Author Archives: wciecon
Stand up against the penny
At this year's American Economics Association humour session, stand-up economist Yoram Bauman launched a new campaign: to end the penny – a subject discussed on this blog before. Bauman has a novel suggestion on how to eliminate the penny: promote it. Make each penny worth five cents. Allow people to trade in 20 pennies for […]
Relative grade inflation, and Operation Birdhunt
Relative grade inflation is when one professor grades easier than another professor. Or when one department grades easier than another department. Operation Birdhunt was my attempt (OK, my colleague Marcel-Cristian Voia did the actual work) to do an econometric study of relative grade inflation across departments. Birdhunt was a failure, but a noble failure.
More evidence on minimum wages, employment and poverty: a continuing series
A couple of months ago, I brought attention to recent work in Quebec on just who is affected by the minimum wage. An important result was that the proportion of minimum wage earners who were in poverty (13.5%) was almost exactly the same as it is for the incidence of poverty in the general population […]
Property taxes the Calgary way
Toronto's new mayor Rob Ford recently promised to freeze property taxes. This type of promise drives me crazy. Property taxes are based on the mill rate times the assessed value of a person's property. So does a pledge to freeze taxes mean the mill rate will be unchanged? If so, property taxes paid will increase […]
Robots, slaves, horses, and Malthus
I think this is the model that Karl Smith has in mind. Assume robots are the same as humans. Robots can do all the work that humans can do. Robots need the same amount of energy/food to stay functioning as humans do, but robots themselves can produce that energy/food just like humans can. Robots will […]
Trends in job tenure
I've written before on an important and yet not-widely-enough-known feature of the Canadian labour market: the remarkable amount of churn in and out of employment: [1], [2]. Another way of looking at the dynamics in the labour market is job tenure, which the Labour Force Survey measures as the length of time a worker has […]
Book review: Dan Gardner’s “Future Babble”
Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen is one of my very favourite journalists. I first came across his work during the 2008 election campaign, in which he distinguished himself by writing what turned out to be the only article on carbon taxes that made no reference to Stéphane Dion's accent. His piece was a beacon […]
Canadian Economic Forecasts 2011 – Make Yours Now!
Continuing the now two year old tradition, I invite you all to make forecasts for 2011. Forecasts are for the latest data available on New Year's Day 2012.
The Rise and Fall of Marxism?
My latest time wasting tech toy is Google Ngram Viewer. What's an ngram? A one word phrase, like "Marx" is a one-gram. "Karl Marx" is a two-gram. "K. Marx" is a three-gram (the period counts as a gram too). A phrase of indefinite length is an ngram. The Ngram viewer is based on Google Books. […]
Most Popular WCI Posts From 2010
In an idea shamelessly stolen from Marginal Revolution, here are the top-10 posts on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative as determined by pageviews. I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t simply 10 posts on the census. In fact the majority of posts had nothing to do with Canada whatsoever. There’s something oddly Canadian about that. And […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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