Andy Harless' tweet (about the US economy) got me thinking. "There’s a frog-boiling aspect to this economy. The consistent lack of *rapid* improvement throughout the recovery is enabling us to reach levels of employment that might not otherwise have been attainable." It reminds me of my old post "Short Run 'Speed Limits' on recovery". The […]
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has released its 23rd annual report on health spending in Canada – National Health Expenditure Trends, 1975 to 2019. As a member of the CIHI National Health Expenditures advisory panel, it is always great to see the wealth of data on trends in health spending across Canada. Total […]
Hilbert's Hotel has infinitely many rooms. Even if every room is full, you can still make room for one more guest in room 1, by moving the guest currently in room 1 to room 2, moving the guest currently in room 2 to room 3, and so on forever. When the rate of interest r […]
Imagine a central bank that pegs the price of farmland. It announces it will buy or sell unlimited amounts of farmland for $10,000 per hectare. So "one dollar" doesn't mean some number of ounces of gold; it means "one square meter of farmland". So the central bank owns farmland, which it rents out to farmers […]
This is the Project Link chart that most startles me: What killed the growth in real wages in the early 1970s? I've been trying to come up with an answer to this question, and I think I have one. I'm not entirely sure that it's the correct answer, but I think it's a plausible conjecture.
It's past time for my annual update for Project Link, my attempt to piece together the fragments of Statistics Canada's published data into coherent time series.
I recently received the following message from Ryan MacDonald at Statistics Canada: “I recently came upon a number [of] scans done by our library to place the historical publications into pdfs. They can sometimes be a little difficult to search for, so I thought I would pass along a few links that may be of […]
Suppose I promise to be in the same place as you; but you make no promise to be in the same place as me. Then I am Beta follower and you are Alpha leader; because you go where you want to go and I must go to the same place to keep my promise. We […]
Well, it is the May long weekend and a celebration of Queen Victoria but this year it has also coincided with the end of Game of Thrones and its own set of Kings, Queens and associated dysfunctional noble figures. There has been a lot of angst expressed about how inadequate the final season has been […]
Ontario's Ford government has a plan to induce professors over 71 to retire. I wrote a column in the Globe and Mail about it. Here's a sneak peak: Nearly one in 10 Ontario university professors is over the age of 65. As of 2016, these professors were earning, on average, $184,947 a year. Moreover, because […]
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