Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Cory Doctorow discusses the inherent impossibility of trying to build any public good on an economic system centered on selfishness:

This is the problem at the core of "mechanism design" grounded in "rational self-interest." If you try to create a system where people do the right thing because they're selfish assholes, you normalize being a selfish asshole. Eventually, the selfish assholes form a cozy little League of Selfish Assholes and turn on the rest of us.   

Appeals to morality don't work on unethical people, but appeals to immorality crowds out ethics.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Jackson points out that Canada's real productivity problem is its embrace of neoliberalism. 

- Adam King discusses how pay transparency produces better results for workers. Francesca Fionda notes that corporate mining operators are having difficulty finding workers due to the public's recognition of the industry's track record of abuse. And Zak Vescera reports on Simon Fraser University's use of public money to hire a fossil fuel-connected firm to spy on striking teaching assistants. 

- Clayton Page Aldern writes that the effects of a climate breakdown will foreseeably include a more violent world as well as a hotter and more parched one. Doug Cuthand highlights how Canada's shouting match over carbon pricing is keeping us from even talking about the scope of policy needed to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And Chris Hatch reports on polling showing that the Cons have fostered a culture of denialism which renders them unwilling to even acknowledge the reality of climate change. And Darryl Greer reports that terminal operators are claiming the entitlement to hide their carbon pollution as a "trade secret". 

- Finally, Joel Dryden and Carla Turner report on the dwindling water resources in southern Alberta - which would represent a problem for any reality-based Saskatchewan government, particularly one planning to throw billions at an irrigation scheme which relies on water that's either disappearing or becoming polluted. And Fatima Syed points out that Ontario is rapidly burning through its available landfill space (due mostly to businesses and institutional dumpers).