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.
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!
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).
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
