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Michael Giberson

Up the Yangtze, a documentary by Yung Chang, examines changes along the Yangtze river in China due to the construction of the Three Gorges dam through the stories of two Chinese youth who took jobs on a cruise ship. The cruises are called "farewell tours" because they offer the chance to see parts of the Yangtze valley that will disappear under the reservoir created by the dam. In all, an estimated two million people will be displaced by the reservoir.

The film offers a slow-paced, almost meditative look at changes wrought by the growing body of water. Sorry energy policy geeks, while Up the Yangtze offers a few glimpses of the dam under construction, you get very little information about who, what, where, and why the dam. Instead you get a human interest story, a small slice of life. The documentary doesn't rush you to any particular conclusion, just gives you material for further contemplation. I enjoyed it.

Michael Giberson

Free Press columnist Ed Shamy offers "a stroll through The Burlington Free Press archives about gasoline prices," beginning January 16, 1974, continuing to today:

Jan. 16, 1974: Gasoline in short supply in Vermont. Entire communities without a single open filling station. And gasoline is obscenely expensive, an average of 48.7 cents per gallon for regular.

Jan. 19, 1974: AAA poll of 113 Vermont service stations shows most are open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., most closed Sundays, all limiting sales to $3, and charging an average of 49.6 cents per gallon.

April 2, 1974. Some Vermont vendors are selling gasoline for as high as 53 cents per gallon for regular. Rampant speculation that oil companies may be gouging consumers.

...

Oct. 1980: "People will drive five miles to get 2 cents off on a gallon," says the manager of a Berlin gas station during a price war.

May 1981: Three gas station owners in Londonderry predict a painfully slow summer tourist season because gas has reached an eye-popping $1.399 per gallon. Rampant speculation that oil companies may be gouging consumers.

May 1989: President of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce says, "When it breaks that $1.50 a gallon figure, that's when it starts to affect people."

...

August 1999: Burlington man: "Terrible! It was $1.19 the other day. Today it was $1.21. They've got you where they want you, and they are going to keep you there until they bleed you to death." Rampant speculation that oil companies may be gouging consumers.

...

September 2005: "I didn't know until yesterday that my pumps wouldn't go over $2.99," says a gas station owner in Elmore.

November 2007, with gasoline prices averaging $3.02 per gallon in Vermont: "Everybody keeps wanting to see what's that point of impact where people start to cut back. We keep setting the benchmark, and people continue to travel," a AAA spokesman says.

Today: $3.50 per gallon and rising with no end in sight.

Shamy adds a footnote: "In 2000, each Vermonter traveled 11,167 miles in a motor vehicle, according to the U.S. Transportation Department. By 2005, there were more of us and still each of us traveled more -- 12,379 miles."

Michael Giberson

I was out in West Texas this past weekend and had a little spare time available Saturday morning. What better for an energy policy geek to do than visit the American Wind Power Center in Lubbock, Texas?

The AWPC is a museum showing off about 150 years of windmill technology. Most of the windmills in the collection were intended for pumping water, or sometimes for milling grain, but they have a few historical electrical generators and a pair of new models including a 660 kW Vespa which powers the site and is interconnected to the local utility. On the ground in the above photo is a disassembled GE 1.5 MW generator that will become the centerpiece of a planned addition.

Thanks to a canceled school tour I was able to get a personal tour of the site from executive director Coy Harris. I asked him whether they had any trouble interconnecting the generator to the local power company. He said it took a bit of effort, but they had to work a lot harder with the city in order to install the tower inside the city, at a facility with public access and near a residential neighborhood.

Harris tipped me off that the Farmers Cooperative Compress located on the Southeast edge of town was installing a number of wind turbines, so I headed over to take a look.

NOTES: It turns out that there are a few other windmill museums, see links to museums and other windmill resources here (from Vintage Windmills online magazine).

The student paper at Texas Tech University discussed the AWPC in this 2006 article.

Lynne Kiesling

I like Wired's "This Day in Tech" feature. Today's feature is this day in bridge history: March 4, 1890, the opening of the Forth Bridge across the Firth of Forth, north of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Three 330-foot towers went up, each atop four separate foundations. The towers cantilevered out toward one another, not quite touching. Machinery hoisted two 350-foot truss spans into place to be supported by the ends of the cantilever arms. Result: two clear spans of 1,710 feet each and a total length of 5,350 feet, not counting the approaches.

The muscular design, with its massive cross-bracing and 58,000 tons of steel, was hailed as a triumph of Victorian engineering on its completion in 1890.

The length of the total span, and the wind patterns in the Firth, make it important to have a really strong bridge, which had not been possible before this effort.

Michael Giberson

I know the internet mantra “information wants to be free,” the bane of many copyright holders.

Macy’s, among many others, is one retail Goliath fighting against the free flow of information online. The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse posted online a copy of Macy’s letter to bfads.net, the “David” in this David and Goliath story, requesting the site remove information carried online related to Macy’s day-after-Thanksgiving sales promotion:

Like many retailers, Macy’s generally conducts a significant shopping promotion centering around the days following Thanksgiving (commonly known as a “Black Friday sale.”) The elements of this promotion, including sale dates and times, as well as sale merchandise selection and pricing, are the product of substantial time and effort on the part of Macy’s, and constitute proprietary information.

We have become aware that the Bfads.net web site (the “Site”) is currently displaying this information, including specifics relating to “early bird” specials, a detailed list of items to be on sale (with sale pricing), ... none of which has been released to the public … The Macy’s Black Friday Materials are protected by copyright, trade secret, and other federal and state laws….

Accordingly, we hereby demand that you immediately remove any and all ... [blah blah blah] ... We further demand that you disclose the source ....

In the New York Times, Randall Stross reports on the battle between retail giants and online davids. Apparently the retailers’ attorneys talk a big game, but are reluctant to actually take such websites into court:

For the last several years, Wal-Mart Stores and other large chains have threatened legal action to intimidate Web sites that get hold of advertising circulars early and publish prices online ahead of company-set release dates. The retailers’ threats rest upon some dubious legal arguments, however, which may be the reason they haven’t shown a keen interest in actually going to court over the issue.

The article calls the legal claims “dubious” in part because “the claim of copyright protection for facts themselves, like sales prices, that exist separately from their original expression was rejected by the courts long ago.” The article then makes reference to a 1991 Supreme Court case in which the court ruled that “names and phone numbers in a telephone directory could not be copyrighted and thus could be freely copied.”

While the article makes much of the fact that the retailers haven’t tested the issue in courts, it may be because the retailers have concluded that the harm is relatively small while court cases are expensive. In addition, huge retailers suing little website operators doesn’t generate much consumer goodwill.

Still, I wish the retailers would sue. I would want them to win. Prices are property.

The phone book case mentioned in the Times article seems inappropriate. In the case, Feist Publ’ns, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., Inc., the court said, “facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship. The distinction is one between creation and discovery: The first person to find and report a particular fact has not created the fact; he or she has merely discovered its existence.” A little later the court said, “[A]ll facts – scientific, historical biographical, and news of the day . . . may not be copyrighted and are part of the public domain available to every person.”

When a retailer, by application of managerial expertise, selects prices and products to promote, the prices chosen are not facts being discovered. The terms of trade that will prevail in the market – the P* that results when economists draw supply and demand on the chalkboard – may be a kind of discoverable fact. The prices at issue here are pieces of the retailer’s business strategy, they are creative utterances.

I grant that the prices here make for a funny kind of property. Retailers will eventually spend millions of dollars to inform the public of the prices, but prior to the retailers’ release of the prices, they will spend to prevent the public from becoming informed. The intent to widely distribute the prices cannot undermine the property claim anymore than a publishers’ intent to sell many copies of a book will undermine a copyright claim.

Prices are information goods, so once they are distributed anywhere it is nearly costless these days to distribute them everywhere. Low cost of distribution doesn’t constitute economic grounds for depriving an owner of property. Books, again, or music seem the obvious examples.

“Prices are property” is the title to a 1991 article in the Journal of Law & Economics by Jarold Mulherin, Jeffry Netter, and James Overdahl. Much of the article focuses on a sixty-year period from the mid-1860s to the 1920s over which the New York Stock Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade and other financial exchanges fought to maintain control over access and use of prices produced on the exchange. The authors make a convincing case, at least to me, that the exchanges were more than just an efficient place to trade shares. Exchanges were and are firms that produce a valuable information good. While the information may become widely distributed, such distribution did not undermine the exchanges’ ownership claims. The authors suggest that the exchanges needed control over price information in order to succeed as organizations.

The authors conclude that, as of 1991, the law governing the output of financial exchanges had become somewhat muddled, and economists were not much help. Economists were generally too ready to believe that prices are the product of abstract, social processes rather than individual choice – too ready to believe that prices are made “in the market” and simply discovered by entrepreneurs. A recent court case involving copyright and prices, NYMEX, Inc. v. IntercontinentalExchange, Inc. – decided on somewhat other issues – suggests that these laws remain muddled.

Sure, information wants to be free. As Wikipedia says, the expression was first made by Stewart Brand in 1984. Brand said:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

I’d be about the last person to believe that the contents of a retailer’s holiday sales catalog is the kind of information that “just changes you life.” But the contents of those catalogs, including the prices chosen by the retailers, are the property of the retailer.

Coming up with a good price can be hard work. Just because the resulting product can be expressed as a simple number, easily copied and cheaply redistributed is no reason to deprive the retailer of its property. Just because the retailer will itself distribute the prices widely is no reason to deprive the retailer of its property. Maybe the law currently protects the retailers’ property claims, and maybe not. I think that there is an economic case to be made in favor of the conclusion that the law should protect the retailers’ valuable information property.

Michael Giberson

Cindy Skrzycki writes:

It took a book called The Jungle, a grim assessment of work inside slaughterhouses, plus a campaign by labor unions, medical professionals and consumer groups, to pressure Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act on the same day in 1906.

The food industry was opposed to legislative and regulatory oversight then, as it is in many instances today.

But, as Ron Bailey explains, it is no "Jungle" out there:

In 1900, six years before Upton Sinclair wrote his great muckraking book, The Jungle, about the filthy conditions in the meatpacking industry, the death rate from gastritis, duodentitis, enteritis, and colitis was 142.7 people per 100,000. ... Today, accepting CDC calculations of 5000 deaths per year implies a hundred-fold reduction, to just 1.4 deaths per 100,000 people.

While there is no comfort in the fact for those affected by the tainted spinach, we were fortunate, from a public policy perspective, that the germs were spread by a fresh, organically-grown vegetable rather than, say, a heavily processed meat product. Thus we are spared a lot of unhelpful editorial hand-wringing about factory farms and associated Puritan scolding about unhealthy diets. Instead, both the news and the editorializing has stayed relatively focused on what happened in this case and what we can learn from it.

Skrzycki describes the latest episode in the continuing comedy that is Washington, D.C., as nanny-state public interest groups seek to demonstrate that no consumer ailment is ever too small to justify a new federal agency. Unfortunately for the nanny-staters, Associated Press medical writer Marilynn Marchione reports that food borne illnesses are at record low levels. Perhaps the existing food safety regulatory superstructure is working, or maybe grocery distributors fear being struck by abusive lawsuits, or just maybe the industry is cleaning itself up out of good old capitalistic enlightened self-interest. Could be some crazy salad-like mix of all three social forces. One thing that seems pretty clear: our food is safer than it has ever been. Go buy some spinach.

Lynne Kiesling

Many of you probably already know that Wyoming was the first state in the US to extend voting to women, which they did as a Territory to ensure sufficient votes for statehood. More along those lines from Wikipedia's entry on Wyoming:

In 1869, Wyoming extended much suffrage to women, at least partially in an attempt to garner enough votes to be admitted as a state. In addition to being the first U.S. state to extend suffrage to women, Wyoming was also the home of many other firsts for U.S. women in politics. It had the first female court bailiff and the first female justice of the peace in the country. Wyoming was also the first state in the Union to elect a female governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross, in 1925.

Jackson also had an all-woman, five-person city council in the 1920s.

Michael Giberson

Grant McCracken finds an Adam Smith passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that adroitly captures the dynamic between our gadgets, our worlds, and ourselves.

Lynne Kiesling

John Moser has tagged me with the bibliophile meme (and he did so on a good day, as I am feeling contemplative):

1. How many books do I own? I estimate 1000, split between home and work pretty evenly and not counting the 500 or so additional books contributed by the KP Spouse. And that doesn't count my 40 or so cookbooks, even though I actually only use about six of them (mostly Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking).

2. What was the last book I bought? Practical Matter: Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851, by Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart. I am in the middle of reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which in combination with Joel Mokyr's work on the origins of industrialization in the dissemination of useful knowledge through scientific societies during the Enlightenment, has piqued my interest in Newton and in Enlightenment science in general. Plus Newton was a character, a bit of a freak, so his life is intriguing.

3. What was the last book I read? Understanding the Process of Economic Change by Douglass North. This is a very ambitious book. North puts forth a hypothesis that weaves together human cognitive processes, belief systems, culture, institutions, and economic growth. It's a really complex set of issues and relationships, and I think he's done a good job of articulating it clearly. It crystallizes the reasons why institutions matter, and why we see different outcomes of similar processes in different places.

4. What are the five books that mean the most to me? This one is really tough.

-Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments. Yeah, you thought I'd say Wealth of Nations, but I think ToMS is even more important and broad in its implications for how real live free and responsible individuals live together in civil society.

-F. A. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty. A broad articulation of the knowledge problem, of the difficulties of Cartesian rationality, and the importance of the formal and informal institutions that enable free and responsible people to live together in civil society.

-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. The best piece of English-language fiction. Ever. Period.

-Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches. In addition to being a work of virtuosity and of great importance for understanding our modern plenitude, this was the first work in which I ever participated as a scholar. Joel taught my graduate economic history course from the notes for the manuscript, and our lively discussions in class taught me how multi-directional scholarship and learning are when they are done well.

-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. Like John, I have deep problems with strict Objectivism, but reading AS, Fountainhead, etc. while in high school shaped my future questioning of authority, my empiricism, my value for independent thought, and my confidence in the originality of my ideas. That last one has taken a couple of decades to develop, but I can trace it to reading Rand in high school.

'Nuff about me. I'm tagging Mr. Seat, Knitress, Courtney, and Rob.

Lynne Kiesling

Most people who like to observe human action and its inherent dynamism (in tension with some inherent stasism, too) seem to be fascinated by cities. I love cities � their histories, their energy, their culture, their architecture (and yes, let�s admit it, their restaurants, and shopping). The various neighborhoods in east London are a great example of organic evolution and dynamism. When I first visited London in 1986, as a history buff and a fan of technological change, I visited them with memories of the Spitalfields wool weavers, the markets, the tumult, and so on. But when I first visited them they were bedraggled collections of down-on-their-luck people and buildings, an agglomeration of poverty that had begun in the Georgian 18th century with the development of upscale housing in the West End.

Since the mid-1990s, though, the areas of Spitalfields, Shoreditch, and Hoxton have seen an influx of artists and dance clubs � artists looking for cheap rents, and dance clubs taking advantage of low rents, high ceilings, and a dearth of high-income neighbors to complain about the noise and late nights. Like other cities (including my beloved Chicago), these neighborhoods contain some old warehouse buildings that have been turned into loft apartments, taking advantage of low property values, high ceilings, and large windows. The proximity to Liverpool Street and new commercial buildings as the City grew east didn�t hurt either.

This is an exciting time for these neighborhoods. They remain edgy and funky, and are also attracting new commercial activity in the form of restaurants, bars, boutiques, and the art galleries that have been in the area for about a decade. As with other neighborhoods in other cities, as they gentrify they may lose that edge, but may become attractive places to live where they were not particularly attractive before.

The thing I most love about the evolution of such neighborhoods is the creative re-use of old industrial and commercial buildings. This creativity symbolized for me the form that dynamism takes in urbanism these days � opportunistically taking advantage of conveniently located but underpriced real estate, keeping the respect of the existing buildings (of course, this is not always organic and is usually accompanied by some zoning or historical protection), seeing opportunities to create new value in a neighborhood.

Of course, given the realities of 21st-century living in Britain, there is substantial government planning of land use. But even within the planning confines, creativity finds its expression. It reminds me of that great book, Jane Jacobs� Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs' point is that urban planning fails when it fails to honor the organic patterns of human activity that have evolved in the neighborhood.

My dissertation advisor and long-time friend, Joel Mokyr, has written a new book that will be published in December. Titled Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, it is an historical analysis of the relationship between economic growth and access to information on technological change and new ideas more broadly construed. From the book description:

He argues that the growth explosion in the modern West in the past two centuries was driven not just by the appearance of new technological ideas but also by the improved access to these ideas in society at large--as made possible by social networks comprising universities, publishers, professional sciences, and kindred institutions. Through a wealth of historical evidence set in clear and lively prose, he shows that changes in the intellectual and social environment and the institutional background in which knowledge was generated and disseminated brought about the Industrial Revolution, followed by sustained economic growth and continuing technological change.

Joel is an intellectual omnivore with wide-ranging interests, and the erudition of his writing makes his work even more compelling. And he's willing to be controversial, so you'll think when you read this. Read it and enjoy.

Brad DeLong has an article in the November issue of Wired that puts our rates of technological change in historical perspective. An excerpt:

Past industrial revolutions � steel, for example, or the coming of mass production to the automobile � had seen explosions of technology that drove the prices of key commodities (train rails, the Model T) down by 5 to 10 percent a year for one, two, or three decades. The information age is not your father�s Oldsmobile: The price of computation, according to Yale�s Bill Nordhaus, has dropped 42 percent per year over 60 years � a trillion-fold fall since 1940.

Today�s technological revolution has so far lasted between two and six times as long as previous revolutions. It is between five and ten times as fast, a race between a cheetah and a possum. And it is a larger share of the economy. It changes what people do in their work, where it is done, and even what economic activity is. The problem: We are not sure how. (Spare a thought for Alan Greenspan � negotiating a soft landing is even harder when you don�t know where the statistical ground is.)

We are not sure how. Yet another sense in which the market process is one of discovery, and a very diffuse one at that. Drives the central planners nuts, heh heh.