- September 2, 2016
David Burress
A back-of the-envelope guess is that the historic and cumulative net social value produced by the nuclear industry is distinctly negative. In other words, investing in nukes made the world economically far worse off than staying with conventional energy.
For example: nukes of the world now produce around 2.5X10**12 kilowatt hours per year. At an overinflated ...
- September 2, 2016
David Burress
Researcher John Lott is widely quoted by the NRA and other gun nuts. He is also a discredited fraud with no academic credibility whatsoever. Nevertheless he still gets quoted in mainstream media. This illustrates the desperately felt need of the MSM to be “balanced,” which is say sell papers to or seduce webclicks from both ...
- September 2, 2016
David Burress
When people praise competitive markets, most of them have no idea what they are talking about. A perfectly competitive market, as close as we can come to it, is a spot market for a perfectly indistinguishable commodity with many buyers and sellers.
Kerosene in the days before Standard Oil was a good example. What automatically happened was ...
- August 31, 2016
David Burress
Libertarian ideology depends on the claim that markets are self-regulating. Here is a tiny counterexample.
One of my daily peeves is shampoo bottles. Some time ago, their squeeze bottles had small holes that provided good control over quantity dispensed. Then the entire industry shifted to larger holes making the quantity harder to control. In consequence the ...
