Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines, and Wired Markets

14.2. From the Vault: Bits, Bucks, and BTUs

I first wrote about this subject in a RAND paper, "Real Time Pricing and Deregulating the Electricity Market,"^[] published in 1980—at the same time as the other RAND paper mentioned in the Introduction, Kevin Lewis's banned classic "The Tumescent Threat."^[] I was flattered that RAND scanned the paper version of my work and reissued it last year on its web site. This work was done at the end of the Carter administration as part of RAND's research program sponsored by the Department of Energy and the EPA.

RAND's position in the input/output view of the economy (which relates an industry's inputs and outputs) was to turn coffee into printed material and Vu-Graphs. Vu-Graphs were a Flintstone version of PowerPoint—clear acetate sheets laboriously produced by the graphic arts department. Letters were transferred by hand, along with the slick graphics. We'd show them to our sponsors on overhead projectors. Generals used two projectors and had colonels seated at each of them to flip the charts. I had one projector and did my own flipping. If you dropped the stack of wickedly slippery acetates you were screwed.

The title Vu-Graph from the briefing version of the paper, "Information, Economics, and Energy" is shown in Figure 14.5. Note the cheeky alternative title, "Bits, Bucks, and BTUs." BTUs are not used in discussions of electricity, but "Megawatts" didn't alliterate with "Bits" and "Bucks."

Figure 14.6 shows another Vu-Graph from the "Bits, ...