Category Environment
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 […]
Toilets, Governments and Incentives
In my morning newspaper, I came across a hardware store flyer advertising a great new innovation – toilet with pump! Essentially, along with your regular toilet, an additional water storage tank and pump is installed that allows you to store recycled water used from your sink, tub, or shower and then use it when you […]
My trip to see the oil sands
Last month, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers organised a field trip for a group of economics professors to see a couple of the oil sands installations. I once wrote somewhere that the oil sands are the most important Canadian economic fact of our time, and I jumped at the offer to join the tour. […]
Goodbye carbon taxes, hello atmospheric user fees
Economists (at least those who believe in global warming) frequently argue that the best way to discourage overuse of fossil fuels is with a carbon tax. A carbon tax reflects unpriced, external or social costs; the environmental damage created by fuel consumption. With a carbon tax in place, people will only consume fuel if the benefits […]
Elinor Ostrom, you were turtley right
Mother turtle laying eggs on banks of Rideau River Elinor Ostrom, Nobel-prize winning political economist, died on June 12, 2012. That same day, a mother turtle pulled her way out of the Rideau River, and made her nest on the river bank. A turtle's idea of a good nesting place is somewhere with soft, loose […]
Who benefits from the oil sands? Who benefits from saying that only Alberta does?
This didn't pass my sniff test: The economic benefits of oil sands development, while considerable, are unevenly distributed across the country, making interprovincial tensions understandable. While provinces other than Alberta are projected to benefit, modelling by the Canadian Energy Research Institute projects that 94 per cent of the GDP impact of oil sands development will […]
“Does Canada have Dutch disease?” is a question without a meaningful answer
The debate about whether or not Canada has "Dutch disease" can never get very far, because there is in fact no clear notion what it is. As far as I'm concerned, the term has by now been stripped of meaning: people are using the definition that is most convenient for their purposes. So in this […]
Pigou and Paternalism
Here is a question from the final exam for my public finance course: A typical person’s demand for potato chips is given by p=5-q where q=the number of packages of chips purchased, and p is the price of chips in dollars per package. The marginal cost of producing potato chips is $1 per package. The […]
Riding the Loser Cruiser
People will use public transit if it's the lowest cost way of getting from point A to point B. Costs have three components. The first is money costs – the cost of gas or a bus fare or a train ticket. The second is time costs – the opportunity cost of time spent driving or […]
Collective Disasters and Individual Responsibility: Lessons from the Kobe earthquake
Japan's 1995 Kobe earthquake resulted in the loss of 6,432 lives, and the complete destruction of over one hundred thousand buildings – a loss of homes comparable to that caused by Japan’s recent tsunami. The people of Japan rebuilt then. Can they rebuild now? (In the pictures: a post-earthquake collapsed expressway; Kobe's expressway today).
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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