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Graph 1. The increasingly inefficient use of carsSummary: parking places are a woefully inefficient use of space. And ugly. Cars are a woefully inefficient use of machinery. Using them, in combination with bi-directional charging of cars, to produce solar can amend this. Doing this the right way, parking places can be beautified, costs will go down and life will be more pleasant. A typical car is, like a washing machine, a household appliance. As such, they are woefully...

Daniel Kahneman, who was, along with Elinor Ostrom, one of the very few non-economists to win the Economics Nobel award, has died aged 90. There are lots of obituaries out there, so I won’t try to summarise his work. Rather, I’ll talk about how it influenced my own academic career. When I was an undergraduate, in the late 1970s, economic analysis of decisions under uncertainty was dominated by the expected utility (EU) theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern. The mean-variance...

Please click here to support this open-access journal and the WEA real-world economic review issue no. 106 download whole issue How entropy drives us towards degrowthCrelis Rammelt2 “It is much too soon to act “ – Economists and the climate changeGiandomenico Scarpelli8 Addressing the climate and inequality crises:An emergency market plan simulationJorge Buzaglo and Leo Buzaglo Olofsgård21 Stocking up on wealth … concentration Blair Fix 40 Back to the past: income distribution in...

Elections over the last week have seen some pretty good outcomes for the Greens and some very bad outcomes for both Labor and the LNP. Here’s what ChatGPT came up when I asked for a representation of Green Labor In the Brisbane Council elections, the Greens got 23.1 per cent of the vote, barely behind Labor on 26.9. The combined total of exactly 50 per cent wasn’t reflected in terms of seats, mainly because of preference leakage and exhaustion, but I want to focus on the longer...

from Blair Fix When it comes to Bitcoin, there’s one thing that almost everyone agrees on: the network sucks up a tremendous amount of energy. But from there, disagreement is the rule. For critics, Bitcoin’s thirst for energy is self-evidently bad — the equivalent of pouring gasoline in a hole and setting it on fire. But for Bitcoin advocates, the network’s energy gluttony is the necessary price of having a secure digital currency. When judging Bitcoin’s energy demands, the advocates...

from Peter Radford Words are not ideas.  They are our means to capture ideas and make them tangible.  The problem is that words are a porous net that inevitably lets some accuracy slip away, but sometimes captures irrelevant detail that shines brightly in the moment and then dulls in the light of later thought. Trying to define something so a discussion can follow without ambiguity in meaning sliding in and muddying things.  Slippery isn’t it? How about this: “I sometimes wish we could...

from Dean Baker This simple point was left out of a Washington Post article on the legal battle surrounding the Biden Administration’s efforts to negotiate lower prices for drugs purchased by Medicare. This point is important because the drug companies are definitely not trying to get the government out of the market, as the industry claims. The industry is effectively insisting that the government is obligated to give it an unrestricted monopoly for the period of its patent duration....

from Lars Syll Time is a scarce resource on television. However, if one still — as is so often the case nowadays — uses precious airtime for trivial matters and meaningless ‘entertainment,’ there must be a reason. Television is — still — for a large part of the population one of the primary sources of information and worldview. Thus, filling program schedules with trivialities becomes an effective means to — instead of functioning as an instrument for shaping opinions and fostering...

from Dean Baker Peter Coy used his column yesterday to beg President Biden not to use the term “greedflation” to explain the runup in inflation since the pandemic. I am sympathetic to much of his argument, most importantly, the idea that corporations suddenly turned greedy is a bit far out. As Coy notes, corporations are always greedy. The real question is whether something unusual was going on with corporate profits in the pandemic. There clearly was an increase in profit margins in the...

Andrew Leigh’s The Shortest History of Economics is the latest in a series of such histories, mostly focused on particular countries. It begins with a striking mini-history of household lighting, focusing on the amount of labour required to produce the light now given off by a standard lightbulb: 58 hours for a wood fire, five hours for a candle based on animal fat, a few minutes for an early electric lightbulb, and less than one second for a modern light-emitting diode. The...