Category General
Historical Canadian Government Data Sources
I recently received the following message from Ryan MacDonald at Statistics Canada: “I recently came upon a number [of] scans done by our library to place the historical publications into pdfs. They can sometimes be a little difficult to search for, so I thought I would pass along a few links that may be of […]
Reflections on Westeros
Well, it is the May long weekend and a celebration of Queen Victoria but this year it has also coincided with the end of Game of Thrones and its own set of Kings, Queens and associated dysfunctional noble figures. There has been a lot of angst expressed about how inadequate the final season has been […]
Accounting Identities and the Implicit Theory of Inertia
Animals can be divided into Carnivores and Non-Carnivores: A = C + NC. Therefore, if we add some wolves to an island of sheep, the number of animals on that island will increase. It's easy to see why that argument might not be right. Wolves kill sheep. But if you didn't know that fact about […]
The Federal Debt of the United States, 1791 to 2018: A Presidential Ranking
A recent story in the National Post by Tristan Hopper highlighted the “utterly unbelievable scale” of current US federal public debt levels. As is always the case, it is useful to get some historical perspective on the evolution of the U.S. federal debt over time – which under President Trump has become the biggest U.S. […]
Is the Russia-America Global CoDominium About to Begin?
In the wake of the Putin-Trump Helsinki summit, there is much speculation about what was actually said between Putin and Trump behind closed doors and the uncertainty spread throughout the American government about whether agreements had been reached on issues such as Syria and the Ukraine. The subsequent invitation to Putin to visit the White […]
Public Debt: A Global Perspective
There is much international preoccupation with debt at the public sector, household and corporate levels and the upward creep in interest rates does apparently keep central bankers – including our own Mr. Poloz – awake at night. Given the problem is an international one, sometimes it is useful to try and get a global perspective […]
So What Happens in the Next Recession?
I’m not a macro economist by any stretch of the imagination and yet I cannot help wondering what is going to happen in terms of policy response the next time Canada goes into a downturn. It is not a question of whether there will be another recession, only when. By policy response, I am of […]
150 Years of Canadian National Defence Spending
Canada’s federal government is going to deliver a new defence policy that is expected to guide Canada’s military for the next generation. While in the works for months, it comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s recent exhortation at the NATO meetings that NATO members are not spending enough and Tuesday’s speech by Minister […]
Five things that can help you get your conference submission accepted
Over the past few months, I've been putting together the program for the upcoming Canadian Economics Association meetings: http://economics.ca/2017/en/. It's a reasonable sized conference – this year we had almost 900 submissions – and quite a few papers were rejected. Yet often papers were not accepted for conference program simply because the author made an easily […]
How to write an email that will get you what you want
Most of my day-to-day social and professional interactions take place over email. It's my primary form of direct, one-on-one contact with students, colleagues, and co-authors. Consequently, my impressions of people are shaped by their emails. Are their emails polite or demanding? Clear or confusing? For good or ill, I judge people by the emails they send. Based on my own […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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