Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Robin Sears offers his theory that the upcoming federal election could represent a meaningful referendum on competing visions for Canada - and Paul Wells seems to expect much the same. But while that might make for a useful statement of the actual consequences of electing the anti-government Cons as opposed to having a progressive coalition materialize, it's hard to see a clash of visions represent the core of the campaign - particularly when the party currently in power won't admit to its active hostility toward social programs and the environment, while another major party seems to be planning to hold off on deciding what it believes in until it has no choice but to do so.

- In the alternative, Crawford Kilian suggests that we should make 2015 the year to mock the Harper Cons in advance of the impending federal election.

- In keeping with that theme south of the border, Dylan Matthews identifies the worst argument for wealth inequality yet. And Danny Feingold interviews Bill de Blasio about the growing recognition that inequality affects everybody.

- Meanwhile, Michael Lewis again discusses the psychological dimension of wealth inequality:

A team of researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed 43,000 Americans and found that, by some wide margin, the rich were more likely to shoplift than the poor. Another study, by a coalition of nonprofits called the Independent Sector, revealed that people with incomes below 25 grand give away, on average, 4.2 percent of their income, while those earning more than 150 grand a year give away only 2.7 percent. A UCLA neuroscientist named Keely Muscatell has published an interesting paper showing that wealth quiets the nerves in the brain associated with empathy: If you show rich people and poor people pictures of kids with cancer, the poor people's brains exhibit a great deal more activity than the rich people's. (An inability to empathize with others has just got to be a disadvantage for any rich person seeking political office, at least outside of New York City.) "As you move up the class ladder," says Keltner, "you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tightfisted in giving to others. Straightforward economic analyses have trouble making sense of this pattern of results."

[There is an obvious] chicken-and-egg question to ask here. But it is beginning to seem that the problem isn't that the kind of people who wind up on the pleasant side of inequality suffer from some moral disability that gives them a market edge. The problem is caused by the inequality itself: It triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains. It causes them to be less likely to care about anyone but themselves or to experience the moral sentiments needed to be a decent citizen.

Or even a happy one. Not long ago, an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank's rich clients. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: A rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That's not all that surprising; it's what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. "All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier," says Norton.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: The happiness will come from the money they don't yet have.

- Finally, Frances Woolley nicely summarizes how our relationship to possessions affects economic theory.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- John Ivison makes the case for more discussion of government spending rather than corruption and scandal. But it's PressProgress leading the way in actually reporting on that front - featuring revelations that multiple resource-related ministers' office have received massive spending boosts, while program spending for First Nations, the environment and foreign aid is getting slashed and/or going unused.

- Justin Ling reports that the NDP - pushed largely by Pierre Ducasse - is taking much-needed steps to set up a Quebec provincial wing. Meanwhile, Paul McLeod notes that Nova Scotia's MPs - with the possible exception of Peter Stoffer - are taking a pass on the provincial NDP leadership race.

- Andrew Coyne points out that the supposed B.C.-Alberta "framework agreement" on pipelines actually means far less than one would think based on the hype surrounding its announcement. But Barbara Yaffe recognizes that Christy Clark's sudden abandonment of repeated campaign promises to avoid the environmental risk linked to pipelines and tanker traffic doesn't figure to satisfy B.C.'s general public.

- And ultimately, political parties will have to answer to voters for their choices - as the Libs are finding out in Toronto Centre despite their best efforts to duck any debate about pipelines.

- Finally, Tom Hayden wonders whether Bill de Blasio's strong positions on inequality and evidence-based crime policy might signal a new form of progressive populism:

De Blasio also can tackle income inequality by signing the living wage ordinance on city contracts, or by preventing Wall Street developers getting special city abatements – measures that Bloomberg vetoed. De Blasio didn't flinch on the issue when confronted in closed meetings with developers during the campaign.

When De Blasio first raised his opposition to the police stop-and-frisk policies, according to Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the candidate began rising in the polls against other contenders in the Democratic primary. The stop-and-frisk policy, a variation of racial profiling against black and brown young people, is generally supported by white and worried New Yorkers and overwhelmingly opposed by communities of color.
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It is reassuring that De Blasio has roots in past social movements instead of the usual pedigrees for a political career. If he has veered back to his lefty roots, it is enabled by a popular anger among voters. This anger was fanned by the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, reinforced by heavy-handed policing, in a city whose power brokers are addicted to opulence.

The media widely acknowledges that Occupy Wall Street "changed the conversation" in America. De Blasio won't represent the 99%, but a healthy majority will do. From Wednesday, Bill de Blasio will have the largest megaphone of any conversation-changer on the national scene.

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Alex Pareene muses that Lawrence Summers would be an entirely worthy nominee to oversee U.S. monetary policy - for a very specific set of criteria:

Laws and policies he championed directly led to the financial crisis, and the same laws and policies caused that crisis to kick off a global recession that we still have not crawled out of. He is more responsible than almost anyone else alive — it’s him, Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, basically — for the severity of the crisis. I can’t think of a better time to inexplicably reward Summers for his disastrous record than today, as news outlets everywhere revisit those miserable days of five years ago and sort through the aftermath. The ascension should happen as soon as possible. Think of it as a sort of birthday president for the crisis.
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The timing has never been better to reaffirm that in America, a lucky few are able to be wrong — disastrously wrong, in ways that cause a great deal of harm and suffering — about everything and be forever rewarded for it. Larry Summers is basically the mascot of the last few terrible decades, and today is the day that should be officially recognized.

- And Peter Beinart sees Bill de Blasio's primary victory as evidence that voters are very much willing to throw their support behind genuinely progressive options, rather than looking for somebody who caters primarily to the Very Serious People.

- Speaking of unabashed progressive heroes, Peter O'Neil excerpts Graeme Truelove's take on Svend Robinson's legacy. And the would-be MPs currently pursuing nominations in the upcoming set of by-elections would do well to follow his example.

- Finally, Armine Yalnizyan offers her take on how the Cons have permanently damaged our ability to assess the state of Canada's housing market - and how the limited data available through the National Household Survey offers plenty of reason for concern.