Monthly Archives: May 2011
Spending on Public Health Programs: Yet Another National Divide
In 1974, the Lalonde Report titled “A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians” argued that we needed to look beyond traditional health care focused on medicine. If we wished to improve the health of the public, a broad determinants of health approach focused on things like lifestyle choice and behaviour needed to be pursued.
Subsidies on Interest Income to increase Aggregate Demand
File this one under "crazy ideas that might be worth thinking about, even if only to understand our own theories better".
The mathematics generation gap
Here's my theory: Some students struggle with economics because they do not fully understand the mathematical tools economists use. Profs do not know how their students were taught mathematics, what their students know, what their students don't know – and have no idea how to help their students bridge those gaps.
Why increased immigration won’t fix population aging
A popular solution to the problem of population aging is to simply increase the rate at which we admit immigrants. This sounds reasonable: the age profile of new immigrants is generally younger than that of the existing population. But increased immigration can't do much more than make the problem slightly less bad. (See also this […]
A short history of population aging in Canada
I'm still playing around with demographic data, and one thing I've done is trace out a timeline of how we ended up having the population aging problem in the first place. I even prepared an animated gif file: a WCI first.
Population aging has begun in earnest
Last year, I blogged about the demographic projections that Statistics Canada had prepared in 2005, and I noted that data post-2005 were tracking the lower bound for the working-age share of the population. They've since released another set of projections starting in 2010, and things don't look any better. The sharp rise in the retirement-age […]
Asset Management
My brother thinks of himself as a farmer, which he is. But I think of him as an asset manager. He has chosen to hold his assets in land, tractors, ploughs; and that's him, driving his tractor, pulling his plough over his land, fixing the tractor, fixing the plough, managing his assets. He earns his […]
“This new priesthood”
A larger and larger proportion of the general income of the nation is every year expended upon medical treatment; each decade show a quite disproportionate growth of the classes of the population which earn a livelihood by medical services. The grip of the doctor and the chemist grows continually stronger.
Probability Theory Question of the Day
A fun question based on something one of my wife's doctors told me. It turns out the information I received from the doctor was likely incorrect, but the question the information is too good not to use, so I'm just going to pretend it is legit. Here goes:
A Strong Dollar?
American economic policy debate has recently taken turns familiar to Canadians – health care sustainability, debts and deficits, and most recently, the value of the dollar.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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