Author Archives: wciecon
Aspiring to asbestos
On the way back from the Zambezi river crossing, the driver told me of his life's ambitions: he wanted to be middle class, to give his children a good start in life, and to have an asbestos roof. In this country, he told me, there are two types of roofs: metal and asbestos. Asbestos is […]
Hot potatoes and hot yams
Money (the medium of exchange) is an asset. But the demand for money is different from the demand for any other asset. Here is an (inadequate) parable that tries to explain why it is different.
A monetary policy target can only be defeated by a better monetary policy target
"Monetary policy can cause bad things to happen in financial markets, which can cause bad things to happen in the rest of the economy. Therefore NGDP targeting is wrong." I made up that quote. But if I had to summarise M.C.K.'s long article in two short sentences, that is how I would do it.
Inheritance
Well, Ontario has a new finance minister – Charles Sousa – and according to the Toronto Star: “Charles Sousa, the two-term Mississauga South MPP who finished fifth in last month’s leadership race, will succeed the retiring Finance Minister Dwight Duncan at the treasury. An affable former Royal Bank executive, Sousa inherits a $11.9-billion deficit that […]
University retention and males
Carleton University admits more male students than females. But it graduates more female students than males. Why? What, if anything, can and should we do about it? (I don't know.) The public access data is here. (Datacubes is a lovely tool, but it takes a little time learning how to use it.) You can see […]
Is Economic Growth Really Ending?
Robert Gordon has argued in his recent NBER paper “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds” that growth rates have slowed and we are reverting to very low historical growth rates and indeed a period of economic stagnation. However, what I find intriguing is that an examination of some long-term data […]
Simple models and the macroeconomics of price controls
I hear that Argentina has imposed [update: economy-wide] price controls. I know next to nothing about Argentina, but I have spent some time thinking about the macroeconomics of price controls. I can easily build a simple macroeconomic model showing that price controls are a good thing that can make everybody better off. I cannot build […]
Can government intervention ever be sufficiently sensitive?
In South Africa the signs of AIDS are subtle, but ever present. Dispensers with free condoms in every university washroom. A red AIDS ribbon painted on the wall of the Knysna hospital. Another on the entrance to the Muizenberg cemetery, where wooden crosses and flowers in plastic bottles mark the resting places of those who […]
(Why) Is inflation finally falling?
This post is premature. It's too early to say for sure. And I don't have any real answers to explain this (possibly non-) event. I'm trying to fit together a number of things that have been puzzling me.
Baboons’ deathly rational calculus
Baboon checking out the buffet at Storms River Mouth restaurant Baboons are rational. They minimize the effort required to attain a given number of calories or, alternatively, maximize the amount of calories obtained from a given amount of effort. Given a choice between spending hours searching for fruit and seeds, or scarfing some left […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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