Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  It sounds like a Catch-22, but it is inherent to the growth of many industries that are split into infrastructural and superstructural components.  Which comes first?  There is no financial incentive to build charging stations unless there are a lot of electric vehicles on the road.  There is no sense buying an electric vehicle unless one knows one will be able to find a charging station at need.  Thios is the sort of thing that sometimes inspires arguments (I consider them overly facile arguments) for  central economic planning.   That is, as it happens, a lousy argument.  A government that plans the infrastructure is locking in a path for its economy over the years or even the decades to come (cough! Eisenhower highways cough!). In terms of market forces, infra and super structure can very well develop in smallish form and then scale up together. But hey, I used to make arguments like that back when I called myself an anarcho-cap. Now I'm...

    are reports now that Tesla is entering into  an unlikely partnership,   a plan to buy “blade batteries” from a Chinese company, BYD, for delivery in the second quarter of next year. This is a new generation of battery that may have a lot to do with the course taken by the electric-car industry. That has nothing much to do with this....  In the second quarter 2021, Tesla reported more than $1 billion net income, and earnings per share of $1.45, which beat analyst  expectations of just $0.98.  Tesla’s overall automotive revenue for the quarter was $10.21 billion.  Critics have sometimes knocked Tesla for relying too much on the sale of regulatory credits  as a source of revenue.  A regulatory system in California, like analogous systems in Europe, give credits to automakers depending on how many EVs they manufacture. Those who don’t manufacture a sufficient number of EVs to keep the regulators happy can avoid penalties by buying ...

Ford Motor Co announced recently that the new electrical vehicle it is offering, its EV SUV, will be known as a Mustang. This invests the new EV with the symbolism of a classic brand name, a model that proved a great success for Ford in the pre-oil-crises 1960s, and that inspired such classic songs as "Mustang Sally." Since those days, nostalgists (and collectors/investors) have regarded the old Mustang as symbolizing an era in which fuel efficiency didn't much enter into calculations as to what car to build, on the one side of the industry, or into what cars to buy, on the other hand. They didn't enter into such calculations because petroleum was cheap, and was expected to remain cheap. Because, after all ... what could go wrong? Calling an EV a Mustang is on the one hand a display of confidence in its design, on the other hand a friendly nod to the regulatory regime in the state of California, and on the third hand a sign of the normalization of EVs. (Someti...