The Progressive Economics Forum

Yesterday afternoon, I caught the subway down to Queen’s Park to find out whether the throne speech would shed any light on the provincial government’s privatization plans. As it turned out, the speech included only a couple of lines on Crown corporations.
But I ran into blogger extraordinaire Warren Kinsella at the legislature and note that [...]

A TD-Pembina-Suzuki study released seven weeks ago projected that cutting Canada’s carbon emissions by 20% below 2006 levels, or even 25% below 1990 levels, would only modestly reduce overall Canadian GDP.
Last week, Jack Mintz critiqued this study for positing a fixed amount of capital investment in Canada. Under this highly dubious assumption, climate policy only [...]

This blog flagged, and Worthwhile Canadian Initiative pursued, a striking discrepancy in July’s employment data. The Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH) indicated that employers paid 74,000 more employees.
Conversely, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) had indicated that employers paid 79,000 fewer employees in July. This difference of 153,000 exceeds 1% of Canada’s workforce.
Today’s release [...]

Debate is heating up about whether the Bank of Canada should or will intervene in currency markets to lower the Canadian dollar (as I have been proposing for three months). Today’s two-cent drop in the exchange rate may indicate that currency traders are anticipating this possibility.
Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Stephen Gordon objected to recent comments from [...]

UPDATE (October 20): The transcript of the hearing described below is now available.
. . .
Late this afternoon, I had the pleasure of serving on a Parliamentary panel composed entirely of members of the United Steelworkers union. 
My co-panellists before the Human Resources committee were Ken Georgetti, CLC President, and Rosalie Washington, a laid-off worker who would [...]

I recently questioned whether Tim Hortons’ reorganization as a Canadian corporation would bring any additional jobs or tax revenue to Canada. Aaron Wherry since did something that journalists covering the Prime Minister’s photo-op on this issue should have done: he asked the company directly. Its response is now available on the Macleans blog.
Of course, Tim [...]

Keystone Liberals
Yesterday, Andrew Coyne lambasted a Liberal Party “Reality Check” from Thursday that looks eerily similar to the table that I had posted on Monday.
Like my table, the Liberals use the words “Growth”, “Decline”, and “Britain.” By contrast, the OECD’s tables use a negative sign (instead of words) to denote declines and refer to the [...]

I recently had the pleasure of serving with Stephen Gordon on a panel about economics and blogging. Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, he has been leading a one-man crusade against reducing the eligibility requirement for Employment Insurance (EI) benefits to 360 hours.
His stated goal is to provide better protection for unemployed workers and counter-cyclical fiscal [...]

Marc Lee predicted a deficit a year ago (in a paper that graciously acknowledged comments from Toby and me.) Our blog was also ahead of the curve on some other aspects of Budget 2009.
I flagged the Equalization cuts the morning after the November 2008 Economic Statement, when they received little attention. These cuts have since become a [...]

Last year was a momentous one for Relentlessly Progressive Economics.
Of course, some of us continued using the blog to disseminate media commentary on behalf of our respective organizations. However, the Progressive Economics Forum (PEF) itself attracted media coverage a couple of times.
Early in the year, The National Post and other CanWest papers cited it for documenting [...]

Declan picks up on Stephen’s suggestion that economists were too diffident to raise concerns about the real estate bubble:
How to square the group of economists in the front pages of the paper offering a series of right wing prescriptions supported by neither fact nor theory with the economist unwilling to point out a housing bubble [...]

Ezra Klein at American Prospect has already commented on some footage that I just saw on CNN.
Paul Krugman marshalled his critique of Obama’s stimulus plan from his blog onto the op-ed page of today’s New York Times. A front-page story in the same newspaper suggests that Democratic legislators have been reading Krugman. Obama responded by [...]

Duncan Cameron’s comment about the role of agriculture in climate change prompted me to take a closer look at greenhouse-gas emissions from sources other than burning fossil fuels.
The final column of the following table is a sectoral breakdown of row 8 from yesterday’s table. All of these emissions are exempt from the Liberal Green Shift.

 Sector

 Fuel [...]

Last Tuesday’s episode of Politics featured Barb Byers on changes to (Un)Employment Insurance and Michael Ignatieff on the humanitarian crisis in Burma. I naturally agree with Byers, but get nervous whenever Ignatieff starts talking tough about the Responsibility to ProtectTM, the doctrine that he invoked to promote the invasion of Iraq.
Ignatieff did not really answer Don [...]

In his latest Maclean’s column, Paul Wells suggests that the Prime Minister’s apparent anger toward various public officials and agencies reflects not his personality, but his ideological crusade against government.
Of course, as Wells observes, the Canadian state was greatly diminished during the years preceding Harper’s government. However, Harper undoubtedly aims to continue the trend and [...]

Yesterday’s Toronto Star contained an interesting article on Leo Gerard, “the most influential Canadian-born Democratic power broker in the United States.”

Thomas Palley has posted a good discussion of the relationship between economic theory and policy, which includes a useful taxonomy of contemporary economists.

Lynn Williams, former International President of the United Steelworkers, has posted an excellent speech on a major American blog. Although the title refers to rebuilding the labour movement, the text touches upon many of the broader policy issues discussed on our blog: how to design a stimulus package, rising inequality, public healthcare, the economics of [...]

This morning, someone viewed Relentlessly Progressive Economics for the 200,000th time.
Since reaching 100,000 views in June, our previous website has crept up to nearly 122,000 even though we added nothing to its 600 classic posts. Since being created in June, the current website has added 259 posts (including this one) and been viewed almost 79,000 [...]

A couple of months ago, Robert Oxoby of the University of Calgary posted a joke paper comparing AC/DC’s original lead signer, Bon Scott, with his successor, Brian Johnson. The paper presented the results of an experiment in which test subjects responded less “rationally” to financial incentives in an “ultimatum game” when listening to Scott’s “It’s [...]

Traffic on our old blog has slowed since we stopped posting there. Nevertheless, that website passed an important milestone in the past couple of hours: someone viewed it for the 100,000th time. Since WordPress excludes views by those of us who post, this statistic is significant.
I have no idea how many hits most blogs garner, but [...]