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Smug Emissions? Reconsidered.

I’d like to offer some thoughts to both sides of the dialogue on hybrids and plugin hybrids. Wintercow is correct to highlight that a primary driver of Prius ownership is the “warm glow” of feeling like a responsible global citizen–and perhaps even more importantly, to be seen in public acting in such a way. Hence the appellations of […]

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Bad Behavior

In what I see as an incredible irony, a popular new shtick among the intelligentisia is that we make behavioral mistakes. Man does not always act like the rational actor that economics presupposes. Of course, that is a bit of a straw man argument. What economists presuppose about human action is that ex-ante people are […]

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How many times have you heard directly or at least been able to infer that, “Economics just doesn’t apply to that!” I hear it quite often, even from within the echo-chamber of economists. You’ll probably most likely encounter it in discussions/arguments about health care and the environment, or some other social phenomenon of importance. Before […]

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Given the stuff that typically comes out of blogs (including this sordid one) maybe I should welcome it. Herewith the comments from Coyote. Bullseye as usual. Try to have this as a conversation at the next dinner party you attend. If I were a Republican, or if I had one iota of trust in them, […]

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Why do I think a 7 gallon wastepaper basket is a pretty neat thing? I like my little Mazda3. It’s “zippy” and pretty comfortable to drive for a compact car. And it cost us somewhere in the range of $16,500 for the car (we actually lease it). And while it is nowhere near the best […]

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But they seem to be helping a builder from the wealthiest suburb of Rochester (Pittsford) erect a 29 home subdivision in one of the “worst” areas of the city. There’s much to parse here, but I want to go read something more productive.

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Stones

Coyote points us to this story: It takes some amazing stones to grab a $32 million subsidized government loan on the promise to add 250 jobs just days before a planned 234 person layoff. Oh silly Coyote, they would have laid off 484 without the loan. By the way, when is the now 5 year […]

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Wintercows Going Peak Bagging

Interlude: Here is Wintercow at the top of Dix Mountain. That was the 5th peak I managed to hit that day. Notice the shirt! If this sort of thing really interests any of you, by all means let me know! I’d love a few hiking buddies although it’s excruciatingly hard to get to do this […]

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I already attempted to address some objections yesterday, especially the general epistemic problem of finding the perfect price: to reiterate, finding the perfect price with a tax isn’t nearly as important when you’ve already got the worst kind of taxes, as long as you tax within the range of plausible estimates of the perfect price. Here are some answers to […]

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Challenge accepted. I no longer have the pleasure of pestering Wintercow in his office hours, but I can still do that here 🙂 This is an email excerpt to Wintercow that I haven’t published: I was thinking about carbon taxes and looking up estimates of the damage per ton of CO2, and there’s a lot of variability depending […]

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