Category General
Social choice and optimal inference
One of the highlights of my graduate school years was the lecture where I learned about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. It’s hard to imagine an question more important to the social sciences that the social choice problem: how can we aggregate individual preferences into a coherent social order? Arrow’s answer is that we can’t, but that […]
Equity and Quebec’s daycare program
One of the Conservatives' election campaign promises was to provide financial support to parents directly, to the tune of $1,200 per child. Progressive-minded commentators have condemned this policy in no uncertain terms; their preferred model runs more along the lines of the Quebec government's $7/day (formerly $5/day) program. Maybe it shouldn't. At the meetings of […]
On the welfare benefits of the estate tax
Much recent discussion on the estate tax. How bad can it be if heirs and heiresses don’t fully appreciate their good fortune?
My first job, my first publication
There’s been some discussion recently about the importance of a freshly-minted academic’s first job. My first job was a non-tenure-track appointment at the University of Western Ontario, and I was glad to get it: academic jobs were scarce then, and UWO is a good school. The job also made it possible to spend more time […]
Tâtonnement in the market for immigrants
Today, Greg Mankiw quotes from Larry Lindsey: Unlike some nations–Canada, for example–we do not "sell" residency to people who promise to bring in investment money and create jobs. As economists would say, if you’re not going to ration by price, you’re going to ration by queue. and asks: Why not ration by price? As noted […]
Even more evidence that people respond to incentives
A few years ago, Human Resources Development Canada (HDRC) ran an experimental project to see how single parents on welfare responded to changes in their budget constraint. It has long been known that single mothers on social assistance are particularly vulnerable to the welfare trap: not only are their payments clawed back as they earn […]
Report from Committee 7
The newly-elected Parliament has begun its first session, and the first couple of days have been taken up with the usual rituals: the election of the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, the Speech from the Throne, and the use of Any Number of Capitalised Words to Describe […]
The anatomy of anti-economics
I recently had occasion to re-read Paul Krugman’s "Pop Internationalism", and this passage from ‘The illusion of conflict in international trade’ jumped out at me. His point of reference is international economics, but in my experience it also applies to other fields as well: As far as I can tell, the attitude of policy-minded intellectuals […]
The revelation principle in action
At the University of Prince Edward Island, a history lecturer’s attempt to get his students to reveal their types in the first week goes awry: P.E.I. professor fired for no-show marking. A history professor who offered students a mark of 70 per cent if they opted out of his class has been fired by the […]
GDP is a flawed measure of economic welfare. So what?
The Economist indulges in a bit of hand-wringing about the exhaustively-documented weaknesses of using GDP to measure economic well-being: It’s high time that economists looked at more than just GDP: Economists spend much time discussing how to boost GDP growth. The OECD itself drew attention this week to the widening gap between America’s and Europe’s […]
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