Category Education
What not to wear, economist edition
What should you wear for an academic job interview? Ariel Rubinstein suggests casual attire: I would argue that wearing jeans and a t-shirt is your dominant strategy: If you are a good student, then a department that will not give you a job because of your "sloppy" appearance does not deserve to have you. If you […]
Low vs falling prices, and relative vs absolute prices, Intro Econ again
The discussion of Intro Economics in my last post got a bit esoteric at times. I want to bring us all back down to earth. This morning I got an email from a student who took my Intro Economics course last year. He works in retail, selling hi-tech goods. He asked me this question: hi-tech […]
Why “great teacher” doesn’t get you on the short list
I'm spending today doing course outlines, meeting with students, and reading letters of reference.* Carleton is hiring this year. I'm on the labour/behavioural economics committee, which so far has received over 100 applications. A candidate's letters of reference are a key part of the package. Generally I skip to the end and read the last […]
Could you pass Eco 100?
My best friend's son is taking Eco 100. While studying for his midterm exam, he encountered this question: True or false: There is no difference between these two equilibrium equations in Eco 100 consumer theory as one equation can be transformed mathematically into the other (a) MUx/MUy=Px/Py (b) MUx/Px=MUy/Py. What do you think? Is this […]
Friedrich List: The Un-Adam Smith
Here is something a little different. My history of economic thought course has just finished up with John Stuart Mill and I will be moving into the socialist reaction to classical economic theory. Most of us probably associate Marx and socialism with criticism of the classical school but there was also an early non-socialist reaction […]
Visions for Universities
My friend and PhD Thesis advisor Peter George was awarded the David C. Smith Award for Significant Contribution to Scholarship and Policy on Higher Education in Canada at a dinner on October 13th hosted by the Council of Universities. As part of the celebration, Peter George delivered a speech that drew upon his three-term experience […]
Revisiting the Sustainability of Post-Secondary Education
I decided to try and dig a little deeper on the issue of the sustainability of post-secondary education spending in Canada by looking at the numbers in real per capita terms and by province. As I mentioned in my earlier post, while fiscal sustainability is a term generally used in the health care policy debate, […]
Sustainable Universities
Judging from some of the ruminating going on in the media lately, it would appear that Canadian universities will soon be facing a new assault under the mantra of sustainability. Some of this is a spillover from the United States where rising tuition fees have exceeded the general inflation rate fostering a view that higher […]
Hysteresis in the teaching of econometrics
When I was a graduate student – some 25 years ago – there was a practical reason for why Bayesian methods played little or no role in the textbooks. Even though classical methods asked the wrong questions* and forced people to wade through a myriad of complicated and contradictory ways of answering them, it was […]
A Lament for Public Policy
In New Directions for Intelligent Government in Canada: Papers in Honour of Ian Stewart, Don Drummond reflects on the state of public policy analysis in Canada and whether the rigour of policy analysis that existed in the past still exists today though he wisely cautions that “tales of the good old days are often the […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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