Author Archives: wciecon
Literary You-genics
In days of old, literature was subject to strict population controls. As John A Hobson put it back in 1910: "Before the arts of printing and of reading became common, most of the great deeds of man, his finest thoughts, his noblest feelings, perished for lack of enduring record and easy accurate communication…. Almost all that […]
Revenue Deficiency, Health Care Sustainability and the Fiscal Dividend
One of the arguments made in the public sector health care sustainability debate is that while the share of national income devoted to public health insurance has grown at a relatively modest rate, the provinces have weakened their resource base with fiscal measures that have reduced their rates of personal and corporate taxation. It has […]
No, Atlanta and St Louis Feds, you can’t test whether core is useful that way
This is frustrating me. People (e.g. the Atlanta Fed Macroblog, the St Louis Fed Economic Synopses (pdf)) still aren't getting it. What can I do to attract attention to my simple point? Think up some totally insulting inflammatory blog post title? Nope, that's not really me. I'm just going to try again. And use bold. […]
The New Keynesian confidence fairy multiplier
The graphs from the University of Michigan's Survey of Consumers (HT Mark Thoma) show something that isn't supposed to happen in New Keynesian macroeconomics. It's not that New Keynesian macroeconomics says it can't happen; it just assumes it doesn't happen. So if the empirical evidence says that it did just happen, we need to re-think […]
Spending on Public Health Programs: Yet Another National Divide
In 1974, the Lalonde Report titled “A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians” argued that we needed to look beyond traditional health care focused on medicine. If we wished to improve the health of the public, a broad determinants of health approach focused on things like lifestyle choice and behaviour needed to be pursued.
Subsidies on Interest Income to increase Aggregate Demand
File this one under "crazy ideas that might be worth thinking about, even if only to understand our own theories better".
The mathematics generation gap
Here's my theory: Some students struggle with economics because they do not fully understand the mathematical tools economists use. Profs do not know how their students were taught mathematics, what their students know, what their students don't know – and have no idea how to help their students bridge those gaps.
Why increased immigration won’t fix population aging
A popular solution to the problem of population aging is to simply increase the rate at which we admit immigrants. This sounds reasonable: the age profile of new immigrants is generally younger than that of the existing population. But increased immigration can't do much more than make the problem slightly less bad. (See also this […]
A short history of population aging in Canada
I'm still playing around with demographic data, and one thing I've done is trace out a timeline of how we ended up having the population aging problem in the first place. I even prepared an animated gif file: a WCI first.
Population aging has begun in earnest
Last year, I blogged about the demographic projections that Statistics Canada had prepared in 2005, and I noted that data post-2005 were tracking the lower bound for the working-age share of the population. They've since released another set of projections starting in 2010, and things don't look any better. The sharp rise in the retirement-age […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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