In Canada, more jobs in the downstream parto autos (sales,d and service) have been added than have been lost in auto production

Can you extend this model to an open economy with competitive suppliers of both products? That would be the more useful discussion and slightly closer to reality.

Your perspective on forward commitment is probably correct. However, is part of the answer that the costs of fine-tuning the policy rate higher than the gain on stability in a low/no growth environment? Some would argue that we have paid a price in terms of a higher exchange rate with a policy of keeping the policy rate at 1% rather than crashing it to 0.25% or less in response to our meager performance. However, other pessimists might argue that leaving it stable left room to maneuver if things really got worse which is potentially likely. IMHO rule-based tinkering with the rate would have added costly volatility to the policy environment and used up the bank's powder with little gain.

I find your comments useful to get the first year student to think. The trouble is many students will take only that one course but will go on to influence policy so some here and now is very vital. I would like to see both you and Simon do posts for some of those policy wonks trained long ago on why Say's law makes no sense because many of them are advising governments on the basis that it holds in all circumstances and is their key policy guidance.

One of the issues is the analysis of value proposition of health care. As I am unfortunately no longer consuming the option value of the health care but rather an extensive user of its services I can speak from personal experience that some of the efficiency gains have clearly come at the expense of and stress to patient and caregivers. Personal expenses and costs as well as the value of increased stress and time costs for the patient are not sufficiently recognized in these studies.

Being very long in the property market with an agricultural farm and a toronto condo, I understand the virtues of property as well as its costs. However 1) property wealth is badly distributed. Net housing wealth is somewhat more broadly distributed but is not really a fungible financial asset because of its shelter services. Contrary to their marketing, the "income from your house" programs are extremely expensive. http://www.cagle.com/2014/03/canadian-middle-class/ is an Ingrid Rice cartoon that came out after the initial data release from the SFS 2) Compared to the volume outstanding of financial and other assets, land is a trivial part of the picture and would affect the expectations (that is what really matters) of a very narrow share of the population. While your point about its exclusion is nice, in the modern world, it is irrelevant in the scale of decision making of the broad economy.

This is a great post. I would add that students and professionals should look carefully at how the data are produced. They should look at the actual question in the survey not just the text description in the dataset. Even the order of the questions can have an impact on the usefulness of the data. As you note, the samples are critical. The challenges with the National Household (Harper) Survey are well known but Statistics Canada has been changing the samples on many key surveys.

I screwed up the reference to Nancy Folbre in my previous post. She is referring btw to free trade discussions but the issue holds for many policies related to trade and industrial structure. If anyone is remotely interested in the chart, you can find it on posts on linkedin or twitter (@jciconsult). The data are on Cansim 282-0070 if you want to look at other occupations.

The story is slightly more complex. Median family incomes are driven by changes in many types of income including investment, property etc, changes in participation rates and even industry mix variables. That makes either simple - no problem statements or big problem statements more complex. I plotted this morning the LFS median wage rate for selected occupations. Management rises like a rocket but the general median wage is also rising as is the occupations unique to manufacturing etc. The issue is a more complex mix including the distribution of types of income and types of jobs and even the geographic issue comes in the problem. Some will say that should all get equalized out. The winners can compensate the losers but that does not happen. See her discussion of Free Trade http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/the-free-trade-blues

Note the typos above (my eyes are 50 years older).

I was taught to touch type by an old school teacher (tough) in grade 10 high school on an old underwood (with no keyboard letters) (in the 1960s). It was not my best mark by any stretch, in fact, one of my worst other than phys-ed. However, I used that skill more than I have used my latin professionally. I note that most of my younger colleagues can neither touch type nor read documentation which makes their speed in producing reports or other products somewhat distressful to me. I would doubt if most students today can to 30 CORRECT words per minute. I know that most of them cannot formulate a proper business letter. I would strongly support a requirement for proper business skills in school.

You can always call me Paul. I think I will be a lot more comfortable when we get all the documentation about the correction for non-response bias. They publish a statistic but we don't know yet if the adjustment impact was bigger for one ethnic group or another or one religious group. We need to get detailed to comfortable. Since I would expect systematic biases in ethnicity, religion, possibly education and occupation, I am very concerned about the "multiple answer" questions. I am not sure how to interpret them yet. At this juncture, we don't have enough information.

Note this quote from non-response bias "Several data sources were used to evaluate the NHS estimates for ethnic origin such as: 2006 Census of Population, 2011 Census of Population results for mother tongue, the Longitudinal Immigrant Database (IMDB) and administrative data pertaining to permanent residents and non-permanent residents from Citizenship and Immigration Canada." Source Link is http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/ref/guides/99-010-x/99-010-x2011006-eng.cfm#a5

Remember that crude corrections of some variables may add more noise than it clears up because of the issue of consistency of the data set. "Simple" guess-timates of bias based on a 5 year dataset and flow adjustments (where are the people now?) may work at the provincial level. It is not sensible at the CA level. We have to treat this as a "New" survey and be very careful of comparing to other datasets. I hope that Statistics Canada will attempt to provide some measure of accuracy greater than their combined non-response rate. The latter seems to be inadequate. We need to see sample size at the cell level to get a feeling (an inaccurate one).

Part of the reason that I wanted StatCan in Toronto is to get as much of chance to ask questions. A pumf would solve some of the issues. They have released Census Pumfs before. The release schedule is up on the Stat_Can web site. Some of you may remember the problems we once had with questions on income from one of the census cycles. Just think what we are going to have now. Income is August 14th. I may try to get another session with them scheduled at that point. The real problem is the talking heads who will use the data like it was a census just like they misuse the LFS etc.

As well as using the data responsibly as we should any dataset, we should also carefully critique any attempts to treat the NHS with the same respect and tools that we used the long-form census by other. For our own part, we should make sure that we make appropriate use of any confidence interval information we are able to obtain or create and share the CI techniques if needed. We should also be careful to make sure that invalid or inappropriate comparisons of data sets are appropriately evaluated and flagged. And IMHO, we should continue to critique the loss of a good tool for political purposes. TABE is hosting a session in Toronto (see www.cabe.ca May 16th) specifically to start our process of understanding the issues with the NHS. TABE May 16th meeting

Here is the link. It is on their global store. http://locator.callawaygolf.com/global/en-us/shop/callaway-authorized-online-retailers.html

Product availability may be determined by marketing arrangements made with local distributors who may have granted exclusive rights. There are multiple golf town sites in Ottawa and several in Toronto. Did you let your fingers do the walking? If you check the online merchants list on the Callaway site, you will find several that offer international shipment.

We are time and travel challenged. Time, even if not working, has become occupied with many things. It is easier to by 8 rolls of toilet paper and store them then to make multiple trips. In our two person household, even though we have a Metro in our building, we walk to a No Frills (good exercise, cheaper prices, better veggies - (more immigrants?)) with large sacks or a cart. Time, money and personal choices matter. You don't have to fill the cart.

One of the issues with invoking consumer choice in medical care is whether an informed choice can be provided by the information available from the suppliers. More importantly, there is the issue of whether there is any choice available to the consumer. There is also the issue whether the preferences of the consumer for more income might conflict with society's requirement for the consumer to stay healthy to avoid externalities.

I am intrigued by the implications of re-switching for the simple productivity/policy discussions that suggest that current low interest rates should solve our investment problem and hence productivity problem. If the issue is expectations about future harvests and markets as well as interest rate evolution, it seems to me that some of the simplistic policy pronouncements of various central bankers, finance ministers and other talking heads get problematic.

It is nice when academics have some time to produce useful pieces like this. The underlying point is that many if not all of the variables that political policy wonks and talking heads usally say "prove" their point have arrows going in and out.

Churches current are filling too many gaps in the social welfare system with programs such as out-of-the-cold etc. The church that I support has very significant programs because we are lucky enough to have a parking lot that brings in revenue. Governments welcome church programs but it raises possible issues of equity of access to welfare services. The real question is why public support for general social welfare programs and public support for ethical perceptions of equity of access to basic services. Directly to your post, I feel good about my real financial and other support for the church because I know what it accomplishes. I don't feel as much support for my tax burden because I know that too much of it is targeted to political goals rather than towards equitable support for Canadians.

Of course, you are also explicitly asking when and at what price the oil should be produced. The current push to extract, sell and build pipelines seems to be driven by the view that developers should get the money when they can and when there is limited appetite for government to focus on long-term rent distribution and environmental costs as compared to short-term jobs.

But your strategy space discussion is probably more useful and durable then a lot of the mindless talking-head speculation on the Eurozone and milk prices that some of the other bloggers are enjoying.