Category Education
Maybe profs should haggle over textbook prices?
Mark Perry shows that textbook prices have been increasing, a lot. I don't know why that is. But maybe there's something that profs could do about it. The publisher's rep drops by your office. She asks which book you will be adopting for your course. She really wants the sale. You say:
Are Technology and Learning joint inputs?
[More musings. I started writing this post arguing that they are joint inputs. Now I'm not so sure. So I changed the title into a question.] We need both land and labour to produce wheat, but land and labour are not "joint inputs", because we can combine them in variable proportions. The marginal product of […]
AK/Solow/Smith/Schumpeterian growth
More random musings, mostly to try to get my own head straight on some questions. (I should steal Robert Waldmann's idea of calling them "stochastic thoughts".) And probably not very original. But sometimes it's easier to try to reinvent the wheel than walk to the library and read all the books on "wheels"; and experiential […]
Are apples non-rival?
Suppose we had an apple replicating machine, that could replicate apples costlessly and instantly. How would we go about answering the question: "Are apples a non-rival good?". 1. We could have a lovely philosophical argument about whether the original apple and the copy are two different apples or just two different manifestations of the same […]
Are ideas really non-rival?
I was writing a simple teaching post, on ideas and increasing returns to scale, in micro and macro. I wrote down "Ideas are non-rival". Then I thought I had better explain what I meant by that. Then I thought about professors, who do research (thinking up new ideas), and teaching (communicating existing ideas to other […]
Unbundling the BA
The most useful university courses and degrees are the hardest to get into. For example, most people would benefit from knowing something about accounting. But do universities facilitate the study of accounting? No. Everywhere admission into Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Business Administration programs is restricted. It's the interests of business schools to turn […]
SSHRC Grant Trends in Economics
Well, the past week saw notifications go out to academic economists on the results of their 2014-15 Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant applications. Needless to say, there will be a lot of unhappy campers but then there always are when it comes to grant application success. Needless to say, […]
Funding and the Future of Ontario Universities
Well, the Council of Ontario Universities or COU is looking for a new President and CEO. The role of COU is to serve as a voice for the province’s university sector and help improve the public policies that affect the sector. As the ad for the position states: “As a member-based organization, COU provides the […]
Ours the task eternal — investing in human capital
That's the motto of Carleton University, where I work. Carleton's task, and my task, and the students' task, is to produce educated students. It takes a lot of resources to do this: my time, the students' time, the support staff's time, plus the use of buildings and land, and hydro. All those resources could be […]
Beware middle-aged men waving feminist flags
On December 12, 2006, Ontario ended "mandatory retirement." As of that date, employers could no longer base termination decisions on an employee's age. Ontario was following the lead of Quebec and Manitoba, which stopped having a standard retirement age in the early 1980s. Within a couple of years, mandatory retirement had effectively ended right across […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments