StillPaisleyCat

You absolutely are missing the point.

It doesn’t matter what we’d like it to be.

Claiming a statistical account measures chickens when it measures albatrosses and then making inferences about chickens, would be silly.

Likewise, using labour productivity figures from the national income accounts.

Nothing to say that the points you and others are raising aren’t both much more relevant and interesting.

But when the business press drags out labour productivity comparisons as if they have anything meaningful to say on the subject, it’s a non sequitur to the conversation you’d really like to have.

Whatever the problems with the old definitions, and they are numerous, they remain the way the national accounts are published in OECD countries.

But so are too the conventions of generally accepted accounting principles for financial accounting.

These are the way our data sources are framed so to do meaningful data analysis and interpretation we have to know them.

Business schools are not immune or exempt from understanding where the data comes from and how it’s constructed. Any good business school in whatever tradition will make sure its students understand that at least.

It’s one thing be such a pedant as to make students switch from conventional and do basic microeconomics with the P and Q axes reversed (as they logically should be), just to correct a deeply embedded error in the history of economic practice - and there are profs out there who do that.

It’s another thing to be insistent on what is actually in a measure that calls itself ‘labour productivity’ and is used by uninformed or deliberately misleading business press in Canada to beat on the labour force itself when the structural issues are completely different.

It would be worth discussing if the business press didn’t constantly misinterpret the meaning of measure.

Fair enough.

There are genuine questions about whether or not the federal government should have given in to the provinces and territories in the 1990s regarding vocational and labour market training.

Both of these, and post secondary, are federal jurisdiction or shared jurisdiction at best. (But accreditation of professional associations and credentials is provincial.)

The federal government did its best to continue to directly fund these kinds of programs but the provinces, especially but not exclusively Quebec, felt strongly that this was preventing them to set their own socioeconomic development priorities.

It sounds like both the CPC and LPC federal parties had platforms that look to have the federal government step back into this space.

One has to wonder if they view the agreements they made to transfer labour market training to the provinces and territories as something they can pull back or wind up…

On the agriculture point, let’s say I am more than qualified to speak to economic terminology.

So, it may be pedantic, but it’s important to understand where economics definitions come from.

Some like labour productivity and economic rents are irrevocably tied to their origins in agricultural economic concepts.

Which means that when applied to a manufacturing or service economy, peoples’ intuition about their meaning can be very wrong.

When we’re teaching economics, we talk about ‘developing economic intuition’ but it would be much easier for students if we didn’t have to counter so many counterintuitive terms.

I was absolutely dumbfounded at the time.

There was so much revealing racism and more in that statement, but also American Exceptionalism and willingness to do anything to get a gold medal.

Agricultural productivity is relevant insomuch as the economic definition of ‘labour productivity’ was developed for that context.

It’s a measure of return of labour to capital.

It is NOT measure of how productive the human capital of a population is.

You and others here are mistakenly confusing human capital which includes investments in

• education
• skills
• health and longevity

with labour productivity.

Also, you are very far off the mark if you think that Canada’s education and skills training is in any way inferior to that of the United States. On every possible measure from literacy to cognitive skills and abilities, the Canadian adult population is better than the US in international comparisons such as by the OECD.

Skilled trades programs are arguably better in Europe but not in the USA.

As a woman older than you, with a mother and aunts of Lwaxana’s age, I found it painfully misogynistic.

All the more so because Picard (and Roddenberry himself) were continually chasing after younger women and nothing was made of it.

I actually am reconciled to Lwaxana and love the much-reviled episode ‘Cost of Living’ but the amount of continuing ridicule and hate she gets from younger male fans drives home the misogyny.

Meanwhile they’re all cool with Picard with Vash.

More likely not catching the predictive spelling.

It’s edited.

But Stewart’s preferences for women generations younger that he is are well established and very public. As are his interventions to give Picard younger love interests right up to the final scene.

I give credit to Majel Barrett credit for leaning into the character and script. It’s more bearable knowing she was likely making Patrick Stewart uncomfortable too!

Every show has a writer’s ‘bible’ that describes the backstory and main characters.

In the case of Lwaxana, a character written for Majel Barret Roddenberry’s wife, some fairly misogynistic stereotypes of middle aged women were laid out for the writers.

Two thoughts.

Most Canadians view changing your administration as a collective responsibility of all US citizens. Kind thoughts are appreciated but most of us are increasingly impatient.

Second, have you considered that, like many other Americans, you may be a Canadian by descent? And if so, any children you may have also?

At present, due to a 2023 Superior Court Bjorkquist decision on Lost Canadians in Ontario (unchallenged by the federal government), there is an exceptional situation where people born outside Canada who are descendants of people born in Canada can apply to claim citizenship.

See this page - the flag at the top gives the latest extension of the interim provisions (that override the existing law that the Court stayed).

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/canadian-citizenship/become-canadian-citizen/eligibility/already-citizen.html

While I wouldn’t normally direct anyone to Reddit, the CanadianCitizenship subreddit has a lot of information on people’s experiences in navigating the process.

See the FAQ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Canadiancitizenship/s/rHN4JVQwQO

We need to let go of the rule of thumb that Canada is 1/10th the US in population.

It’s not just a nitpick to say that’s off now.

Canada has had a more rapidly growing population such that it’s been 1/9th that of the United States for most of a decade.

A quick calculation on current population estimates puts it as 347.5 / 41.5 million = ~ 8.4.

That said, Canada still has more manufacturing jobs per capita even with the correction.

I appreciate that you recognize that so-called ‘labour productivity’* is primarily a measure of the quality and technological level of the capital that the labour is working with.

Too often, comparative measures of labour productivity and discussion focuses on hours worked, vacation days etc.

These are very much second-order.

Education levels are not second-order but Canadian workers are more literate and better educated across the board than the US manufacturing workers.

So, the real question in manufacturing (as it is in housing construction), “Why is the Canadian private sector so unwilling to invest in ongoing technological upgrading let alone innovation?”

• ‘Labour productivity’ was originally a measure of how much a given number of workers could produce with a fixed piece of land. Crop improvements and technology increased that in the agricultural revolution.

This really is a great piece.

Interesting first-person perspective on Carney as a fellow graduate student at Oxford.

But it was the latter half of the piece, that reflects on how Canadians who study in the UK or US are constantly subjected to overly aggressive declarations that deny Canada as a nation, which really hit home for me.

As a Canadian who attended graduate school in the US, I experienced almost verbatim every denial and put down in this piece.

And so many more constant and dumbfoundingly bizarre nonsequitur microaggressions. (One of the American I shared office space with lashed out that Canadians didn’t have any ‘real’ Black people so we had to borrow them from Jamaica to compete as athletes in Track and Field.)

So many of these offensive remarks were self contradictory - e.g.,

• Canada doesn’t exist as a nation or culture but at the same time Canadian students are vocally criticized for being ‘so nationalistic’

• there’s no need to include Canada in a listing of macroeconomic indicators of major economies because it’s ‘just a regional economy in in North America’ but only the US indicators are included. Meanwhile, California is profiled and discussed as a separate economy because it’s ‘so large’.

• or a renowned professor who I worked for as a research assistant observing at some random point when he realized where I had done my undergraduate degree ‘Oh, you went to a real place’ - which given how difficult it was to get into that school and program, should never have been a question.