Businesses have a pretty good way of knowing when to offer more or less of a good. It’s encapsulated in the equation MC = MR, and shown in the graphic below. Briefly, in the production of any good, unit-costs fall to start with as the benefits of economies of scale start to rise. Eventually, however, if production is expanded far enough you get diseconomies of scale, and the marginal cost begins to rise. Where the
It’s getting close to that time of year when I need to sign off for the holidays (tomorrow will be the last blog until January 4th). So before then, I thought it would be worth quickly catching up on a few things. Some reports you may have missed. A number of reports have come out recently that I have been meaning to review. Two, I think, are of passing note: i) The Alberta Auditor-general devoted part of his annual report (see pages
A few weeks back, I wrote about the Liberals Arts/humanities, and some really bad arguments both for and against them. As usual when I write these, I got a lot of feedback to the effect of: “well, how would you defend the Liberal Arts, smart guy”? Which, you know, fair enough. So, here’s my answer. The humanities, at root, are about pattern recognition in the same way that the sciences and the social sciences are: they just seek patterns in different areas of
So the OECD’s Education at a Glance was published yesterday. It’s taken a couple of months longer than usual because of the need to convert into the new International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) system. No, don’t ask; it’s better not to know. I won’t say there’s a whole lot new in this issue that will be of interest to PSE-types. One point of note is that Statscan has – for no obvious or stated reason – substantially restated Canadian expenditure
You may recall that last week I posted some curious data from CUDO, which suggested that the ratio of undergraduate “classes” (we’re not entirely sure what this means) to full-time professors in Ontario was an amazingly-low 2.4 to 1. Three quick follow-ups to that piece. 1. In the previous post, I offered space on the blog to anyone involved with CUDO who could clear up the mystery of why undergraduate teaching loads appeared to be so low. No one has taken
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