Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Jerry Taylor writes that any reasonable evaluation of the risks associated with a climate breakdown demands that we transition away from carbon pollution as quickly as possible. Aria Bendix points out that multiple major U.S. cities stand to become uninhabitable over the next few decades due to the consequences of climate change. Moira Welsh notes that Toronto is unprepared for the frequency and intensity of floods which are hitting it on a regular basis. And Sarah Rieger writes that Calgary's drinking water is at risk of contamination from wildfires upstream. 

- Atiya Jaffar discusses the growing movement for a Green New Deal in Canada, while Yanis Varoufakis is hopeful that a similar plan can united Europe's progressive forces. And Andrew Nikiforuk sets out a few of the most damaging myths about pipelines which have distorted any discussion of climate policy and fossil fuels in Alberta (and beyond).

- Eric Doherty points out how a transformation of transportation infrastructure needs to be part of any viable climate plan, while Cat Hobbs notes that common ownership will be a crucial feature of a transit system that better serves users while reducing carbon emissions. And Matthew Taylor points out how a reduction in work hours may play an important role in answering the climate crisis.

- David Hagmann, Emily Ho and George Loewenstein study the harmful effects of small "nudges" which lead people toward greater opposition against carbon taxes. But Neil Macdonald (for all the issues elsewhere in his reasoning) argues that a similar effect applies to carbon taxes themselves in distracting from, and undermining public support for, any more thorough transition to a clean society. 

- Finally, Lisa Xing discusses OpenMedia's push for a right to repair linked to electronics sold and used in Canada.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Lisa Gennetian discusses how behavioural economics can inform the development of programs to end child poverty - including by ensuring a guaranteed income to help parents avoid needless financial stress. And Annie Lowrey makes the case for a basic income as a matter of freedom from an intrusive state apparatus focused on stripping away contingent benefits.

- Jedediah Purdy comments on the increasing salience of class issues in the U.S. as the Trump administration hands over policy-making authority to big business. And Andrew Jacobs reports on Trump's use of the U.S.' foreign influence to attack breast-feeding in order to benefit corporations looking to peddle breast milk substitutes.

- Ryan Cooper points out that an attempt to sell out the corporate sector has proven politically toxic for U.S. Democrats - and suggests developing policy for the 99% whose votes will prove decisive, rather than the .01% willing to pour exorbitant amounts of money into conditional donations.

- Tom Parkin writes that Canada has lost out from the Libs' failure to keep the infrastructure promises that were so central in the 2015 federal election. 

- Finally, Andrew Coyne rightly points out that nearly the entire argument being used against proportional representation involves the entirely arbitrary choice to set the proper number of representatives for each group of voters at only one.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- CBC talks to Robert Frank about the role of luck and privilege in generating concentrated wealth. And Kate Bahn highlights the reality that collective action is needed to help level a playing field currently tilted to benefit those who already have the most.

- Samantha Eyler-Driscoll interviews Gabriel Zucman about the dangers of inequality (and the financial secrecy which enables it). And Richard Brooks offers a warning that big accounting firms are too close to the corporations they're supposed to be monitoring, while Matthew Yglesias writes that the Republicans are setting up another financial crisis by letting the financial sector run amok.

- Peter Goodman discusses Stockton, California's plans for a basic income experiment. And Johann Hari notes that a secure income can have massive mental health benefits - while financial precarity can instead feed into depression and other illnesses:

For several decades now, we have been taught to see our deepest forms of pain—our depression, our anxiety—as primarily problems with our internal brain chemistry: some missing serotonin here, some missing dopamine there. This is how I was told to think about my depression by my doctor. But the UN’s leading medical figures have warned that this view is “biased and selective use of research outcomes” that “cause more harm than good” and “must be abandoned.” There is, they claim, a different way of looking at this problem—one that offers meaningful solutions.
...
...If depression is primarily—as we have been led to believe by pharmaceutical company marketing campaigns—a problem with our brain chemistry, this makes no sense. The brains of the people of Dauphin did not suddenly evolve in those three years. But the World Health Organization, the leading medical body in the world, has explained: “Mental health is produced socially. The presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator and requires social as well as individual solutions.” In reality, depression and anxiety are produced by a broad range of factors. Some are biological—but many are social and psychological.

This requires us to think differently about how we respond to depression and anxiety. Dr Forget told me, after she interviewed many of the people who had been on the guaranteed income program, that it “works as an antidepressant.” Severe financial anxiety is one of several factors which has been proven to cause depression. Reducing that cause reduces the amount of depression. All over the world, I hunted for alternative antidepressants that should be offered alongside chemical antidepressants—and I kept seeing this key insight that had been discovered in Canada in the 1970s: the most effective strategies for dealing with depression are the ones that deal with the reasons why we are in such pain in the first place.

- But Stephanie Nebehay reports on a UN human rights investigation showing how the Trump administration is going out of its way to further impoverish the U.S.' lower classes, while Ed Pilkington notes that core Trump supporters in rural areas are likely suffering some of the worst effects.

- Finally, Jessica McCrory Calarco notes that the "marshmallow test" referred to regularly in behavioural economics likely has more to do with socioeconomic status than any inherent self-discipline.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Eduardo Porter examines how high-end tax cuts create gains for only the wealthy few. And Lydia DePillis points out that decades of increases to top-end incomes haven't translated into anything close to proportional spending which would share the gains with society at large.

- Juan Williams writes that U.S. voters are getting the message that a Republican party obsessed with further enriching corporate elites can't be trusted even on what it claims as signature issues:

The bigger news on Capitol Hill was that Americans now trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle taxes and the economy, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

For the last 40 years, Republicans have consistently outperformed Democrats when voters were asked which party is the better steward of taxes and the economy.

Now, the Journal poll has voters favoring Democrats by 33 percent to 29 percent on taxes, and by 35 percent to 30 percent on the economy.

...

With so much money concentrated in the hands of so few Americans, it is no wonder that polls show this law is wildly unpopular, with support ranging in major polls only from 26 to 32 percent.

"Don't let your Uncle Bob be fooled: Republicans are voting for this because their wealthy patrons demand it," former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote last week on his website. "Their tax plan will weaken our economy for years - reducing demand, widening inequality, and increasing the national debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade."

And now for the political fall-out:

Before the tax cut vote, Democrats led Republicans on the generic Congressional preference ballot question by 15 points. Fifty-one percent said they would vote or lean towards voting Democratic, while just 36 percent said the same about Republicans, according to Monmouth University.

Look for those numbers to sink even lower when Trump voters realize they've been had. They were sold a bill of goods by his party when they voted for Trump-style economic populism in 2016.

- Sarah Jaffe writes that poverty represents a failing of the society which enables its existence, not the people who get trapped in it. And Brad Chilcott argues that a renewed sense of solidarity is the best gift we can ask for - and offer - over the holidays.

- Philip Stephens discusses the temporary stall of populism due in no small part to Donald Trump's buffoonery, while noting that the structural factors which have allowed it to develop remain unaddressed. And John Nichols comments on Paul Ryan's Scrooge-like tendencies which have been given free rein under Trump.

- Finally, Ian Bickis points out a few of the ways in which people predictably deviate from the assumptions of laissez-faire zealots.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Tim Harford discusses how insurance and other industries are built on exploiting people who are risk-averse due to the inability to absorb substantial costs as "money pumps" for those who have more than they need:

(L)et’s step back and ask ourselves what insurance is for. Classical economics has an answer: people are risk-averse, which means that they will pay good money to reduce the variability of outcomes they face. If home insurance guards against the loss of a million pounds when my house burns down, I’m happy to buy the insurance even though the insurance company expects to make a profit from it.

But this risk aversion emerges from the fact that money is worth more to poor people than to rich people. Gaining a million pounds would make me rich but losing a million pounds would make me poor. I should not gamble a million pounds on the toss of a coin, because the million pounds I might lose is more precious to me than the million pounds I might gain.

As so often with classical economics, this is an excellent description of how we should behave. It is not such an excellent description of how we actually do behave. Risk aversion can only explain why we insure large risks. It cannot explain why we insure small ones. 

...

A money pump is a person whose irrationalities can be systematically exploited for financial gain. The simplest money pump is a person who prefers an apple to a doughnut, prefers a doughnut to a chocolate bar, and prefers a chocolate bar to an apple. Just offer them an apple in exchange for their doughnut plus a penny. They will accept. Then offer them a chocolate bar for their apple plus a penny. Then offer them a doughnut for their chocolate bar plus a penny. They end up with their original doughnut and are three pence poorer. Repeat for ever.

Money-pump arguments are sometimes deployed to object that people cannot be irrational, otherwise they would be bankrupted by money pumping. But economists are increasingly coming to realise that, instead, we should be looking for money pumping in action.

Given our anxiety about small risks, what would the money pumping look like? It would be an insurance policy focused on the narrowest possible slice of risk. It would be sold alongside another product or service, often at the last moment. It would be marketed by creating anxiety and then offering the product to make the anxiety go away. In short, it would look like the collision damage waiver, the extended warranty, and PPI. These bespoke slices of insurance are among the largest money-pumping projects in the modern economy. No wonder the banks abandoned their principles to join in.

- Jared Bernstein and Lori Wallach highlight (PDF) the need for an international trade regime which serves the public interest, not only the greed of the people who already have the most. And Yves Smith theorizes that the public backlash against corporate-centered trade deals may lead both to changes in how international trade is managed, and the identity of the countries at the forefront of developing the standards to be pursued.

- Needless to say, the Libs' devotion to the current trade model figures to exclude Canada from that group for the foreseeable future. And the Alberta Federation of Labour laments the Libs' determination to exploit foreign labour at the expense of both easily-abused temporary workers, and the Canadians who would otherwise fill the positions.

- Derek Thompson makes the case for a long-overdue round of trust-busting to reduce corporate power over innovation and economic development.

- Finally, Ed Finn writes that our health system should focus far more on maintaining wellness rather than responding only once an illness develops.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Paolo Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo study (PDF) how the economic conditions an individual's youth influence enduring values - and find that the experience of an economic shock tends to lead to a greater appreciation of a fair redistribution of resources:

Consistent with theories of social psychology, this paper shows that large macroeconomic shocks experienced during the critical years of adolescence and early adulthood, between the ages of 18 and 25, shape preferences for redistribution and that this effect is statistically and economically significant.
...
Our findings are consistent with three broad interpretations. First, evidence from social psychology (and also neuroscience) shows that young adults are particularly responsive to the external environment, implying that later experiences are less relevant in shaping behavior.

A second interpretation regarding the persistent effect of macroeconomic shocks on beliefs is consistent with Cogley and Sargent (2008). The authors argue, in reference to the Great Depression, that macroeconomic shocks are “beliefs-twisting events,” whose influence can last long, because it takes a long time to correct the pessimistic beliefs induced by the depression, through the observation of macroeconomic data.

A third interpretation is consistent with theoretical work by Piketty (1995): the author argues that shocks could change people’s belief about the relative importance of luck versus effort as a driver of success. This belief, in his model, is related to the amount of taxes that people vote for and their preferences for government intervention. We find evidence consistent with his theory: the uncertainty created by macroeconomic shocks makes people believe that luck is more relevant than effort and, as a result, increases their desire for government intervention.

- And Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser discuss the strong correlation between trust and long-term growth - signalling how much damage is done to everybody's interests when elites instead focus on short-term extraction of wealth for themselves.

- Jon Schwarz rightly lambastes Apple for refusing to pay corporate taxes to the U.S. until it's able to extract what it considers a satisfactory discount, while the UK has announced what may be a significant move to limit the tax avoidance industry. Mike Bird, Vipal Mongaand and Aaron Kuriloff report on the trend of corporations handing out massive dividends - in many cases borrowing to hand shareholders more than a business has earned in income. And Gary Fooks, Karen West and Kevin Farnsworth trace the ballooning of executive pay to a concerted effort to transfer income from other workers to the executive class.

- Michael Walker and Sarah Kaine note that a strike at the UK delivery service Deliveroo offers an important example as to how workers with precarious jobs can engage in successful collective action. And Roger Baird discusses the potential for organization throughout the gig economy.

- Meanwhile, Dean Beeby reports on the misuse of unpaid interns by the federal government - though as with the failure to pay workers under the Phoenix pay scandal, the Libs' inclination seems to be toward prolonged study rather than quickly rectifying gross violations of employment law. And Alicia Bridges reports on the continued lack of workplace safety standard compliance in Saskatchewan.

- Finally, Christo Aivalis discusses how a postal banking system would fit into the values that should inform all of our decisions about the future of public services in Canada.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Branko Milanovic points out how the commodification of our interactions may create an incentive for short-term exploitation:

Commodification of what was hitherto a non-commercial resource makes each of us do many jobs and even, as in the renting of apartments, capitalists. But saying that I work many jobs is the same thing as saying that workers do not hold durably individual jobs and that the labor market is fully “flexible” with people getting in and out of jobs at a very high rate. Thus workers indeed become, from the point of view of the employer, fully interchangeable “agents”. Each of then stays in a job a few weeks or months: everyone is equally good or bad as everyone else. We are indeed coming close to the dream world of neoclassical economics where individuals, with their true characteristics, no longer exists because they have been replaced by “agents”.

The problem with this kind of commodification and flexibilization is that it undermines human relations and trust that are needed for the smooth functioning of an economy. When there are repeated games we try to establish relationships of trust with people with whom we interact. But if we move from one place to another with high frequency, change jobs every couple of weeks, and everybody else does the same, then there are no repeated games because we do not interact with the same people. If there are no repeated games, our behavior adjusts to expecting to play just a single game, a single interaction. And this new behavior is very different.
...
Increasing commodification of many activities, the gig economy and flexibilization of labor market are just a part of the same change; they should be seen as a movement toward a more rational, but ultimately more depersonalized, economy where most of interactions will be one-shot contacts. Holding of many jobs and the shortness of interactions make investing in cooperative behavior prohibitively expensive. This Is the key reason why I am less optimistic than others that we are moving toward a society with a more collective, or “nicer” ethos. Actually, I think we are moving in the opposite direction.

- Sandro Contenta and Jim Rankin report on new research showing how poverty, race and other factors influence the removal of children from their families by Ontario's Child Services. And Jake Johnson discusses the place of race in the U.S.' ongoing class war.

- Tom Parkin examines how Justin Trudeau is falling far short of his promises of reconciliation with First Nations. And Jason Warick highlights the racist assumptions behind much of the institutional response to Colten Boushie's shooting, while John Baglow exposes the virtual lynch mob that has formed to try to justify the killing. 

- Finally, Ian Millhiser examines how fines and fees imposed by the criminal justice system can trap an already-poor family in a further cycle of debt. And Michael Powell writes about the Rio Olympics as a painful example of billions being spent on an elite vanity project while people living in poverty are forced to do without necessities.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Yvan Guillemette discusses the need for public-sector investment in economic development to make up for the massive amounts of private capital sitting idle. And Daniel Kahnemann challenges the theory that corporate decision-making is either rational or directed toward optimal outcomes:

“You look at large organizations that are supposed to be optimal, rational. And the amount of folly in the way these places are run, the stupid procedures that they have, the really, really poor thinking you see all around you, is actually fairly troubling,” he said, noting that there is much that could be improved.

 

Figuring out how to make the act of decision-making “commensurate with the complexity and importance of the stakes” is a huge problem, in Kahneman’s view, to which the business world does not devote much thought.

- Meanwhile, James Hutt rightly argues that a transition toward a cleaner economy would offer an ideal opportunity to develop more and better jobs. 

- But of course that would require some interest in the well-being of workers. And Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on how Ontario is slashing health services for people who have suffered injuries on the job, while frequently forcing people back to work before they're ready.

- Bryce Covert writes that San Francisco is the latest city to learn that it's even in terms of bare dollars and cents, it's more efficient to provide housing to people who need it than to deal with the social costs of homelessness.

 - Finally, Michael Harris slams the Cons' manufactured outrage over Niki Ashton's daring to campaign for Bernie Sanders. But it's worth noting as well that we should fully expect our political leaders to have some interest in issues and campaigns beyond their own level of government (and in some cases borders).

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- CBC follows up on the connection between childhood poverty and increased health-care costs later in life. And Sunny Freeman points out how the living wage planned by Rachel Notley's NDP figures to benefit Alberta's economy in general.

- Meanwhile, William Gardner laments our lack of accurate information on health and well-being in the wake of the Cons' census shredding, particularly among exactly the marginalized communities who are most likely to need help.

- And Richard Thaler reminds us why it's foolish to assume that people and economies can be treated as if they'll operate according to market ideals of perfect information and equality in bargaining power. 

- Gerald Caplan offers a warning to the Notley government as to what it can expect from a corporate establishment which considers itself to be above the will of the public. And in keeping with the theme of this week's column, David McGrane sees the NDP's victory as bringing Alberta's politics in line with those of the other prairie provinces.

- Finally, Andrew Coyne discusses how the Cons managed to fit nearly every possible indictment of their government into a single day's worth of legislative abuses and public deception. And Robin Sears highlights why the next federal election campaign figures to be far less predictable than the government which will be up for public scrutiny.

Now we're just haggling over the price

Others have rightly wondered whether the Wildrose Party's new promise to make floor-crossing MPs pay a price to the party will be enforceable at all. But it's also worth examining how it might affect MLAs' decision-making - with the result potentially being the exact opposite of what Brian Jean intends.

Previously, the bar to Wildrose MLAs crossing the floor was a moral one: the promise, to constituents and party alike, that MLAs would resist the temptation to join another party. And while that bar may have failed to stop Danielle Smith and others from breaking their promise, it certainly seems to have had an impact on the political prospects of those who made the switch.

In contrast, Jean has made floor-crossing into a financial issue. The sticker price tag to buy a Wildrose MLA is now being advertised publicly - and it's hardly inconceivable that the benefits of a cabinet position or a more secure seat would outweigh the financial incentive to stay even if it's otherwise enforceable.

Indeed, Jean may be setting up a political example of a familiar experiment in behavioural economics: just as a price on anti-social behaviour in the case of late daycare pickups actually increased violations by causing parents to think in economic rather than moral terms, so too might it allow MLAs to claim they owe constituents nothing more than to buy out their party status.

And the problem is expanded since Wildrose is also changing the question as to who's entitled to raise concerns about a violation of expectations. The new contract makes it explicit that it's the party, not constituents, which holds a duty of loyalty and which has the power to enforce an MLA's obligations. And by implication, the party will also have the power to decide an MLA isn't worth pursuing - no matter what voters may think.

Of course, as long as the surface financial deterrent helps to convince voters that Jean is more serious about sticking it out with Wildrose than Smith was, it will serve a political purpose. But for anybody who would prefer that the relationship among parties, candidates and voters be based on principles rather than dollar signs, it shifts MLAs' incentives in exactly the wrong direction.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Joe Fiorito discusses the spread of income inequality in Canada. And Doug Henwood reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, while wondering what will follow from the empirical observation that accumulated wealth tends to perpetuate itself to the detriment of most of the population:

The core message of this enormous and enormously important book can be delivered in a few lines: Left to its own devices, wealth inevitably tends to concentrate in capitalist economies. There is no “natural” mechanism inherent in the structure of such economies for inhibiting, much less reversing, that tendency. Only crises like war and depression, or political interventions like taxation (which, to the upper classes, would be a crisis), can do the trick. And Thomas Piketty has two centuries of data to prove his point.
...

Economics as a discipline loves stories about equilibrium and convergence. Vast inequities should, in theory, be “competed away,” as neoclassical economics likes to say. But mostly they’re not. Globally, poorer countries should gain on richer ones as technology and education spread and mobile capital’s search for higher returns makes the poor less poor. That has happened to some degree, but rapidly developing economies such as India and many African nations remain much poorer than the United States or Western Europe. In the case of personal wealth, old fortunes should decline and be replaced by new ones, just as manual typewriters were replaced by electric ones, and electric typewriters were superseded by computers. But in fact old money is remarkably persistent. Yes, we’ve seen the creation of a large number of new fortunes over the last few decades, a change from wealth’s dark days of the mid-twentieth century. Bill Gates is the son of a well-off lawyer who was nowhere near a billionaire; Mark Zuckerberg sprang from the loins of a dentist and a psychiatrist. They are the very picture of modern new wealth. But despite those new fortunes, inheritance remains very important. David Rockefeller, worth $2.8 billion at the age of ninety-eight, is number 193 on the Forbes 400. Overall, Piketty concludes, it’s likely that half or more of the wealth of the upper orders originates in inheritance.

And though Piketty doesn’t explore this, I’ve long suspected that a major force for the repeal of the estate tax in the United States has been that the billionaires of the neoliberal age—the tech and finance moguls, some famous, some barely known—have been thinking about their legacy. The scions of the second Gilded Age want to see their grandchildren on the Forbes 400, just like David Rockefeller is a ghost of the first Gilded Age. I’m less sure whether they want to see their names on traditional foundations—maybe more the entrepreneurial kind. But it’s clear that the political salience of the “death tax” is a reflection of a cadre of fortunes of a sort that was long out of fashion.

...

Anticapitalist rhetoric need not be lazy—and for all the empirical sophistication of Piketty’s work, his political thinking is hardly a model of complexity or effort. He mostly aspires to contribute to rational democratic deliberation about “the best way to organize society.”

Still, while such deliberation is clearly necessary, political action cannot be factored out of that process just because we happen to have lived through the Cold War’s unmourned collapse. It’s energizing to see that a younger generation of political intellectuals, who were in grade school when the Berlin Wall came down, missed the anticapitalist vaccination. They might be able to take Piketty’s data and cause some genuine trouble with it. Because serious trouble—demonstrations, strikes, insurgent political movements—is what it will take to derail capitalism’s inevitable tendency toward concentration. Short of that, it looks like we’ll be continuing our journey along the road to a new serfdom.

- Meanwhile, Bart Cammaerts highlights the need to distance democratic decision-making from the influence of big money. And Salon offers a few educated guesses as to when and how the next financial crash may strike - with the influence of the financial sector on lax regulation serving as a major driving force.

- Carol Goar takes note of Peggy Nash's efforts to address youth unemployment, while pointing out the risk of a "lost generation" if reasonably secure jobs are a thing of the past.

- Finally, Tim Harford takes a look at how behavioural economics have already influenced public policy - and how much more room there is to test the work done by governments to maximize the achievement of policy goals while minimizing costs.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Saturday reading.

- Rick Salutin writes about the need for the labour movement to better promote its contribution to the general public - and my only quibble is that I'd prefer to see a focus on what still can be (and needs to be) done rather than past victories:

(W)hy don't (unions) contest the battle for the public mind? I don't know why but they don't, or rarely do. They seem to have lost track of that tactic. It went missing in the Ontario teachers conflict this year, too. The unions made little or no effort to explain their case and enlist parents, students and citizens on their side. That left the McGuinty government with the role of defender of the taxpayers.

It's not inevitable. The Chicago teachers' union laboured for wider support and won their strike with it. This matters not just because it would be smart for unions. It's because they, for about a century, have been central to general social improvement. They provided inspiration, resources, organization: without them there would not have been public health care, universal pensions, health and safety laws, the whole panoply of the (now disputed) welfare state.
...
It's a daunting challenge for unions. Today they barely exist in the public mind. A few decades ago, if you asked people to free-associate with "union" you'd get many responses: strikes, chants, acronyms, leaders, songs. Now, at least among the young, you'd probably get mostly blanks. Nothing. On the other hand, a blank slate isn't the worst place to start.

- Bill Curry reports that the federal government is studying the use of behavioural "nudges" in other countries as a basis for Canadian programs. But it's well worth questioning whether those nudges are being used to generate actual positive outcomes, or merely new profit centres for well-connected rent-seekers - and the Cons' choice to push workers toward private pensions rather than expanding the lower-cost Canada Pension Plan offers nothing but reason for concern on that front.

- Janina Enrile writes about the pluses of a guaranteed annual income among other means to alleviate poverty:

The senator for Kingston-Frontenac-Leeds is calling for policy changes in government, following a report from the Canadian Medical Association that says bad health can be a result of poverty.

Hugh Segal said this can be helped through the implementation of a guaranteed annual income, which would alleviate concerns for people who couldn’t afford healthier food, which is often more expensive.
...
 It’s why the introduction of a guaranteed annual income would help especially, said Elaine Power, a Queen’s University professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies.

“It would cost a lot in the short term,” she said. “As a long-term investment strategy, I think it’s the most important thing we can do for the health and the fiscal sustainability of the country.”

The poor nutrition that results from a lower income adds to other anxieties, Power said.

“That contributes to your health... There’s the stress of knowing that other people have better lives than you. There’s the stress of being a parent and knowing you can’t provide for your children,” she said. “The chronic stress probably interacts with poor nutrition (and) chronic malnutrition to make things even worse.”

- Meanwhile, CBC reports on the NDP's eminently reasonable proposal to at least ensure that municipalities are informed about dangerous goods being shipped through their territory. But I'd fully expect even that modest suggestion to be met with a wave of corporatist blather about the "red tape" involved in allowing communities to prepare for the risks shippers want to impose on them.

- Finally, Enrique Mendizabal offers a concise set of theories as to how change can happen - with the choices serving as both an important set of considerations for issue-based organizations, and a set of criteria by which to evaluate our political choices.

On default positions

Dan Ariely comments on how the normalization of cheating can produce a cascading effect:

The consequences of this sort of cheating are even more severe when the network of contagion is larger. We see this when we look at Greece, where masses of people have been cheating a little bit everywhere, and it’s all added up. What this shows is just how contagious dishonesty can be. When we see somebody else cheat, especially if they’re part of our own, internal group, all of a sudden we figure out that it’s more acceptable to act this way. It’s not that the probability of our getting caught has changed – it’s that we’ve changed our mindset, convincing ourselves that the act itself is actually OK. At some point, you just think, “This is the way things are done,” and you go with the flow.

One woman from Greece recently told me that she was selling her apartment and she was considering whether to sell it legally (and pay taxes) or illegally (without paying taxes). She quickly realized that she had bought it illegally, and that she would lose money if she turned around and sold it legally – not to mention that, in her mind, she would be the only person in Greece paying taxes on real-estate property.

When everyone around you is cheating the system, what’s your motivation to be the one not playing along? 

And on what's surely an entirely unrelated note, Andrew Hepburn reports on how prize fixing may be par for the course in the financial sector:

Barclays attempted to manipulate LIBOR both to give a false impression of the bank’s health and also to benefit its trading positions. It did not do so alone: traders coordinated their activities with other banks to ensure successful manipulations. For example, let’s say Barclays had accumulated bets that interest rates would rise. Submitting artificially high estimates of how much it cost the bank to borrow funds would tend to push the published LIBOR rate higher, thus benefitting its trading positions. To do so, however, it would need to collude with other banks, because the highest and lowest submissions are automatically excluded in the calculation of LIBOR.
...
The truth is, though, that price-fixers are less likely to be caught or punished severely in the financial industry.

Admittedly, authorities across the developed world have become quite adept at spotting and cracking down on manipulation and cartel behaviour in a number of other areas. In the U.S., for example, anti-trust laws provide significant civil and criminal penalties for those found guilty of cartel behaviour—and there have been some notable enforcement actions. The same goes for the European Union. As recently as 2010, the European Commission fined 11 airlines almost $1 billion for fixing the price of air cargo.

Yet with the exception of stocks, regulators have made comparatively little headway in combating market manipulation in the world of finance. The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission, for example, has only successfully prosecuted one case of market manipulation in its entire history (though there have been some cases of–mostly modest–settlements along the way). This, in turn, has contributed to various shenanigans mushrooming across the industry.

And to make matters worse, there's Corporate Knights' analysis as to how Canada's corporate sector treats its legal obligation to pay taxes:

All wasn’t good news. The average percentage of defined benefit pension plans that are funded is down again this year, as is the average percentage of statutory taxes that was paid.

“It’s not surprising,” said Michael Yow, lead analyst with CK Capital, this magazine's sister research division. “Companies are looking for ways to keep cash during more trying economic times, so they’re looking for any possibility to take advantage of any and all tax loopholes.”

All of which would seem to make for about the most unlikely scenario for yet another anti-regulation push telling the public to just trust whatever the corporate sector deems acceptable. And yet, here we are.