Category General
Crime and Police
Statistics Canada has released its most recent report on police personnel and expenditures and notes that police strength measured as officers per capita declined in 2012 by 1 percent. Moreover, there has been a slight decline in police expenditures overall with spending in 2011 totaling 12.9 billion – a decline of 0.7 percent from the […]
Measuring Popes
With the Conclave of Cardinals about to convene to choose a successor to Benedict XVI, it is worth taking a look at some statistics regarding the line of popes over the course of 2000 years. Based on the list in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Benedict XVI was the 267th pope in a line stretching back to […]
The Year Ahead
The New Year is when we try to look ahead and project what we think the economy will be like. There is no shortage of forecasts from banks, international economic agencies and independent forecasters as to how the Canadian, US and world economies will fare over the next year.
Capital and interest in the steady state
My meandering musings. Mostly to try to clarify my own thoughts. Read at your own risk. What's wrong with this picture?
In praise of General Equilibrium Models
Q1. What happens if they built robots that could do my job as well as I could, and those robots got cheaper and cheaper over time? My wages would have to fall so I could compete with the robots, and I would be worse off. Q2. What happens if they built robots that could do […]
Wikipedia nails it
Wikipedia entries on economics seem to be written mostly by graduate students, eager to share their knowledge with others, and a disproportionate number of Austrian, feminist and other heterodox economists. Sometimes they get it pretty much exactly right, as with this description of the practice of economics:
Is the Stationary State Coming?
Robert Gordon has recently published an NBER paper titled “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds”. The paper questions the universal assumption that gained currency in the 1950s with Robert Solow's work that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. Indeed, Gordon suggests that the past 250 years […]
Economic Forecasting: Is Google Trends the Future?
Google Trends is a quick and popular way to assess the importance of ideas, events and trends by looking at the results of people’s web searches. In fact, as is well known, it has been used to study flu activity based on searches for flu related terms. And, right here on WCI, it has been […]
Joint outputs
There's something a bit weird about the way we normally do economics. Or maybe it's just the examples we normally use. My mind isn't quite clear on it yet. So I'm writing this blog post. We usually talk about multiple inputs producing one output. Labour, land, and capital are inputs used to produce apples. Three […]
How I spent my gap year
Some economists think the 1871 revolution was a big mistake, and led economics down the wrong path. They take their inspiration from pre-1871 economics, especially Ricardo and Marx, and proceed from there. Many of them are very smart and knowledgeable people. They think that most academic economists ignore them and know little or nothing about […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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