Category Frances Woolley
The behavioural economics of the Marie Kondo method
Marie Kondo is the guru behind the best-selling Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy. For some people, like me, her method works. One possible reason for its success is that, underneath it all, there are some sound behavioural economics principles. 1. Shift the reference point Marie Kondo recommends dividing one's possessions into five categories […]
Reading Amartya Sen on Poverty and Famines
The shut down of entire sectors of the economy in response a pandemic is akin to a crop failure. Both represent a sudden, large and unexpected decline in production. Both leave people without resources, without the wherewithall to command the necessities of life. So I am revisiting Amartya Sen's 1981 monograph Poverty and Famines (ungated), […]
This is no virus for old men
Statistics Canada has just released a dataset with detailed anonymized information on all confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada, available for download here. Unlike many of the available trackers, the Statistics Canada data reports cases by date of onset, defined as "earliest date available from the following series: Symptom Onset Date, Specimen Collection Date, Laboratory Testing […]
Regional disparities in hospital bed access across Canada
Thank you to Kayle Hatt and Kevin Andrew for generating some of the numbers and charts behind this post, and for helpful suggestions. The number of acute care hospital beds per capita is an imperfect measure of a health care system's ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, beds are easy to acquire, […]
How prepared is your hospital for COVID-19?
I've written a blog post for the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP). It begins: One widely touted response to the COVID-19 pandemic is to “flatten the curve” — to spread COVID-19 infections over time, so that the medical system can cope with them. Yet a cold hard look at the numbers suggests our […]
Postmodern Economic Measurement: There is no number, only numbers
National income accounting distills a nation's economy into a single number: gross domestic product. GDP has been critiqued many times for its neglect of household production, environmental degradation, income distribution, and so on. Many alternatives have been proposed, such as genuine progress indicators, happiness measures, the Human Development Index, the Better Life Index, well-being indexes, […]
Does (cohort) size matter?
In the US, the portion of young men between the ages of 18 to 34 who report having at least one partner has fallen substantially in recent years (sorry for the small image size): Charts similar to the one above have prompted talk of a sex recession. Yet worries that Millennials are killing sex (as […]
Why do I have to collect my pension already?
Ontario's Ford government has a plan to induce professors over 71 to retire. I wrote a column in the Globe and Mail about it. Here's a sneak peak: Nearly one in 10 Ontario university professors is over the age of 65. As of 2016, these professors were earning, on average, $184,947 a year. Moreover, because […]
About that EKOS poll
A recent EKOS poll found "the incidence of [Canadians] thinking there are too many visible minorities is up significantly and no longer trails opposition to general immigration (as it has historically)." Here is a picture that shows the question EKOS asked, and the long-term trend in Canadians' responses to this question (click on the picture […]
Do Chinese Canadians struggle in the labour market?
Update: A revised version of the paper discussed in this blog, with results close to those obtained using the PUMF, is available here. Thanks to Feng Hou for taking my concerns seriously and responding to them promptly.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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