Utopia, you are standing in it!

| 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…