I love The Economist, but even they fuck up from time to time. An article in the current Technology Quarterly really boiled my blood; I wrote a letter in response:

SIR – I was surprised and disappointed by the poor economics in ”Pulling the plug on standby power” (Technology Quarterly, March 11). You argued that “[e]quipment-makers do not have any incentive to use more efficient components, after all, since the cost (in higher power consumption) is borne by their customers.” But this is as absurd as claiming that auto makers have no incentive to make fuel-efficient vehicles because drivers, not manufacturers, bear the cost of petrol. Indeed, the entire article was awash in the principal fallacy of central planners everywhere: “The market has failed; we can fix it.” Thank goodness for the article that followed, in which economic development pioneer Iqbal Quadir noted that “[t]op-down approaches do not work. The bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.”

Michael Hartl
Orange, California

I should note that the Quarterly was excellent overall, as usual. In one article they even got right the meaning of the term hacker.