Sen. Wm. McMaster Chair in Urban Health Equity | Prof & A/Dean Research @McMasteru | Scientist @MAP_Health | @Ticats enthusiast | Houser: https://xitter.cf/t.co/WBoId5bv54
Hamilton, Ontario
Joined September 2010
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Jim Dunn retweeted
COVID Broke the GTA New Condo Market. What Rises From the Ashes Will Look Very Different | UrbanToronto urbantoronto.ca/news/2026/10…
Alarming news. PISA is the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. oecd.org/en/about/programmes…
The PISA 2025 results are out today. Some quick insights.
- The major story is very significant global decline. The last PISA study was in 2022, and saw big declines in reading and maths scores from 2018. Obviously the pandemic played a part.
- But this 2025 round has seen further falls even from the 2022 lows!
Things haven't gone back to normal post-pandemic - they've got worse.
Every generation thinks the generation below is less smart - but this time they might be right!
Jim Dunn retweeted
Canada has options. It can diversify trade, strengthen European and Indo-Pacific relationships and reduce its dependence on the US. The more Washington pushes in that direction, the more attractive those alternatives become.
This isn't tough negotiating. It is destroying goodwill and calling the resulting resistance a negotiating problem.
Trump may believe America's economic weight gives him unlimited leverage. Lutnick seems to share that assumption.
The problem is that leverage only works while the other side still wants the relationship badly enough to compromise.
Jim Dunn retweeted
We just crossed a line in medicine that humanity has been walking toward for a hundred years.
For the first time, doctors can take a biopsy of your specific tumor, read its unique DNA mutations — the exact fingerprint no other cancer on earth shares — and build a custom mRNA blueprint written for one human being. Yours.
It doesn't poison the cancer. It teaches your own immune system what to hunt.
And this week, Phase 3 results confirmed it works.
Added to the best immunotherapy we already had, this individualized cancer vaccine has been dramatically cutting the odds that high-risk melanoma comes back. In the earlier data, the combination reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49%, and the risk of the cancer spreading to distant organs by 62%, compared to the standard treatment alone. This week's Phase 3 readout confirmed the benefit holds. That is not a modest tweak. That is a different trajectory for a human life.
And melanoma is just the first door. The same approach is now in trials across lung, bladder, and kidney cancers — a whole program of them, racing forward.
Understand what this actually means, because it's bigger than one drug.
For all of history, we fought cancer with blunt weapons. Cut it out. Burn it with radiation. Flood the whole body with chemotherapy and hope the cancer dies before the patient suffers too much. We were swinging a hammer in the dark.
This is a blueprint. A weapon designed atom by atom for one person's disease, that turns their own body into the thing that finds and destroys it. We are watching medicine shift from managing cancer to hunting it.
I've spent my life as a physician, and I did not expect to see this so soon. We were told personalized cancer vaccines were a thirty-year dream. They are happening right now, in real patients, with real data, in our lifetime.
I don't say this lightly, and I say it as a doctor who knows exactly how rare these moments are: this is one of the most hopeful things to happen in the history of the field.
I woke up thinking of the words of the morning prayer — Modeh Ani — I thank You. Gratitude, the moment you open your eyes, for a soul returned and a day given. To be alive at the exact hour when human beings learned to teach the body to cure itself feels like standing inside that prayer.
We are not at the end of cancer. But we are, unmistakably, at the beginning of the end of its reign.
Jim Dunn retweeted
Damn... another banger here by Cameron.
While the pundits, lobbyists and self-proclaimed housing experts talk supply until they are blue in the face (who doesn't like supply?)..
The industry is busy managing the supply of new housing, almost as if managing scarcity it the game.
"Landbanking is a normal and necessary part of the property market.
No one truly wants the homes we might desire in the next few decades to be built today. Market traders learn how quickly to develop housing via trial and error as they try to develop homes faster or slower in response to return incentives."
I dive deep into the topic of landbanking and explain why this is the key to understanding why new homes are built or not.
fresheconomicthinking.com/p/…
Jim Dunn retweeted
I've critiqued hundreds of clients' writing now.
One of my most underrated tips: delete the throat clear.
In journalism, there's an expression called "burying the lede." Usually, the best part of a piece is buried deep within the post. I have noticed that almost always, in my writing and in other people's, there is a more compelling hook further down the page. This is true even if you try not to.
It takes time to ramp up to your best writing.
When you write your first draft, don't overthink the start. Just get it out. Then, when you edit:
1. Look for the most compelling part
2. Cut everything before it
Hook people first. Provide context second.
This is right on 🎯. It will take some time to overcome the damage created by very low interest rates coinciding with rising incomes.
Canada’s housing story is really a credit story.
Household credit went from roughly $31 billion in 1970 to about $3.2 trillion today.
For decades, the system had powerful tailwinds:
📈 Rising incomes
👫 Two-income households
📉 Falling interest rates
🏦 Expanding mortgage credit
🏠 Rising home prices
Each allowed Canadians to borrow more, which helped push real estate prices higher.
But debt cannot compound faster than incomes forever.
That is what this S-curve is showing.
Canada is no longer at the beginning of the credit expansion. We are near the mature end of it.
The total amount of debt can remain extremely high while the rate of new credit growth slows sharply.
That matters because housing prices are set at the margin.
A bubble does not require credit to collapse.
It only requires the marginal buyer to stop receiving ever-larger mortgages.
And that may be exactly where Canada is today.
🍂 Economic Autumn rewarded leverage, falling rates and asset inflation.
❄️ Economic Winter begins when that credit machine loses momentum.
Then comes Creative Destruction 💥🌱
Capital eventually moves away from bidding up existing assets and toward the technologies and productive industries that create the next era of real wealth.
The question for Canadian housing is simple: if the 40-year credit tailwind is ending, where does the next major source of purchasing power come from?
Interesting, and disconcerting. Good reminder that housing prices are one thing, carrying costs are what really matters.
⚡️The American house has become a permanent inflation conduit.
A homeowner now absorbs nearly every structural failure in the economy through one asset.
Insurance carries climate risk, rebuilding inflation, and insurer retreat.
Property taxes carry municipal fiscal pressure.
Maintenance and repairs carry labor shortages, material inflation, aging housing stock, and regulatory costs.
Interest carries the federal credibility problem and the bond market’s higher price of money.
The purchase price carries decades of restricted supply and asset inflation.
Every layer reprices upward independently.
That changes the nature of homeownership. The mortgage payment once gradually became easier as wages rose and fixed debt stayed fixed. Now the surrounding costs keep expanding fast enough to consume much of that advantage. Even owners with 3% mortgages remain exposed through taxes, insurance, repairs, and maintenance.
New buyers receive the full punishment at once. They pay the capitalized asset price, today’s mortgage rate, today’s insurance premium, today’s tax base, and today’s repair costs. They are purchasing an old house through an entirely new cost structure.
That deepens the lock-in.
Existing owners cannot afford to surrender cheap debt.
Prospective buyers cannot afford the replacement cost.
Listings disappear.
Mobility dies.
Scarcity preserves prices.
Rising prices then increase taxes, insurance values, and repair expectations, feeding the carrying cost again.
The system has created a reflexive housing trap where ownership becomes more valuable on paper and more expensive to sustain in cash.
That is why the country can simultaneously produce record home equity and widespread housing stress. People can be asset-rich, cashflow-poor, and unable to move.
The darkest part is that shelter has become the collection point for inflation the official CPI cannot emotionally capture. A 26% rise in consumer prices feels abstract. A 39% rise in the annual cost of keeping the roof over your head reorganizes your entire life.
America turned the home into both the primary wealth engine and the primary household liability.
Owners cannot easily leave it.
Nonowners cannot easily enter it.
Everyone pays more to keep the structure intact.
Jim Dunn retweeted
Bruce Springsteen opening a show in Australia with a Bee Gees classic—and somehow making it sound completely his own.
🎬 Stayin’ Alive — Brisbane, 2014
🎤 Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
#BruceSpringsteen #StayinAlive #LiveMusic
Jim Dunn retweeted
As @MinneapolisFed shows, the homeownership rate on a per capita basis (owners / people) is lower than on a household basis (households / people)—because many young people haven't even started their own households; they're living with parents/friends. What's going on? 🧵 ...
Jim Dunn retweeted
A few OECD countries use maximum Loan-to-Income (LTI) ratios, instead of using maximum Debt-Service-to-Income (DTI) ratios like we use in the U.S.
Here's a big advantage of using LTI caps.
If your income is $100,000 and the LTI cap is 4.0, then the most you can borrow to buy a home is $400,000.
A disadvantage of the U.S. using maximum DTI ratios is that when interest rates fall, home buyers can borrow more money, which leads to higher home prices.
Seems like we've been having problems with real estate booms and busts in recent decades.
An advantage of using maximum LTI ratios instead of maximum DTI ratios is that when interest rates fall, home buyers in LTI countries who were going to borrow the maximum amount of money will get lower monthly mortgage payments, but they can NOT borrow more money, so home prices don't increase as much when interest rates fall.
Real estate booms and busts would be smaller if U.S. regulators used maximum LTI ratios, instead of maximum DTI ratios.
oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en…
Jim Dunn retweeted
🚨 BREAKTHROUGH: Scientists from McMaster University have developed AeroVax a breathable vaccine mist that delivers immunity directly to the lungs in just 2 minutes.🧵
This x 100. There is so much to learn from people like this person's brother.
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