Confusing the Satisfaction of Some Consumers’ Preferences for Market Failure. Donald Boudreaux

Only by implicitly assuming that consumers are automata who mindlessly flood into retail stores the moment doors open for business can Robert Frank conclude – as he did earlier this week in the New York Times - that pre-dawn holiday retail-store openings are the result of a competitive struggle that ultimately harms everyone.  But consumers are not the passive fools that Frank presumes them to be.  They have preferences, on which they can act, regarding the hours at which they shop.  If enough consumers want to sleep in without losing ready access to all of This Season’s Must-Have Holiday Gifts, one or more retailers will have incentive and ability to cater to these consumers.

Such retailers can advertise “We stock a huge inventory of all the holiday gifts you want and we never open earlier than 10am!”  Problem solved.  Late-sleeping shoppers will then be assured they can awaken at a respectable hour before trundling down to shop at such retailers.

Want evidence?  Consider the fact that the vast majority of retailers, even during the holidays, in fact do not open before sunrise.

Frank has long been consumed by his vision of market competition as a negative-sum game.  He here carelessly allows his bias to be confirmed by evidence of nothing more than some retailers’ successfully catering to some consumers’ preferences for the excitement of pre-dawn holiday shopping.

UPDATE: The New York Times‘s great science writer, John Tierney, offers the following thought to me in a private e-mail:

I would guess that the retailers are doing this at least in part for the free publicity — the shots of people camping outside the Best Buy sign — so they’re offering low prices as a way of paying the performers in their publicity campaign.

Yep.  A very good point.

Gas o carbón. Antón Uriarte

El gas natural suele estar compuesto entre un 70 % y un 90 % de metano, CH4. Antes de quemarlo, no es difícil separarlo de otros componentes que pueden estar presentes en apreciables proporciones en el gas extraído del subsuelo, como dióxido de carbono, etano o sulfuro de hidrógeno.

Quemar metano, es decir, oxigenar su carbono, se representa con una ecuación sencilla

CH4 +2 O2 = CO2 + 2H2O + energía

El carbón es más complicado. Es una mezcla de muchos compuestos difíciles de separar y además en proporciones variables. Una fórmula aproximada del carbón es C135H96O9NS.

Lo que interesa del carbón son sus átomos de carbono, que pueden representar el 85 % de su masa. Interesan, porque al igual que pasa con el carbono del metano, combinándolos con el oxígeno, producen energía ( C+O2 = CO2 +energía). Pero en la combustión del carbón, los otros elementos que lo integran, difíciles de separar antes de la quema, pueden formar compuestos nocivos. Por eso se califica al carbón de "sucio", sin explicar que en las modernas centrales térmicas se minimizan las emisiones de estos compuestos hasta hacerlas bajísimas (como en la japonesa de Isogo, en la foto de arriba).

Cuando se quema carbón se emite aproximadamente el doble de CO2 que cuando se quema metano, unos 800 gramos de CO2 por kWh en el carbón, frente a 400 gramos por kWh en el gas natural. Esto, que es una ventaja para los detractores del CO2 (entre los que no me incluyo), sirvió y sirve para promocionar las centrales de gas frente a las más tradicionales de carbón. Además, su fórmula de combustión sencilla sirvió y sirve para calificarlo de "limpio".

Un incoveniente, sin embargo, para los que creen que es incoveniente el efecto invernadero (entre los que tampoco me incluyo) es que hay metano, CH4, que se escapa sin ser quemado, tanto en los pozos como en los gasoductos, y molécula por molécula, una de metano tiene un potencial de calentamiento entre 20 y 100 veces superior a una de dióxido de carbono. Por eso quizás, en cuanto al efecto invernadero, la sustitución del carbón por gas en centrales térmicas no lo disminuye nada (co2: Repunte de metano).

NaturalGas.org

Real Clean Coal: Japan’s Unit #2 Isogo Plant — MasterResource

Man-made earthquakes. Matt Ridley

Whatever the rights and wrongs of dam building, induced seismicity is part of a trend affecting human culpability in general. Gradually, over the years, people have taken on more responsibility for what goes wrong in the world. Acts of God have become acts of man. Five hundred years ago, even with unlimited money and power, there would have been little a ruler could do to prevent plague, famine, flood or misery. Now almost every death from infectious disease, hunger or weather, wherever it happens in the world, is in theory preventable.

With knowledge comes responsibility. The destruction of a city by an asteroid that we fail to divert, or the death of a child in Africa to whom we fail to get a dose of oral-rehydration therapy, is on our conscience now as never before. If even some earthquakes might be our fault, it is responsibility we should welcome, because it is better to have rows about who caused or failed to prevent a disaster than to live in a world where disasters are inevitable.


Read full.

Charts of the Day: Kidney Shortage Worsens Yearly

By Mark Perry.

As a follow-up to this recent CD post on the market for kidneys, the charts above show up-to-date data on the kidney situation from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS).  Here's the current situation:

1. There are currently 90,363 registered candidates on the ever-increasing waiting list to receive a kidney transplant, which is an all-time record high (see top chart).  

2. Based on actual transplant operations through August of this year, an estimated 16,855 patients will have a kidney transplant operation this year (see top chart).

3. Of the 90,363 patients currently on the waiting list, only about 18.6%, or fewer than one-in-five, will actually receive a kidney transplant this year (see bottom chart).  That's the lowest chance of receiving a kidney for those on the waiting list since UNOS records start in 1989, and way below the 50% chance in 1989, 1990 and 1991.  

4. Based on data from the last few years, there will be about 5,000 registered candidates on the list who will die this year while waiting for a kidney, and another 2,000 who will be removed from the list because they are considered to be too sick to survive a kidney transplant operation.   

Bottom Line: The situation for those with renal failure waiting desperately to receive a kidney continues to worsen every year under the current policy that prohibits donor compensation.  The only realistic, long-term and truly compassionate solution to address America's worsening kidney shortage is to legalize some form of donor compensation.  

Nourishing Bourgeois Culture

By Don Boudreaux.

Like too many western aid experts, Samuel Loewenberg misses the fundamental reason famines still ravage developing countries (“The Famine Next Time,” Nov. 27).

The reason isn’t drought. Yuma, Arizona, gets vanishingly little rainfall, yet denizens of that city aren’t ever threatened with starvation.

Nor is the reason a lack of Well-Researched Plans designed and implemented by Smart and Caring Experts. Yuma is amply supplied with food not through the efforts of intrepid bureaucrats but, instead, through the profit-seeking of restaurants such as McDonalds, retailers such as Wal-Mart, distributors such as Sysco, processors such as Kraft, and thousands of farmers and ranchers – each helped by additional thousands of producers of machinery, fertilizers, packaging materials, and the like – all responding to market prices.

Nor is the reason even the inadequacy of roads: that inadequacy is a consequence of what ails Africa, not a cause.

The bouts of famine that still haunt Africa were routine throughout history and the globe. These were ended only when, only where, and only to the extent that bourgeois culture and its adornments – chiefly, reasonably free entrepreneurial markets – flourished. To recognize this fact is to rob western busybodies of sexy agendas; but it is also to point the only way toward real prosperity for Africans.