Monthly Archives: October 2012
Value for Money in Health
The Conference Board is having a Summit on Sustainable Health and Health Care October 30th and 31st in Toronto featuring a plethora of media, industry, health service and academic experts who will focus on the need to refocus the health system “from treating acute illness to preventing and managing chronic disease so governments, healthcare leaders […]
Fiscal policy in a simple New Keynesian OLG model with unemployment
For wonks. And for Andy Harless, who encouraged me to do something like this. Yep, there's still a burden on future generations, even with unemployment [update: if future taxes are increased as a result of current fiscal deficits]. Assume people live 2 periods. Lifetime utility is: U = Log(consumption when young) + [(1/(1+n)]Log(consumption when old). […]
Is the Stationary State Coming?
Robert Gordon has recently published an NBER paper titled “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds”. The paper questions the universal assumption that gained currency in the 1950s with Robert Solow's work that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. Indeed, Gordon suggests that the past 250 years […]
OECD v. StatsCan: who does it better?
The OECD makes its data publicly available through http://stats.oecd.org/. The OECD "warehouse technology" software is also used to power, for example, I.Stat, the Italian statistical agency's data extraction service. The comparable facility on the Statistics Canada website is CANSIM. The question for the day is: who does it better? What are the strengths/weaknesses of the CANSIM […]
I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally (the Externalities Edition)
From the back cover of one of my all-time favourite baseball books, Ball Four: When Ball Four was first published in 1970, it hit the sports world like a lightning bolt. Commissioners, executives, players and sportswriters were thrown into a state of shock. Stunned. Scandalized. The controversy was front–page news. Sportswriters called Bouton a Judas, a Benedict […]
Why Dalton Left
Its no coincidence that on the same day as the Ontario Fall Economic Statement was released, Dalton McGuinty suddenly announced his resignation as Premier of Ontario. After the political acrimony and angst of dealing with teachers, doctors, civil servants and the opposition in a minority government situation, the outlook for Ontario’s 2012-13 deficit is 14.4 […]
Can government make wireless better?
This post was written by Simon van Norden of HEC-Montréal. The CRTC announced this week that they wanted Canadians’ opinions on our cell phone service providers. They’ll be holding public hearings starting in January with an eye towards developing a code of conduct for the Canadian retail wireless services industry (i.e. cell phones and mobile internet.) […]
Why Noah Smith doesn’t get my point about the debt burden
Because aggregating across people alive at a particular time is not the same as aggregating across time periods in the lifetimes of a particular cohort of people. (See JP Koning on the Borges Problem or Scott Sumner). [Update: or does Noah get my point? because later on in the comments to his post he says: […]
How time travel is possible
Suppose you wanted to take milk away from people on the east coast, and give it to people on the west coast. But you don't have any way of transporting the milk quickly enough to stop it spoiling before it gets from one coast to the other. Here's how you do it: You take milk […]
What part of “counter-example” don’t you get?
Suppose you claim that it is impossible for a debt to create a burden on future generations unless: it causes a reduction in investment that reduces future output; the higher future taxes cause disincentive effects that reduce future output; it is owed to foreigners so we have to pay part of our future output to […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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