Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted material for your weekend reading.

- Armine Yalnizyan discusses how free-market economic theory fails to take into account the realities of human (and other animal) behaviour:

Observing a group of chimpanzees she had trained to use currency to trade for food, Ms. Santos found monkeys don’t like to save. They often steal from one another and from the market “salesman”. And they display a tendency towards greed. Sound familiar?

There’s more, and it speaks profoundly to what makes rapidly expanding markets so prone to increasing risk. Confronted with complex decisions we make mistakes, panic and revert to basic instincts. One such instinct is a bias towards thinking in relative, not absolute terms. Another is a bias towards loss aversion.

Both lead to a simple and potentially disruptive truth: Humans don’t like to lose anything of value that they’ve obtained, and will actually take on more risky behavior with the object of value in a misguided attempt to save what they already had.

The research gives the lie to the notion that markets are rational. It sheds important light on ways to reduce risk and improve performance. And it suggests why markets tend towards greater concentration, an inherently unstable distribution of resources and power because it reinforces both greed and fear.

- Meanwhile, it's a day ending in "y". Which means that Erin has once again exposed a Jack Mintz tax-slashing screed as containing a typical combination of factual errors, questionable assumptions and non-disclosure.

- I've supported competing candidates in each of the last two municipal elections. But it's still a plus to see Fred Clipsham pursuing the NDP's nomination in Regina Qu'Appelle - particularly since the incumbent manages to stand out even among the Cons' invisible Saskatchewan MPs for sheer uselessness.

- Let's give due credit to the Sask Party for at least one form of democratic participation that's been excised from all other parties besides the NDP, as it actually saw a sitting MLA defeated in a nomination contest. Though that type of competition would have far more meaning if it wasn't limited to changing the individual responsible for defending policies not set by the party's membership.

- I don't dispute that it would be a plus to see usage statistics for SaskConnected - both to see how it's working now, and how it can be improved. But otherwise, David Seymour's attempt to sell the service off looks to be based on little more than the usual desire to hand free assets to the private sector rather than any valid reason why wireless Internet access can't practically be treated as a freely available public good.

- Finally, pogge nicely points out what's most frustrating about the current federal landscape:

This last extended break from blogging was originally prompted by illness but more recently I've simply had difficulty getting my enthusiasm for it back. Weighing in on the endless election speculation doesn't do a whole lot for me when I don't expect the outcome of an election to make a lot of difference in the direction the country takes. And I don't. When the rallying cry "Blogging for a Harper-free Canada" first surfaced a while back, my initial reaction was to ask myself why we should set the bar so low. I still think it's a good question.

And the likes of Thomas Walkom aren't helping matters by looking to keep the bar in position through the next election campaign.