Category General
General Gluts, Secular Stagnation and the World Economy
The head of the International Monetary Fund warned today on her visit to Beijing that the global economy faces the risk of a "lost decade" with little or no growth and that without action, the world faces worsening financial instability and a possible collapse of demand. This news item also coincided with my morning lecture […]
Revisiting the Sustainability of Post-Secondary Education
I decided to try and dig a little deeper on the issue of the sustainability of post-secondary education spending in Canada by looking at the numbers in real per capita terms and by province. As I mentioned in my earlier post, while fiscal sustainability is a term generally used in the health care policy debate, […]
Medieval Monetary Thought
In my final class lecture this week on ancient and medieval economic thought, I discussed the work of Nicholas Oresme (1320 to 1382), a French Roman Catholic bishop who was also a philosopher, mathematician and an economic thinker. I found it interesting to see a career link between mathematics and economics so early on. More […]
The Long Hand of Medieval Economic Thought…
In the current Ontario election campaign, both the Ontario Conservatives and the NDP have put in their platforms pledges to remove the HST from home hydro bills and home heating. It is argued that these items are not luxuries and that the HST has made life less affordable for families. The NDP goes a step […]
A Lament for Public Policy
In New Directions for Intelligent Government in Canada: Papers in Honour of Ian Stewart, Don Drummond reflects on the state of public policy analysis in Canada and whether the rigour of policy analysis that existed in the past still exists today though he wisely cautions that “tales of the good old days are often the […]
Ranking Employment Performance
It has been the conventional wisdom in Canada that we have weathered the Great Recession and the financial crisis much better than the rest of the world. Ever wonder why when government comparisons are made about how Canada fared during the Great Recession, the comparison made is inevitably with the G-7 countries?
Another Canadian economics blog! And yet another!
The University of Victoria economics department has provided us with two – count 'em, 2 – new economics blogs in the last few months. David Giles' Econometrics Beat has been up for a while now, and he is to be congratulated for writing a blog on the required course that almost all economics students would […]
Thinking About Economics
As part of my fall teaching load, I will be teaching what economists sometimes refer to as “History of Thought” but which is more correctly termed the “History of Economic Thought” or perhaps “Evolution of Economic Theory and Analysis”.
Understanding another’s theory
Two field linguists are trying to translate a foreign language from scratch. So they are following a native speaker around. The first linguist knows the difference between a rabbit and a hare. The second linguist doesn't know the difference between a rabbit and a hare.
Forecasting the Future
I've always been a fan of science fiction and the other day came across an old anthology of Canadian science fiction on my downstairs shelf that contains a copy of a pamphlet written in 1883 forecasting what Canada was supposed to be like in 1983. The actual author is apparently unknown but wrote the pamphlet […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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