Author Archives: admin

by Jane S. Shaw David French at Phi Beta Cons and Charlotte Allen at Minding the Campus have been discussing the sustainability movement, which has taken over colleges around the country.  Apparently colleges are worried that the Republican Congress will hold back on “sustainability” funds that were just beginning to trickle out under the 2008Continue reading “Green, and Green, on Campus”

by Pete Geddes

I have several hockey-playing friends who simply cannot understand my opposition to government subsidies for “green” energy. They question my belief that the market process is likely to generate environmentally and ethically superior results and default to describing me as a “market fundamentalist.” If you find yourself in a similar situation, I’d like to offer the following for your consideration.

In addition to several empirical arguments against government intervention, I think it’s important to explain the philosophical underpinnings for my preference for markets over mandates. I start with these insights from 1974 Nobel Laureate F.A.Hayek:

The knowledge problem

In modern societies, knowledge of time- and place-specific conditions is dispersed among millions of individuals. Consumers and producers communicate their desires through prices. Markets then allocate resources — labor, capital, and human ingenuity — in a manner that can’t be anticipated or mimicked by a central plan (or planner.)

This fundamental insight is found in Hayek’s essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic.

This piece explains why large scale economic planning fails. It is because the social world does not consist of physical objects governed by simple laws of causality, but is a ‘kaleidic’ world inhabited by individuals with minds, whose inner recesses are inaccessible to the external observer, where knowledge is not ‘fixed’ and available to a single person or institution. (Another essential critique is found in the work of János Kornai.)

Here’s an example from the American West: 
Between 1933 and 1938 the Columbia Basin Project (CBP) impounded water behind the Grand Coulee Dam. It was to provide irrigation and power to 100,000 family farms, and turn the desert of eastern Washington into lush farmland. Two generations later, only a few thousand farmers and corporations work the irrigated land–at great cost to taxpayers and the environment.
 What was the problem? Planners designed policies for an unknown future, the only kind we have. The CBP plans did not anticipate changes in technology such as the replacement of horses by tractors. The tractors, tillers, and harvesters all became much, much larger and faster. This led to huge consolidation rather than 40-acre farms. Social preferences are even more difficult to predict (e.g., for healthy runs of wild salmon instead of more dams for irrigation).

“Product of human action but not human design…”

My progressive friends are firm believers in the theory of evolution and are highly dismissive of alternative explains, except when considering social policy. I find this intriguing, but not surprising.

The idea that things exist in the world that are the product of human action but not human design is highly unintuitive. In Hayek’s 1967 essay, “The Principles of a Liberal Social Order,” he explores this:

by Laura Huggins Here’s what not to buy for your kids: books like Where Does the Garbage Go?, Oil Spill!, and What’s So Bad About Gasoline? As PERC fellow Andy Morriss writes in this essay on eco-propaganda for kids, “If these books are what kids grow up with today, we should hope they spend theirContinue reading “Still looking for stocking stuffers?”

by Pete Geddes In today’s Wall Street Journal the always well-informed Holman Jenkins offers a primer on the inherent problem of government intervention in the energy economy. To recap: When we subsidize things that trade in the market, we benefit the well off and well organized at the expense of the most vulnerable members ofContinue reading “The real “green” in the green energy economy”

Next month, fishers in the Pacific groundwater fishery will operate under a new management system called catch shares. This market-based system gives fishers the rights to a share of the total allowable catch, and has proven to halt or even reverse declines from overfishing. Don’t expect results overnight; it will take time to get the system toContinue reading “Hat Tip To EDFish”

by Shawn Regan With wolf numbers rising in the American West, ranchers are increasingly bearing the costs of their presence. This Guardian story has the details: His farm equipment roster now includes a roll-out fence: a two-mile coil of electrified cable fitted with bright red strips of plastic. The sight of the streamers on theContinue reading “Living with Wolves”

by Pete Geddes What will our energy future look like? Of course, I have no special insights, but I see two interesting trends. Here’s the first. In large, complex economies, meaningful energy transitions occur gradually across many decades. Vaclav Smil, from the University of Manitoba, offers these compelling observations.

 In most of the world’s developed economiesContinue reading “CH4 and the Decarbonization of Energy”

Louisiana’s oyster businesses survived the BP oil spill, but can they survive “man’s decision to stop the oil”?

by Shawn Regan Free riders beware. From The Week (sub req): A Spanish woman has filed papers staking an official legal claim to the sun. Angeles Duran, 49, states in notarized documents she is now the official “owner of the sun, a star of spectral type G2, located in the centre of the solar system,Continue reading “Property Rights to the Sun?”