Why California’s Push for Rooftop Solar is a Foggy Idea
Would you trust your neighbors with billions of dollars of public money to invest in a clean energy future? If you live in California, this isn’t a hypothetical question.
California Gov. Jerry Brown last month announced his intention to rely on “tens of thousands of little decisions” by Californians to develop a 12 giga-watt renewable energy infrastructure by 2020. In remarks at a UCLA clean energy conference, Brown embraced distributed solar generation in order to avoid the pitfalls that often encumber large-scale renewable energy projects, including the capital costs of transmitting energy from far-flung deserts and hilltops. Furthermore, rooftop solar panels and Cameron-esque windmills also pose little threat to desert tortoises or sacred Native American sites, so they are less apt to be caught up in the kind of litigation that has delayed major renewable projects.
But energy policy that relies on distributed generation has its drawbacks. Perhaps most notably, it forsakes economies of scale. It also places infrastructure investment decisions in the hands of homeowners, who, as this space has suggested, may not make socially optimal—or even individually rational—choices. Read More »
The Beekeeper Dilemma
Beekeepers transport their hives from field to field and make money helping farmers, orchardists and others pollinate their crops. (See the wonderful old paper by Steven N.S. Cheung, “The Fable of the Bees: An Economic Investigation,” Journal of Law and Economics, 1973.)
There are now indications that colony collapse, the current plague of the industry, may result from too-frequent moves of hives and the resulting greater exposure to more varieties of pathogens. The beekeeper thus faces a trade-off: increase revenue by moving hives around, but incur a potential cost of collapse; or move hives less and make less revenue, but reduce the potential risk. From what I’ve been told, different beekeepers make different choices, depending in part on their assessments of the risk of colony collapse and their degree of risk aversion.
[HT: SK-L]
Cohabitation in the U.S. has Doubled Since the Mid-1990s
A recent study by the Pew Research Center titled “Living Together: The Economics of Cohabitation,” finds that rates of cohabitation in the U.S. have gone up significantly over the last 15 years. Authors Richard Fry and D’Very Cohn use census data from heterosexual couples who (unlike many of their homosexual counterparts) have a choice between getting married, or simply living together unmarried. Fry and Cohn write:
Cohabitation is an increasingly prevalent lifestyle in the United States. The share of 30- to 44-year-olds living as unmarried couples has more than doubled since the mid-1990s. Adults with lower levels of education—without college degrees—are twice as likely to cohabit as those with college degrees.
Perhaps you already guessed that – the pressure to get married isn’t quite the same as it was 50 years ago. What’s more interesting though is that the level of education makes a big difference as to how the median household income of cohabiters measures up against their married counterparts. Read More »
Interpreting the Fed: How Did it Lower Rates This Time?
I’ve found a lot of the recent discussion about the Fed to be, frankly, confused. So I thought it worth trying to put the issues into a broader context.
Read the Fed’s latest statement, and you’ll see many of the themes I’ve talked about recently. They’ve learned that the economy is not only weak, but that—as I’ve been forecasting for some time—“economic growth so far this year has been considerably slower than the Committee had expected.” Turn to the labor market, and they somewhat dryly note “a deterioration in overall labor market conditions.” And while they won’t use the word double dip, they do note that “downside risks to the economic outlook have increased.” Also, “inflation has moderated.” So there’s plenty of room for them to try to goose the economy. But how? Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 