Sure, some hyperbole may lead to more funding for those engineers who have kept at it the last fifty years, making driving considerably more safe than in my youth. As we shop for a car for our youngest daughter, we are thankful for the improved rates – ones that still have a size that scares us. We all wish for better odds, better engineering. The toll remains high enough that most of us have sat at sad funerals for youngsters dead too early & families shattered; all of us have encountered scarred survivors.
Economics & Finance
Paying For Productive Adults
Glenn Reynolds links to an article by Philip Longman in Foreign Affairs that covers much of the same ground that I did in a previous series of post [Family Free-Riders, Family Free-Riders Part II, The Gratis-Giddyup Problem] that looked at how modern economies fail to support the raising of children into productive adults.
I argued that from the perspective of economics we can think of productive adults as a type of product or resource that an economic system must produce in order to maintain itself. From this perspective, a child represents the production phase of the adult. We seldom think of the problem in these terms. Indeed, the entire debate is framed as to what is good for children as if children were the end goal when in fact children are economically useless in the modern world. Any society could get a short-term economic boost from decreasing the number of children it raises. Many sub-population have done exactly that.
Longman points out that birthrates are falling in all parts of the world regardless of economic system.
A Series of Analogies
Iain Murray is critical of the EU’s emission trading scheme (ETS), framing it with an analogy that that may be especially clear to some Houstonians gazing at their retirements:
It should also be mentioned that volatile markets are particularly prone to manipulation by the unscrupulous. Enron recognized the potential volatility of carbon markets when it lobbied hard for their introduction in the United States. Badly structured markets where transparency is lacking are to the rogue traders like pheromones in the insect world.
Ethanol Tariff Update
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol (here, also here.) On Friday, President Bush suggested that the tariff should be eliminated, or at least temporarily waived in order to ease the gasoline supply & price crunch which is expected for the summer.
Both the corn farmers and the sugar industry will oppose this initiative, and it’s unlikely that it will make it though Congress unless the administration does some very effective PR work.
Update: Today’s WSJ endorses the elimination of the tariff, and credits Congressman John Shadegg (Arizona) for pushing this idea. (Shadegg’s specific proposal is to suspend the tariff until 2007.)
Ethanol policy also needs to consider impact on the transportation network. Ethanol cannot be shipped via conventional pipelines (a fact which has received little media attention until very recently) and has to go by rail or barge if long distances are involved. Major railroad bottlenecks seem likely, given that some of the routes needed for domestic ethanol are already heavily used for coal and grain. The Union Pacific has already slowed down shipments of ethanol to the DFW area due to heavy congestion in its rail terminal there.
Imported ethanol might help the overall transportation-capacity situation to some extent, since it can come directly into major east and west coast ports, but isn’t going to help with bottlenecks at blending facilities.