Chris Sims

Not "many businesses", Cambie did not and still does not have particularly high business density. The main complainant was one clothing store, Hazel & Co., on 16th Ave.

Can't wait for the 22 Minutes sketch! The episodes just write themselves...

I don't see any way for the Conservatives to make inroads if their messaging is that they will be better than the Liberals on issues like trade diversification

The US system is honestly crazy to me. Not making any attempt to align with the median voter theorem...

At various points the separatist Bloc Québecois has made one of their policy objectives increasing pensions, usually as a condition to support Liberal budget measures. Thankfully they've been completely rebuffed on this front so far

Knowing that Romansch was one of the Swiss official languages was a staple of my high school trivia league; really enjoyed this article! I think all the people involved could stand to recognize that even when writing is standardized a great variety of spoken forms can still co-exist

There's a relatively old fire hall/library in Vancouver (the aptly named Firehall Branch). A big draw for me when I was a kid

Well, the visual relies in part on the blue area being much larger than the green area. But in reality, many counties should still be in brown

Depicting only at most 5% of countries as having no universal suffrage seems highly dubious - are they counting places like Russia due to their sham elections?

Seems like COVID led to a huge productivity increase YoY (although with some pretrend). Maybe the rise of delivery/takeout?

I found a lot of the discourse at that time missed the fact that it's very reasonable to expect that high immigration numbers mean that some measures like GDP per capita will fall - there will obviously be some adjustment period for workers new to Canada to find the jobs that best match their skills

Not the right time of year, but in the summer you can see people "surfing" in the St. Lawrence behind Habitat 67, it's quite neat

-3 in Alberta is brutal, wow

I mean, it's cool that it has the Canada Line! But only, like, a fifth of the blocks have any retail...

I don't really understand why one good (or bad) earnings report should meaningfully move the valuation of these companies. Their valuations are clearly based on the expectation of enormous future profits, and profits over a pretty short time scale in 2025 are not very informative about that

I don't understand why the media keeps writing these fluff stories about Bhutan. The "gross domestic happiness" metric is by now pretty well established as a means for the government to justify ethnic cleansing of Hindu minorities.

An underrated problem is that the Democrats (or Republicans) exist at basically all levels of government, so there's this kind of grand strategy about how to balance objectives at the federal/state/municipal level. Whereas in Canada the federal parties are only concerned about federal politics

And completely the opposite of Canada, where we had an election earlier this year where the result was basically what you would see in a two-party system (the Liberals and Conservative both 40+% vote share)

If you look at a very classic trade model like Heckscher-Ohlin, one of the key results is that trade reduces factor prices for the factors a country is scarce in. If the US is scarce in manufacturing labour relative to China (almost certainly true), then it's not surprising manufacturing wages fall

Well, obviously the "serious benefits" of trade depend on wages in some sectors falling. I generally agree that there should have been more effort to retrain workers given that the job losses were geographically concentrated, but I don't agree these changes stemmed from greed or corruption

Do you find the fact that the Chinese growth miracle has reduced poverty by more than almost any other event in history unimportant?

I was fortunate to hear Hamelin play the Hammerklavier at Orford several years ago, really opened my eyes to what a spectacular sonata is it. I had never quite "gotten it" before (although I have always loved the Waldstein, played it for my ARCT)

Canada has easily the best performance of any country at this competition over the past three iterations, 2nd/5th, 1st, and 2nd. We're great at producing excellent pianists!

I don't get all the hostility to this. It seems there were some pretty serious issues about bail policy, people committing violent crimes while on bail, etc. In general, I'm going to trust this government over others to do this right

Didn't work out for Edward Casaubon...

I honestly think the Canadian hybrid between metric and Imperial is terrible, I think I have very poor intuitions about measurement as a result

Very proud today to be a student of Joel Mokyr. An endlessly supportive, knowledgeable, and kind advisor who seems to know everything about economic history. And not to mention an eagle-eyed editor, keen cyclist (at almost 80!), and classical music lover. A totally deserved award!

He has certainly had many fruitful coauthoring relationships, with people like Cormac Ó Gráda, but I think the only one you would describe as clearly "higher-tech" is his more recent work with Morgan Kelly. In part, it's difficult to test some of these ideas in a credible econometric design

A later generation of economic historians simply could not get tenure at top universities working on economic history (e.g. Greg Clark at Stanford), and so there ended up being a dearth of talent at top places.