Utopia, you are standing in it!

| 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…