I recently wrote a post about using property rights to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Jesse Jenkins, of The Energy Collective, responded to my draft post that he thought my idea of allocating property rights based off of land use was too complex. I assured him that it was not and gave a logical and concise rebuttal. However, his challenge to me left me thinking about how to simplify the regulatory approach. This post is my effort to sketch out such a simplified approach. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: August 2013
What Level of Government Is Necessary?
The short answer is, it depends. But on what? The purpose of this post is to etch out how we can estimate what level of government we need. The recent actions of my government (United States) restricting our civil liberties in the name of security got me thinking about the subject. I ranged from reflecting back on my socialistic youth to contemplating the consequences of anarcho-libertarianism. The answer came contemplating Hayek’s notion of emergent social order and trying to understand why and where that social emergence comes from. Continue reading
Allowing Complexity: A Liberal Response to Climate Change
In the essay below, I explore the consequences of current energy and environmental policy and suggest an alternative set of solutions based on private property rights to resolve cost externalities and foster innovation. The essay is a little longer than I hoped. It is in two parts, the first identifies the failures in current policy, and the second part identifies how we can implement a more enlightened environmental policy.
Defining Scieince
I often wondered about what is the nature and purpose of science. While researching what was to become the foundations of statistical economics, I stumbled across an author that I hadn’t heard of before, Edwin Jaynes. His work has become a profound influence on my research and thinking. In one of his works, he asks, “How shall we best think about Nature and most efficiently predict her behavior, given only our incomplete knowledge?” Continue reading
Measuring Privacy
Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scope of government surveillance made me think about how we can quantify privacy between each other and our government. Here statistical economics can provide the framework needed to do so, through the use of measuring the index of probability of human action, and specifying that government knowledge of an individual cannot be less than some minimum index, without the use of a warrant to obtain specific information delineated in the warrant. Continue reading
Hayek’s Demon
After reading Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society“, I was immediately reminded of Maxwell’s demon, or rather of Leo Szilard’s response. The similarity between the logic of Szilard and Hayek are what I discuss today. Continue reading
Statistical Economics 