Category Everyday economics
Spare Parts, and The Use of Knowledge in Society
Random musings from a small sample on a subject about which I know little. Where did I read that military amateurs talk strategy, but military professionals talk logistics? Or that if they did a re-make of The Graduate, the one word career advice would be changed from "plastics" to "logistics"?
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:
The Beer IneQuality Index
The conventional Canadian view is that American beer is bad; watery and weak. Yet American breweries produce some of the world's best beers – superb brews coming out of microbreweries across the country. What is striking about the United States is the country's level of inequality – or, to be more precise, the beer quality […]
A Very Brief History of Demand and Supply
I’m teaching History of Economic Thought again this year and during my progression through the material this term what has struck me is the very long road over time –literally hundreds of years – to understanding markets and value as the simultaneous interaction both supply and demand side factors culminating in the standard diagram of […]
Babies as Human Capital in an OLG model
I'm trolling Elizabeth Breunig. Because she said that "Human capital is one of the more odious terms in the capitalist lexicon". And I like the term "human capital", because I think it helps us think more clearly about investment in training and education. Are new-born babies "human capital"? My first thought was that they possess […]
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 […]
Marrying satisfaction with happiness
Shawn Grover and John Helliwell have just written a paper that claims to say something about marriage and happiness. Just about all the news coverage of this research has featured headlines like "Married People Are Happier People" or "Definitive Proof That Marriage, Especially To Your Best Friend, Makes You Happier." The paper is just one of the latest contributions […]
The economics of stuff
Some simple observations: 1. Economies grow when people buy stuff. 2. Over time, people accumulate more and more stuff. 3. People can only handle so much stuff. Sock drawers get full of socks. Cupboards get full of cups. Bookshelves get full of books. 4. It's hard to get rid of stuff. Economic models typically […]
Why does Toronto have better outdoor ice than Ottawa?
Toronto is, on average, warmer than Ottawa. So why does it have better outdoor ice? Some might argue that it doesn't. Every winter, Ottawa's Rideau Canal freezes to form the world's largest skating rink. Just about every city park sports an outdoor ice surface. But almost all of the city's ice is natural. On warm days, […]
Economic Superiority
Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan have penned a Max Plank SciencesPo discussion paper on the traits of the economics profession. In The Superiority of Economists, the authors write: “Taken together, these traits constitute what we call the superiority of economists, where economists’ objective supremacy is intimately linked with their subjective sense of authority […]
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