ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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They can't, because politics gets in the way. Look at diseases, their occurance in society, and waht is spent on each. The spending does not correlate with occurance in all cases.
Inposing an Energy surtax upon Utilities and Auto companies Corporate profits, if they do not devote at least ten percent of their total Investment schedule to alternative Energy sources. Hey wait, that would not cost Taxpayers anything, and might even make some money. I would suggest and 8% surtax. Of course, Congress and President could not accept that. lgl
Why not have a type of electronic market where different technologies are bid on like the Iowa Electronic Market? There was a recent post about this on Marginal Revolution where drug companies are using internal markets to determine which drugs are worth persuing.
This was an Economist article several months ago:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2476988
But to answer your question, it can't. Are you trolling? The DOE should be abolished (along with the NIH, DOT, BLS, BEA and NASA - abominations all).
Incidentally, your description of the Internet is incorrect. Although it was originally designed to be redundant and robust to a nuclear explosion, it's long since dropped the redundance. It's an economic problem rather than a technological one: it's simply cheaper to route all the fibers through one pipe.
As it is, the proverbial "construction worker with a backhoe in Iowa" could bring down the whole Internet.
It's unlikely that the economics of power-lines are any different: a power-line grid would probably be equally vulnerable to disruption in any one place.
This doesn't negate the main point that more efficient transmission is a good idea, though.
For Discussion. How can the government best determine where to spend money on energy research, for example on hydrogen vs. nanotechnology?
If the government wanted to spend taxpayer money on energy research (I hope they do not) an efficient way to do it might be to simply match private investment in energy research on a 1 to 1 (better 1 to 1000, of course) basis. While this would result in too much money spent on energy research, it would otherwise not be distortionary, I believe (except for the sub-optimum investment in all other sectors of the economy, of course).