One thing to consider is whether the school has a PhD stream. At Toronto, the MA program is split into a regular and a PhD stream, where PhD stream students take the PhD first-year level micro/macro/metrics by default. There are advantages if you think you'll be in academia for sure, but I'm not sure about the transferability of those credits to other schools. More importantly, the department puts much more funding and aid to the PhD stream students. Going to Toronto for PhD stream would've been comparable to UBC for me, but regular MA would've been much more expensive. I ended up going to my undergrad alma mater (UBC), as opposed to Toronto, in part because I didn't feel that their MA program would've pigeonholed me into a PhD later on while being strong enough to prepare for one if that's what I wanted (which, it turns out, wasn't).

Garfield, McKinley, and Lincoln in the top ten, and JFK at #12. Maybe high growth is not all that good for a president's personal survival.

Indifference curves are inherently difficult to use as a educational tool because, in the view of the utility maximizer, 100% of the curve is irrelevant: it's outside the budget set! I often imagine utility maximization as being a gnat in the budget set, walking around to find the highest point. Inevitably I end up on the budget line and looking for the highest point along that line. Yes, the highest point is tangent to a contour line-I mean indifference curve-but all of that curve is inaccessible to me. For all that I know, all those isoutility points don't exist (they do exist, because preferences are complete, but that's beyond first year). I think I understand the whole indifference curve tangency thing because I did calculus and function maximization before, not the other way around.

"Your Queen appears to be giving an order that is unlike any the King has ever given before. Surely people remember history." I'd say that kings have been giving orders of their own accord rather recently. They were more like transmitting the words of the oracle of the Bretton Forests for decades before, and reading the sacred ores themselves before that.

Mike Moffatt (citing other people) seems to lean toward: yes, that is an externality, or at least if we're talking about time-inconsistent preferences. Or, at least, if a Pigovian tax creates time-consistent behaviour on inconsistent individuals, and causes increased total welfare, then the case for imposing them is not different than imposing such a tax to increase total welfare by removing the disutility caused upon others. http://economics.about.com/b/2010/03/18/can-you-impose-an-externality-on-yourself.htm

Nick Rowe: "Most of us earn our income from selling our labour." Old Ari: "But I don't have anything to sell, I buy with money I have saved" There's something about labour, and the value of time, that take a while for people to wrap their heads around. Nobody seems to see themselves as "selling" labour before learning economics in an academic setting. My guess is that the inflation fallacy is related to why every public policy seems to need to be phrased in "jobs" for it to get any political traction. [insert Stephen Gordon rant here] I recall having a discussion about prices which led to me talking about market clearing through queuing, and someone else flat out refused the idea. It's as if because if I waste time in a queue, there's no obvious gains from my use of time this way (except for lower than market clearing priced goods, which seems to be forgotten), so it doesn't count as a cost because it's not "paid" to anyone else.

Re. Excel: My guess is that you are using a "Line" chart. Switch to an "XY (Scatter)" chart, and it should take the numerical values of your x-axis variable instead of using them as labels.