"Every US president since Nixon has called for freeing the US from ‘dependence on foreign oil’ (within ten years!). Every president has failed. Fracking, however, has delivered the goods. Fracking has reduced the price of energy, reduced net emissions of greenhouse gases and turned the US into an energy exporter.
In How Much Has Shale Gas Saved U.S. Consumers? Lucas Davis compare LNG prices in the US ($5.3 Mcf), Europe ($14.4 Mcf) and Japan ($16.1 Mcf) to offer some plausible back of the envelope calculations:
Advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling caused U.S. natural gas production to increase significantly, and the U.S. went from being a net importer of natural gas to being the world’s largest exporter. This paper calculates how much shale gas has saved U.S. natural gas consumers. Using price differences between the United States, Europe and Japan, we calculate that U.S. natural gas consumers have saved $4.5-$5.3 trillion between 2007 and 2025, equivalent to $237-$276 billion annually. Access to low-price U.S. natural gas has been particularly valuable during major supply shocks such as the war in Ukraine, and the benefits of shale gas have been experienced broadly across sectors and states."
Thursday, May 14, 2026
How Much Has Shale Gas Saved U.S. Consumers?
Anne O. Krueger on market failures, government failures and incentive
"Some of these arguments about the market assume that if there are market failures, then whatever the government will do will be better. Maybe the market failures are huge, but that does not persuade me that government failures will not automatically be as huge. That’s the part that’s wrong. I still think that when you’re talking about lots of economic activities, you want to just look at incentives. If there’s something wrong with the market, get the incentives right. Giving bureaucrats the incentive to regulate is not the incentive that will work best in most cases."
Can De-Regulation of Branch Banking Improve Capital Allocation?
"The Great Depression led to dramatic increases in bank regulation.
One study looks at an instance of bank deregulation during this period: state-level sanctioning of
bank branching, which allowed banks to operate multiple offices within a state. … [S]tates with extensive branching in 1940 … experienced long-run gains in manufacturing productivity.
The study also
assessed the role of capital reallocation using bank and branch-level balance sheet data from 1937. … Branch offices located in capital-constrained counties … were twice as likely to receive funding on net from other banks and branches than comparable stand-alone banks in the same areas.
In addition, the new
branch networks improved capital allocation by directing funds to where they were most scarce, a function that stand-alone banks could not perform.
All in all, these
findings provide evidence that the institutional structure of branching—rather than simply expanded banking access—improved capital allocation and integrated financial markets to fuel manufacturing productivity growth, especially in underserved areas."
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
How a Scientific Cartel Protects Fraudsters and Rakes in Billions of Taxpayer Dollars
Corrupt scientists rarely face accountability. The real victims are everyone else.
From Reason. Excerpts:
"Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, published a paper in Nature in 2006 claiming to identify a specific amyloid beta protein assembly as the direct cause of memory impairment in Alzheimer's. This reinvigorated the amyloid hypothesis at a moment when skepticism about it was ramping up. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) devoted $1.6 billion to projects that mention amyloids in 2022 alone, nearly half of all federal Alzheimer's funding that year. Lesné was a star.
But there were rumblings. Numerous amyloid drugs made it to trials with billions invested by pharmaceutical companies. They failed repeatedly. A question arose in the pharmaceutical community: How can this be right? How can the trials keep failing if the underlying research is correct?
In 2022, the Vanderbilt neuroscientist Matthew Schrag uncovered evidence that images in Lesné's paper had been manipulated. Science magazine found more than 20 suspect papers by Lesné, with over 70 instances of possible image tampering. Nature retracted the paper in June 2024. Every author except Lesné signed the retraction. Lesné himself resigned from his tenured position at the University of Minnesota on March 1, 2025, three years after his fraud was exposed.
More news and details trickled out over time. Charles Piller's 2025 book Doctored talks about the Amyloid Mafia, a nickname for a network that had prioritized novelty over replication and marginalized dissenters for decades. Anyone questioning the amyloid gospel was pushed out and watched their funding vanish."
"Lesné resigned, but was still rich. None of his grant money was clawed back. The system that was supposed to catch this—peer review, university compliance, journal editorial boards—failed repeatedly for years.
Lesné was not a lone bad apple. The rot and corruption of academic research are systemic and structural. Daniele Fanelli's 2009 meta-analysis of survey data in PLOS One showed that approximately 2 percent of scientists self-reported fabrication or falsification—and 14 percent reported witnessing it in colleagues. Self-reports mark the floor, not the ceiling.
J.B. Carlisle's 2021 paper, "False individual patient data and zombie randomised controlled trials submitted to Anaesthesia," showed that out of 153 trials with individual patient data available, 44 percent had untrustworthy data and 26 percent were zombie trials animated entirely by false data. In a 2025 PNAS study, researchers estimated that the number of fraudulent publications is doubling every 1.5 years, while legitimate publications double every 15.
At least 400,000 papers published from 2000 through 2022 showed signs of coming from paper mills. Former BMJ editor Richard Smith asked, "Is it time to assume health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?" A 2015 Lancet comment by Richard Horton put it bluntly: "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."
"The peer review process helps enable this fraud. The economist Bruce Yandle called it the "Bootleggers and Baptists" phenomenon: A group with strongly held moral beliefs will end up working with people interested in exploiting it financially. Self-righteous gatekeepers say peer review is required for integrity. As a byproduct, the publishing oligopoly extracts billions in profit by charging for access to taxpayer-funded research. Paper mills have become a shadow market worth, by one conservative estimate cited by Nature, hundreds of millions of dollars per year by publishing any slop they get their hands on, knowing that researchers desperate to publish would rather cheat than starve and that sociopaths would happily buy authorship with a credit card."
"The Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 legally required public posting of clinical trial results on ClinicalTrials.gov. A 2015 New England Journal of Medicine analysis showed only 13.4 percent compliance in reporting summary results within the required 12-month window. The government has the authority to fine violators up to $10,000 per day; it could have collected $25 billion according to a 2015 STAT investigation. But it collected essentially nothing, because the agency doesn't want to fight the powerful institutions it regulates."
More capitalist countries have lower income inequality
"More capitalist countries have lower income inequality, not higher. High income inequality is caused by cronyism which goes hand in hand with highly regulated markets. Welfare states also lower inequality, but you need free markets wealth to have generous welfare states."
"You can't derive causality from raw data. Those scatter plots are just a description of reality. If your causal picture of the world makes you expect the opposite patterns, you should re-evaluate. The cronyism comment is an alternate causal theory that fits the pattern.
In any case, if you think I'm deriving my whole world view from a few scatter plots, that's a very uncharitable interpretation. No, that's not what I'm doing. While, yes, empirical evidence is very important. Too many people have theories that are intuitive but flat out wrong.
The correlations on the upper-left and lower-right are actually quite strong. The other two less so, which further enhances the point! 1 Size of govt weakly correlated with equality, unless in rich country. 2 Even in rich countries, capitalism doesn't increase inequality."
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Trump Halts the Blockade of U.S. Ports
His waiver of the Jones Act is helping U.S. oil supply, so why not repeal the 1920 law?
WSJ editorial. Excerpts:
"So far, about two dozen waiver voyages have been reported complete as of April 30, according to the Maritime Administration."
"Mr. Trump’s initial suspension of the Jones Act was for 60 days, but late last month he extended that for another 90 days, with the White House calling it a great success. “New data compiled since the initial waiver was issued revealed that significantly more supply was able to reach U.S. ports faster,” a spokeswoman said. “This extension will help ensure vital energy products, industrial materials, and agricultural necessities are maintained.”"
"Funny, it also sounds like a good argument for permanent Jones Act relief. In a crisis, such as a hurricane in the Caribbean or a menacing in the Persian Gulf, the archaic law becomes an acute problem, because it limits the flexibility of American supply chains to respond."
"The Jones Act’s defenders call it an America First policy to protect a U.S. shipbuilding industry and merchant marine. A century later, that clearly hasn’t worked."
Entrepreneurs Flocked to Colorado. Now Red Tape Is Driving Some Away
Proposed AI bill has many wondering whether state’s regulations killing its entrepreneurial spirit
By Owen Tucker-Smith of The WSJ. Excerpts:
"A widely circulated report last month from the state’s chamber of commerce reported a loss of publicly traded companies based in the state, estimating that Colorado had lost workers from some 98 firms to relocations or failed site-selection opportunities since 2019."
"Companies’ latest complaint is over a landmark state bill regulating artificial intelligence. A previous version of the bill would have required companies to take steps to reduce the risk that AI-based algorithms used for high-stakes decisions such as employment or healthcare discriminate against users."
"The state added half a million jobs in the mid-2010s as startup culture and domestic migration drove explosive growth, but the economy has recently grown sluggish."
"Blake Scholl, chief executive of the Denver-based aviation company Boom Supersonic, moved to Colorado a decade ago, inspired by its thriving business climate, but said the pileup of regulations has delayed his construction projects."
"the AI bill would add compliance costs and distract attention from companies when they need to focus on winning the AI race."