Most Popular WCI Posts From 2010

In an idea shamelessly stolen from Marginal Revolution, here are the top-10 posts on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative as determined by pageviews.  I was surprised to learn that it wasn't simply 10 posts on the census.  In fact the majority of posts had nothing to do with Canada whatsoever.  There's something oddly Canadian about that.

And the top 10 are...

1. Why "everyone" should be forced to take Intro Economics - Nick Rowe: "The reason is not what you are expecting. It's because maybe if he had been forced to take Intro Economics, the 12th President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago, who is a specialist in money and macro, who has a CV that creams mine 100 times over, would not be making mistakes like this."



2. Greg Mankiw's Ten Principles of Economics -- the tourist platter. And math and PC.


3. An update on the concentration of income in Canada - Stephen Gordon: "So the main thing to come away with is that the trend to higher income shares a the very top of the income distribution - particularly in the top 0.5% - is still ongoing."


4. The orthodox loss of faith - Nick Rowe: "I think we are witnessing the biggest silent shift in macroeconomic thought since the Second World War. For 70 years we have taught, and believed, that we would never again need to suffer a persistent shortage of demand. We promised ourselves the 1930's were behind us. We knew how to increase demand, and would do it if we needed to."


5. The supply and demand for (belief in) EMH


6. Daylight Savings Time and the non-neutrality of money - Nick Rowe: "A purely nominal change (whether we say than solar noon is called "12.00" or "13.00") will have a big real effect. Even though we all know that it's just a nominal change. Nobody is fooled by the government changing our watches without us seeing them do it. Nobody suffers from "time illusion". We know it's not really earlier. In fact, it's the people who don't hear that the time has changed who are likely to still get up at the same real time, by the sun."


7. Long-term unemployment in Canada and the US


8. On the lessons to be learned from the elimination of the Canadian federal deficit in the 1990s - Stephen Gordon: "It would appear that there is a significant constituency in both the US and in Europe agitating for immediate efforts to reduce their respective governments' deficits, and some are pointing to the Canadian experience of the 1990s. If Canada could make the swift transition from decades of large and chronic deficits to being the poster child of fiscal rectitude with no apparent ill effects, then why can't everyone else? The answer is that Europe and the US in 2010 is not Canada in 1995, in pretty much every way that matters."


9. Why making the 2011 census long form voluntary is a bad idea


10. Some thoughts on the Gauti Eggertsson & Paul Krugman paper