Lighting and Economics

Couple of interesting stories in ALDaily today. Arts and Letters Daily puts up three selected links each day. Often they aren't of interest to me, but often enough I find some real gems amongst their choices. Their home page also has a slew of links to interesting and engaging stuff.

The first story is on lighting. I was just talking to a friend here at my favorite coffee shop about the forecast that we might get a thunderstorm tonight. In fact, the weather forecasters mention that just to cover their butts: maybe one time in 15 or 20 that they predict thunderstorms do we actually get any here on the valley floor. But the Coast Range and the Cascades do get much more violent weather than we do, so the butt-covering forecasts are not just teasing to people that live in more rugged terrain. Growing up in Ohio, summer thunderstorms were the one part of the season's weather I looked forward to. I miss them here- are summers are dry, dry, dry. We actually had a few minutes of drizzle in the early morning, about 6:00, late last week, and the sound and smell were delicious to me, even though there wasn't enough rain to more than dampen the pavement. So I miss lightning, and this article was a fun read for me. I would take issue with some of the author's science factoids, but they're minor in context. An aspect that I enjoyed is that much of the narrative takes place in the Georgian Bay/Parry Sound area of Ontario, Canada, an area in which I've spent a fair amount of time.

The second story is on "what we know for sure" in the discipline of economics. I took the intro year of econ as an undergrad, a decision I've never regretted. That series didn't leave me strongly knowledgeable about econ, but it left me with a strong enough background that I can understand journalism aimed at an educated layperson, and with a little effort, unravel the logic behind the conclusions that experts come to without explaining intermediate steps. The author here is clearly a follower of Friedman's free-market-is-god school of thinking. As I've noted before, I'm a strong supporter of free-market ideals, but in it's current incarnation (in my opinion), the main cause of free market failure is the fact that it's too easy, in fact accepted and promoted, to exclude and ignore real costs that don't have an immediate free market dollar cost, but that do impose real costs down the line. For example, cutting down a stand of trees interferes with the availability of clean water. But that cost is not figured into the cost of producing lumber. A coal fired power plant produces enormous amounts of carbon dioxide that is interfering with our ability to count on a consistent climate, but as things stand now, those costs are ignored.

With all that said, the article on economics was quite interesting to me, in that while I recognized I was inclined to disagree with the author on many points at a fairly fundamental level, I found myself for the most part agreeing with his basic conclusions- there were a couple that I have a hard time accepting, but again it gets back to what essentially amounts to philosophy as opposed to empiricism. I don't think on these points he's relying on empiricism as much as he thinks he is- there is less consistent agreement then he seems to be claiming amongst experts. Nevertheless, if you are interested in economics, and you should be, I recommend this article. I have purposely omitted the points I take issue with, but I would be interested in your take.