Category Nick Rowe
The End of Finance? The monetisation of everything.
I know it's wrong, or at least deeply problematic, to adopt a teleological view of history: to say that History has an End, or Purpose, and is inexorably driven by deterministic Iron Laws towards that End, with perhaps an occasional hiccough along the way. But I can't stop myself. What is the End of Finance? […]
Stag Hunt and macroeconomics
A coordination failure is when rational individual behaviour leads to a bad outcome. Some other outcome would be preferred by all. Keynesians especially emphasise coordination failures, though nearly all macroeconomists say that coordination failures sometimes happen, and say the US economy is in one right now. That makes us optimists. Maybe this isn't the best […]
P-data, Q-data, and L-data
Economists have got lots of P-data and Q-data, and we pay a lot of attention to it. I think we don't have much L-data, except anecdotal, and we don't pay much attention to the hard L-data we do have. P-data is data on the prices at which goods are traded. Q-data is data on the […]
Poor sales MINUS quality of labour
Update 3: I wish I had titled this post: "Labour quality: the dog that stopped barking". I see something a bit different in that graph that all the macro-bloggers have been blogging about. Sure, I see the "poor sales" that everyone else sees. But what about "quality of labour"? What's important is that "quality of […]
Greg Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics — the tourist platter. And math and PC.
When I first read Greg Mankiw's "Ten Principles of Economics" I thought they were embarrassing. But I really liked the rest of the book, and decided to become a Canadian co-author (along with Ron Kneebone and Ken McKenzie of The University of Calgary). I thought that when teaching I would just skim over the 10 […]
Hayek, Keynes, Hicks, money, and New Keynesian macroeconomics
Hayek said that individuals make current plans for future actions based on their expectations of the future actions of others. And others might be planning to do something different from what you expect them to do. And economists need to look at what happens when those plans and expectations are not mutually consistent, and look […]
The Bank of Canada and the Fed: rules vs. discretion
I just can't get interested in the Bank of Canada right now. I can only think about the Fed. The Bank of Canada is just too boring. Which it should be.
Blogging as crack
Compared to other forms of writing, especially academic writing, blogging is like crack. (Not that I would know, about crack I mean). It is cheap and easy; the hits come very quickly (once Stephen had invested all the years of hard work to get this blog going for the rest of us free-loaders); the hits […]
The house price fairy
The house price fairy visited me last night. She offered me three choices: she would instantly double all house prices; she would instantly halve all house prices; or she would leave all house prices the same. "You stupid fairy!" I replied. "Don't you know i already own this house, and I have no plans to […]
Time-shifting planned demand vs. permanently increasing actual demand
Most policies aimed at increasing demand merely time-shift planned demand. Does that mean they don't really work? Does it mean we get recovery now at the expense of an even bigger recession later? Do we just have to cross our fingers and hope that something else eventually comes along to increase demand in future? A […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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