Stephen Roach commented that he had been reading twenty-five papers on the Renminbi — but this is the only one you need to read. Here’s the panel:

Moderator

Greg Ip

U.S. Economics Editor
The Economist

Panelists

Donald Kohn

Senior Fellow, Economic Studies

Eswar Prasad

Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development

Stephen Roach

Senior Lecturer and Senior Fellow of the Jackson Institute, Yale University
Non-Executive Chairman of Asia, Morgan Stanley

There is a full transcript.

Also on the panel was DOE’s Casey Delhotal, Director, East Asian Affairs. Very interesting commentary on the US/China cooperation, especially the IP issues.

Altogether a very worthwhile conference, though I was disappointed there was no discussion of US/China nuclear cooperation, especially 4th generation.

The Brookings transcript is here.

The Qi Ye presentation slides are here.

China’s 11th five-year plan is here.

As a rule of thumb Nuclear is ‘cost competitive’(not considering externalized costs) in a ‘new build environment’ with coal at $4/MMbtu and Natural Gas at $6/MMBtu.

Those conditions exist in China and the US Southeast. That is where AP1000′s are being built. Those conditions also exist in the UK where the government position is ‘nuclear without subsidy’. They also exist in a good many other places in the world.

Australia and the US West have considerable quantities of coal that can be extracted and delivered a reasonable distance to market for well under $4/MMBtu. The discussion as to how to make cleaner technologies financially competitive with coal is therefore a much more difficult discussion.

Imagine how much lower the US cost will be once the “lawyer-protester” risk falls away, and the plants are mass-manufactured.

There’s a secure solution to America’s energy problem buried under booming Carlsbad, N.M. If only Washington would get out of the way.

French and US polls that I’ve read consistently show that people who live near nuclear power stations want to have more nuclear, not less. That perspective is almost impossible to find in the usual sensational media coverage. But this recent Forbes article is different. Carlsbad New Mexico is the site of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP ).

(…) Since opening in 1999, WIPP has operated so smoothly and safely that Carlsbad is lobbying the feds to ­expand the project to take the nuclear mother lode: 160,000 more tons of the worst high-level nuclear waste in the country

(…) Carlsbad has a different take. “It’s really a labor of love,” says Forrest. “We’ve proven that nuclear waste can be disposed of in a safe, reliable way.”

This attitude—“Yes in my backyard,” if you will—has brought near permanent prosperity to this isolated spot that until recently had no endemic economic engine. Unemployment sits at 3.8%, versus 6.5% statewide and 8.5% nationally. And thanks to this project—euphemistically known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP—New Mexico has received more than $300 million in federal highway funds in the past decade, $100 million of which has gone into the roads around Carlsbad. WIPP is the nation’s only permanent, deep geologic repository for nuclear waste. The roads have to be good for the two dozen trucks a week hauling in radioactive drums brimming with the plutonium-laden detritus of America’s nuclear weapons production.

As recommended by the Obama administration’s blue ribbon commission, community involvement is essential to the successful siting and operation of a spent fuel storage facility. A similar story is found in the Swedish town of Östhammar a town of 22,000 inhabitants a two-hour drive north of Stockholm. Spiegel May 19, 2011 Why One Swedish Town Welcomes a Waste Dump. The towns of Östhammar and Oskarshamn competed for the new storage facility:

(…) For years, local officials were worried that another town with a nuclear power plant — Oskarshamn, which is 465 kilometers away and was also vying to be the site of the repository — would end up winning the contest. The two towns decided to make a deal. The company building the repository, Svensk Kärnbränslehantering (SKB), would provide two billion Swedish krona, or about €223 million ($312 million), of which the runner-up would receive 75 percent and the winner only 25 percent.

Some might say it was an attractive incentive for one of the towns to step on the brakes and come in second place.

The decision was made on a rainy summer day in 2009. Edelsvärd remembers the day very clearly. Östhammar town officials were sitting at the town hall, watching a live broadcast of the showdown in Stockholm. When the name of their community appeared on the screen, Edelsvärd says that “people weren’t cheering the way they would at a football match, but you could sense the feeling of elation in the room. It was a very Swedish way of expressing joy.”

Another case of good decisions resulting from competent community consultation is Finland’s new repository at Onkalo.

Please remember that what the media and Greenpeace call “nuclear waste” is actually incredibly valuable fuel for power generation. E.g., in the case of England, the UK DECC chief scientist David MacKay supported estimates that all of England’s electrical needs can be supplied for 500 years by burning the existing UK “waste”. This is in the context of Duncan Clark’s article on deployment of fast reactors such as the GE Hitachi PRISM being proposed to burn the UK “waste plutonium”.

(…) According to figures calculated for the Guardian by the American writer and fast reactor advocate Tom Blees, this alternative approach could – given a large enough number of reactors – produce enough low-carbon electricity from Britain’s waste stockpile to supply the UK at current rates of demand for more than 500 years.

MacKay confirmed this figure. “As an upper bound on what you could get from those resources in fast reactors I think it’s a very reasonable estimate. In reality you’d get all kinds of issues so you wouldn’t achieve the upper bound but I still think it’s a reasonable starting point.”

Q. The annual increase in the cost of college tuition seems to be much greater than inflation every year. Even during the recent financial crisis, tuitions were generally going up across the board! Seems like this is a problem waiting to happen. Do you think that we’re going to get a point soon where it won’t be a good investment to go to a private university unless you know that you’re going into a lucrative field (finance, computer science, medicine, economics)? Asked another way: my friend is going to a $40k/year private university to study finance. Is this likely to be a bad investment? -Stocker

A. We are already there. The return on education investment at a school is becoming less about the quality of education and more about the quality of networking available from that university’s alumni base.

If it were up to me, I would look very closely at limiting the size and total amount of student loans that can be federally guaranteed to $5k per year in 2012 dollars. If we limit the amount of money available in loans to students, we would create several improvements in this country:

1. Universities would become more efficient. They would have to separate education from all the other things that universities pride themselves on.
2. We would improve the economy and help protect the future of our kids. I think most people who look at these things fail to realize that graduating from college no longer means the entry of a “mature consumer” into the market who will rent an apartment, buy a car, buy clothes for work, etc. Instead, we get indentured servants whose only goal is to try to figure out how to not spend money so they can pay back their student loans!

(…)

Q. It seems that there is a mismatch between the skills that employers are looking for today and the skills that are being developed by college and high school graduates in the U.S. This seems like a huge problem to me. Do you see this mismatch yourself? What should (or could) be done about this? -Mickey

A. You will see new types of “trade schools” pop up to meet this demand. Six-, eight-, ten-week courses that are taught not by traditional schools, but by the new generation of trade schools that focus on programming skills, welding skills, whatever skills employers are looking for. But rather than these being accredited by educational institutions, they will be branded with the names of well-known individuals and brands.

So you could see the “Mark Cuban School of Programming” or “The Mark Cuban School of Selling.” They will be designed to give you the specific skills employers are asking for in the shortest period possible.

Read the whole thing »

From Tim Harford, about the UK:

…as Mr Summers pointed out, even China seems to have been shedding manufacturing jobs over the last couple of decades. Perhaps the data deceive here, but the Chinese manufacturing boom seems to be more about increasing output per worker than employing more workers. If the Chinese can’t generate jobs through manufacturing I am not sure we should be expecting too much from that strategy.

Excellent piece by Reihan Salam on private equity. And how Bain Capital fit into the larger picture of a dynamic economy.

The difficult truth that virtually no politician is prepared to acknowledge is that the road to job creation runs through job destruction.

{snip}

What Mitt Romney discovered was that American corporations sometimes had to be dragged, wailing and whining, into a state of efficiency. As a management consultant at Bain & Company, Romney had studied successful firms and then told other firms how to replicate their strategies. But those firms had come of age in the fat years of American corporate dominance, when many believed that the Japanese could do little more than manufacture cheap toys and textiles, and many were reluctant to accept his newfangled advice. It eventually became clear that if Romney and his cohort were going to remake American business, they’d have to raise money to make their own investments. Spurred by the senior partners at Bain & Company, Romney and his merry band of consultants established Bain Capital.

I wish Romney were as eloquent in his defense as is Salam.

Sounds good, though I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the Salam analysis. I don’t have a dog in this hunt.

It is challenging just to keep up with the pace of education innovation. The number of players keeps increasing too: Kahn Academy, Udacity, now take a look at Showme.com who have developed an easy-to-use iPad app so you can create your own “Sal Kahn like” video+audio+whiteboard segments.

Learning and teaching made simple

ShowMe is an open learning community where you can teach or learn anything. Watch great lessons for free, or create your own with the iPad app.

The free iPad app and free website are beta, but seem to work fine in my testing. The website is an essential part of the solution – that is where you host your library of Showmes!

(…) What Khan and Thrun and others are creating is a new educational paradigm, which promises not only much greater scalability than anything we’ve had until now, but also higher-quality education. That’s the real lesson of Thrun’s Stanford students taking his class online: it means that the online model really can have its cake (reach millions of people) while eating it too (be better for students than the courses offered at elite institutions).

The trick is intimacy, in a way which takes full advantage of the lean-forward nature of computer screens. I’m in England right now, where the Open University has been around for over 40 years. The OU has historically reached students through the lean-back mediums of TV and radio, which in turn encouraged its lecturers to behave as though they were trying to reach a large audience. When you see Salman Khan or Sebastian Thrun drawing pictures on the computer screen in front of you, while listening to them talk to you through headphones you’re wearing, the experience is very different — it’s a much more immersive and intimate experience. Blow that YouTube video up to full screen, and jump down the rabbit hole. You might just learn something.