A revealing episode from the Royals' visit to Canada

Who knew that Duchesses were allowed to wear thongs?

And isn't there some staff person in charge of being sure that thongs are not worn on windy days? Presumably that person's job is now available.

Canada Day

This year, Canada Day is really special because their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, a.k.a. Kate and William, have come to visit.

Coverage by the Monarchist League of Canada [!] here and by the Daily Mail in the UK here.

The really, really important bit of this truly momentous occasion is, of course, what Kate is wearing.

The mind reels at the excitement of it all.

Happy Canada Day!

Addendum: it turns out that rumors of Prince Harry dating his sister-in-law Pippa Middleton are apparently false. It's in the WaPo so it must be true.

State of the Art Lecture from the Canadian Economic Association Meetings

The slides from my "State of the Art" lecture entitled "Putting the Evidence in Evidence-Based Policy" that I gave at the Canadian Economic Association meetings in Ottawa this past Friday are now available on my web page.

I was flattered to be invited and really enjoyed it, though as usual I tried to talk about too much in the time allowed. I was delighted to be introduced by my friend Barbara Glover, who is one of those rare government bureaucrats who is both successful in government and "gets" academics and what they have to offer to the policy process.

One message that I hope got across in my talk is that Canada is way behind the Nordic and Germanic countries in Europe in terms of the data available for policy design and evaluation. This is also true in the US, but the US partially makes up for it by doing randomized social experiments, at least in the areas of labor market policy, education policy and criminal justice policy, while Canada does not.

My talk at the CEAs is a modified version of a talk I gave in Oz two years ago. The associated paper, which covers many of the same issues in textual form (and provides full citations) is on my web page here.

Purple and Proud

Western Ontario is the only Canadian university to make Playboy's list of the top ten party schools.

Addendum: I should have included more context for this post. Western Ontario was my first academic job.

Canada's new government

The Economist has some wise words on Canada's new majority Conservative government.

It is always helpful in translating for Americans to recall that Canadian conservative has more lovers of tradition, but fewer evangelicals and libertarians, than American conservatism.

Waiting at the border

A piece in the most recent Canadian Public Policy (the policy journal of the Canadian Economic Association) estimates the cost of border delays between the US and Canada.

When I fume about border delays, which is to say every time I go to Canada, I focus on the delays for people crossing the border, but the costs associated with delays on the movement of goods are likely to be much larger in the aggregate.

I would note, as I often do in conversation, that the Europeans have done much better than we have on this dimension. Crossing from Germany into France, two countries that have fought three majors wars in the last 150 years and, truth be told, still don't really like (or, what is not unrelated, understand) each other very much, one does not have to stop at all. I've done it. You just drive right by some rusting remains of a border crossing station.

In contrast, Canada and the US, probably the two most similar separate countries on earth, who have not fought a war in 199 years, with integrated telecommunications and energy systems, still subject their residents, and their goods, to long delays, inane border questioning and, in the case of goods, heaps of bureaucracy on top of it. We can and should do better.

As an aside, estimating the costs on individual travelers would make a fine paper, too.

Scott Walker should have learned from Mike Huckabee

And here is the lowdown on Scott Walker getting punked. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

As they used to say back during those Cold War days: trust but verify.

Data, evaluation and the quality of public policy

This new working paper describes an evaluation data set that researchers can use to study the effects of active labor market policies in Germany. The data set combines administrative data drawn from multiple sources with innovative survey data.

There is nothing like this available in the US or Canada. Under the guise of privacy concerns, the political process in the US and Canada avoids assembling the sorts of data that would allow very high quality non-experimental evaluations (as well as descriptive analysis useful for understanding program operation and informing program implementation and design) of active labor market programs. Part of this is, at least in the US, due to the fact that both political parties have strong, but different, prior beliefs, about the effectiveness of such programs. To many democrats they are obviously effective (how could more schooling be bad?) while for republicans they are obviously ineffective (how could bureaucrats increase anyone's employment chances?) thus the demand for quality empirical analysis is low regardless of who is in power.

What we might call the "data gap" (a play on the historical "missile gap") has the effect of leading US researchers, at the margin, to spend their time working on non-US data, as with Dale Mortensen's ongoing research project in Denmark and Sandy Black's ongoing use of the Norwegian register data. Now, to be sure, no one actually moves outside the US because the salaries are much too low, but they do change their travel plans and their research agendas. In some ways this is good, because it leads to more interactions between North American and European researchers. However, the US is a big country, and policy unguided by serious evaluation in the US affects a large number of people and one of the world's most important economies.

There are real, low-cost opportunities for dong some good here. Will anyone in DC pick up the ball and run with it?

Making omelettes at the US / Canada border

If the Germans and the French can figure out how to have a border where you don't have to stop when you cross, then really, really, the US and Canada should be able to figure it out as well.

In the meantime, that flushing sound you hear is your tax dollars being wasted on the War on Kinder Surprise Eggs. Don't you feel safer now?

Hat tip: Sonia Laszlo on FB

Biased research on smoking ...

Here is an example of why moving all research from the drug companies to government funded labs and university researchers will not solve the problem of biased research.

Though one should not omit the possibility that the researchers hired by Health Canada to do the research simply were not very good or did not include on their team someone familiar with survey design. An easy way to deflate nearly any applied economist doing research using survey data is to start asking about the details of the data collection, either in terms of the sampling or in terms of the survey structure and question wording.

There's no hockey on ... what shall we do?

Canadians have the world's highest internet usage. Could it be opportunity costs? It would be interesting to see the seasonal (and regional) patterns.

Back to the Future, Back to the USSR

The fellow who runs the Northstar Compass lives in a posh house in the same neighborhood as my in-laws.

The website of the Maoist International Movement says: "Northstar Compass occupies a niche to the nominal left of the most left-wing social-democrats like the CP-USA and to the right of consistent Maoists. It consists of reprints of various communist and so-called communist organizations from the ex- Soviet Union for the consumption of Russians in Russia and Russophiles in the Western imperialist countries, especially Canada where it is based and the United $tates."

Now, can someone please point out the Judean People's Front?

CBC kids

I had occasion to watch a couple of hours of CBC kids, the children's network of the government-run Canadian Broadcasting Company, the other day. It engendered the following thoughts:

1. I quite enjoyed Dirt Girl. This Australian show was low on preaching, what it preached was actually useful (e.g. wear gloves when handling fertilizer) and all the characters had cute Australian accents. Plus the animation was creative and happy and reminded me a bit of what Terry Gilliam used to create for Monty Python.

2. In contrast, Turbodogs was dull, smarmy and preachy. As is often the case when I watch cartoons produced after about 1975, I wondered what it was that was broken about Road Runner and Bugs Bunny that needed fixing with a lot of preaching.

3. I still have never heard a coherent case for having a government-run television network in a democracy. If there is such a case, it is hard to see how it extends beyond news to entertainment programs that look exactly like those on commercial networks. It is also hard to see how an independent non-profit could not fill the same niche without relying on tax funding and without implicit or explicit worries about pro-state bias.

Winds of change reach London, Ontario

Joe Fontana, who was my MPP (member of provincial parliament) when I was teaching at Western Ontario and living in London, Ontario, is London's new mayor.

I used to get a lot of junk mail from Joe, explaining to me how much fun he was having spending other people's money. The "liberal" in "liberal party" in Canada means liberal with other people's money (and having a good time, and maybe a bit of corruption, but all in the pursuit of fun for those on the inside and their pals).

I have to say, though, that old Joe is almost surely an improvement over the woman he replaced, Anne Marie DiCicco, who had been the mayor since before I decamped for Maryland. Anne has had some problems with her husband, whom she imported from Texas. Anne Marie was, in turn, more or less a continuation of the dreaded dragon lady Diane Haskett, for whom the mayor's office was mainly an opportunity for her to publicly act out her unhappy obsession with strip clubs, massage parlors and homosexuals.

So, I say, good luck Joe! Let the party begin.

Hat tip: Todd Stinebrickner

Canadian census long form (continued)

You can sign a petition regarding either (or both) political interference with Statistics Canada in general or the elimination of the Canadian Census long form in particular. I signed the first of the two petitions.

And you can read articles in Canadian Public Policy on that very topic as well. The pieces on the Census long form controversy are ungated for now. Click on "Show Access Options" and then access them via Metapress.

Grandma's political machine

Meet Hazel, who has been the mayor of Mississauga Ontario (where my in-laws live, as it turns out) for over 30 years and who is now in her late 80s. She has a wikipedia page too, and more recently, scandal has arrived over business dealings involving the city government and her son.

Canadian census long form

The conservative government in Canada is seeking to eliminate the Census "long form" (or, more gently, to make it voluntary). The US did this a few years ago but replaced the long form with the (still mandatory) American Community Survey, so that the issue of having data (almost) uncontaminated by non-random response bias, which to me is the key issue in the debate over the long form, does not arise. The Canadians propose to make the long form voluntary, thus corrupting all the estimates it generates with selection bias.

Here is a fairly reasonable Globe and Mail editorial and here is a somewhat over-heated and remarkably political editorial from Nature.

Here are some tweets from a Canadian government minister who does not, as the saying goes, get it.

Shame on the conservatives in Canada for not being serious on this one. They are an embarrassment to themselves and to Canada and are sending a strong signal that they are not serious about good government. And that matters in Canada, where the analogue to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is "peace, order and good government."

My pals at Reason also do not distinguish themselves on this one. The fact that the data are not perfect is an argument for improving the data, not abandoning the attempt. More broadly, it seems to me that classical liberals should support govenrment production of public goods, like knowledge, and the evidence-based policy making it supports, particularly given, at least in my experience, that most programs and policies cannot pass a cost-benefit test when rigorous evidence is available.

Regular readers may object that I cannot complain about mandatory jury duty and then not complain about a mandatory census, but the census from mandatory jury duty in three important ways. First, the tax is small. Completing the Census for takes a few minutes. Second, the tax is uniform. Everyone pays the same small tax, rather than jurors who get stuck on long trials paying a gigantic in-kind tax and jurors who escape without being assigned to a trial paying no tax. Third, volunteer jurors are probably a good substitute (perhaps even a superior substitute) for mandatory ones, while voluntary surveys are not a good substitute for mandatory ones, particularly not at the key task of establishing solid benchmark statistics against which all the other voluntary surveys can be judged.

I do think that the Census should aim to minimize the burden of the long form. 20 percent of the population may be much more than is required to get very precise population estimates, even at a provincial or metropolitan area level. In a sense, reducing the population subject to the requirement to complete the long form is what the US did by replacing it by the ACS.

More broadly, given Facebook and Google and all the rest, it seems a bit bizarre for people to worry about the privacy implications of the innocuous questions on the long form.

Hat tip on the tweets to a friend at a government contractor in Canada.

Airline competition in Canada (or the lack thereof)

Gulliver correctly describes the state of the airline industry in Canada, but fails to mention that the Canadians will not even let a US airline fly people between two destinations with a stop in between in the US (i.e. Toronto to Vancouver via Detroit on Delta).

Don't get me wrong - the Canadian airline industry is better off with Westjet than without it, but they really should open up to US airlines (as the US should open up to Canadian airlines). If the Euros, who really at bottom do not like or trust each other very much, can do it, we should be able to do it.

Hope and change in the skies?

Intermarriage in Canada

These statistics were on the front page of the National Post, with no accompanying article, a few weeks ago when I was in Ottawa for a one-day conference on the Canada Student Loan Program.

The percentage of mixed couples for black Canadians is particularly notable and, I suspect, much much higher than the corresponding rate in the US. An interesting question is whether this results from differences in preferences between the two countries or from the fact that, both relatively and absolutely, blacks represent a much smaller fraction of the population in Canada, and so have a smaller within-group choice set. Of course, it could be some of both.

That's a free paper idea ...

Air Canada

Air Canada [sic] has won awards for service the past couple of years, according to this piece on the Economist's Gulliver blog.

This just cannot be right. I have told the joke that opens the Gulliver post on many occasions to explain my views about Air Canada, as it neatly summarizes my experience.

My favorite Air Canada story took place when I was teaching at Western Ontario. I wanted to fly from London, Ontario to Rochester, NY, to give a seminar at Rochester. This involved two short Air Canada flights, with Toronto as the transfer airport. When I arrived, the Air Canada gate agent would not let me "planeside check" my roller bag. I had, for some reason, to check it through the formal luggage system, which of course means time wasted at Rochester waiting at the luggage carousel as well as the opportunity for Air Canada baggage handlers to lose the bag in Toronto. I resisted but ultimately had to give in.

When I arrive at Rochester, I waited patiently (well, perhaps not so patiently) at the luggage carousel, but of course my bag did not arrive. I went and waited in line for the Air Canada luggage agent. Eventually it was determined that my bag had never even been loaded on the plane in London. The gate agents had decided that there were other, more important, bags already on the plane, so mine could wait for another time. In any case, I was told that my bag would be available at the airport early the next morning. So, Lance Lochner, who was at Rochester at the time and was the host of my visit, dutifully drove me to the airport in the morning. No bag. No reason. Just Air Canada incompetence. Probably they are used to dealing with Canadians who tend to take these things with resignation and good humor. I do not.

I ended up giving my seminar in the ratty clothes I had worn on the plane. I eventually got my bag back, but it never did make it to Toronto. It was this incident that led me to resolve to fly Air Canada only when absolutely necessary, a resolution I still keep.

So, at the risk of sounding like those folks who still go on about how Al Gore really won the 2000 election, I think there must be something amiss with the voting system that led to these implausible awards to Air Canada. Either that or all the nice staff from Canadian Airlines, sadly absorbed by Air Canada about a decade ago, somehow effected an astounding change in the business culture at Air Canada.