Monthly Archives: October 2015
Toasted Pumpkin Seeds or, Waste is a Value Judgement
Today, hundreds of thousands of pumpkin carvers will simply discard their pumpkin's seeds. I believe tossing out pumpkin seeds is a terrible waste. Pumpkin seeds, roasted with salt and butter, are a delicious and nutritious snack. And they aren't difficult to make: separate out the pumpkin seeds, wash them well with water, dry on paper […]
Health Spending: A Much Longer Term View
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has just released their 2015 report on health expenditure trends and they show that total nominal health expenditure in Canada continues to grow (1.6 percent in 2015) but at a slower rate. Health spending (public and private) has reached $219.1 billion dollars or $6,105 dollars per capita. As […]
Old Keynesian vs New Keynesian fiscal policy
Mostly for non-macroeconomists. I first learned macroeconomics in the very early 1970's in the UK. I learned that the macroeconomy was not automatically self-equilibrating, and that the government should use fiscal policy to target "full employment" (aka "potential output"). The government should loosen fiscal policy when the economy was below potential and tighten fiscal policy […]
One awkward question about Stephen Poloz’s speech (on Integrating Financial Stability into Monetary Policy)
Suppose the Bank of Canada were following a 5% NGDP level-path target. And suppose that actual NGDP was on target, and was expected to remain on target in future. And suppose you were Governor, and one of your advisors gives you some important news. Financial markets are in a bubble, so the prices of financial […]
Keynes just left Canada
Paul Kugman's post title is "Keynes comes to Canada". Paul is wrong. Keynes was in Canada, but he just left. Look at this graph from Matthew Klein (a very good article, by the way): The other bit of information you need to know is that the Bank of Canada hit the Zero Lower Bound in […]
Negative interest vacuum-cleaner Gesellian money for broke central banks
[I can't decide whether this thought-experiment has any policy relevance. I hope not, but who knows what the future will bring? It came to my mind after reading a (more policy-relevant) post by Simon Wren-Lewis.] 1. Helicopter money is when the central bank prints money and puts it in people's pockets. Vacuum-cleaner money is the […]
How much revenue will the Liberals generate with a new tax bracket on high earners?
[I started writing this post in May, but I stopped when it looked like the Liberals were not going to be in a position to implement this measure. Happily, I didn't actually delete it.] [An earlier version made a stupid mistake; I did everything under tha assumption that the increase was 3 percentage points, and […]
Two types of liquidity “shortage”
If I said that the recent recession was caused by a shortage of liquidity, most people would say I was mad. "Look how easy it is to get a loan, at such low interest rates!" In hyperinflations, the price of liquidity is extremely high. If the price level is doubling daily, then currency pays a […]
Countries as clubs: open borders and debt/GDP ratios
Don't think of a country as an area of land. Think of a country as a club, to which a group of people belong. Nomadic tribes were not attached to any particular area of land. Settled agriculture on scarce land is a recent and contingent fact. Clubs provide club goods to their members. Club goods […]
Labour market flows revisited
It's been a while since I've looked at patterns in gross labour market flows; the last time was here. The basic methodology is taken from Stephen Tapp's CJE article, in which he extracts labour market transitions from the Labour Force Survey Public Use Microdata Files. Not all transitions are covered by the LFS questionnaire, but […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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