Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Sean McElwee offers a new set of evidence that the right-wing Republicans who run on the economy in fact do it nothing but harm. And David Dayen discusses how Bernie Sanders may be able to push the U.S.' policy discussion into a far more positive area by forcing both parties to confront the failure of corporatist economics.

- But David MacDonald warns that Justin Trudeau and the Libs are trying to force Canada into a limited choice between tax baubles for the upper class. And Chantal Hebert too sees Trudeau as doing little more than offering a second small-c conservative party for voters.

- John Barber and the Globe and Mail note that bill C-51 is being rammed through Parliament by the Cons and Libs alike even though it's never been justified even in principle, let alone in its specifics. And as the Libs accept the argument that we have to hold our noses and vote for anything the Cons say will address national security, Tabatha Southey points out that similar legislation has actually made the public less safe when it comes to crime.

- Meanwhile, Alice Funke exposes how another bill strong-armed through Parliament by the Cons has gone awry, as Canadians could be on the hook to reimburse seven-figure bills for by-elections which have been called to last until this fall's general election.

- Finally, Neal Irwin highlights the fact that an employee can achieve exactly the same advancement by giving the false appearance of working long hours as by actually working those hours. But most significant is this point about the significant of overwork:

But the fact that the consultants who quietly lightened their workload did just as well in their performance reviews as those who were truly working 80 or more hours a week suggests that in normal times, heavy workloads may be more about signaling devotion to a firm than really being more productive. The person working 80 hours isn’t necessarily serving clients any better than the person working 50.

In other words, maybe the real problem isn’t men faking greater devotion to their jobs. Maybe it’s that too many companies reward the wrong things, favoring the illusion of extraordinary effort over actual productivity.