Roderick Hill

The Case of the Missing Organizations: Co-operatives and the Textbooks

The form of association ... which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist with capitalist as chief, and workpeople without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.

Happiness in Canada Since World War II

Where data exist, measures of averagehappiness in industrialized countries typicallyshow little or no upward trend over time,despite substantial growth in real per capitaincomes. This paper examines the existingCanadian data to see if they support thisgeneralization. The Canadian data have someoverall positive trend. Some simple regressionssuggest that per capita real incomes arepositively associated with happiness, whileunemployment and inflation appear to benegatively associated with happiness, a resultalso found in recent studies of Western Europeand the United States. Controlling for thesevariables, a negative time trend emerges.

Trade Shocks And Employment Change In Canadian Manufacturing Industries: An Applied General Equilibrium Approach

A variety of methods have been used to estimate the employment effects of trade shocks in particular industries. This paper examines Canadian date for 1972 and 1980 using both a method due to Anne Krueger and an applied general equilibrium model. Both approaches suggest that the possibility of “injury” due to changes in trade existed in only a few Canadian manufacturing industries. [F 14]

Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires

Economists’ interest in subjective well being has taken off in the last 15 years. Carol Graham’s Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires is one of the latest books by economists on the subject. Here, ‘‘happiness’’ is a catch-all term for different measures of subjective well being, ranging from happiness itself to questions about satisfaction with life as a whole or with aspects of life (such as health, family, or work). This convention (which I adhere to here) is unfortunate because, while the various measures of subjective well being are typically highly correlated, they are not the same. The reasons for this sudden interest among economists in what people say about their own well being are unclear. Graham speculates (p. 2) that ‘‘it may be simply a reflection of how much more adventurous and eclectic the socalled ‘dismal science’ has become.’’ That eclecticism has included greater contacts with psychology, where the study of subjective well being has long been taken seriously, and where conclusions had been reached that challenged the simplistic orthodoxy in economics. Perhaps that, along with the leadership of some pioneering economists and the availability of more and better survey data, helped turned the tide. Graham makes the case that the study of happiness is a science. The data can be examined with credible methods to uncover underlying similarities, and interesting differences, across a wide variety of societies ranging from Afghanistan to the USA. The book is aimed at an audience of social scientists with some familiarity with statistics, rather than the general public. Much of the book sets out the results of the work Graham has done with various co-authors. While some chapters rely heavily on that work, it is not simply a reprint of previously published papers. However, the book would have benefitted from a more careful editing to eliminate occasional repetition and to correct errors, such as obvious deficiencies in some of the figures. Graham’s work has ranged widely across different regions of the world, particularly Latin America and Russia, but also Central Asia and Africa, so the ‘‘around the world’’ part of the title is apt. This makes the book particularly worthwhile for those whose reading has been confined to papers dealing with the more heavily-examined data for Europe and the USA. Her work has also explored a diverse range of issues, such as the REVIEW OF SOCIAL ECONOMY

Is There an Overemphasis on Perfectly Competitive Markets in Microeconomics Principles Texts

Microeconomic principles courses focus on perfectly competitive markets far more than other market structures. Perhaps this is because perfect competition: (1) describes many important real world markets; or, (2) usefully approximates many markets that are not literally perfectly competitive; or (3) is pedagogically useful as a simple model; or (4) is an ideal market structure to be used as a standard to evaluate the efficiency of other market structures and the merits of government intervention; or (5) provides a useful model of dynamic processes in a capitalist economy. We find none of these reasons sufficiently compelling. We conclude that focusing attention on a simple imperfectly competitive model would better convey the central lessons of modern microeconomics. Perfect competition would remain, but as a special case.

Accounting for the employment effects of changes in trade

Simple “accounting” methods have been used to estimate the effects of changes in trade on sectoral employment. Using an applied general equilibrium (AGE) model with Canadian data for 1972 and 1980, this article examines an accounting method first employed in a Brookings study by Charles Frank. The results suggest that despite the criticism it has received, this method provides a reasonable way of assessing the change in employment attributable to changes in imports.