Monthly Archives: July 2013
Feminist triumph or impending disaster?
Right now almost 90 percent of Canadians live in provinces or territories with female premiers. This is a sure indication that Canada's provincial governments are in for a rough ride. It's sometimes called the glass cliff: men are chosen to lead in prosperous times; women are selected to be leaders in times of crisis. Iceland […]
Does the End of Growth Mean the Rise of Inequality?
Classical economics argued that eventually a stationary state or the end of economic growth was going to be reached but they did not forsee the technological change of 19th century industrialization. The result was income and wealth growing by leaps and bounds. However, yet another paper – this time by Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman […]
Smoking and health care expenditures
In an old post, Chris Auld attacked the "zombie argument" that healthy lifestyles substantially decrease demand on the health care system. As he put it: All people — and I do not mean to shock anyone — die some time, even including people who live very healthy lifestyles. Preventing someone from dying of a smoking-related illness only means […]
Mourning Detroit
Well, I have never been to Detroit and have only glimpsed it live from across the river in Windsor once. Yet, its bankruptcy has caught my interest because for the longest time in Thunder Bay we used to get our cable feed from Detroit (they then shifted away a few years ago to Minneapolis) and […]
A Digression on University Finance
Well, you may have caught Alex Usher’s HESA post this week on university finances. He presented data on university operating budgets from the CAUBO/Statistics Canada financial survey for the period 2007-08 to 2011-12 that shows that university budgets went up by 28 percent. This is quite intriguing because while universities maintain they have been having […]
Satisfaction
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides. […]
Crime and Macroeconomics
The Banca D’Italia – Italy’s central bank – supports and promotes a wide range of research activity including quite a bit even in the area of economic history, which for an economic historian like myself is especially heart warming to see. The ongoing Euro Zone economic downturn and crisis naturally also spawns a lot of […]
Do use Wikipedia as a reference
I wish professors would stop saying to students "Do not use Wikipedia as a reference." What the professor means is "Do not read Wikipedia. Do not take ideas from Wikipedia. Instead, consult scholarly journals, books, government documents, and other serious, credible, high quality sources." What students hear is "Don't put Wikipedia down in the list of references […]
Are More Physicians Preferred to Less?
Physician spending has been highlighted as one of the fastest growing expenditure categories in Canadian health care spending. The increase in supply of physicians, rising fees and the increasing utilization of health care per capita are recognized as important and intertwined factors driving expenditure for physician services. Despite perceptions of a shortage of physicians, the […]
The invisible mentor
I had a mentor once. Any time my name was put forward for a time consuming yet impotent committee he would say, "Frances has a lot of other commitments right now, let's ask so and so." I didn't know he was doing this until later; I just noticed that my more tiresome committee duties miraculously […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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