David Cameron recently announced a major initiative to renew Britain’s infrastructure. In this post I examine the role of infrastructure in society, how should it be paid for, and assess the possible impacts of infrastructure investments on economic growth. The overall message is one of incremental improvements, but with investments in communications infrastructure holding the most promise for Britain’s future prosperity.
This paper should be mandatory reading before anyone tries to decode an economic model. For engineers or physical scientists, the mathematical formalism of economics seems familiar but that’s about it. In particular the assumptions used seem woefully inadequate to act as a foundation for any meaningful representation of the real world. Rational consumer and firm behaviour, stylised economies with only one product (made with no capital) and the like may help make the math work out, but good luck finding homo economicus out in the field, carefully evaluating the marginal utility of just one more orange in the grocery store.
Read more on Economic models as analogies…
After nearly 18 months in review, our Biomass and Bioenergy paper is now out:
Recent years have shown a marked interest in the construction of eco-towns, showcase developments intended to demonstrate the best in ecologically-sensitive and energy-efficient construction. This paper examines one such development in the UK and considers the role of biomass energy systems. We present an integrated resource modelling framework that identifies an optimized low-cost energy supply system including the choice of conversion technologies, fuel sources, and distribution networks. Our analysis shows that strategies based on imported wood chips, rather than locally converted forestry residues, burned in a mix of ICE and ORC combined heat and power facilities offer the most promise. While there are uncertainties surrounding the precise environmental impacts of these solutions, it is clear that such biomass systems can help eco-towns to meet their target of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Read more on Evaluating biomass energy strategies for a UK eco-town…
A fascinating new book on urban economics, infrastructure, and the links between them.
I’ve been working through Gelman et al.’s otherwise excellent Bayesian Data Analysis
and it’s going reasonably well. My statistics is a little bit rusty so it’s taken time to work through all of the exercises and really understand what’s going on. But I say “otherwise excellent” because yesterday I spent ages trying to figure out a problem, only to discover that the data published in the book don’t correspond to the text discussion.
Read more on Grrr……
Posted in R | Tagged Rstats, statistics
I’ve knocked together a quick function for generating efficient Monte Carlo samples. It takes a bit of the legwork out of running Monte Carlo simulations.
