Utopia, you are standing in it!

A guest post by Yoram Barzel.

Doug North, Some Reminiscences

| By Yoram Barzel |

By the time I arrived at the University of Washington in 1961, Doug had been there for a decade, and he stayed for two more. Moving from one Washington (the University of Washington in Seattle) to another Washington (Washington University in St. Louis) is confusing. Most people associate Doug’s career with Washington University in St. Louis, but it was in Seattle that he did the bulk of the work for which he won the Nobel Prize. His work is well known, and I focus on other aspects of his career and on personal memories.

Doug got his PhD from Berkeley, and he was the first to admit that he hadn’t learned much there. Throughout his time in Seattle, when he needed advice when it came to economic analysis, he asked for it with great humility…

| Nicolai Foss |

Here is a recent MIT Sloan Management Review piece by Peter and me, “Why Managers Still Matter.” We pick up on a number of themes of our 2012 book Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment. A brief excerpt:

“Wikifying” the modern business has become a call to arms for some management scholars and pundits. As Tim Kastelle, a leading scholar on innovation management at the University of Queensland Business School in Australia, wrote: “It’s time to start reimagining management. Making everyone a chief is a good place to start.”

Companies, some of which operate in very traditional market sectors, have been crowing for years about their systems for “managing without managers” and how market forces and well-designed incentives can help decentralize management and motivate employees to take the initiative. . . .

From our perspective, the view that executive authority is increasingly passé is wrong. Indeed, we have found…

I’ve been researching Nozick and his commentators for the MA course I’m giving next semester on Contemporary Political Theory (details on my university web page, see right hand column). The most vicious critics of Nozick are certainly his fellow Libertarians, including Murray Rothbard who Nozick refers to as important in converting him to a Libertarian point of view. Libertarian in this context means the capitalist version in which if the state exists at all, it should only exist to uphold property rights based on voluntary contract, and protect individuals from violence. In the Anarchist, or near Anarchist version, of which Rothbard is the best example, these laws emerge in a voluntary way without any need for a state.

Though I was already acquainted with the idea that Capitalist Libertarians/Anarcho-Capitalists are a quarrelsome lot and that most of them are on the fringe of the academic world, I was startled by…

Rawlsekian is a word that was first used, to the best of my knowledge, in the headline of a piece by Will Wilkinson for Cato@Liberty (part of the website of the libertarian foundation, Cato), ‘Is Rawlsekianism the Future?’, posted on 4th December 2006.  The item builds on an idea floated by Brink Lindsey (like Wilkinson now an ex-Cato employee) of ‘liberaltarianism’, that is an alliance between libertarians and liberals (as social democrats are known in the United States) rather than the more familiar alliance between libertarians and conservatives.  Hopes of a liberaltarian moment around Barack Obama’s election have now been obliterated, but the idea lives on, and is gaining influence, at the more philosophical and theoretical level, which is where Rawlsekianism enters the stage.

Rawlsekianism is one way of referring to the combination of the ideas of the political philosopher John Rawls with the ideas of the economist…

| Peter Klein |

I haven’t seen anything from our sociologist friends at orgtheory.net about Wilfred McClay’s piece in last Friday’s WSJ, “Twilight of Sociology,” so I’ll take a stab. (The gated version is here; this public link should work for a few days.) Ruminating on Seymour Martin Lipset’s death in December, McClay wonders “whether the discipline of sociology itself may now be ebbing away, as so many of its leading practitioners depart the scene without, it seems, anyone standing ready to replace them.”

McClay blames the decline of sociology on two factors: politics and scientism.

| Peter Klein |

I’m very excited about Doug Allen’s forthcoming book The Institutional Revolution(University of Chicago Press). Trained by Yoram Barzel (and hence part of the Tree of Zvi), Doug is a leading contemporary scholar on property rights, transaction costs, contracting, and economic history. His work on agricultural contracting with Dean Lueck, including their 2002 book The Nature of the Farm, is a classic contribution to the economics literature on economic organization. He also has a very good introductory textbook. More information is at Doug’s informative (and amusing) website.

Here’s the cover blurb for the new book:

Few events in the history of humanity rival the Industrial Revolution. Following its onset in eighteenth-century Britain, sweeping changes in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and technology began to gain unstoppable momentum throughout Europe, North America, and eventually much of the world—with profound effects on socioeconomic and cultural conditions.

In The Institutional Revolution,

Queen Elizabeth II this year celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, commemorating 70 years as monarch. UCL recently hosted an event to discuss why we have jubilees, what they say about monarchies, what the process of starting the next reign will look like, the future of the monarchy at home and abroad, and what lessons can be learned from other European monarchies. A summary of the discussion is below.

On Thursday 17 March 2022, UCL hosted a webinar entitled The Platinum Jubilee and the Future of the Monarchy, chaired by Professor Robert Hazell, founder of the Constitution Unit. Robert was joined by four panellists: Dr Bob Morris, an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Unit, Dr Craig Prescott, Lecturer in Law at Bangor University, Dr Carolyn Harris, a royal historian at the University of Toronto, and Professor Helle Krunke, Head of the Centre for European and…

There was a high production of electricity from solar and wind previous weekend (weekend of April 23-24). As expected, there was the usual cheering and celebrating of this event. One of the many was this tweet from a member of the Flemish Green party (translated from Dutch)

Still need arguments for the roll-out of renewable energy?

Electricity price briefly below zero thanks to sun and wind

He links to a newspaper article with the same title and brings forward these negative prices as a decisive argument for more solar and wind: if you weren’t convinced yet, then this surely is the argument that will.

I don’t really agree with that. Those negative prices over the last weekend are not an argument for the roll-out of solar and wind (maybe even the contrary) and it shows his poor understanding of why exactly electricity prices dipped below zero in that weekend.

| Peter Klein |

Armen Alchian passed away this morning at 98. We’ll have more to write soon, but note for now that Alchian is one of the most-often discussed scholars here at O&M. A father of the “UCLA” property-rights tradition and a pioneer in the theory of the firm, Alchian wrote on a dizzying variety of topics and was consistently insightful and original.

Alchian was very intellectually curious, always pushing in new directions and looking for new understandings, without much concern for his reputation or legacy. One personal story: I once asked him, as a naive and somewhat cocky junior scholar, how he reconciled the team-production theory of the firm in Alchian and Demsetz (1972) with the holdup theory in Klein, Crawford, and Alchian (1978). Aren’t these inconsistent? He replied — politely masking the irritation he must have felt — “Well, Harold came to me with this interesting problem to…

| Peter Klein |

Alchian and me, circa 2000.

Armen Alchian’s friend and colleague Susan Woodward has a nice piece in a forthcoming Journal of Corporate Finance special issue on Alchian. Here are a few passages that may be of special interest to O&Mers:

Orley Ashenfelter asked Armen to write a book review of Oliver Williamson’s The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (such a brilliant title!). I got enlisted for that project too (Alchian and Woodward (1988)). Armen began writing, but I went back to reread Institutions of Capitalism. Armen gave me what he had written, and I was baffled. “Armen, this stuff isn’t in Williamson.” He asked, “Well, did he get it wrong?” I said, “No, it’s not that he got it wrong. These issues just aren’t there at all. You attribute these ideas to him, but they really come from our other paper.” And he said “Oh, well, don’t…

Fighting back is the only way to tackle Big Wind when its goonish developers are threatening to wreck your community.

America’s rural communities have won a string of victories by working together, getting organised and getting lawyers involved early. As a result, pro-community and pro-reliable energy groups are on the ascendant in the US.

At the heart of their success, is an understanding of their enemy and its deep and insidious connections with government enablers. It also helps to understand the thoroughly flawed economics of intermittent wind power and never concede that there is a ‘right’ place for these things, anywhere, anytime.

Start with the unassailable economic truth that there is absolutely no market for electricity that cannot be delivered as and when power consumers need it, and the argument for intermittent and unreliable wind and solar, falls of the first hurdle.

In the absence of massive and endless subsidies…

April 29, 2022: Planets aren’t supposed to have tails, but Mercury does. Dr. Sebastian Voltmer just photographed it from La Palma in the Canary Islands:

“This is NOT a comet, not even a meteor, but the planet Mercury, which is currently very close to the Pleiades,” says Voltmer. “How is the tail formed? The solar wind and micro-meteorites eject sodium atoms from Mercury’s surface. This creates a yellow-orange tail of sodium gas that is around 2.5 million kilometers long.”

People around the world have been watching Mercury climb up the evening sky this month. Some of them are probably wondering “why didn’t I see the tail?”

Answer: A special filter is required. “I used a 589 nm filter tuned to the yellow glow of sodium,” says Voltmer. Without this kind of sodium filter, Mercury’s tail would be invisible.

The great wind and solar scam’s beneficiaries couldn’t care less about the poorest billion, struggling daily for a little energy for cooking or warmth, which comes often in the form of scavenged twigs and dung.

Raking in $billions in wind and solar subsidies is just the beginning. The Great Green Reset now includes so-called net-zero carbon oxide gas emissions targets.

Rent seekers and international bankers are salivating at the prospect of making $trillions trading in carbon dioxide gas credits – presumably backed by an invisible commodity that will never be delivered. And all backed by government mandates. What’s not to like?

Well, condemning the Third World’s poorest to a life of agrarian misery, for a start.

The meddling by global elites in Third World energy policy is as pervasive and insidious as it is callous and mercenary.

By refusing to back reliable coal-fired power plants, Davos man and his compatriots…

Image credit: sustainable-bus.com H/T JohnM
One bus…30 fire fighters. Best wear running shoes and travel light if boarding such a vehicle. This has happened before.
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Dozens of electric buses will be taken off the streets of Paris temporarily “as a precaution” after two of the vehicles caught fire, public transport operator RATP said on Friday. The Local – France reporting.

Following a second blaze on Friday morning, in which no one was hurt, “RATP has taken the decision to suspend use of 149 electric buses” of manufacturer Bollore’s Bluebus 5SE model, the state-owned company said.

The number 71 bus that caught fire in southeast Paris early on Friday released thick clouds of black smoke and a strong smell of burning plastic, according to an AFP journalist on the scene.

“The bus driver immediately evacuated all the passengers. Nobody was hurt,” RATP said, while the city…