Posts Tagged: politics

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25
Nov 08

Porter Hypothesis

From Wikipedia:

According to the Porter Hypothesis strict environmental regulations can induce efficiency and encourage innovations that help improve commercial competitiveness. The hypothesis was formulated by the economist Michael Porter.

According to this hypothesis, strict environmental regulation triggers the discovery and introduction of cleaner technologies and environmental improvements, the innovation effect, making production processes and products more efficient. The cost savings that can be achieved are sufficient to overcompensate for both the compliance costs directly attributed to new regulations and the innovation costs.

This is exactly why I am thrilled when the price of gas goes up. The sooner, and higher, the better.

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17
Nov 08

Trillion here, trillion there. Pretty soon we’ll be talking about real money.

Duncan Mansfield reporting on a new book: What We Could Have Done With the Money: 50 Ways To Spend the Trillion Dollars We’ve Spent on Iraq.

He calculates $1 trillion could pave the entire U.S. interstate highway system with gold – 23.5-karat gold leaf. It could buy every person on the planet an iPod. It could give every high school student in America a free college education. It could pay off every American’s credit card. It could buy a Buick for every senior citizen still driving in America.

[via Made to Stick]

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19
Oct 08

Solution More Elegant Than The Problem?

Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts was reported to say:

“This was never going to be a bill that was going to make people happy,” he said. “No solution to a problem can be more elegant than the problem itself. We are dealing with a very difficult problem.”

Do you think this is true? I can’t say one thing for or against the bailout, but it seems to me that problems are never elegant, and solutions (at least the good ones) are always elegant.

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7
Sep 08

Innovation in Policy and Politics

After the US just dedicated $1 Billion to Georgia (the country), Thomas Friedman writes for the Times how innovation, which is America’s “most important competitive advantage”, is not present in either political party’s conversation:

While we still have enormous innovative energy bubbling up from the American people, it is not being supported and nurtured as needed in today’s supercompetitive world. Right now, we feel like a country in a very slow decline – in infrastructure, basic research and education - just slow enough to lull us into thinking that we have all the time and money to play around in Tbilisi, Georgia, more than Atlanta, Georgia.

[...]

As Chuck Vest, the former president of M.I.T., said to me: “Both candidates have spoken a lot about ‘change,’ but in most areas of need, innovation is the only mechanism that can actually change things in substantive ways. Innovation is where creative thinking and practical know-how meet to do new things in new ways, and old things in new ways.

[emphasis added]

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, to innovate means:

make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products : the company‘s failure to diversify and innovate competitively.
• [ trans. ] introduce (something new, esp. a product) : innovating new products, developing existing ones.

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29
Jul 08

On the Price of Gas

Thomas L Friedman on the price of gas:

When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.

Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives.

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