Category General
A Longer Term View of U.S. Public Debt
With the August 2nd deadline for raising the United States public debt ceiling looming, it might be useful to take a longer-term view on exactly how bad the US debt situation is at least with respect to the past.
Economics, History and the Shrinking Middle
As an economic historian by training, I’m always aware of the unique ground straddled by practitioners of the cliometric craft. We are economists by training and in terms of many of the questions we are interested in, but much of our research focuses on collection and analysis of primary sources.
Cities, Capital Cities and Economic Performance
It is the conventional wisdom that urban centers with their concentrations of human and physical capital and their dense social networks are engines of growth. One exception to this is can be the case where a dominant urban center by virtue of its institutional monopoly on a country or region’s economic life is able to […]
Livio Di Matteo joins Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
As many of you are no doubt aware, Lakehead University's Livio Di Matteo has been writing on economic policy for quite some time for various newspapers and on his own blog, Northern Economist. We are happy to announce that Livio has accepted our invitation to blog at WCI as well; he will be making his […]
A comment on comments
While we are happy to have people read our posts and to discuss the points raised therein, we would ask people to remember that personal attacks and abusive comments will not be tolerated. There's been a recent uptick in such occurrences, and I'd like to nip this in the bud. That is all.
The case against the penny
Mike Moffatt delivers the coup de grâce for the penny in today's Ottawa Citizen. Go read it. Tell your friends to read it. Tell your MP to read it.
Five years of Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
The first WCI post was written five years ago today. Since then, the number of bloggers posting here has increased to four and more than 1,000 other posts have been published, along with some 17,000 comments. I take a certain satisfaction in these numbers, so I'm going to indulge in a meta-post below the fold.
Neo-classical economics is dead. Sort of.
Ten years ago, David Colander wrote an obituary describing "the death of neo-classical economics." Sort of. Strictly speaking, he was calling for economist-assisted terminasia:
In Praise of Dark Ages
This can't be quite right. But I'm going to run it by you anyway. An occasional Dark Age is a good thing. We sometimes need to forget. We sometimes need to torch libraries. That's the only way that knowledge can progress. Paul Krugman defined a Dark Age well. I forget exactly what he said, and […]
Why isn’t the real world more like Disneyland?
Sometimes I wish the real world was more like Disneyland. Free, reliable, public transit. No litter. No poverty. A place where you can walk anywhere you want to go. Where there are no Wal-marts, and small stores on Main Street thrive and prosper. Where Hollywood still has beautiful art deco buildings, but the tattoo parlours […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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