Here’s an enhanced, more polished version of your blog post—tightened for clarity, stronger flow, and a more provocative close, while keeping your core arguments intact: Rethinking Venture Capital: What Really Drives Startup Success? In today’s startup culture, venture capital is often framed as the essential fuel for success. The story is everywhere: if you want … Read more
As a professional accountant with more than 3 decades of experience – including 5 years with the CRA as an auditor and 5 years with a Big Four firm as a tax specialist in SR&ED, I began dealing with a Silicon Valley-based financial startup, handling the tax compliance for their small Canadian subsidiary. Three years … Read more
Canada’s new competency map for CPAs: Makes it difficult (or impossible) for small, one or two-partner firms to train their replacements. While the “new” Competency Map (CM 2.0) has not fully launched its certification program yet (delayed until 2027), the current post-unification competency framework has already created significant hurdles for small firms (1–2 partners) trying … Read more
Introduction to AI Does Not Pose an Existential Risk to Humanity This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. You can use/share it anyway you want, provided you attribute it to me (Blair Fix) and link to Economics from the Top Down. ABOUT THIS ARTICLE – Editor I was first introduced to … Read more
SUPERSIZE ME Our Insatiable Appetite for Stuff (and Services) Average House Sizes 1950 to 2010 Average House Size 1950 to 2010 (SOURCE: Darrin Qualman’s Blog – 2018) AI Summary by WORDTUNE The average size of a newly constructed single-family detached home in the US is now 2,600 square feet and probably 2,200 in Canada. The … Read more
Canadians log more hours than other countries but the workforce is less productive. What gives? CLAUDE LAVOIE PUBLISHED DECEMBER 12, 2023 Claude Lavoie was director-general of economic studies and policy analysis at the Department of Finance from 2008 to 2023. He has represented Canada at OECD meetings and has received many honours, including the Queen’s … Read more
While our American neighbors to the South would like to paint themselves as free traders, in fact, they are the probably world’s most successful protectionists. After two rounds of free trade deals in the last 30 years or so, we’ve lost a huge amount of manufacturing and processing jobs – most notably in softwood lumber … Read more
Five short decades ago, the economic landscape in Canada and the world was vastly different. Five decades before that farming was the dominant occupation, and Canada was primarily rural. In this overview, we’ll look at the accounting occupation in Canada and how it has changed during the last five decades and try and understand some … Read more
Audit and management consulting work are largely irrelevant for the smaller 99% of firms that dominate the sector. Auditing has been declining in importance since the US public markets started shrinking since their heyday in the mid to late 1990s. Today private equity is the most common way for early-stage companies to scale their operations. … Read more
Higher Education Lobbyists Line Up for Handouts In September 2019, Oxford University in the UK published an article by Gwilym Croucher linking productivity and higher education: “Universities and colleges now demand a greater proportion of public and private resources and form a larger part of the economic life of most countries. Higher education contributes to … Read more