Latest posts
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Some fertility and AI forecasts
The 2024 forecast is particularly pessimistic about China’s fertility prospects. Both projections produce very substantial global aging, a major global capital glut producing very low long-run real capital returns. The latest forecast entails 10% lower global GDP in 2100 and far higher payroll tax rates to fund old-age benefits. Most important, it entails a major…
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Regulated Markets Are Slow to Handle Change
Gowrisankaran, Langer and Reguant have an excellent paper, Energy Transitions in Regulated Markets (WP), in the latest AER. The basic idea is that regulation designed to prevent utilities from building useless power plants can induce them to keep obsolete power plants. Some background. We regulated electric utilities under the theory that they were natural monopolies…