Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Amativa Banerjee writes about the cognitive dissonance involved in living through the COVID-19 pandemic. And Ian Sample reports on scientists' recognition that the UK's deadly second COVID wave was the result of the repetition of mistakes and a failure to learn from the first wave. 

- Needless to say, that makes an especially dangerous and deadly fourth wave all the more preventable and inexcusable. On that front, Mickey Djuric reports on the continuing erosion of care for Saskatchewan residents in need of surgery, while Zak Vescera reports that the province is on the verge of needing to ship ICU patients to Ontario for lack of health care capacity. 

- Meanwhile, Marlene Leung reports that many of the experts trying to help save lives in the midst of a pandemic have themselves faced threats of violence for daring to do so. 

- Norm Farrell writes that David Card's Nobel prize helps to signal how empirical reality is on the side of progressive policy - even as the wealthiest few set up self-serving default assumptions to the contrary. 

- Jacob Lorinc reports on the CCPA's research into the hundreds of thousands of workers who have left thankless and abusive service-sector jobs for ones which offer greater pay and security - and the employers trying to spin that as reflecting a "labour shortage" rather than a need to do better themselves. Robert Reich characterizes the newfound willingness of U.S. workers to reject unacceptable work as an unofficial (and entirely necessary) general strike. And Shannon Waters documents the lobbying by B.C. employers against a basic standard of paid sick leave. 

- Finally, Mariana Mazzucato highlights the need for a new international consensus in which governments plan, and deploy public resources toward, a new economic structure which serves the common good rather than the rich.