Category Everyday economics
A cost effective crime fighting agenda
The Conservative Party of Canada is committed to a law-and-order agenda. Strengthened and toughened sentencing is a key part of that agenda. Sentencing reduces crime through "incapacitation". It is hard to rob a bank when you're in prison, so an incarcerated offender is an incapacitated offender. Yet incapacitating potential offenders through incarceration has two key […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: The April 1st Edition
Economics Departments across the country and around the world are engaged in a competitive struggle with other programs and disciplines for the hearts and minds of young students as they make choices regarding what program of study to enter out of high school. Once in university, the struggle is not over as Economics Departments are […]
Don’t eat the marshmallow
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery" – Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield" Canadians are increasingly indebted. 31% of us struggle to make our bills and payments. We're pretty clueless when it comes to retirement – just 40% […]
Dumb men commercials
Dumb men commercials. Ads featuring men who can't cook. Men who are too stupid to understand how casinos work. And, especially, dumb white men, like the oldsters in the TD ad or the man with "tax pain" in the H&R Block commercial. There's enough stupid men commercials to inspire a blog dedicated entirely to the subject. Why are these ads so pervasive?
Revealed preference for newsprint and the rise of Fox News.
My dog can't talk, but his preferences are revealed by his actions. I know he likes tofu better than chicken because, given a choice between a piece of tofu and a piece of chicken, he will pick the tofu. Choices reveal human preferences too. In January, my parents arranged for me to have a free […]
Cars, control, and cost-benefit analysis
I was watching a TV documentary on the history of engineering car safety. It talked about the really good inventions like better brakes, steering, suspension, and tires, that help the driver avoid an accident. And things like safety glass, crumple zones, seat belts and air-bags that help you survive an accident you don't avoid. Then […]
Does female employment raise or lower savings rates?
When female incomes rise, household expenditure patterns change. One oft-quoted survey paper suggests: men spend more of the income they control for their own consumption than do women. Alcohol, cigarettes, status consumer goods, even "female companionship" are noted in these studies. Another well known paper found that a UK policy change that transferred resources from […]
Organic Milk and Japanese Cars
In the Spring of 2009, the Dairy Farmers of Canada launched the "100% Canadian milk campaign." Products displaying the logo shown on the right are guaranteed to be made with 100% Canadian milk. I'll admit it. As someone who lived through the British BSE outbreak of the 1980s, I'm slightly paranoid about milk safety. I'm […]
Videogames and the sexual division of labour
Consider a model in which individuals have a fixed amount of time to allocate between three activities: paid work, household production, and gaming. Each one of these activities requires an investment of effort and human capital, and each provides rewards, either monetary or non-monetary.
Popular support for increased inequality?
One part of Canada's tax-transfer system increases inequality of wealth. That's not an unfortunate side-effect of the policy; it is deliberately designed that way. It would be very easy to design it differently so that it did not increase inequality.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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