Monthly Archives: July 2010
The Canadian recovery is nearly complete. Now what?
According to this morning's Labour Force Survey release (the LFS is a mandatory survey that uses census data – are its days numbered, too?), 97% of the jobs that were lost to the recessions have been recovered. This, along with 78% of GDP (April data) and 64% of hours worked (3-month average) regained makes for […]
Sumner, Kling, Friedman (Patri) and Some Other Guy on Debt and Equity
A recent comment by Scott Sumner caught my eye: Reading Russ’s paper makes me realize just how much our system is biased toward debt. And by the way, it isn’t just moral hazard; our tax system is also biased toward debt and against equity. People talk about Americans borrowing too much, but given all these […]
Why I’m still a sticky-price macroeconomist, despite everything
David Andolfatto has written a very good post criticising sticky-price macroeconomics. This post really needed to be written. It explains why a minority of macroeconomists don't like the mainstream assumption of sticky prices. After you have read it you should understand why those crazy freshwater macroeconomists aren't quite so crazy after all. I agree with […]
2011*
One of (many!) unpleasant implications of making the census long form voluntary is its effects on how data are tracked through time. Between censuses, Statistics Canada does the best it can to keep track of changes using survey data, but there's always the risk of sampling error accumulating as time goes on. The census – […]
“Fire!” in Noah’s Flood. Optimal scare tactics?
Suppose I were an American blogger. Suppose I had a very large popular following, that believed everything I said. But suppose the people who actually influenced and controlled policy thought I was a total airhead. I'm not sure what I would do, but I know what I would be very tempted to do: yell "Inflation […]
The eurozone pain is mainly in Spain
In a previous post, I charted the employment losses for the G7 countries and noted that while the US was still bouncing along the trough of of a deep recession, the other countries were less badly-hit. But there was an important country missing from that graph – and it wouldn't have been included in a […]
New (Canadian) blog on the Cuban Economy
My friend and Carleton University colleague Arch Ritter has just started a new blog "The Cuban Economy/La Economia Cubana". He currently has three posts: one on Cuban real wages and GDP (why have real wages recovered little from the 90% decline in the early 1990's, while reported GDP has recovered fully); a second on a […]
Why making the 2011 census long form voluntary is a bad idea
Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks that the idea of sending out a voluntary long form in next year's census is a bad idea. Since this seems to be a file to which I will be returning from time to time, here are a couple of points to consider:
Saturday morning comics
Piled Higher and Deeper, http://www.phdcomics.com, is my favourite on-line comic – this is the one on my door. I'm sharing it with you to celebrate my sabbatical, which started yesterday.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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