Category Frances Woolley
Faith as a substitute for savings
Saving for retirement is a gamble. You live, you win, because you reap the benefits of your thrift; you die, you lose, because you sacrificed enjoyment for no good reason. Historically, retirement saving was even more of a gamble than it is today. In 1810, world life expectancy was less than 40 years (see this […]
The decline of American economists and the European cultural revolution
In 1991, two thirds of the articles in Econlit, a comprehensive index of academic economic research, were written by people based in North America. By 2006, that share had dropped by one third to 45 percent. These numbers are taken from a recent working paper by Cardoso, Guimaraes and Zimmermann. Their evidence suggests that the […]
Does the rest of the world subsidize research on the American economy?
When studios shoot movies or TV shows in Canada, they stick US licence plates on the cars and pretend Toronto is New York (the Rudy Giuliani biopic Rudy), Alberta is Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain), and BC is Kansas (Smallville). Studios do it because anything explicitly Canadian tanks in the ratings. The same rule applies to blogging. […]
The generosity collapse
People give when they're asked. Jim Andreoni and Justin Rao have proved it. They ran the following experiment: one person, the allocator, was given 100 'money units', worth $10 in real money. She was free to choose how much to keep for herself and how much to give to another person, the recipient. The recipient, […]
Stand up against the penny
At this year's American Economics Association humour session, stand-up economist Yoram Bauman launched a new campaign: to end the penny – a subject discussed on this blog before. Bauman has a novel suggestion on how to eliminate the penny: promote it. Make each penny worth five cents. Allow people to trade in 20 pennies for […]
Property taxes the Calgary way
Toronto's new mayor Rob Ford recently promised to freeze property taxes. This type of promise drives me crazy. Property taxes are based on the mill rate times the assessed value of a person's property. So does a pledge to freeze taxes mean the mill rate will be unchanged? If so, property taxes paid will increase […]
The Rise and Fall of Marxism?
My latest time wasting tech toy is Google Ngram Viewer. What's an ngram? A one word phrase, like "Marx" is a one-gram. "Karl Marx" is a two-gram. "K. Marx" is a three-gram (the period counts as a gram too). A phrase of indefinite length is an ngram. The Ngram viewer is based on Google Books. […]
Conspicuous Production
Holiday parties are a time for conspicuous production: "Would you like some bread with sun-dried tomatoes – I just baked it this afternoon? The tomatoes? Oh, they're nothing – I had stacks of them in my garden this year, so I dried them in the solar-powered food drier that I built last summer." It wasn't […]
Holiday pictures
Some images to capture the holiday spirit…
A 21st century misery index
The 20th century misery index was the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate. In 1982, Canada's inflation rate stood at 10.9 percent,while unemployment was at 11.0 percent, for a 21.9 percent misery index. 2009, with inflation of 0.3 percent and unemployment of 8.3 percent, didn't even come close by old-style misery index measures. Yet, as […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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