Marty Weitzman’s Noah’s Ark Problem —Alex Tabarrok

Marty Weitzman passed away suddenly yesterday. He was on many people’s shortlist for the Nobel. His work is marked by high-theory applied to practical problems. The theory is always worked out in great generality and is difficult even for most economists. Weitzman wanted to be understood by more than a handful of theorists, however, and so he also went to great lengths to look for special cases or revealing metaphors. Thus, the typical Weitzman paper has a dense middle section of math but an introduction and conclusion of sparkling prose that can be understood and appreciated by anyone for its insights.

The Noah’s Ark Problem illustrates the model and is my favorite Weitzman paper....

Marginal Revolution
Marty Weitzman’s Noah’s Ark Problem
Alex Tabarrok | Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and a research fellow with the Mercatus Center

Conservation In The Time Of Control Fraud

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)

Conservation In The Time Of Control Fraud

This is an interesting story on the role of Hank Paulson in personally funding conservation in China.

What are your thoughts while considering Hank Paulson simultaneously involved in conservation PLUS epic financial looting the last 15 years?

That brings up contradictory implications of Biblical proportions. Forget Peter, Hank's been robbing the entire US MiddleClass to pay Paulson, and apparently feels compelled to do penance by conserving some but not all habitats.

Maybe Hank's funding a private reserve for Control Frauds, so they'll never again have to get down on bended knee in front of their victims & accomplices.

Wouldn't Middle Classes everywhere do a far better job of conserving their own environments if they weren't robbed blind beforehand? No habitat for the human Middle Class?

Methinks "Herr-los" Paulson is uselessly robbing his own mirror here. He can't see the conservation for the robbery, so he vainly pursues one in order to try to personally fund the other.

Hank, Hank, Hank. Just give it a rest? NeoLiberalism is not a prerequisite for Christian Scientists.

A surprising inability to see the big picture? Or a massive, purposeful Control Fraud, and an outright traitor to his own nation, in more ways than one. So far, no court has subpoenaed Hank to find out, nor investigated him thoroughly enough to display the implications for an American ex Middle Class that has yet to decide how to respond to Hank's weirdly selective conservation efforts.

Leo Hickman — GRANTHAM: Capitalism Is Great, But It Assigns No Value To Your Grandchildren

Jeremy Grantham: "Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to. However, it is totally ill-equipped to deal with a small handful of issues.

"Unfortunately, today, they are the issues that are absolutely central to our long-term wellbeing and even survival. It doesn't think long-term very well because of high discount rate structure."

Business Insider
GRANTHAM: Capitalism Is Great, But It Assigns No Value To Your Grandchildren
Leo Hickman, The Telegraph

Jeremy Grantham gives a shout out to Kenneth Boulding, author of Evolutionary Economics, Ecodynamics, The World as a Total System, The Economics of Human Betterment, and many other works. Boulding was also aware of monetary economics, sectoral balances and functional finance. See, for instance, Economic Analysis, rev. ed., 1948, p. 399-402. See also L. Randall Wray, "Kenneth Boulding's Reconstruction of Macroeconomics," Review of Social Economy; December 1997.

Grantham: One of my new heroes is an economist called Kenneth Boulding who, at 22, got a paper into Keynes's journal. At the age of about 50 he realised that economics was not taking its job seriously, that it was not interested in utility, in real serious improvement in the world, but that it was increasingly interested in new, elegant mathematical theories designed to get career advancement, over usefulness.

He said the only people who believe you can have compound growth in a finite world are either mad men or economists. He also said: "Mathematics has brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."

This is a fairly long interview, but it is worth reading for several reasons. One is, of course, that Jeremy Grantham has been around for a long time and speaks from deep experience. In addition, he is essentially saying that what matters is real resources rather than money.

We don't build things on paper and yet we've begun to talk as if we do. People say that the Chinese have built all their railroads on debt, to which I say, "no, they haven't". They've built them with real Chinese people and real cement and real steel that are part of the real world.

Clean, Efficient Wood Stoves Good for People and the Planet

SAN SALVADOR, Jan 11, 2012 (Tierramérica) - In his quest to make the most efficient possible use of energy generated through wood combustion, Salvadoran René Núñez developed a simple but highly efficient wood stove that produces no smoke and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent.

A whole meal can be cooked on a Turbococina or "Turbostove", as he dubbed the device, using just five small pieces of wood around 13 cm long, which can be easily obtained from tree pruning. 

The Turbococina is not a new invention. Núñez developed a prototype 16 years ago, and since then, the professor, electrical engineer and inventor has continued to work on perfecting it. In 2010 he achieved a thermal efficiency rate of 93 percent and a 95 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Prior to that, he had already managed to eliminate nitrous oxide and carbon monoxide emissions.

Read the rest at IPS

Clean, Efficient Wood Stoves Good for People and the Planet

By Edgardo Ayala

Not fancy, but very high tech in a simple way.