Category Frances Woolley
Why isn’t the real world more like Disneyland?
Sometimes I wish the real world was more like Disneyland. Free, reliable, public transit. No litter. No poverty. A place where you can walk anywhere you want to go. Where there are no Wal-marts, and small stores on Main Street thrive and prosper. Where Hollywood still has beautiful art deco buildings, but the tattoo parlours […]
Saturday morning comics
Piled Higher and Deeper, http://www.phdcomics.com, is my favourite on-line comic – this is the one on my door. I'm sharing it with you to celebrate my sabbatical, which started yesterday.
Waste water
On the streets of Palm Springs, the stores have mister systems, spraying passers by – or an empty sidewalk – with a fine mist. Lurid green lawns are watered in the heat of the day, excess water running off onto the road. None of the hotels we've stayed at – not the Santa Monica eco-friendly […]
Front of the line passes
Universal Studios sells regular passes and 'front of the line' passes. The front of the line passes allow the passholder to go through a special gate and wait in a special 'front of the line' queue. Buying a front of the line pass is rational if: price of front of the line pass – price […]
Philanthropy and the public good
I'm just back from visiting the Getty Villa and I don't know what to make of it. On the one hand, this is a model of what can be achieved through private philanthropy. J. Paul Getty built the villa to house his collection of Greek and Roman antiquities. The building, grounds, and setting are gorgeous, […]
Should Greenpeace just give up?
The Onion has just run a piece imagining the thoughts of suicidal blue whales: Claiming that their miserable lives had become too depressing to endure, the world's remaining blue whales surfaced Monday and desperately pleaded with environmentalists to immediately cease all conservation efforts so the species could "just be done with it and finally go […]
Has female empowerment caused a decline in teacher quality?
My sister, Rachel Goddyn, believes that expanding female job opportunities have led to a decline in the quality of elementary and high school teachers. My own family is a case in point. Our grandmother was a kindergarten teacher. My sister Alice and I both teach at universities — something that would have been unimaginable for our […]
Incomprehensibly huge disasters
There is a tribe in the Amazon whose members can only count to five. Any amount greater than five is simply "many." We're surrounded by numbers in the millions (executive salaries), billions (Canadian government debt), and trillions (US government debt). But how much better are we than Amazon tribespeople in understanding what these amounts mean?
Should recent immigrants be eligible for Old Age Security?
Most Canadian seniors are guaranteed an income above the poverty line by Old Age Security, Guaranteed Income Supplement and the Canada Pension Plan. Seniors are less likely to be poor than children or adults under 65 – with one exception. Mike Veall has found that 71 percent of recent immigrants aged 66 and older have […]
SpongeBob SquarePants and the Economics of Identity
SpongeBob SquarePants lives in a pineapple under the sea, makes the best burgers in Bikini Bottom, and loves life. Akerlof and Kranton's Economics of Identity explains why SpongeBob is so happy. An identity is a sense of self, "this is who I am". Every one of us has many identities – our gender, nationality, religion, […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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