Climate Change Lunch

We met today for the monthly "Climate Change Lunch" that we hold at ANU - if you are in Canberra and interested in meeting to discuss climate change policy and economics please contact Jack Pezzey. Among the topics we discussed was my poll. In particular, we wondered why the distribution is bimodal. There are positive responses and negative responses, but no-one chose the class "0-25%". The one

Does the Grant System Discourage Innovation?

Many of those interviewed for this New York Times article think so. I believe the same applies in many or most scientific fields. The majority of the comments also support that view. Even the supporters of the current U.S. process seem to be agreeing with Winston Churchill's comments on democracy. An alternative often mentioned in the comments is to support strong individuals rather than strong

Delays for Clean Coal

Interesting article by Gregg Easterbrook on delays in implementing more energy and carbon efficient approaches to electricity generation from coal. It sounds like perverse regulation is getting in the way of what the market is willing to do...

Energy Spiral

Cool energy spiral chart compares different energy quantities.

How Optimistic Are You about Reductions in Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

I've added a poll at the upper righthand side of the blog asking: "What Will Be the Global Level of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 2050 Compared to Today?" I'm interested in total world emissions (not per capita) and this is emissions not concentrations. Please go ahead and vote!

eigenfactor.org

Eigenfactor.com is a relatively new website that provides ratings for academic journals. It's main competitor is the venerable Journal Citation Reports from ISI and in the field of economics impact factors computed by RePEc from the information in their database. Eigenfactor actually derives its data from ISI. It uses the record of citations in a given year to articles published in the previous

New Global Ranking of Economics Research Institutions

RePEc has developed a new global ranking of economics research institutions. The new ranking agglomerates economists at different departments within an institution. Previous RePEc rankings of institutions have treated each department as a separate entity. Universities like Australian National University have suffered because they have four main economics departments (!) as well as a few

Conspicuous Blogging

An interesting article about changes in the ways people are signalling status - a switch from conspicuous consumption of material goods to online signalling through the number of Facebook friends say. I'm not sure quite how important this is as a trend in quantitative terms but there is certainly something in it. It fits in with similar news from Japan. Of course those of us in academia have long

Another Review of Taleb

I wrote a very short review of "The Black Swan" a little while ago. Here is a good but very long review of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. A summary would be: "Taleb is unoriginal when right, otherwise wrong (especially about option pricing), and a dilettante/crank".