This and that to end your weekend.
- Paul Luke comments on the general stratification of workers into three groups: professionals facing extended hours and stress at a single job, service-sector workers juggling multiple jobs at more than full-time hours, and people struggling to find work at all. But it's well worth asking whether it's inevitable that we'll keep moving in a direction which seems to offer few benefits for anybody but the employers who extract more work for less pay - and asking what public policy choices we could make to ensure manageable workloads for more of the would-be workers who might want them.
- Tabatha Southey hands out her medals for climate-change denial in the wake of last week's extreme winter weather.
- Robin Rowland catches the Cons putting the National Energy Board in charge of regulating fisheries affected by pipelines - once again signalling their determination to have environmental concerns heard only by organizations whose primary concern is expanding resource extraction (if those concerns are to heard at all).
- Ezra Klein writes about the impact of partisan and ideological framing on different groups' support for exactly the same set of ideas, and wonders whether meaningful policy discussion is effectively ruled out by partisan affiliations. And Henry Farrell replies that there's value in being able to look at ideas critically based on motivated reasoning arising out of their origins - as long as the result is a meaningful evaluation of the ideas presented on all sides.
- Finally, Daniel Boffey reports on the UK's stock of publicly-constructed social housing - which, thanks to Conservative governments past and present, has largely become a source of rent revenue for the wealthy rather than an actual opportunity for people to find an affordable place to live.
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