Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Farming is a risky business. Always has been. A federal program to keep farmers in business during droughts seems like a good idea to me. Sadly, it’s also a target for fraud:“On a normal day, the promising storms produced snow or rain that would fall onto a system of official weather stations at airstrips or town halls, into heated “tipping buckets.” When the teeter-totter buckets filled with a thimbleful of water, the seesaw tilted, dropping one...

Suppose that you wake up tomorrow and discover that a sadistic alien has turned you into an economist.  You are just getting over your shock at your new predicament (“How will I make friends?  Will anyone ever trust me again?  At least I’m not a lawyer.”) when Kamala Harris, responding to voter concerns about inflation, makes a vague statement in favor of government restrictions on the price of groceries.  It just so happens that you have a...

This is actually related to my day job. For some decades I have been puzzled by two of Kahneman and Tversky’s discoveries (reported very well in this excellent book). First, there is the excessive reliance on diagnostic characteristics (called diagnostic expectations by economists). A classic example is the room with 90 lawyers and 10 engineers. Jim is quiet and hardworking and likes model trains. It is human nature to conclude he is an engineer...

The false dichotomy of climate change remediationYears ago, I had a Facebook friend from my hometown who was a big enthusiast of molten salt nuclear reactor technology. He wasn’t a scientist or engineer, but his dad had worked on MSRs in the ‘60s, and he fetishized his dad’s memory. As some point, I mentioned that we had installed rooftop solar on our house, and he began attacking me. Rather than see MSRs and solar as two parallel paths towards...

I am late to the discussion of the (possible) US soft landing. I think I better write about the soft landing (so far) in case it is ceasing to be soft (I am not making a forecast). The remarkable thing is that the dramatic increase in the Federal Funds Rate did not induce a downturn let alone a recession The way interest rates affect GDP is principally residential investment and exchange rates. Other monetary authorities also raised rates in...

by Joseph Joyce Capital Ebbs and Flows The Republican nomination of Donald Trump as its nominee for President ensures that international trade will be a major issue in the campaign. Trump views trade as a zero-sum game and the existence of U.S. trade deficits as proof that other nations have taken advantage of U.S. openness (= weakness). Tariffs are the primary policy tool to respond to the unfair treatment of U.S.-made goods and even the...

Yesterday, I posted about geoengineering the oceans as a promising form of carbon capture. But why do we need carbon capture at all? Can’t we just conserve our way out of global warming?No.Here are a couple of reasons why the *only* way to avert climate disaster is to start removing carbon from the atmosphere:1. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is ca. 120 years. What that means is that if all sources of CO2—man-made, forest fires, vulcanism,...

I came of age scientifically at the beginning of the cloning era. As various genes associated with human genetic disorders—sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s—were cloned, the papers reporting these successes always ended with some statement that now the door was open to therapy. These prophecies proved to be wildly optimistic. Now, with the advent of CRISPR gene editing, it is becoming possible to realize the...

Imagine that Congress wants to address some social or economic problem by prohibiting certain undesirable acts.  One approach Congress can take is to specifically describe the undesirable behavior and prohibit it.  This approach sometimes works well – it is the basis of traditional criminal law – but it has two great disadvantages.  First, in many fields – like drug regulation and pollution control – Congress lacks the expertise to identify which...

Israel is on a dangerously self-destructive course.  The brutality of the Gaza campaign is antagonizing allies and making it difficult for regional players to continue normalizing relations.  The prospects for a durable peace are dimming at the same time that the policy of military supremacy that provided a modicum of security over the past two decades looks increasingly unsustainable.  Netanyahu clearly deserves much of the blame for what is...