Monthly Archives: June 2010
Inadvertently Pro-Communist Movies
I’m fighting my annual summer cold this week, so I thought I’d do a bit of a lighter topic today. About a month ago I saw an interview on TVO with Michael Lerner who played gambler Arnold Rothstein in one of my all-time favourite movies Eight Men Out. Lerner made the claim that Eight Men […]
Should Greenpeace just give up?
The Onion has just run a piece imagining the thoughts of suicidal blue whales: Claiming that their miserable lives had become too depressing to endure, the world's remaining blue whales surfaced Monday and desperately pleaded with environmentalists to immediately cease all conservation efforts so the species could "just be done with it and finally go […]
US fixed rate mortgages aren’t fixed rate mortgages; they are weird, stupid, and dangerous
Americans aren't really insular, like the English. But they live in a very big country, and that can have the same effect. If there's something peculiar about the US, Americans sometimes won't realise how peculiar it is. US mortgages are peculiar. "Weird" is a better term. Patrick Lawler, as described by James Hagerty, has tried […]
Why do economists assume tradeoffs?
It's Principle #1 of Greg Mankiw's Intro text's Ten Principles of Economics: "People Face Tradeoffs". Why? Why do economists always make this assumption? Why does having more of one good thing always have to mean having less of another good thing? Is this some fact of nature? Is Nature such a meanie that she can't […]
(Why) Was old stuff built to last?
Was old stuff built to last longer than new stuff? If so, why? This is not a serious post. I enjoy (economic) history, and think it's important. But I'm really bad at it. History is the only subject I failed in school (too much stuff to remember). But my mind is still stuck on thinking […]
Re-Writing History – the Canadian Dollar in the 1990s
From a widely cited Paul Krugman piece: Yep, you can have fiscal austerity without contraction if you have a massive devaluation against your main trading partner. So we can have austerity without a new depression as long as all the world’s major economies devalue against … oh, wait. And monetary policy, of course, wasn’t up […]
On the lessons to be learned from the elimination of the Canadian federal deficit in the 1990s
It would appear that there is a significant constituency in both the US and in Europe agitating for immediate efforts to reduce their respective governments' deficits, and some are pointing to the Canadian experience of the 1990s. If Canada could make the swift transition from decades of large and chronic deficits to being the poster […]
Has female empowerment caused a decline in teacher quality?
My sister, Rachel Goddyn, believes that expanding female job opportunities have led to a decline in the quality of elementary and high school teachers. My own family is a case in point. Our grandmother was a kindergarten teacher. My sister Alice and I both teach at universities — something that would have been unimaginable for our […]
Incomprehensibly huge disasters
There is a tribe in the Amazon whose members can only count to five. Any amount greater than five is simply "many." We're surrounded by numbers in the millions (executive salaries), billions (Canadian government debt), and trillions (US government debt). But how much better are we than Amazon tribespeople in understanding what these amounts mean?
Should recent immigrants be eligible for Old Age Security?
Most Canadian seniors are guaranteed an income above the poverty line by Old Age Security, Guaranteed Income Supplement and the Canada Pension Plan. Seniors are less likely to be poor than children or adults under 65 – with one exception. Mike Veall has found that 71 percent of recent immigrants aged 66 and older have […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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