Showing posts with label privatization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label privatization. Show all posts

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Highly Linkable

Been travelling, so been behind. Some links to begin the catch up:

A podcast about when a teenage founder of a fictional company gets bought out for real money by the adults he "fired" for being too adult.

Expensive wine is for SUCKERS!

A wonderful example of how exploitable scientific study can be especially in the realm of health--study shows eating chocolate helps weight loss!

Speaking of food, a conversation with food historian (and contrarian) Rachel Laudan. One slice,
It´s to restore some sense of the benefits of modern food so that we do not waste time and energy trying to turn back the clock but can continue to improve our food system and disseminate those improvements as widely as possible.
Russ Roberts on recently being on Paul Krugman's bad side--I'm fully with Russ, of course.

Small but important steps on the road to education freedom.

Funny thing happened while we were wringing our hands over colony collapse disorder--the market (already) adapted to it minimizing the problem. (HT: Arnold Kling)

John Cochrane addresses one of the most fundamentally important questions in U.S. political economy--how to attain sustainable 4% annual economic growth. I fully (wistfully) endorse his short list of policy solutions.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

On the road again

I've been tearing up the Oklahoma interstates and toll ways the past several days. In one business-week's time, last Friday through Thursday tomorrow, I will have traveled over 1,000 for work. All of it driving having taken me southwest, north, northeast and finally southeast.

Besides the $.55 per mile reimbursement, the windshield time has enabled me to catch up with many of my podcast backlog. Especially helpful is Downcast's feature allowing 1.5x playback speed.

Two of the podcasts I listened to over this stretch along (Robert Pool on How to Build Infrastructure During an Age of Sequester from ReasonTV and Freakonomics Radio on The Downside of More Miles Per Gallon) with catching up with the latest installment of Chunka Mui's analysis and prognostications about Google's driverless car led me to do some predicting of my own.

In 30 years we will want to privatize and it will seem as obvious to privatize the roads as we want today to privatize and it seems obvious to privatize the US Postal Service. This applies to all roads from interstate highways to major metro arteries to lesser used neighborhood and rural roads. The impetus and obviousness of privatization as the natural solution decreases as we go down that list. Yet I predict that will indeed be the majority opinion held by those who seriously and objectively consider the situation. There will be strong doubters. It will probably prove to be a politically incorrect position. There will be entrenched special interests.

That is all to say that in 30 years we will be about 5-10 years away from road privatization -yes, that is indeed a prediction about the USPS today as well.

I have 80% confidence in all these predictions. I give a 75% probability that in 10 years the USPS will be gone or very largely gone as we know it today. I'll give the same probability about public roads (funding, maintenance, ownership, etc.) for the year 2053. Check back then . . .