Over the past week, we have had a number of conversations about the deficiencies of economics education at the ECON 1000, undergraduate and Ph.D. level.  Depending on the school, a Ph.D. student may never encounter anything on behavioural economics or experimental economics or economic analysis of law.  There are all kinds of things I would love […]

A must read: The Economist asks a number of prominent economists the following: How have the financial crisis and recession affected the way economics is taught? How should economic instruction change? For the 'how should it change' question, my views are closest to that of Harold James. As far as my own introductory course – […]

In response to Prof. Gordon's Some implications of thinking of trade as a form of technology, Paul Friesen wrote: Actually, I think manufacturing is special in a way most economists fail to appreciate adequately. Manufacturing clusters. If you do manufacturing, you create an environment in which more manufacturing is likely to develop. Clusters and clustering […]

A must read by Andrew Coyne – Of jobs and jets.  The whole "Build the F-35s in Canada to keep jobs" arguments misses two key points: Jobs are a cost, not a benefit. Unless we're going to be given the jets for free (unlikely), we will need to work to obtain the jets, no matter […]

Been away for the past week or so fighting the flu.  Hoping to come back to regular blogging soon.  In the meantime, two interesting stories from the Globe: Government study reveals significant errors in voluntary census In another example from the report, the real 2006 long-form census found that visible minorities as a share of […]

Have you ever had a conversation that completely changed your thinking on a subject?  My thinking on inequality and taxes was radically altered about 10 years ago when my office mate and I were studying for an exam in Robin Boadway's PhD course in Public Finance, and we got to discussing tax rate structure.  During […]

Big Think on one of my favourite topics – changes in behaviour caused by mineral levels in the body: Communities with higher than average amounts of lithium in their drinking water had significantly lower suicide rates than communities with lower levels. Regions of Texas with lower lithium concentrations had an average suicide rate of 14.2 […]

Given our conversations this weekend, this could not have come at a better time.  I just received this from Facebook friend and all around good guy Bruce Bartlett – Free Economic Journals.   Contains journal articles and policy papers from U.S. government departments such as the BLS, academic journals such as the Journal of Economic Perspectives […]

The comments on the post Neo-classical economics is dead. Sort of. and Why economics textbooks are (sometimes) ideological show there is a fundamental disconnect between what economists do and what the general public thinks we do.  There's also a fundamental disconnect on what economists believe and what the general public thinks we believe.  And it's […]