Make Econ Scientific

Recent Posts

Texas: The Energy-Only Bias

So far, no electricity market is able to completely avoid blackouts due to insufficient capacity. That means some mechanism must decide the extent of blackouts that will be accepted. There are two

Frozen: Electric Blackouts inTexas

Massive blackouts in TX raise two questions: Was in wind — does climate policy threaten America? And was it free-wheeling TX regulation?

Toward a New Climate Game (2)

A Reciprocal Voluntary Agreement Back to Post #1 Feb 1, 2021 — In the prior post, I concluded that the UN climate game, since the signing of the Kyoto accord, has been

Toward a New Climate Game (1)

First in a series on new climate-cooperation experiments — Why We Need to Change the Climate Game

Thorium Reactors? Or, Molten Salt?

I’ve been curious about thorium for years. Now, Andrew Yang proposes to spend $50 billion researching thorium molten salt reactors by 2025.

Honor & the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Game theory assumes sociopathic players. That leads to cooperation failures in repeated games. Except it doesn’t. Not unless the players also know for sure that the other players are too.

Freeman Dyson on Climate

Here’s a fun interview with Freeman Dyson, the guy that explained Richard Feynman to the world (and improved his math). He also recently discovered some very interesting new properties of repeated prisoner-dilemma games.

Why Is OPEC Letting The Oil Price Crash?

In January 2015 History is the key In 1980, the Saudi’s oil minister, Yamani, warned OPEC it was trying to keep the price too high. They didn’t listen, and all agreed to

Hofstadter’s Super Rationality

Climate negotiations are a sort of prisoner’s dilemma, so we need to find a way to change the game or change the outcome of a prisoner’s dilemma. Douglas Hofstadter (of Scientific American

Honor and Punishment

Chimps and people subscribe to similar codes of honor. It’s been built in for 7 million years, and it may be just what we need to enforce a cooperative climate treaty.