Category fun
Fencing In Canada
Wisconsin Governor and potential presidential candidate Scott Walker apparently thinks it is not an unreasonable idea to consider building a wall between Canada and the United States in order to secure his country’s borders from security threats. Now, to be fair, he did not say that a wall should be built along the 5,525 mile […]
Or perhaps women’s offices actually are colder?
Another day, another article about the gendered impacts of air conditioning. Here's the story: North American offices are air conditioned to a temperature which is, from a female perspective, too cold. Women shiver at their desks; men are just fine. It's a serious environmental issue. When women have office space heaters cranked up in July […]
Open borders vs forced emigration
Let's start simple. There are two physically identical islands, Alpha and Beta. There are two agents, A and B. Initially, A lives on Alpha, and B lives on Beta. Under "Open Borders", each agent has the right to move to either island, if he wishes to. Under "Forced Emigration", each agent has the obligation to […]
AK/Solow/Smith/Schumpeterian growth
More random musings, mostly to try to get my own head straight on some questions. (I should steal Robert Waldmann's idea of calling them "stochastic thoughts".) And probably not very original. But sometimes it's easier to try to reinvent the wheel than walk to the library and read all the books on "wheels"; and experiential […]
Are apples non-rival?
Suppose we had an apple replicating machine, that could replicate apples costlessly and instantly. How would we go about answering the question: "Are apples a non-rival good?". 1. We could have a lovely philosophical argument about whether the original apple and the copy are two different apples or just two different manifestations of the same […]
Are ideas really non-rival?
I was writing a simple teaching post, on ideas and increasing returns to scale, in micro and macro. I wrote down "Ideas are non-rival". Then I thought I had better explain what I meant by that. Then I thought about professors, who do research (thinking up new ideas), and teaching (communicating existing ideas to other […]
The mechanics of exchange and non market-clearing prices
[Update: on second thoughts, maybe this post was not quite ready for prime-time. But I think it's still fun to play with.] Here is a very simple model of a pure exchange economy where the mechanics of exchange (who can trade what with whom) determine whether very small departures of prices from market-clearing cause very […]
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 […]
The Land Theory of Value
Last night I spoke with my Dutch ancestor again. Nick van Rowe told me about the Land Theory of Value, which began with the French, but was perfected by the Dutch. This is what he told me: Science has proved that land existed prior to both labour and capital. The Universe existed billions of years […]
Does capital income exist?
[Ages ago, as a graduate student, I "wasted" my time (when I should have been finishing my thesis) reading capital theory, including the more "heterodox" stuff. My memory is pretty hazy, but I still think about the old questions occasionally. There's nothing really new here for economists familiar with "dated goods".] 1. Suppose I know […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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