Tag Archives: economics
SSHRC Grant Trends in Economics
Well, the past week saw notifications go out to academic economists on the results of their 2014-15 Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant applications. Needless to say, there will be a lot of unhappy campers but then there always are when it comes to grant application success. Needless to say, […]
Economic Superiority
Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan have penned a Max Plank SciencesPo discussion paper on the traits of the economics profession. In The Superiority of Economists, the authors write: “Taken together, these traits constitute what we call the superiority of economists, where economists’ objective supremacy is intimately linked with their subjective sense of authority […]
Visualizing the Economy
I will be teaching first year economics this fall for the first time in quite a number of years and I want to provide a more gripping visual presentation of what an economy is. I have the standard set of graphs illustrating the circular flow and the production possibilities frontier in order to provide the […]
What’s in a Name?
We all know that the word “economics” comes from the Greek “oikonomia” which refers to the thrifty management of household affairs. By extension, the origin of the term “economy” is closely related to the same term as it is from the Latin “oeconomia”, which is again from the same Greek “oikonomia”. From all this, it […]
The Economic Role of Monarchy
In the wake of the abdication of King Juan Carlos of Spain, the New York Times ran a short piece on monarchies noting that 12 monarchies still survive in Europe with eight of them being liberal democracies – Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden. Incidentally, these Scandinavian monarchies in particular are […]
Some Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Economics of Social Interaction
Economics is really all about incentives and their effect on behaviour at the micro and macro level. My training in economics emphasized the role of prices in communicating information about scarcity and opportunity cost and providing the incentives that affect economic behaviour. Yet, all of our economic behaviour is also rooted on an institutional framework […]
Why bikes are cooler than cars
The car is in decline. The Economist says so, and so does the New York Times. Cars are boring; bikes are cooler. Here are the top 10 reasons why. 10. Cars are for stuff People from the pre-computer era have books, DVDs, TVs, stereos, big photo albums, board games, and playing cards. They need cars […]
Eliminating milk quotas: a thought experiment
There are three ways to reduce the price of a product. The first is through technological innovation – the reason why the price of computing power and memory storage is now so low. The second is to cut wages, or the price of other inputs. Even though the basic technology of sewing t-shirts has not […]
Mary Jane and Milton
Milton Friedman – Nobel Laureate in Economics and adviser to Ronald Reagan – supported legalizing and taxing marijuana. Stephen Easton's classic paper advocating marijuana legalization was published by the Fraser Institute. Why do so many right-leaning economists favour marijuana legalization? Conservative economists typically believe that a person is a best judge of what is in […]
Should spelling and grammar count?
I'm spending my weekend marking exams and papers. As always, I have to decide, "Should I take off marks for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors?" Grades are a measure of a student's abilities, skills, and knowledge. They are used by admission committees in deciding a student's potential for graduate work (a master's degree, or law […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments