Renaissance
I’m pleased to announce that I have accepted a new position at Carnegie Mellon University, as Visiting Professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Co-Director of the Institute for...
View ArticleAdam Smith and the Digital Economy: Connectedness and Gains From Trade
How can an 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist help us understand the digital economy and our modern, hyper-connected world? That’s a question I’m tackling in a series of three essays at...
View ArticleAgainst Anti-anti-anti-price Gouging
First let’s unpack the “against anti-anti-anti-price gouging” title to get oriented: Price gouging – a common name for price increases of goods in demand due to an emergency Anti-price gouging – common...
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Consumer Complaints in Massachusetts Fell in the First Quarter of 2020
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey has been active fighting against price gouging during the pandemic emergency. Actually, she was on the case even before the governor issued a stay-at-home...
View ArticleAre N95 Masks Essential Goods Covered by State Price Gouging Laws?
Should state laws prohibiting price gouging on essential goods and services apply to individual consumer purchases of N95 masks? The New York state law prohibits unconscionably excessive prices for...
View ArticleKnowledge Problem archive 2002-2020
This is the archive of the Knowledge Problem blog, all 4,690 posts. The search function will help you locate posts on the various topics Mike and I wrote about at KP, and the tags and tag word cloud...
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