Author Archives: wciecon
Second best monetary and fiscal policy and the strategy space
[This post covers too much ground and stretches my brain too far. I'm trying to put Lipsey-Lancaster and game theory together, and apply it to monetary-fiscal. I blame Brad DeLong for making me think about this.] Brad DeLong says: "But as long as Nick Rowe recognizes that fixing situations of depressed activity by simply printing […]
Land vs Helicopters
[This post is not as clear as I want it to be. Sorry.] Most discussions of long run secular stagnation, and short run liquidity traps, ignore land. They shouldn't. If a central bank runs out of other options to increase aggregate demand, it could always use helicopter money. Or it could buy land. Is it […]
Physicians and Workload: A Very Simple International Comparison
The Canadian Medical Association has been having its annual meetings this week in Ottawa and in honor of the event, let me put out another international comparison on physicians using data from the OECD Health Statistics 2013. The first chart (Figure 1) is a basic resource availability measure showing the number of physicians per 1000 […]
Money, prices, and coordination failures
[This is very long, and covers a lot of old ground for me, as well as some new. It was supposed to be a belated reply to Brad DeLong's post. But my thoughts wandered. (By the way, for some reason I never remember being annoyed at Simon Wren-Lewis, even when I disagree with him; but […]
Stewardship and Autonomy
Ontario last week announced the signing of Strategic Mandate Agreements with each of its 44 universities and colleges as part of a move to “drive system-wide objectives articulated by the Ministry’s Differentiation Policy Framework.” Essentially, in a restrained fiscal environment the provincial government prefers to target money for new programs only where they can be […]
Why has the Bank of Canada “done nothing” for 4 years?
On the face of it, the Bank of Canada has done absolutely nothing for nearly 4 years now, and most people think it won't do anything until sometime next year. The target of the overnight rate has stayed at 1% for a very long time. This is very puzzling. I do not understand it. But […]
Why is enterprise software so bad?
Every piece of software I use in the course of academic administration is lousy. Sure, the systems do what they're supposed to do most of the time, and they're not that difficult to learn how to use. But every single one has numerous design flaws; clunky features that eat up seconds or minutes or hours […]
Why do I hate driverless cars?
I hate driverless cars. That is the fact that needs to be explained. Not justified, but explained. Driverless cars pose no threat to my job, my income, or my wealth. That's not it. The insurance companies, or safety-nazis, might force us to use driverless cars. That would be a threat to my enjoyment of driving. […]
If new money is always paid as interest on old money
…will an increase in the rate of interest paid for holding money be deflationary (because it increases the demand for money), or inflationary (because it increases the growth rate in the supply of money)? This question crops up from time to time, in comments here and on other blogs, so I thought I would lay […]
The Quantity Theory and Neutrality of Money when money is endogenous
"If the central bank permanently doubles the stock of (base) money: all nominal variables will double [that's the Quantity Theory of Money]; all real variables will stay the same [that's the Neutrality of Money]." The Quantity Theory of Money and the Neutrality of Money go together. It is very hard to have one without the […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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