Category Frances Woolley
Another rant about the Globe and Mail’s coverage of economics
One of the featured articles in today’s Globe and Mail is on “Economists and their fairy tale world of prognostication.” I don’t mind people taking pot shots at the economics profession – I do it myself. But at least try to get the shot remotely on target.
Walt Disney, War and Taxes
In the 1940s, Walt Disney contributed to America's war effort through his propaganda cartoons. In The Spirit of 43, Scrooge McDuck urges Donald Duck to save up to pay his taxes – "it's your dough, but it's your war too." Because "taxes will keep democracy on the march." The New Spirit is stirring stuff – […]
Every click counts
Every time a student or researcher clicks his mouse, he is appraising scholarship – is it worth viewing? downloading? The information generated by on-line activity is gathered by university libraries, publishers, and a host of other users. Repec, for example, collects file view and download statistics, and uses them to rank authors.
Remembering the ballentine
Peter Kennedy passed away suddenly on August 30, after a bicycle ride and swim near his Whistler home. He was the best teacher. His ability to remember students' names was legendary. He did it by association "I remembered your name was Peter because you have a red coat, and my hair is red and my […]
Do women promote women?
It's tenure and promotion time. In universities across the country, assistant professors are preparing their files, bundling together every article they have ever published. The files are sent out to external reviewers, experts in the candidate's field, whose carefully worded letters can make or break young academics' careers. Every year I am asked to do […]
“It’s like having a private education within the public school system”
The demand for French immersion education in Vancouver so far outstrips the supply that the school board allocates places by lottery. But why? Is it because French is a useful employment skill? Because learning to speak French makes you a better person? Or is it because parents know intuitively what economists can show econometrically: peer […]
Gender equity and vertical equity
I'm spending today writing a review of Caren Grown and Imraan Valodia's new book Taxation and Gender Equity.The review is for the journal Feminist Economics, but I'll give you an uncensored sneak preview of the good bits here.
Some reasons not to take an undergraduate degree in economics
In a recent post, Nick Rowe speculated that the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis made basic macro mistakes in part because he has an undergraduate degree in math. Yet a person wanting to make a career as an academic economist (or a president of a federal reserve bank) should not choose economics […]
Why economics textbooks are (sometimes) ideological
In a recent comment on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative Tom Slee shared this experience: …{W]hen my son comes back from an Economics 101 course at an Ontario university and shows me bald statements like these from his textbook (Parkin and Bade) then I have no problem with using a broad brush to criticize the profession:… "Arguments […]
Neo-classical economics is dead. Sort of.
Ten years ago, David Colander wrote an obituary describing "the death of neo-classical economics." Sort of. Strictly speaking, he was calling for economist-assisted terminasia:
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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