Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Lance Taylor summarizes his new book documenting how and why U.S. inequality has ballooned over the past few decades. And Heather Scoffield writes about Tiff Macklem's attention to inequality and the plight of marginalized people - as well as how it represents a (necessary) departure from the basis for Canada's previous monetary policy.

- Patricia Cohen highlights how debates over the effect of social programs tend to involve evidence that benefits for people out of work tend to help everybody, weighed against rhetoric from employers who assume they'll be better off if workers are desperate for lack of any alternatives to low-paying work. Alex MacPherson and Zak Vescera follow up on Scott Moe's choice to turn federal benefits into a provincial cash cow rather than allowing any expanded programs to benefit recipients. And Joseph Hall notes that wage subsidies may likewise have served mostly to goose profits rather than to help workers.

 - Crawford Kilian observes that the aftereffects of the coronavirus will last for decades whether or not people have experienced severe medical symptoms in the short term. And Kyle Benning reports on Kyle Anderson's warnings about the growing number of untraceable COVID-19 cases in Saskatchewan. 

- Jemima McEvoy discusses the multiple U.S. teachers who have already died of COVID-19 in only a month since their classes resumed. And PressProgress takes note of the attempt to substitute "arm's-length" measurements and an attempt to have students face the same direction for adequate physical distancing in Regina public schools.

- Andre Picard discusses how people living with dementia have been hit harder than anybody else by the coronavirus pandemic.

- Finally, Monetta Bailey writes about the important role of protest in expanding the range of choices available to people who have been structurally denied the opportunities others take for granted.