Marginal Revolution: Monday links

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Monday links

1. Paul Krugman against ethanol

2. Tying all six Star Wars episodes together

3. Is the Euro popular?

4. 3-D world map, based on economic activity (Flash player required)

Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 29, 2007 at 06:48 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink

Comments

at times i wonder what would it take for bush to do to make krugman agree with him.

Posted by: sa at Jan 29, 2007 7:56:27 PM

The map is cool. I wish I could rotate and zoom. Tokyo seems to have the most economic activity, followed by two cities in Europe I can't quite make out (London and Paris?) and NYC.

Posted by: Trieu Truong at Jan 29, 2007 8:20:46 PM

The critique on ethanol is widely known and held by people who are well-informed. Corn-based ethanol isn't going to be a workable solution for meeting our energy needs or reducing emissions. Corn-based diesel might be a more effective use of corn, although our current corn farming system is loaded with problems which go beyond energy.

Posted by: don Hosek at Jan 29, 2007 8:24:46 PM

Has anyone look into seting up ethonal production in Africa to address their poverty problems and CO2 emissions at the same time. If it works in Brazil might it also work there.

Posted by: joan at Jan 29, 2007 8:39:58 PM

Does anyone know of studies done to assess the true cost of ethanol produced from corn, factoring in the subsidies to corn farmers, or of comparisons across various dimensions of ethanol, gasoline, and other alternatives? Thanks!

Posted by: The Tsunami at Jan 29, 2007 11:33:01 PM

It's not exactly a peer-reviewed econ journal, but Popular Mechanics did some good back-of-the-envelope work on the subject here.

Posted by: Derek Loweq at Jan 30, 2007 9:13:29 AM

Ethanol does not need to be corn based. Grasses and others can be used too.

Posted by: Tom at Jan 30, 2007 12:00:40 PM

About the star wars bit:

Some of it may or may not be true in the mind of George Lucas, but there are some errors.

Chewbacca was not a rebellion spy. Chewie and Han are together due to Han rescuing Chewie from Empire slavery (the empire enslaved the wookies under the ruse of sedition to work on the Death Star). Han Solo was an Imperial Officer in training, but the Corellian independent streak didn't fit in the Empire. In that short time after dismissal, Han rescued Chewie. In the Wookie fashion, Chewie took on a life debt to Han which is why they are together.

Also, the YT-100 Corellian freighter (model of the Falcon, notice freighter, not cruiser) is not the fastest ship in the galaxy by itself, but only became so under Lando and Han's customizing. The Wookie delgation would have used a more comfortable ship like the one Leia took to Tatooine.

I whole heartedly agree with the ideas of R2 using C3PO as a cover to do the dirty work of espionage.

One standing complaint, is when Obi-Won and Vader face off in the death star, there should have been more dialouge about their history while they were fighting. For all the history they have together, that fight was deviod of any emotion. Just my opinion, though.

Posted by: Fletch at Jan 30, 2007 2:38:49 PM

To the person looking for analysis of the costs of corn based ethanol - there has been a lot of analysis of this issue. Google Pimentel (from Cornell). Pimentel is more pessemistic than others - IIRC a major difference is if you assume that the corn used to produce ethqnol is from fiedls yielding much better than average (an assumption ethanol proponents make) or from fields yeilding an average amount. If you assume that that ethanol uses marginal corn production, it seems to make sense to assume that corn yeilds will be less than average.

My apologies for the typos. I have never commented here before, and I can only see about half of what I type on my screen. (Any idea why?)

Posted by: Greg at Jan 30, 2007 3:01:53 PM

From the transcript:

"We must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol -- (applause) -- using everything from wood chips to grasses, to agricultural wastes."

[that's the only appearance of the word "ethanol" in the transcript, and "corn" does not appear.]

I do think that he deserves some credit from people like Krugman for proposing tightened MPG standards. That hadn't happened at all under Krugman's favorite president.

-dk

Posted by: Dick King at Jan 30, 2007 4:52:46 PM

Thanks very much for the pointers Derek and Greg!

Posted by: The Tsunami at Jan 30, 2007 7:21:30 PM

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