Monthly Archives: September 2014
Open borders for land too?
[I am trying to explain what I think is a conceptual confusion by the "Open Borders" people. Unfortunately, my brain isn't very clear either.] Land can't move, of course. But borders can. We can't move land across the borders, but we can move borders across the land. So if half the people in country B […]
Never mind the mean, feel the variance: some thoughts on grading schemes
Imagine two course sections with the following grading schemes: Section A: 4 assignments worth 5% each for a total of 20%; 35% midterm; 45% final. Section B: 4 assignments worth 10% each for a total of 40%; 60% final. In my experience, students often reason: "Section B places more weight on assignments. I can work with […]
What’s special about monetary coordination failures?
This is a response to Brad DeLong's and David Glasner's good posts. They are good posts because they forced me to think. This is what I think. [I really ought to spend more time on this post, but I am a little snowed under with committee work at present. Sorry.]
The gender politics of taxation
The pressure to cut taxes comes from those who pay relatively more in taxes, and benefit relatively less from government spending. Men, on average, earn more than women. Hence they pay more taxes than women do:
Physician Numbers Rising-Costs Stable For Now
CIHI has just released its latest report on physicians – Physicians in Canada 2013 – and the key findings can be summarized as follows: (1) For the 7th year in a row, the number of physicians in Canada increased, reaching 220 per 100,000 population in 2013. (2) In 2012–2013, total payments to physicians in Canada […]
Fractional reserves, capital, communism, and the optimum quantity of money
Just trying to get my head clearer on some related stuff. I have a weird thought-experiment, that I think helps us understand fractional reserve banking better. Even though, paradoxically, there are no commercial banks in my thought-experiment. There is just One Big Bank, owned and controlled by the government, that issues the only form of […]
What is the most pressing issue in Canadian tax policy today?
The most pressing issue in Canadian tax policy today is that people don't like paying taxes, and it is increasingly hard to persuade them to do so. The heavy duty engines of tax revenue generation are the personal income tax and the federal and provincial sales taxes. Federally, personal income taxes raise about half of […]
Is Modern Macro Useful?
Well, I had a quick read through Kartik B. Athreya’s Big Ideas in Macroeconomics: A Non-Technical View because I have not been near macro theory since I finished grad school nearly 25 years ago. It seemed like a good way to re-acquaint myself with the subject and get some insight on what some of the […]
Suppose that printing money were irreversible
Suppose, just suppose, that you believed that printing money was irreversible, or just very hard to reverse. So central banks could increase the supply of base money by printing money, but could not (or could not easily) reduce the supply of base money again by burning money. And suppose you knew that central banks had […]
Three meanings of “printing money causes inflation”
This is supposed to be a very simple post, mainly for non-economists. "Printing money causes inflation" can mean three different things. What I will say here should be obvious to economists, but I'm not sure if it is obvious to non-economists. And it makes me wonder if sometimes things get lost in translation. Maybe, just […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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