Category Labour markets
Collegiality as a positive externality
Yesterday my contact at the Globe asked me to write something about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to scrap the company's teleworking policy. The final product is here.
Why don’t we have disinflation (until now)?
Just a quickie, between meetings. Paul Krugman asks "Why don't we have deflation?" His answer is: downward nominal wage rigidity. And he shows that graph of frequency distribution of nominal wage changes with a big spike at zero. I don't think that's quite the right question. So I don't think that's quite the right answer. […]
Labour supply, lions and elephants
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they […]
University retention and males
Carleton University admits more male students than females. But it graduates more female students than males. Why? What, if anything, can and should we do about it? (I don't know.) The public access data is here. (Datacubes is a lovely tool, but it takes a little time learning how to use it.) You can see […]
Is Economic Growth Really Ending?
Robert Gordon has argued in his recent NBER paper “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds” that growth rates have slowed and we are reverting to very low historical growth rates and indeed a period of economic stagnation. However, what I find intriguing is that an examination of some long-term data […]
Leviathan, Exit, Voice and Ontario Teachers
The last few weeks has seen the death of two economists – James Buchanan and Albert O. Hirschman – whose work has influenced my intellectual development and thinking over the years. Their thoughts combined with tomorrow’s “political action” by Ontario teachers against the soon to expire McGuinty government has caused me to think about what […]
Technology, preferences, and wages; kinks and curves, Moseley and Krugman.
Look at the red curve PF1 and the blue curve PF2 in this picture. Ignore everything else: That's the picture Paul Krugman drew, showing how a capital-biased change in technology would shift the production function.
Production of Robots by means of Robots.
(Sorry about the title. The devil made me write it.) What are we afraid of? Let's think about the worst-case, nightmare scenario for the distribution of income. Assume that all capital is robots, and robots are perfect substitutes for human workers. One robot can produce everything and anything one human worker can produce. And that […]
Growing Ontario One Report at a Time
The Conference Board of Canada has chimed in on what ails Ontario and how to get it moving in a recently released report titled Needed: A Comprehensive Growth Strategy for Ontario. The report argues that after rebounding from the 2008-09 recession, Ontario has slipped into tepid growth of around 2 percent annually and needs a […]
Bureaucratic Entropy?
The Association of Ontario Municipalities is having its annual conference August 19-22 in Ottawa, the mother city of all governments in Canada. Among the items on the agenda are the keynote address on: “new secrets to leadership with five powerful tools to improve negotiation effectiveness”, a speech by Ontario’s premier (followed by the opposition leaders […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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