Category General
Holiday halt
Since I’ll soon be caught up in a whirlwind of holiday activities with family near and not-quite-so-near, blogging will resume sometime in early January. Joyeuses fêtes
Howler of the day
The courier company UPS has filed a claim under NAFTA’s Chapter 11 against Canada Post, in which it claims that the government-owned corporation is using its profits from its first-class mail business – for which it has a government-mandated monopoly – to unfairly subsidise its courier division. Today’s Toronto Star – the connaisseur’s preferred choice […]
Too much change
When I was younger, I would occasionally get irritated waiting in line at a cash register while an older citizen sorted through a handful of coins to pay the exact amount. After all, it was faster to pay with notes and let the cashier – who had the various coins in a conveniently-arranged tray – […]
We made the front page of The Economist!
This never happens. Do you think that they’ll start regularly including Canadian data in their cross-country comparisons? Nah. Too much to hope for.
An elegant summary of what ails GM
Courtesy of William Watson, in today’s National Post: Here’s the problem with General Motors. Would you buy a car, used or new, from a company that wrote the following sentence: "The Buick LaCrosse is conquesting sales at impressive rates … "? "Conquesting"?
GDP vs ‘Progress and Happiness’
The New York Times reports on a conference in Nova Scotia: A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom* (registration req’d). [Thanks to the New Economist, who in turn thanks other two bloggers.] Everyone agrees that GDP is not the same thing as social welfare: economists learn this point early on in our […]
Note to self: Learn more economic history
Yesterday, I thought there were only two other Canadian academic economists with blogs: John Palmer’s Eclectic Econoclast and Brian Ferguson’s Canadian Econoview. But today I’m delighted to add Sandra Peart’s Adam Smith Lives! to that list (thanks to Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy for the pointer). Sandra’s mission is to haul economic history to its rightful […]
Introduction
Canadian academic economists have a low public profile. Offhand, it’s pretty easy to come up with at least three reasons for that: We’re Canadian. We’re academics. We’re economists. That pretty much adds up to the trifecta in the category of "people whose opinion is not eagerly sought out". But I think there’s more to it […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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