The website of economist and keynote speaker Linda Nazareth, expert in demographics, global trends and the future of work
There are a lot of things robots can do, but they cannot make societies any younger. Canada and the U.S. are aging – there is little debate about that. What exactly that will mean for the labor force and the economy is a bit more up for grabs, but to get an idea of how […]
I’m happy to have been able to contribute to Macleans’ list of ’75 Charts Every Canadian Should Watch in 2017′. My post was on the ‘Gig Economy’ and you can find it here (you have to scroll down to find it, but that gives you a chance to see some fascinating graphs first) but as […]
If I had to think of an industry prone to poisonous industrial relations battles I would probably think first or the auto sector, or maybe even something like education or health. The battles in those industries, however, are apparently being matched by orchestras (can I say ‘in the orchestra industry’?) across North America. Like many […]
Collaboration, sharing ideas, boosting creativity, creating bonds – all of these are reasons that are typically given for having open plan workspaces. Sit next to your colleagues in an open plan office or cubicle, goes the reasoning, and productivity will rise. Not so, says new analysis by researchers at the University of Auckland in New […]
Maybe I’m late to the party, but it was only recently that I heard the phrase ‘side hustle’. Apparently it has been around a while: way back in 2013, Entrepreneur.com tacked up an online definition, calling ‘a way to make some extra cash that allows you flexibility to pursue what you’re most interested in’. It […]
Amongst the problems with the Sharing Economy – and its offshoot, the Gig Economy – is the fact that shares in it tend to be pretty unequal. In fact, even more than is the case of a usual employee-employer relationship, oftentimes the ‘employee’ in this example (who is really a gig worker) ends up with […]
A year ago most of the us knew little to nothing about the Zika virus, but at the mid-point of 2016, it appears that its existence is one factor that could disrupt world economic activity for years to come. The existence of the Zika virus is a great example of a ‘disruptor’ a random factor […]
Really, it seemed like the universal basic income (UBI), was going to be the hot new thing in economic policy. It sounds like such a simple solution to economic woes, so uncomplicated, just so basic really. Give every citizen in a country some form of stipend so that at the very least everyone has enough […]
Here’s a new one to me: the ‘divorce mortgage’. No its not some crazy, invented term to describe a financing vehicle (my mind went back to ‘plain vanilla swaps’ from the days when derivatives were the buzz), but rather exactly what it sounds like: a mortgage that suits people who own a home together but […]
You might not have noticed it, what with one economic crisis and stock market meltdown after another grabbing your attention, but the last few decades have actually been great ones for investors. Thanks to a perfect storm of factors, investment returns for the period from 1985 to 2015 came in at well above the historical […]
