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1. Productivity accountants miss widespread magic

   “Any sufficiently advanced technology,” said the science/science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, “is indistinguishable from magic.” I get that quote from the podcast of The John Batchelor Show, where a tech company uses it in its ...

2. Competitiveness by the numbers is only partly helpful

   The self-appointed but now also semi-institutionalized World Economic Forum, progenitor of “Davos Man,” published its Global Competitiveness Report for 2018 this week. The United States came first, scoring 85.6 points out of a possible ...

3. Happy 150th to one of the world's most demonstrably successful societies

   I was 15 when Canada turned 100. It was a very exciting time. Expo 67 was underway. The world seemed to be coming to Montreal, where I was growing up. There was background trepidation about the separatist movement in Quebec and the state ...

4. William Watson: Was Stuart McLean, national treasure, also a public good?

   I was not an early fan of Stuart McLean. I listened live to his famous gift of a cockroach to Peter Gzowski on Gzowski’s retirement show and thought it was silly, as, frankly, Gzowski seemed to, as well. And when The Vinyl Café first ...

5. Job numbers prove economy never sleeps

   Anyone paying attention to Canada's current federal election campaign has heard—dozens of times—that the Canadian economy either was or was not in a recession in the first half of this year. Whether it really was or not, economists ...