Frances, if you send it to me, I can upload it here on WCI. I'm curious to see that as well. But wow. I thought that there wouldn't be anything glaring at the national level, and that we'd stumble across things over time. But this is right out of the gate.

You're making unsupported assertions to denounce policies that demonstrably increase incomes of low-income households and which reduce inequality. Which side are you on, again?

There may be a stigma associated with welfare - but is anyone suggesting eliminating it? I don't see why there's a stigma in receiving supplements to your market income. It's not as though people look through your mail for govt cheques or can see when the govt makes a direct deposit into your account.

Frances - I'm presenting in the last session on sunday morning, so I'll be there anyway. And I'll be driving, so I don't have to rush away. Maybe I'll do just that.

Yikes. I didn't realise that. I was thinking that they might limit themselves to releasing education, income and the other variables for which there other sources to check against. This is going to be a problem. I wonder if it'd be the good idea for the CEA (and other interested bodies) to write letters to research journals advising them of the problems with the NHS data?

I was thinking fewer variables in the dataset. And you're right about the raw data-public use datafile distinction.

I've been wondering bout this as well. IIRC, StatsCan made promises to the effect that they'd only release data in which they had confidence. We know that there will be far less useful information in the NHS than there was in the census, and a smaller data set may be the way that loss is reflected. On the other hand, if StatsCan is forced to push dodgy data out the door in order to make the Conservative govt look good ("See! We told you the NHS would be just as good as a census! Look at all this data!"), then we're going to have to take a very close look at the documentation about response rates, strategies to correct for response bias and diagnostics about data quality. And if Statscan pushes it all out the door without any meaningful documentation, well, then we have a serious problem.

"People don't want allowances because they don't want the government to call them poor." Any empirical support for that rejection of policies that demonstrably reduce inequality?

And yet in Sweden, the heavy lifting of reducing income inequality is done using transfers. The Swedish tax system has about the same redistributive effect as Canada's. The Canadian Left's intellectual - and moral - failure is its fetish for policy instruments and utter lack of concern for policy outcomes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know: "This goes to eleven."

*sigh*

Um, there *is* empirical evidence. Quite a lot, all saying the same thing. Here is a recent OECD effort. And here is a recent IMF working paper.

Bob - apparently the govt is expecting to book a charge for some Atomic Energy of Canada Limited's liabilities. The budget didn't give a number, but it must be pretty big.

I once wrote a blog post on that exact question: "Why the GST is a good idea"

Ah. So my initial inference - that peak hotness is obtained around the time a new professor gets tenure - was incorrect.

(Also, tell Lynda I said hello.)

Oof. Yes. This is one of those things you learn with experience: that you are the only one who will ever make whatever effort it takes to understand your notation. If your notation is too opaque, people will simply give up and stop reading. I know I've written referee reports to the effect that since the author hadn't made an effort to be understood, I wasn't about to make the effort to understand the paper.

There are two types of people: 1) Bayesians 2) People who don't yet know that they're Bayesians

rsj: No, that's not Pontryagin's minimum principle. The minimization is with respect to the *exogenous* variable p, not the control variable. Dan: To the extent that equilibrium paths must be consistent with the laws of motion, GE still amounts to making sure that things add up. Frances: That really is - as they say around these parts - la question qui tue. Maybe I should have gone to a higher-profile school for my PhD.

That's three content-free dissenting comments. How many more?

You had me at the title. Great stuff.

I published the duplicates anyway, as a way of training the spam filter.

Maybe we did have a bad supply shock: the fall in the terms of trade is generally shoehorned into the standard AS-AD as an upward shift in the AS curve. It was maybe not so bad as to be the main driver of the recession, but perhaps bad enough to keep in mind.

I suspect Mike Moffatt's answer would be that the Bank of Canada's monetary stance has been too tight over the past couple of years. I've been reluctant to adopt that view, but it's getting harder to resist.

JP Koning: thanks, and my apologies for not having looked earlier. I've updated the post to point people to your explanations.

Livio beat me to it.