Category Productivity
Importing people is not like importing apples
Remember all the old Canadian nationalists? The ones who said that the (Canada-US) Free Trade Agreement would destroy Canadian culture? The ones we economists defeated back in the 1988 election? I'm beginning to wish we hadn't defeated them quite so thoroughly. They were wrong. But they sorta, kinda, did have a point. Social/economic institutions are […]
Musical chairs with heterogeneity
There are two problems with musical chairs: The obvious problem: there aren't enough chairs for the kids that want to sit on them. The less obvious problem: chairs and kids are heterogeneous, so if kids grab any chair they can get, some tall kids will be sitting on short chairs and some short kids will […]
Robots and the Core
I don't do micro. Can somebody please find me some simple accessible link that explains "the core" and its relation to competitive equilibrium? Thanks. This one (pdf) looks good but has got too much math for me to understand. [Update: here's Aumann (pdf). First couple of pages are readable. Thanks notsneaky.] Suppose you have an […]
A modest proposal for renewed imperialism
I hear that a lot of people want to migrate to…Finland. I'm pretty sure it's not because they like Finland's climate, or scenery. I don't think it's got anything to do with the physical geography of Finland. I think that they want to move to Finland because they like Finland's political, legal, and social institutions, […]
Business cycle theory vs growth theory
Macroeconomics is divided into (short run) business cycle theory and (long run) growth theory. Those of us who do business cycle theory have a bit of an inferiority complex (though you might not know it from listening to us argue). Because growth theory seems to be so much more important. Where would you rather live: […]
Are Technology and Learning joint inputs?
[More musings. I started writing this post arguing that they are joint inputs. Now I'm not so sure. So I changed the title into a question.] We need both land and labour to produce wheat, but land and labour are not "joint inputs", because we can combine them in variable proportions. The marginal product of […]
AK/Solow/Smith/Schumpeterian growth
More random musings, mostly to try to get my own head straight on some questions. (I should steal Robert Waldmann's idea of calling them "stochastic thoughts".) And probably not very original. But sometimes it's easier to try to reinvent the wheel than walk to the library and read all the books on "wheels"; and experiential […]
Are apples non-rival?
Suppose we had an apple replicating machine, that could replicate apples costlessly and instantly. How would we go about answering the question: "Are apples a non-rival good?". 1. We could have a lovely philosophical argument about whether the original apple and the copy are two different apples or just two different manifestations of the same […]
Are ideas really non-rival?
I was writing a simple teaching post, on ideas and increasing returns to scale, in micro and macro. I wrote down "Ideas are non-rival". Then I thought I had better explain what I meant by that. Then I thought about professors, who do research (thinking up new ideas), and teaching (communicating existing ideas to other […]
Mathiness and Growth theory
Paul Romer says: "No model can have a competitive equilibrium with price-taking behavior and partially excludable nonrival goods. If you are not an economist, this would be a model in which someone who has a monopoly on an idea can charge for its use, but somehow is unable to influence the price that users have […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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