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Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

timharford.com

211–220 of 291 posts

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#211
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better to use the batteries than hauling around mostly unused batteries all the time.

Plug in hybrids need to haul around an engine, gas tank, transmission, exhaust system etc. They also need extra batteries over a standard hybrid.

Those items aren’t made with as much extractive materials proportionally as EV batteries. If using PHEVs means more miles travelled are electric while less lithium is mined, great.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#212
An environmentalist organisation could do this by buying them and shuttering them.

The problem with this is that eventually the government notices what you're doing and just takes it away from you. This happens regularly with attempts to preserve natural lands and resources.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#213
post #179

> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back…

I hope my ignorance can be forgiven, but every time I see economist lit it comes off as incredibly reductive. There's always something (like the secondary fight-night line you mention) that seems intuitively obvious to me but gets glossed over. Am I just ignorant?

> Am I just ignorant?

No. Economics academia is an "emperor's new clothes" field. They generate enormous amounts of dense, complex-sounding literature, and most if it is as you describe. It's never practical.

Sometimes there are interesting models that help to understand things that happened in the past, but as a field, economics seems unable to predict anything that will happen in the future (even on a fundamental level) and therefore can't seem to graduate to the level of science.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#214

An environmentalist organisation could do this by buying them and shuttering them. The problem with this is that eventually the government notices what you're doing and just takes it away from you. This happens regularly with attempts to preserve natural lands and resources.

Another issue is that it artificially pumps up the market for coal mines, which would likely lead to the development and operation of unprofitable coal mines that would otherwise never be opened.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#215

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

I read somewhere PHEV users don’t really bother charging effectively making them even worse than gas guzzlers.

Also that seems what Toyota is thinking with their anti-BEV lobbyism.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#216
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope my ignorance can be forgiven, but every time I see economist lit it comes off as incredibly reductive. There's always something (like the secondary fight-night line you mention) that seems intuitively obvious to me but gets glossed over. Am I just ignorant?

> Am I just ignorant? No. Economics academia is an "emperor's new clothes" field. They generate enormous amounts of dense, complex-sounding literature, and most if it is as you describe. It's never practical. Sometimes there are interesting models that help to understand things that happened in the past, but as a field, economics seems unable to predict anything that will happen in the future (even on a fundamental l…

And if you are able to do that most likely you will find yourself in a hedge fund but not in the academia.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#217

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most" We have a name for them - Bus Drivers! Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week. Today 95% of all electric busses are in China…

There’s a critical difference; convincing your local government to switch to electric buses is rather more difficult than choosing how to spend your own money.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#218
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope my ignorance can be forgiven, but every time I see economist lit it comes off as incredibly reductive. There's always something (like the secondary fight-night line you mention) that seems intuitively obvious to me but gets glossed over. Am I just ignorant?

> Am I just ignorant? No. Economics academia is an "emperor's new clothes" field. They generate enormous amounts of dense, complex-sounding literature, and most if it is as you describe. It's never practical. Sometimes there are interesting models that help to understand things that happened in the past, but as a field, economics seems unable to predict anything that will happen in the future (even on a fundamental l…

It's like this because they start from postulates that are contrary to reality. The idea that elements in an economic systems act in a rational way, or that there is an "invisible hand" that drives the markets, or that the markets operate in equilibrium, these are all ad hoc ideas that have no basis in reality. I classify it more like a kind of economic theology.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#219
post #179

> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back…

I hope my ignorance can be forgiven, but every time I see economist lit it comes off as incredibly reductive. There's always something (like the secondary fight-night line you mention) that seems intuitively obvious to me but gets glossed over. Am I just ignorant?

Economics is an extremely political science, a lot of common knowledge about what economists believe/predict/do is probably wrong. There is about as much visibility into what economics actually predicts as into physics, mathematics or any other science.

Most economics is quoted to try and score points in political debates where the lines are already drawn, conclusions already reached and people are mainly looking for tools to push their preferred solution. In such an environment, you might expect to see an enormous amount of very low quality economics content - probably full of motivated reasoning if you look for it.

It doesn't say much about the state of the field, more about how hard it is to find the field in amongst the dross. Eg, it is reasonably clear that most people writing about about Marxism or Keynesianism haven't read Marx or Keynes wrote.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most" We have a name for them - Bus Drivers! Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week. Today 95% of all electric busses are in China…

How heavy is an EV bus? Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class. Would a bus be even more so, to the point of being dangerously massive?

> Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class

A Tesla Model 3 weights roughly as much as its ICE equivalent (BMW 3 series).

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