Monthly Archives: January 2017
Variety and Growth
A closed economy produces only apples, using fixed amounts of labour and land. Suppose there is an exogenous increase in the number of varieties of apples produced. With a constant returns to scale technology, GDP stays the same. But if people have a taste for variety, or a variety of different tastes, people are better […]
The Mary Tyler Moore Effect
In 1970, every Justice on the Supreme Court of Canada was male. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau had an all-male cabinet. Canada had never had a female premier – or even a female television newsreader. Little girls across the country were starting to feel the faint stirrings of ambition, often encouraged by mothers who wanted […]
How to write an email that will get you what you want
Most of my day-to-day social and professional interactions take place over email. It's my primary form of direct, one-on-one contact with students, colleagues, and co-authors. Consequently, my impressions of people are shaped by their emails. Are their emails polite or demanding? Clear or confusing? For good or ill, I judge people by the emails they send. Based on my own […]
Hume’s Sailing Ships correcting Samuelson’s Icebergs
Paul Samuelson said (PITA gated) that David Hume's price-specie flow mechanism (ungated) was wrong. And I am saying, nervously biting my fingernails, that Samuelson was wrong. Assume that durable sailing ships are costly to build, but have low (or zero for simplicity) operating costs. Assume apples are the only tradeable good, and one ship can […]
AD/AS: a suggested interpretation
Many macroeconomists don't like the Aggregate Demand/Aggregate Supply framework often used in Introductory macro textbooks. Maybe that's because it isn't explained properly. So I am going to explain it my way. If you explain the AD/AS framework my way, you will see that it portrays a deep and realistic understanding of macroeconomics that is lost […]
Infrastructure Overbuilds: Past and Present
Thomas Gunton of Simon Fraser University’s Resource and Environmental Planning Program had a piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail raising the question if the statement of support for the Keystone XL pipeline and the approval of two other pipelines was moving Canada to a situation of surplus capacity when it comes to pipelines? Gunton’s answer […]
Tony
Tony Atkinson died January 1, 2017. He was my PhD supervisor when I was at LSE in the 1980s, and we kept in touch occasionally afterwards. What follows are some personal reflections on his life and his work. In his youth, Tony hitchhiked around Europe. In his later years, he would give lifts to Oxford students thumbing their […]
Happy New Year….Really!
Well, it’s the start of a New Year and traditionally there should be a sense of optimism to a fresh start. Indeed, at least one forecasting company feels that the global outlook for 2017 is at least stable despite the challenges of 2016 and indeed is expecting an uptick in commodity prices. However, given the […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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