Monthly Archives: November 2011
No, we really don’t want to reduce inequality
A few weeks ago, Mike Moffatt wrote an op-ed that ran in the Ottawa Citizen and several other PostMedia papers to the effect that there simply isn't the will on the part of 99% of the population to do much about inequality: if there were, there'd be more popular support for the sort of tax-and-redistribution […]
Why isn’t NGDP targeting a lefty thing?
I don't have an answer to that question. The politics of NGDP targeting doesn't make any sense to me. I don't understand it at all.
Friedrich List: The Un-Adam Smith
Here is something a little different. My history of economic thought course has just finished up with John Stuart Mill and I will be moving into the socialist reaction to classical economic theory. Most of us probably associate Marx and socialism with criticism of the classical school but there was also an early non-socialist reaction […]
Soldiers of fortune, department chairs, and CEO pay
Assume ten identical young men. One of them is needed to do a dangerous job which creates disutility for the person doing it. Assume they have diminishing marginal utility of consumption. Assume (though a weaker assumption can get the same results) that the utility function is separable in consumption and the type of job. There […]
“Just one more dying quail a week, and you’re in Yankee Stadium”
The incomes earned by elite athletes are often cited as examples in arguments to the effect that high incomes aren't a problem that need solving. If large numbers of people are willing – eager, even – to give small sums of money to watch Wilt Chamberlain play basketball, then on what grounds would anyone begrudge […]
Miles Corak has a blog. Subscribe now
Miles Corak, a labour economist formerly of Statistics Canada, currently at the University of Ottawa, has started a blog. He's off to a great start; go read what he's written, and then go back for more. I know I will.
Crank it up to 11 for Nigel Tufnel
Nigel Tufnel, lead guitarist of Spinal Tap, gave an unforgettable illustration of the difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers. A three minute clip with lead-in is here, a one minute clip with just the highlights is here. And if you just want to savour the words…
Teaching bleg: Online sources for the story of the global economic crises?
I'm teaching an advanced macro course this term, and I've decided that someone who is receiving an undergraduate degree in economics should be conversant in current events. After six years of blogging, I've seen lots of material. Too much, in fact; I scarcely know where to start. Can anyone point me to some online summaries I […]
Could the ECB become the central fiscal authority?
There is only one way to save the Euro now. The ECB acts as lender of last resort to the 17 Eurozone governments. But nobody would want to act as lender of last resort to a deadbeat, and the ECB wouldn't want to act as lender of last resort to a fiscal deadbeat. With the […]
How to present a paper, revisited
Nick Rowe once wrote down some simple advice about how to present an academic paper: Presenters should concentrate on giving us the big picture: the motivation, key assumptions, the main results, and the intuition behind those results. Don’t try and grind through countless equations in excruciating detail; you won’t have time, and nobody cares (if […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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