The Energy Problem
The psychology of carbon pricing – Bottom level transactions – Conducting transactions – The surcharge on energy – Can we achieve economic efficiency? - Simplicity and Fairness- Emergent properties of the system
The Psychology of putting a price on Carbon
Conventional wisdom says that if we put a price on greenhouse emissions from fossil [...]
The community dislikes water restrictions as a way of reducing water consumption. It is fundamentally unfair and is disliked by the authorities and the population so why do we continue to use it as the main way to control the use of water during periods of shortage? The normal economic response to a shortage situation [...]
The Federal government has set a precedent with its recommendation in its emission trading greenpaper to move some excise taxes to emissions permits taxes. The same idea can be used to include China and India and all coal buying customers and countries into an emissions reduction scheme.
Here is how it could work. The [...]
The government is going to compensate households for the rise in petrol prices caused by emissions trading. The question is how best to compensate people for the price increase?The government could experiment tomorrow by giving anyone who purchases petrol a shopper docket that they can redeem if they spend the money received on infrastructure to [...]
The information content of money
The evolution of money - The rules of currencies - “Debt money” versus “trade money” - The emergent effects of present currency rules - Attaching information to money
Money was invented to facilitate trade between individuals. Every currency contains information in the way that it captures and measures value, and in [...]
We are told that we need a gas fired power station so we can build a Data Centre in Canberra and for the power station to be a backup in case NSW cannot supply us power. The second reason has been dropped and we are now left with the idea of building a Data Centre [...]
The economy as an adaptive system
The organisation of ants – The nature of adaptive systems – New goals for new economies – Water Rewards - Rewards as a system How is it that ants are so good at finding food? If a single ant finds a food source (such as that [...]
An introduction to Rewards – The Tragedy of the Commons - Why historical approaches don’t work - A new way
This book is about an extremely simple concept that brings a fresh approach to the problems of allocating and optimising the resources required by modern societies.
It’s a concept that is politically palatable, [...]
Congratulations to the ACT governmentThe ACT government is to be congratulated if it introduces land rents for low income residents. It should now consider extending the idea and allow all newly developed land to be rented by anyone for any purpose - anywhere [...]
Keeping control of your electronic identity
Human culture and society in all its diversity is built upon individuals interacting with other individuals. In a similar way that a termite mound is an emergent property of the sum of individual interactions of thousands of termites, so human culture and all of society’s artefacts are emergent properties of [...]
