Monthly Archives: December 2011
A Public Policy Keltner List
In the 1985 edition of his Baseball Abstract, Bill James published his Keltner List, a series of 15 questions designed to evaluate a baseball player's worthiness for the Hall of Fame. I have a similar, albeit shorter, list of questions I like to ask when analyzing public policy proposals.
Most viewed posts in 2011
This is to complement Frances' post on which WCI posts were most liked on Facebook. Here are the ten posts that received the most page views since January 1: The mathematics generation gap This is what a balance-sheet recession looks like, and it's not pretty Dumb men commercials US productivity exceptionalism What's the best way […]
Debt is too a burden on our children (unless you believe in Ricardian Equivalence)
So, I was out there shovelling snow, thinking about writing a post on the burden of the debt on future generations. And about how macroeconomists' beliefs on this question had silently shifted about 30 years ago, and about how we as a profession have engaged in a sort of "memory falsification" (like Timur Kuran's concept […]
Most liked posts of 2011
What WCI readers liked on Facebook in 2011 (number of likes in parentheses): The mathematics generation gap (205) This is what a balance-sheet recession looks like, and it's not pretty (89) No, we really don't want to reduce inequality (73)
Where will Canada’s growth come from?
The consensus outlook for Canadian economic growth in 2012 is generally tepid, with the possibility of another international financial crisis tipping us into recession as it did in the fall of 2008. After looking over the potential sources of growth, it's easy to see where this consensus came from. One of those data-intensive posts with […]
Does Christmas Really Create Deadweight Loss?
"I want a baby doll and a waterproof [coat] with a hood and a pair of gloves and a toffee apple and a gold penny and a silver sixpence and a long toffee." Annie Howard, Christmas 1911. In 1993, Joe Waldfogel asked his undergraduates to estimate the total amount paid by the gift-givers for all […]
Books for budding economists
"Magrathea is a myth, a fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to be economists, it's…" Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What books should you give your children (nieces, nephews, friends) if you want them to grow up to become economists?
The Trade Cycle; why I=S is a bad place to start doing macro.
In the olden days, economists used to talk about the trade cycle. (They meant a cycle in the amount of all trade, not just international trade). They meant a cycle in the amount of exchange. There are fluctuations over time in the amount of buying and selling that people do. In a boom, trade speeds […]
Pigou and Paternalism
Here is a question from the final exam for my public finance course: A typical person’s demand for potato chips is given by p=5-q where q=the number of packages of chips purchased, and p is the price of chips in dollars per package. The marginal cost of producing potato chips is $1 per package. The […]
Why Y? A disproof of Keynesian macroeconomics?
There's something really wrong with the way we do short run macroeconomics. We focus all our attention on the output of newly-produced goods and services. That's what we call "Y". We talk about Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply, and what we mean by AD and AS is the demand and supply of those same newly-produced […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments