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Below is an on-line comment I submitted re The New York Times’ op-ed (Aril 7, 2022) on the Bucha atrocities. The comment speaks to the tilted character of reporting on the Ukraine war. That tilt should be of concern to all who care about freedom, democracy, and open society.   “Who committed the Bucha atrocities […]

I recently contributed an essay to a paper series published by the University of Toronto’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance. The focus of my own essay is the role Canadian municipalities can play in addressing homelessness. A ‘top 10’ overview of the essay can be found here (in English): https://nickfalvo.ca/what-can-municipalities-do-about-homelessness/ A ‘top 10’ overview of the essay can be found here (in French):...

At this moment, retail energy prices (prices paid by consumers and companies for final use of energy) are, compared with other consumer prices, rising fast. Has this happened before? Yesterdays post shows that in the EU and since 2006 the rise is exceptional. But what shows when we look further back in time? For reasons of convenience and because the USA data stretch back to 1960 while the EU data only stretch back to 1997 I’ve tinkered a little with USA consumer price data. The answer...

Inflation is up. A remarkable aspect of todays inflation is the relatively high increase of energy prices (graph), an international phenomenon. Rising prices are a bitch when nominal incomes stay behind, which at the moment is the case in Europe. This leads especially to problems for people with lower incomes who have less money to spare and who spent a relatively larger amount of their income on energy. So, what to do? Should we raise interest rates? Hmmm…. The relation between...

One of the purposes – if not the main one – of mimicking physics was to argue that economics is a value-free science as it is argued about the natural sciences. However, the truth is that every researcher starts her work expecting to arrive at some result. The critical issue is if, in the process of investigation, she is open to consider arriving at a different conclusion although it may contradict her own and her colleagues’ a priori beliefs. Any individual or social group has a...

from Jorge Buzaglo and Leo Buzaglo Olofsgård and RWER current issue In recent years there has been a proliferation of alternatives to move beyond GDP as an indicator of socio-economic wellbeing. This was most probably due to the growing distrust of GDP as an appropriate metric for measuring the degree of advancement of societies. Another probable reason for the growing GDP disbelief is the ecological crisis rapidly approaching catastrophic levels, and the international opinion and mass...

from Dean Baker There is a story of a football coach who ran running plays near the end of a game, when he clearly should have been passing. Apparently, he had seen data showing that teams that win, on average, run on a certain number of plays. His team was below this number, so he decided that he had to have more runs if his team was going to win. This is a classic case of confusing correlation with causation. (For those not familiar with football, when a team is ahead, it generally uses...

The latest from my new Blogstack I can’t remember any previous time when I’ve been in unqualified agreement with Chris Uhlmann, but his description of the current election campaign as a policy-free contest between “a pathological liar, which is what the Labor Party seems to be calling the government, and a gutless fraud, which is what the Prime Minister essentially has dubbed you,” Of the two, I’ll give the higher preference to the gutless fraud, after ranking all acceptable...