Today in Fortnightly

It was mid-July 1980, and Elizabeth Warren was busy. She both submitted her article to Public Utilities Fortnightly, and married a fellow law professor. 

Iran held our hostages, and we led a boycott of the Moscow Olympics (following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan). Her article, “The Regulatory Lag Fallacy,” was published in the mid-August 1980 issue. 

The Commerce Department last week reported the gross domestic product. A major component of the GDP is personal consumption expenditures, what is spent by American households on all goods and services. Plus what is spent on their behalf, by insurance companies for example.

A tiny slice of consumer expenditures is our electric bills. How tiny? In December 2015, just 1.37 percent of expenditures were to pay for electricity. 

Last Friday's "Today from Public Utilities Fortnightly," summarizing four electricity horror movies, stirred many of you to find more such flicks. Here's four:

Frankenstein (1931)

The first Frankenstein film was a 16-minute picture created in 1910 by Edison Studios. Thomas Edison may have been the producer.

In the legendary 1931 film, scientist Henry Frankenstein and assistant Fritz assemble a human body from parts collected from around their European village. Frankenstein wants to create human life through electrical devices he's "innovated." 

There are several good measures of what electricity costs us. What's the best? Let's try dividing the total of all our electric bills into America's gross domestic product, its GDP.

This way, we capture all our expenditures on electric service. Whether directly through residential bills. Or indirectly through the bills paid by businesses and institutions that we ultimately pay for (through our purchases of all goods and services).