Search

Search results

1. Steady as she goes, Professor Phillips (people consume goods and services—not generic output)

   We’re trying to get some brickwork done around our front door. But we’re having trouble finding someone to do it. One guy we called said he’s booked to the end of the year. Another said he’d do it but then quoted a price almost three ...

2. A free press must be free of government

   I just got an email from Isabelle Melançon, whom I’m afraid I don’t know. It urges me: “Let’s mobilize?” Nicely designed with tasteful fonts, it’s topped with a picture of Ms. Melançon reading a newspaper and smiling broadly—something I’m ...

3. The ordeals of Canadian health care

   Richard Zeckhauser is Harvard through and through. He is Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He got a Harvard A.B. (what everybody else calls a B.A.) in 1962, summa cum laude no ...

4. Trump’s trade war—backing us into the 1930s?

   A new research paper by economists David Jacks of Simon Fraser University and Dennis Novy of the University of Warwick makes me think the continuing U.S.-China trade war may be backing us into the 1930s. “Backing us in” because we’re at a ...

5. To save the whales buy off the Ahabs

   CBC’s The National ran a fascinating story this week about a program that pays cargo ships to slow down so they don’t run into and kill killer whales. The incentives operate off the California coast in the Santa Barbara Channel. According ...

6. Why Rice plays Texas, the moon shot and a very big public good

   Of all the great lines John F. Kennedy and his speech writer and alter ego, Ted Sorensen, crafted during the 1950s and ’60s, one of my favourite is Kennedy’s throwaway quip in 1962: “Why does Rice play Texas?,” which he jotted onto a text ...

7. Family ‘income mobility’ data—a cup at least half full

   Statistics Canada published some interesting data on income mobility this week. Actually, “interesting” is probably redundant. Thanks to our current political and policy preoccupation with who’s doing well in this society and who isn’t, ...

8. Real wages rising, except for smokers and drinkers

   CJAD 800 AM, Montreal’s main English-language radio station, wanted to talk to me about the new poll CBC has been riffing off of all week long, the one about how Canadians are “ conflicted and worried ” heading into this fall’s federal ...

9. You can grow new trees, but not new money

   I had a call this week from one of the charities my wife and I support. A pleasant-sounding fellow at the other end of the line said they just wanted to let us know that in future they won’t send out the usual mass mailings about their ...

10. Our eighth-best carbon policies

    Economists talk about “first-best” policies, by which—we’re a little illiterate—we actually mean “best” policies. With less offence to the language, we go on to “second-best” policies, “third-best” policies and so on, for as many numbers ...