Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Duncan Cameron writes about the fundamental choice between austerity and full employment in developing the 2021 federal budget. And Noah Smith points out that while pipeline cancellations signal the imminent end of fossil fuels, they don't need to have any impact on job numbers if they're paired with appropriate transition plans.

- Luke Savage calls out corporate liberals for prioritizing the convenience provided by precarious workers over secure livelihoods for the workers themselves. And Brett Nelson discusses how Indigo is one more employer seeing a wave of unionization as workers join together to defend their rights and interests in the workplace.

- Christian Paas-Lang talks to Miles Corak about the need to be far more ambitious than the Trudeau Libs in combating poverty and inequality. 

- Sharif El-Defrawy and Bob Bell warn about the problems with Ontario's choice to privatize eye surgery as yet another step toward corporate health care. And Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack, and Ziad Obermeyer study (PDF) how even small cost-sharing requirements for prescription drugs result in significant harm to patient outcomes.

- Finally, Claire Porter Robbins discusses the need to take action against growing racism in Alberta, while Dan Collen points out how far too many Canadian media outlets are giving positive coverage to racists and/or conspiracy theorists. And Christopher Curtis discusses how journalism is being trashed in the name of slightly increased corporate profits.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Linda Geddes discusses the problem with people approaching COVID-19 restrictions based on the question of what's permitted (or worse yet what they can get away with), rather than what choices are most likely to limit the spread of the virus.

- Richard Horton writes about the growing expert push for a no-COVID strategy, while Michael Baker and Martin McKee offer 16 reasons for any country to pursue that goal. Lynsey Chutel and Marc Santora point out the need to fight the pandemic everywhere for anybody to be safe from future spread and newer, more dangerous variants. May Warren wonders what ever happened to contact tracing as part of the plan to control community spread in far too much of Canada, while the Globe and Mail's editorial board laments the failure to use rapid testing as one means of identifying potential sources of transmission before symptoms have appeared. And Winnie Byanyima argues that it's unconscionable for vaccines developed largely at public expense to be turned into corporate profit centres at the expense of universal availability as a public good, while Reshma Ramachandran and Zoey Thill take note of the rhetorical sleight of hand involved in associating vaccines with pharmaceutical companies rather than public sources of research and support.

- Meanwhile, Scott Gilmore discusses how Canada's national response to the coronavirus ranks among the world's worst. Andre Picard notes that the latest federal announcements involving limitations on some type of travel figure to offer far more in terms of symbolism than substantial outcomes. Mike Blanchfield reports on the growing recognition that we need domestic vaccine production capacity. And Charles Shaver highlights the importance of paid sick leave, particularly for people working to keep the public healthy.

- AFP reports on Argentina's implementation of a wealth tax to help fund coronavirus relief. And Christian Paas-Laing interviews Miles Corak about the need to do more to rein in wealth inequality - including the fact that Chrystia Freeland earned much of her public reputation documenting and (at least implicitly) recognizing the need for greater equity which her government is choosing not to pursue.

- Finally, Zarah Sultana discusses how big money distorts the U.S.' political system beyond any reasonable definition of the term "democracy". And Umair Haque writes about the dangers of being satisfied with a return to the same normal which produced the rise of Trumpian fascism to begin with.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Richard Warnica discusses the end of a summer in which we've been far too lax about limiting the foreseeable effects of COVID-19. Aaron Wherry writes that the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic will hurt all the more since we've learned - but all too often ignored - how to limit its spread. Devi Sridhar points out that irregular lockdowns in response to dangerous flare-ups aren't the same as bringing the virus under control. Rebecca Solnit highlights how a misleading focus on individual responsibility rather than public policy has resulted in damage that we could have avoided. Sara Mojtehedzadeh examines the Ontario workplaces which have seen outbreaks. And Pam Belluck writes about the lingering effects of COVID-19 on people who are classified as having recovered.

- Kim Siever argues that rather than viewing union wages as unduly high, we should be demanding wage fairness through all kinds of workplaces. And Jeffrey Clemens and Michael Strain find that increased minimum wages increase union density - and not so much among the lower-wage workers who benefit directly, but among other workers who recognize the value of collective action.

- Paul Haavardsrud talks to Miles Corak about the options and opportunities in developing windfall taxes on the wealthy. And Alex Ledson reports on new research showing that the elimination of France's wealth tax hasn't produced economic gains, but has instead has served only to turbocharge the growth of inequality.

- Finally, Jeff Goodell writes that the U.S.' fracking boom has never been based on anything more than a Ponzi scheme. Javier Blas and Grant Smith discuss how OPEC is planning to flood the oil market, making Canada's reserves even less economical even if we ignore their environmental and social costs. And Ben Lennon notes that while many oil and gas workers haven't been presented with the offer of a just transition to cleaner energy, they tend to be enthusiastic about the prospect once they know it exists.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Miles Corak weighs in on how COVID-19 is revealing and exacerbating existing inequality rather than serving as any leveling force.

- Jessica Yun reports on how the ability to work from home reflects existing privilege, while Sara Mojtehedzadeh notes that already-vulnerable migrant farm workers are being required to sign waivers against liability for coronavirus-related risk. But Steven Chase reports that Canada's union movement is pushing both to make work safer in the midst of the pandemic, and to improve wages and working conditions for essential workers in the longer term. 

- Caryn Lieberman reports on a call from hundreds of Ontario health providers to better provide for homeless people. And Mickey Djuric points out that hundreds of people in Saskatoon remain without a home even as they're being told to engage in physical isolation.

- Anna Dodd suggests that our willingness to follow expert advice in response to COVID-19 - even where it results in a break from the status quo - should push us in the same direction in averting a climate breakdown.

- David Climenhaga comments on the importance of Canada's public health care system in fending off invasive neoliberalism.

- Finally, David Moscrop writes that the Libs' latest decision to continue to arming Saudi Arabia - even in the absence of any ability to point fingers at the Harper Cons - demonstrates their willingness to trade lives and principles for corporate interests.

Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Noam Scheiber, Nelson Schwartz and Tiffany Hsu point out how the social isolation required in response to COVID-19 is only confirming and exacerbating the U.S.' class divide. And Shawn Micallef highlights the vast difference between social isolation in a large home as opposed to a confined living space.

- David Naylor and Tim Evans offer their suggestions for a path back to normalcy. CBC News reports on the wake-up call the pandemic represents for Canada's prescription drug supply. Danyaal Raza and Hasan Sheikh discuss the importance of strengthening our health care system as part of our rescue from the coronavirus pandemic. And Miles Corak argues that the delay in responding to COVID-19 should push us to maintain more government capacity at all times - rather than relying on a "just in time" relief apparatus to assemble only once a crisis is already underway.

- Sara Birrell takes note of the extremely limited help for workers on offer from Scott Moe's Saskatchewan Party government. And David Macdonald examines the all-too-gradually-improving federal relief package.

- David Dayen exposes a few of the U.S. lobbyists looking to turn a public emergency into a windfall for their well-connected corporate clients. Reuven Avi-Yonah makes the case for a war effort to include excess profit taxes of the type applied during World War II. And George Turner is rightly concerned about tax avoiders who have callously refused to contribute to society now cutting to the front of the line in the midst of a crisis. 

- Finally, Jonathan Watts looks at the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic which apply equally to our climate crisis.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Thomas Piketty sets out a proposal to start addressing inequality across the EU. Derek Thompson discusses how the U.S.' economy has been designed to squeeze younger workers at every turn, while Sean Coughlan points out that UK youth are skeptical that social mobility is a realistic prospect. And Miles Corak proposes unconditional learning bonds for less-wealthy families as one means of leveling the playing field.

- Matt Price comments on the importance of pursuing a large-scale transition to a cleaner and fairer economy in Canada - though he does miss the reality that the labour movement is already leading the push in that direction.

- Sharon Riley reports that most of the oil well sites certified as being "reclaimed" even under Alberta's already-insufficient regulatory system fall far short of meeting the definition. And the CP reports on a new study showing that the vast majority of oil sector emissions will get a free pass in the Libs' carbon pricing scheme.

- Meanwhile, Nick Falvo offers some considerations for Alberta's budget - including the importance of finally taking in a reasonable amount of tax revenue.

- Finally, Noah Smith writes about the impending battle over corporate monopolies, with particular attention to the effect of corporate dominance on workers in addition to consumers.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Miles Corak offers a must-read paper on the two stories most often told about inequality in Canada, reaching this conclusion on the recent accumulation of wealth at the top of the income spectrum and the readily observable inequality of opportunity based on the inheritance of social and economic capital:

(C)areful analyses lean toward the view that higher rents may be behind the greater incomes of the Canadian top 1 percent. Lemieux and Riddell (2016) conclude their detailed study by saying:

On balance, we think that our findings are more consistent with a rent-extraction story than with a market-based explanation…. Although some high incomes are surely compensation for hard work, the growth in top incomes over time has been so large that rent extraction must be the major contributing factor. (134)

They show that top earners are particularly concentrated in certain professions. For example, about one-quarter of those with top-1-percent incomes in 2011 are trained in medicine, law and jurisprudence, or business and commerce. Over a 20-year period, the fraction of the top 1 percent working in finance doubled from about 5 to 10 percent, as did the fraction working in oil and gas extraction industries, moving from less than 3 percent to more than 7 percent of all top earners. This is consistent with research by Murphy and Veall (2015), who document that the top 1 percent are disproportionately found in Toronto and Calgary. Together, these facts are all suggestive of the possibility that institutional factors—such as the capacity to negotiate the terms of compensation from governments, as in the case of doctors, or from boards of directors, as in the case of senior managers—determine pay. They are also suggestive of the possibility that factors beyond individual effort, such as commodity price and exchange rate movements, also create opportunities for higher pay.
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(T)he most common way to find a job is through family and friends. That holds true for all of us, but it is immensely more likely for the kids of the very rich. Corak and Piraino (2016, 2011) show that about 40 percent of young Canadian men have at some point worked for exactly the same firm that at some point also employed their fathers. But if dad's earnings put him in the top 25 percent, these chances are above average; they start taking off if dad is in the top 5 percent and are higher still for top earners. Almost 7 out of 10 sons of top-1-percent fathers had a job with an employer that had also employed their fathers. All parents want to help their children in whatever way they can. However, top earners can do it more than others, and with more consequence: virtually guaranteeing, if not a lifetime of high earnings, at least a good start in life.

Connections matter. And for the top earners this might even be nepotism. This is not a bad thing if parents pass on real skills to their children, skills that might be specific to particular occupations, industries, or even firms. If this is the case, then it makes economic sense to follow in your father's footsteps. Wayne Gretzky often talked about the role his father played in developing his skating and stick handling skills. They spent hours and hours together on the backyard rink. But not all top earners got to where they are because of this sort of investment. In fact, sons of top-earning fathers who do not work at the same employer as their fathers are much more likely to fall out of the top than those who do (Bingley, Corak, and Westergard-Nielson 2012). Bad nepotism promotes people above their abilities by virtue of connections, and it erodes rather than enhances economic productivity. Richard Reeves (2013) of the Brookings Institution encapsulates this intuition when he speaks of a “glass floor” supporting untalented rich kids, a floor that at the same time limits the degree of upward mobility for others.

- Meanwhile, Robert Reich discusses the likely effects of the Trump administration - which of course include making the U.S.' appalling income and wealth inequality all the worse. And Noah Smith highlights the needed development of economic targets to address inequality - though I'd question his implicit view that we should assume that unmeasurable factors such as "the social prestige and self-respect that come from having a job" deserve special mention, while the well-documented costs in health and welfare arising out of poverty and inequality can be ignored.

- PressProgress examines what Brad Wall has gone out of his way to avoid recognizing about climate change - though I'd consider them to be overly generous in stopping at five points.

- Finally, Thomas Levenson makes the case for far more public investment in pure scientific research.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Owen Jones argues that UK Labour needs to make far more effort to connect with working-class citizens in order to hold off the populist right, while Jamelle Bouie examines Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns as a worthwhile model for uniting groups of disaffected voters. And Wolfgang Munchau comments on the failure of neoliberal politicians to acknowledge and reverse how financial elites have twisted the global economy for their own benefit.

- Meanwhile, Miles Corak points out that a cycle of poverty is particularly acute for boys born into lower-income families.

- Jason Beattie discusses how UK attacks on recipients of social benefits are costing more money than the clawed-back benefit amounts, while creating desperate needs for people wrongly targeted.

- Gloria Galloway reports on the Auditor-General's findings that Canada's federal government is routinely failing to set or meet appropriate standards in assessing program effectiveness.

- Finally, Ed Broadbent discusses how a proportional electoral system would prevent the likes of Donald Trump from taking absolute power with a minority of support:

Consider that under our current first-past-the-post system, successive Harper and Trudeau governments have rolled to majorities with the support of fewer than four in 10 voters.

Consider that a leading Conservative leadership candidate, Kellie Leitch, has hailed the Trump victory as an exciting message that must be delivered here, as she continues to peddle her “Canadian values” mantra to the party faithful.

And consider that Van Jones, a leading CNN analyst and former Barack Obama adviser, warned at a Broadbent Institute gala this past week that a Trump-like victory could happen here. Mr. Jones urged progressives to push back with an “army of love.”

That army should be carrying PR as its weapon of choice.

 ...
We’ll leave our American friends to sort out their electoral-college concerns, but the question for Canadians is whether a PR system could block a Trump here.

The answer is yes, because PR rewards voters with a fair outcome. A party that wins 40 per cent of the vote will win only about 40 per cent of the seats, not a majority. A party winning 30 per cent will be rewarded with 30 per cent of the seats, and so on.

...

If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is serious about having voters vote their values and have that reflected in the composition of the House of Commons – and delivering on a key and oft-repeated campaign promise – the most important thing he can do is support proportional representation.

Or we could wait until an unfair system allows a Trump-style government to gain a toehold in our backyard.

Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Miles Corak asks how we should see the growing concentration of income at the top of the spectrum, and concludes that we should be concerned mostly with the breakdown between personal merit and success among the extremely privileged:

Connections matter. And for the top earners this might even be nepotism. This is not a bad thing if parents pass on real skills to their children, skills that might be specific to particular occupations, industries, or even firms. If this is the case, then it makes economic sense to follow in your father’s footsteps.
...
...But not all top earners got to where they are because of this sort of investment. In fact, sons of top-earning fathers who do not work at the same employer as their fathers are much more likely to fall out of the top than those who do.

Bad nepotism promotes people above their abilities by virtue of connections, and it erodes rather than enhances economic productivity. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution encapsulates this intuition when he speaks of a “glass floor” supporting untalented rich kids, a floor that at the same time limits the degree of upward mobility for others.

There is, however, an even larger cost. Social mobility is about a lot more than just using job contacts to make it into the top 1 percent. It is also about making investments in the health, education, and opportunities of all children and supporting families in a way that complements their efforts to promote the well-being of their kids. If the rich leverage economic power to exercise political power, they can also skew broader public policy choices—from the tax system to the education system, and other sources of human capital investment—in a way that limits possibilities for the majority.

Social mobility is turned into a race, a race through a course with many bottlenecks that the relatively advantaged are best at manoeuvring. Besides, all of this discussion refers simply to the correlation of earnings across generations, which is only a partial measure of mobility. The inheritance of material wealth, not just earnings advantage, should also be part of the way we measure and think about social mobility. Much higher incomes at the top over an extended period translate to a higher stock of wealth, and this may advantage the next generation in a way that is not tied to their earnings capacity.

All of this may start eroding the belief that labour markets are fair and that anyone can aspire to the top. It is not envy that is at the root of a connection between the well-being of the less rich and the rich, but rather a concern over fairness as equality of opportunity. If the rich cannot leverage economic power to exercise political power, then it is quite possible for the majority to live with a richer top 1 percent and be less concerned about how this minority will influence their welfare and the prospects of their children.

- Meanwhile, Meredith MacLeod reports on Credit Suisse's research showing that Canada is set to see a sharp increase in the number of millionaires over the next few years - even as Benjamin Tal notes that Canada's economy is shifting toward both part-time and lower-paying jobs. And Katie Allen rightly argues that governments which focus unduly on infrastructure as the sole basis for economic development will only exacerbate the problem by failing to account for the need for fair wages and more secure livelihoods.

- Laurie Monsebraaten reports on new research estimating the cost of poverty in Toronto alone at up to $5.5 billion per year. And the International Labour Organization assesses the cost of eliminating poverty in each country - with Canada needing to redirect only $249 million per year to lift all Canadians out of extreme and moderate poverty.

- Finally, Bruce Mutsvairo highlights the dangers of journalistic "balance" when it serves primarily to create false equivalencies and legitimize damaging policies. And George Monbiot lists the crises humanity has stumbled into, while highlighting the need for massive collective action to reverse any of them.

New column day

Here, on the continuing obstacles to pay equity and other gender equality in the workplace.

For further reading...
- For background on the current state of the gender pay gap in Canada, see the Canada Women's Foundation's fact sheet, as well as Mary Cornish's study (PDF) showing a continuing gap in every industry examined. And the OECD's data allows for comparisons both between countries and over time.
- The Education Policy Research Initiative's study by Ross Finnie, Kaveh Afshar, Eda Bozkurt, Masashi Miyairi and Dejan Pavlic cited in the column is here (PDF). And Sarah Kliff's must-read take on the ongoing pay gap is here, with particular reference to previous research (PDF) by Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz.
- Janice Dickson reports on the NDP's efforts to improve pay equity legislation at the federal level.
- Miles Corak points out the connection between inequality in general and the gender gap in particular.
- Claire Cain Miller discusses the disparate impact of a child on a male employee as opposed to a female. 
- Finally, Laura Beeston writes about a newly-released internal analysis by the federal Finance Department showing that Canadian mothers are less likely than their counterparts abroad to participate in the job market.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Miles Corak argues for a "second-chance" society to make up for the damaging effects of inequality - though I'd argue that while he has the principle exactly right, it's worth defining it as "no person left behind" to avoid any suggestion that people have a limited number of chances:

Canadians need to build a “second chance” society so that the consequences of bad luck or bad choices don’t matter as much.

There is a whole host of ways our social programs built up in an era of stable and steady job growth need to be refitted for a polarized labour market hard-wired to generate inequalities. We don’t just need unemployment insurance, as much as we need “wage” insurance that will top up the earnings of someone with a long work history who is laid-off and forced to take a lower paying job.

We don’t just need quality education, but also full tuition relief through income-contingent loans that tailor repayments and forgiveness to a graduate’s income. Rather than strapping them to low paying jobs to pay-off debts, they need to be given the room to drop back into school to get a different diploma or degree.

We don’t just need infrastructure as make-work or to maintain our bridges, roads, and sewers, but also as social infrastructure to enhance all of our lives, regardless of our incomes: transportation networks that work, housing, neighbourhoods, and parks that buck the market tendency to segregate and separate.

But the final ingredient of Canada’s success needs to be nurtured no less than the twins of social investment and social insurance. That, of course, is a sense of identity that values and even fosters diversity, where newcomers not only “integrate” but the mainstream also bends, adapts, and redefines itself. A broad sense of citizenship, and a culture of community and sharing are all the more important now in an era of inequality.

Ultimately the most corrosive dimension of inequality is that it feeds a sense of entitlement among the lucky, and a sense of shame among the unlucky, and this perverts our long run capacity to collectively invest, support, and care for ourselves and our children. This is the deepest foundation of social mobility in Canada, and something that we should continue to celebrate and value, but also something that we need to continue to nurture.

- Meanwhile, Leah Askarinam writes about the positive results when low-income parents are able to go back to school.

- Mitchell Anderson argues that we should treat real estate as a public resource, while Rob Carrick writes that the promise of homeownership as a source of economic security has proven false for far too many Canadians. And on that front, Luke Kawa reports on Canada's soaring private debt - which is particularly stark in comparison to the U.S. in light of its well-documented real estate bubbles.

- Finally, Citizens for Public Justice offers its suggestions for the federal budget - with a strong focus on both reducing poverty, and tackling climate change. And Jacqueline Howard points out that Canada's Prairies represent one of the regions which stands to be affected most as our climate changes.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Linda Tirado writes that whatever the language used as an excuse for turning public benefits into private profits, we should know better than to consider it credible:

Given how much I had heard my whole life about British dignity, and the fact that there is a thing here called the House of Lords, I had assumed I would find something like comity and refinement among the people charged with running the place. Instead, I found Boris Johnson.

I began to feel at home immediately. Then I heard the term “skivers and strivers”. It felt familiar – in America we say “makers and takers”. If you listen, you can’t help but hear US-style campaigning creeping into the British political system. It’s not only the rhyming phrases meant to boil an incredibly nuanced issue down to a simple cops v robbers scenario. It’s the exact same arguments.
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There is only so much variation you can put on one school of political thought, and both men are fairly mainstream-to-right with occasional forays into ideological counterproductivity. Both want to pare government spending to the bone, ostensibly to cut the debt and/or deficit depending on which we are very concerned with this week. In the end, you’ll wind up with some pretty sizeable tax cuts to the wealthy either way.

But can two countries with very different approaches to shared sacrifice and benefit have the same economic strategies? Given that a British citizen thinks it their right to see a doctor, and an American citizen may or may not think that the very idea is the reddest of Soviet plots, can privatising healthcare really solve the woes of both nations’ systems? It seems unlikely, given that the US still has an incredible number of people who are uninsured and the system is largely still run by private companies, that the solution will resemble what’s needed in the NHS.

- Jeremy Nuttall weighs in on the growth of food bank use in Canada. Miles Corak takes a look at income inequality, pointing out that a Working Income Tax Benefit which didn't wither away to nothing for the vast majority of workers would represent a good start in developing a more fair economic system. And Lars Osberg points out that there's plenty of room to increase how much high-end income goes to fund needed social benefits, while Carol Goar offers a few more suggestions as to how to pay for the Libs' campaign promises.

- CBC reports on the Canadian Institute for Health Information's latest study on the persistence - and in some case expansion - of health inequalities in Canada. And Canadian Doctors for Medicare calls for the federal government to step in and ensure that access to health care doesn't become a privilege reserved for the rich.

- Yves Engler writes that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is all about corporate control rather than free trade. And Michael Geist points out how the TPP is particularly flawed in its restrictions on digital policy.

- Barrie McKenna reports that the Libs are dropping at least one of the Cons' most gratuitous corporate giveaways by eliminating a mandatory P3 screen for infrastructure funding.

- Finally, the New York Times rightly argues that mass surveillance is neither necessary nor particularly helpful in trying to keep the public safe.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Miles Corak writes about the spread of economic inequality in Canada:

Companies like ATS epitomize the underlying tide driving jobs and incomes when the computer revolution meets global markets. This tide never went away, even if until a year or so ago a swift current of oil made it easier for some of us to paddle in the opposite direction. It’s a tide offering prosperity to a lucky few, creating proportionately fewer jobs than Canadians need, and leaving many hanging on tight to whatever jetsam floats within reach.

But this tide was always there, even when it looked like we were richer than others. And it will continue to leave many Canadians standing still, waiting, and hoping for the promise of prosperity.

- Paul Mason examines the costs of disposable labour and theorizes that a new era of better treatment for workers might be approaching. But Tony Atkinson argues that we'll need a major shift in public policy as well to share in any future economic gains - and offers a few policy prescriptions to reverse the trend.

- Josh Zumbrun discusses Gabriel Zucman's work in determining how much wealth has been siphoned into tax havens.

- Kaylie Tiessen points out that we can learn from past child care programs while developing a national model.

- Finally, Neil Macdonald rightly argues that Stephen Harper's cynical attacks on women who wear niqabs represents a repudiation of the very concept of individual rights. And Richard Gwyn highlights Thomas Mulcair's courage and honesty in fighting back against the Cons' bigotry rather than playing along for political gain.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Peter Schroeder reports on a galling lobbying effort to keep the U.S.' government paying free money to banks. And Jeremy Smith discusses how corporate groups have pushed to treat any form of public-interest regulation or fair taxation as an imposition on financial-sector profiteering:

Mr Das outflanks even Ms Reinhart in the scope of what he includes (as it appears) within the scope of "financial repression".  It also covers – according to his article – higher taxes, co-paying for government services, cuts in benefits, raising pensionable retirement dates, currency devaluations, as well as maintaining low and negative interest rates, and new liquidity requirements for banks.  What he fails to mention (yet this is surely more “repressive” than low interest rates) is the fact that real wages in the UK were “repressed” by about 8% from 2009 to 2013.

At the end of the day Mr Das’s argument is no more than the classic bond-holder’s self-serving contention down the ages: that creditors - and sovereign bond-holders above all - always and everywhere must have their real rate of return protected and enforced...
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What the “financial repression” proponents always ignore is that there was one period in western societies when the finance sector was well-managed, in line with Keynes’s policies for cheap money, with interest rates at low levels across the range of maturities. This was the period from 1945 to the early 1970s – and in some respects starting earlier, with the New Deal in America.  In his response to a paper published by the Bank of International Settlements on financial repression by Carmen Reinhart and  Maria Belen Sbrancia, "The Liquidation of Government Debt” (2011), Professor Alan Taylor commented:

We must be wary of confusing financial repression (which sounds like a terrible thing) with financial regulation (which sounds a good deal more wholesome).  In the context of current debate on how better to regulate the financial sector after the recent debacle, it is entirely understandable that the authorities have decided that banks and other entities were given far too much leeway to pursue activities that were not only self-destructive, but also destructive of the wider economy…

Whether we call it financial repression, lack of competition, tough regulation, the fact remains that the 1945 to 1975 era was a glorious period of economic growth in the advanced countries, as well as in many emerging economies.  It was a time of rapid economic growth with the allocation and mobilization of large amounts of capital, generalized macroeconomic and financial stability, sustained real wage growth and low unemployment…

In marked contrast, the subsequent thirty-some year period from 1975 to the present has been one of financial liberalization, but at the same time has seen a pronounced slowdown in growth and capital accumulation, more financial crises, real wage stagnation, and elevated unemployment.

- Meanwhile, Aimee Groth points out that entrepreneurship - so often pitched as a means of encouraging social mobility - actually arises out of privilege since the only people with the ability to take risks are those with alternate means of support. The Huffington Post comments on the "glass floor" which ensures that the children of privilege never lose their advantages. And Miles Corak outlines some steps we should be taking to build an inclusive economy.

- Marie-Danielle Smith follows up on the UN Human Rights Committee's review of Canada by pointing out that the Cons seem to be the only people in the country who don't see both room for improvement, and an urgent need to achieve it.

- Finally, Drew Nelles writes that if the Cons' Mother Canada proposal is an abomination, it also reflects far too well the culture of corporatism and self-worship that represents their most obvious contribution to Canada. Which means it's no wonder that (as Charles Mandel reports) the project's proponents are cancelling public meetings which might result in people actually thinking about what it means. 

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- John Cassidy offers ten options to reduce income inequality. And Andrew Coyne concurs with the first and most important suggestion that income supports sufficient to provide a stable living to everybody would make for the ideal solution.

- Meanwhile, Frances Russell is the latest to write that the Cons' income-splitting scheme is only designed to exacerbate the gap between the rich and the rest of us. Miles Corak notes that even Republicans can't avoid recognizing that equality of opportunity is fading in the U.S. - though he recognizes their inclination to avoid acknowledging the role of inequality as a cause. Logan Sachon interviews a few members of the precariat about about the extreme obstacles facing people who have to juggle part-time and temporary jobs for lack of full-time opportunities. And in an interview with Josh Eidelson, John Schmitt discusses how the U.S. has chosen inequality and worker suppression as the basis for its economic policy over the past several decades:

Workers today are a lot older than they were in the 1960s or the 1970s, and they are enormously better-educated than they were in the 1960s or 1970s. The fact that most workers are doing barely better, and some workers are doing worse than their counterparts from 40 or 50 years ago … suggest that the problem is that the way the economy converts people’s skills, people’s experience, people’s education and their training, into good jobs is what has deteriorated over this period. Not people’s underlying skills, or work experience, or education.

And I think it points to something completely different — and I think it’s absent from a lot of the discussion as [to] the reasons why we have economic inequality, and the reasons why we have these continuous problems with mobility and opportunity. And that has to do with bargaining power of workers. And you know, that I think is a piece that’s unfortunately missing from the president’s discussion of economic inequality, and it’s absent from his discussion of mobility and opportunity.

The way the economy has been restructured over the last three or four decades has removed the bargaining power of workers at the middle and the bottom. And it’s done that in a very systematic way.
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It doesn’t stop there … Immigrant workers have almost no rights under our labor law … Because their position is so weak, it undermines the power of low-wage workers who were born here and have — barely — more rights … It creates a perfect set of circumstances for low-wage employers, because they can play immigrant workers against U.S.-born workers, in an environment where neither of them has very many rights. So businesses don’t have a big incentive to try and fix that situation …

We’ve had trade deals such as [the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership], which we’re discussing right now, which are basically organized to increase the power, economic power of corporations, and to undermine the power of their workers and consumers.

You know, we privatized state and local government functions at quite an alarming rate … The main advantage that the private sector has over the public sector is not that they’re more efficient at organizing school buses. It’s that they pay their workers less and they don’t give them benefits …

That discussion of bargaining power, and the politics and the policies around it, is firstly what’s going to be missing from the State of the Union address.

- Speaking of privatization, Travis Homenuk criticizes the Sask Party's plan to privatize food services in correctional centres. CBC reports that Ontario's highways are suffering from the poor performance of private maintenance operations - though it's far from clear that the imposition of contractual fines makes up for the injuries suffered by citizens due to contractor neglect. And Sean Shaw discusses how P3s are at best a matter of accounting and budgeting trickery rather than value for public money.

- But Matthew Taylor reports that the trend toward privatization is far from universal - as a cross-party group of UK MPs is working on legislation to keep public services public.

- Finally, the CP reports that the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation has understandably given up on a federal environmental monitoring program. And while it's understandable that nobody would trust, say, a government which puts oil lobbyists on the public payroll to stop environmental research, there's all the more work to be done in ensuring that First Nations with much to lose (or gain) from tar sands development can engage in meaningful discussions with the next federal government.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- The Economist discusses research by Miles Corak and others on intergenerational inequality. And interestingly, other studies seem to suggest Corak has actually underestimated the barriers to social mobility:

THE “Great Gatsby curve” is the name Alan Krueger, an economic adviser to Barack Obama, gave to the relationship between income inequality and social mobility across the generations. Mr Krueger used the phrase in a 2012 speech to describe the work of Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa, who has shown that more unequal economies tend to have less fluid societies. Mr Corak reckons that in some places, like America and Britain, around 50% of income differences in one generation are attributable to differences in the previous generation (in more egalitarian Scandinavia, the number is less than 30%).
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As late as 2011 aristocratic surnames appear among the ranks of lawyers, considered for this purpose a high-status position, at a frequency almost six times that of their occurrence in the population as a whole. Mr Clark reckons that even in famously mobile Sweden, some 70-80% of a family’s social status is transmitted from generation to generation across a span of centuries. Other economists use similar techniques to reveal comparable immobility in societies from 19th-century Spain to post-Qing-dynasty China. Inherited advantage is detectable for a very long time.

A second method relies on the chance overrepresentation of rare surnames in high- or low-status groups at some point in the past. If very few Britons are called Micklethwait, for example, and people with that name were disproportionately wealthy in 1800, then you can gauge long-run mobility by studying how long it takes the Micklethwait name to lose its wealth-predicting power. In a paper written by Mr Clark and Neil Cummins of Queens College, City University of New York, the authors use data from probate records of 19th-century estates to classify rare surnames into different wealth categories. They then use similar data to see how common each surname is in these categories in subsequent years. Again, some 70-80% of economic advantage seems to be transmitted from generation to generation.

That said, I do wonder whether a "rare surname" starting point would pick up factors which might be better classified as relating to family reputations and connections than wealth - though the advantages presented by those factors obviously serve to create an unfair playing field as well.

- Meanwhile, Tim Dickinson notes that the wealthy in the U.S. have stacked the deck even further in their favour with the help of the Republican Party - as a massive increase in high-end incomes since 1997 hasn't been matched with much added contribution to the greater good by way of tax revenues.

- And speaking of stacked decks, Max Paris reports on the oil industry's (thus far successful) lobbying to avoid any significant greenhouse gas emission regulation.

- Crawford Kilian reviews Paul Wells' The Longer I'm Prime Minister while noting that Stephen Harper may have planted the seeds of his own demise.

- Finally, Stephen Maher points out that the Cons' attitude toward law-breaking by their own allies would be better applied to the criminal justice system in general:

The Conservatives’ tough-on-crime message, delivered at every opportunity, is a message about the criminal as other, like the late Anthony Smith and the other guys in hoodies in that photo of Ford outside a crack house. They are evildoers who need to be punished.

The Tories, like Ford himself, oppose supervised injection sites for drug users, which save lives and reduce crime. They give voters what they want: the emotional satisfaction of punishing wrongdoers.

This government has imposed mandatory minimum sentences across the board, not just on violent criminals but also on pot growers.

It sounds tough, but taking away discretion from judges costs us more, does nothing to make us safer and leads to injustices.

Consider the case of Leroy Smickle, a gainfully employed 27-year-old with no criminal record who in 2009 had the bad luck to be caught posing with a loaded handgun for a Facebook profile pic, and found himself looking at three years in prison. Ontario Superior Court Judge Anne Molloy ruled that the sentence would be “fundamentally unfair,” and declared the minimum unconstitutional. The Crown appealed, demanding that he serve his three years.

Flaherty shed tears for the Fords because he knows them and knows they’re suffering, because whatever the tawdry facts of the case, he feels for them.

We should show as much compassion for Leroy Smickle and his family.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Today is of course voting day in Regina's wastewater treatment plant referendum - and you can get voting information here. And Paul Dechene explains his personal Yes vote by pointing to the need for public control over our infrastructure, while Brian Webb highlights the importance of the treatment plan for water quality in Regina and elsewhere.

- Frances Russell traces the decline of democracy and equality in Canada over the past few decades to free trade agreements designed to limit both. And Miles Corak confirms that Canada has seen the same type of stagnation and stratification as the U.S.:

At the same time the slice of the pie going to those in the bottom has not changed, while those in the middle have, indeed, experienced a decline in their share.

These patterns are remarkably similar to those in the United States. In fact, I have shamelessly borrowed the entire structure of this post from an article in The New York Times by Eduardo Porter summarizing a report released by the US Census Bureau.

Thirty years of economic growth; thirty years of incremental but steady increases in productivity; after major public policy initiatives, like free trade with the United States and other countries beginning in 1980s, like the relentless and unforgiving pursuit of zero inflation that unleashed a major recession in the early 1990s, like slashing government deficits “come what may” in the years that followed, like a major run up in commodity prices and expansion of the resource sector, partly subsidized through the public purse, policies conducted in the name of increased prosperity and a better future for all; and yet after all of this, the typical family now feels less secure and has no higher a standard of living than a generation ago.

- Meanwhile, Robyn Benson notes that government and corporate attacks on the few institutions speaking up for workers aren't about to stop anytime soon.

- And finally, Pat Atkinson comments on the mess the Wall government has made of education in Saskatchewan.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Matthew Yglesias sums up the effects of four decades of U.S. union-busting, and points out how the supposed benefit from pointing a fire hose filled with money in the general direction of the corporate sector hasn't materialized:

If you turn back 30 or 40 years, the policy rationale for crushing labor union influence went something like this: In the short-term crushing private sector labor unions is going to lead to a surge in corporate profits, but profits are the fuel of investment and long-term economic growth. Companies with high profits have the capital necessary to invest. And the existence of large profit margins means there are profit opportunities to be exploited with new investment. It makes perfect sense. But it hasn't happened, and profits have soared far in excess of investment.
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(S)everal decades into this experiment, we're seeing much more of the "profits surge" than the "surging profits lead to an investment boom" dynamic. One explanation for this that's growing in popularity on the right is that the rise of more capital-friendly politics in the mid-1970s coincidentally occurred at the exact same time as a structural slowdown in the rate of technological progress, so while it seems like anti-labor politics has failed to deliver the goods, it's really all just a stroke of bad luck.

And maybe that's right—just because an (unfalsifiable) proposition seems conveniently conducive to the interests of very rich people doesn't mean it's false. But it sure seems false to me.

- Duncan Cameron comments on the Harper Cons' latest transparent attempt to attack anybody still making anything approaching a decent living - in this case, striking foreign service officers. And David Bush points out the need for an active rank-and-file membership to bolster the effectiveness of unions.

- Miles Corak discusses how income inequality has been exacerbated in Canada over the past few decades - and how we shouldn't see temporary resource price spikes as an alternative to income security:

I don’t see commodity prices increasing indefinitely, and don’t see the last 15 years revealing the changes in the underlying structure of the economy and the jobs market.

The fact that a sustained resource boom has not increased median incomes higher than they were at the past economic booms suggests an underlying structural change that is working against the typical household.
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An awareness of the experience and policy discussion in the United States sheds light on the impact of policies like falling real minimum wages, increasing low-skilled immigration, less investment in high quality accessible education in the early years, higher tuition fees, and limited parental leave.

And as a result I see more clearly the need and the possibilities for fundamentally changing tax and social policies, and promoting human capital investment in a way that favours families who have made little or no progress over the course of 30 years, others who have witnessed outright declines in their standard of living, and even others who in spite of their overall income levels face increased insecurity.

- Finally, both Les Whittington and Nick Taylor-Vaisey discuss the Cons' continued refusal to set greenhouse gas emission regulations for the tar sands. 

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Gerald Kaplan discusses how the privileges of power have contributed to the utterly callous response to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion by Stephen Harper and Ed Burkhardt:

For me, of all Burkhardt’s outrageous statements nothing surpasses his public accusation that the train’s engineer, Tom Harding, was responsible for the disaster, suspending him without pay. Among the victims of the train derailment, Tom Harding must now be included.

In truth, of course, Burkhardt had no more clue than you or I or Lord Acton how the derailment happened and who might be responsible. Indeed, his own company policies have very pointedly been questioned. Yet he simply invented the culprit, because I suppose that’s what rich and powerful people are able to do.
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Prime Minister Harper is the other powerhouse who showed last week that he knows he can get away with just about anything. First, he named Pierre Poilievre as his new Minister of State for Democratic Reform, an oxymoron by any standard. Globe columnist Lawrence Martin describes Poilievre as “one of [Harper’s] most belligerent, thuggish, MPs”. Next to the Prime Minister himself, with his obsession about “enemies”, no member of this government has demonstrated contempt for the spirit of democracy more than Mr. Poilievre. As Lawrence Martin wrote, this was one of Mr. Harper’s well-known “in-your-face moves.”

Second, Mr. Harper appointed to the sensitive post of Canadian ambassador to Jordan (with responsibility to Iraq) one Bruno Saccomani, who until that moment was his bodyguard, or, more formally, the RCMP man who headed his security team.

It is surely not too much to expect a Canadian ambassador to know something about the complex world of diplomacy and all that entails. And if you’re being assigned to be our country’s chief representative in two turbulent countries in a dangerously volatile region, shouldn’t you have a soupcon of background in the area? Or is that just me?

- Meanwhile, Miles Corak points out the disturbingly tight relationship between family background and economic outcomes in the U.S. And while Canada serves for now as a contrast, it's well worth noting that the Harper Cons are doing their best to push us down the same path of walled-off wealth for a few and a precarious living for the rest.

- Paul Krugman highlights the dishonesty and anti-worker bias behind the Great Pension Scare. Which, needless to say, is presented a propos of nothing.

[Update: Let's add Doug J's take:

The war against public pensions reminds me of the Iraq War. Even if one accepts that there is/was a big pre-existing problem in either case, the constant stream of lies is troubling.]

- Also, the Cons make clear what happens to honest civil servants who allow truth to undermine their deliberately false talking points. 

- The Ottawa Citizen recognizes and laments the shameful exploitation of hungry First Nations Canadians for experimentation. Bernard Valcourt isn't so big on shame, and considers the matter closed by an apology for other monstrous attacks on First Nations culture.

- Finally, Susan Delacourt comments on why the Cons' departmental enemies lists may go far beyond politics as usual - particularly if information intended for government use only is being illegally loaded into CIMS for partisan purposes.

Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Polly Toynbee writes that there's no magic involved in collecting fair tax rates from the rich - only a need for the political will to fund public priorities:

Cutting the 50% top rate suggests no great enthusiasm for rigorous taxing. Last week's ONS figures revealed gigantic avoidance of the 50% top rate. It could have been collected but George Osborne needed to prove it didn't work. The Treasury estimated raising the rate to 50% should bring in £6.2bn, but the actual return was a puny £100m.

In year one, before its official start date, high earners gamed the tax by rushing to take dividends and bonuses early. They paid more into pensions, gaining undeserved higher tax relief. Or they used trusts, or took income as capital gains. (That can be stopped, by fixing capital gains, as Nigel Lawson did, at the same rate as income tax, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies advocates.) Once Osborne announced the top rate would fall to 45%, high earners gamed it again. Incomes Data Services reports a massive delay in bonuses until after 6 April, when they leapt up by 107% in the finance sector to catch the new 45% rate. That could have been forestalled.

To Osborne it proved there's no point in taxing the rich. But the IFS says Denmark successfully collects its high top rate because it has no dodges: the rich can be taxed if reliefs are blocked. But this government never worried over income being sucked up from middle to top, with the share of national income taken by the top 1% now having risen to 14%, as GDP shifts from pay to profits. Osborne redistributes taxes the wrong way. Even raising tax thresholds sees most gain go to the top half, not to low earners.
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Tax cheating should be Labour's chance to tell honest political truths: you get what you pay for, you can't have Swedish services on US tax ideology. Tax is the price we pay for civilisation. At elections, all parties promise the impossible, more with less and cuts in "bureaucracy" to pay for everything. Treating the public like children on tax does nothing for trust in politics. The door has opened for that conversation.

- Meanwhile, Miles Corak notes that we can't make any strides toward equality of opportunity without treating more equal distribution of wealth as a priority:

Relatively less upward mobility of the least advantaged is one reason why intergenerational mobility is lower in the United States than in other countries to which Americans are often compared. But it is not the only reason. Intergenerational mobility is also lower because children of top-earning parents are more likely to become top earners in their turn. An era of rising inequality is more likely to heighten these differences than to diminish them.

Inequality lowers mobility because it shapes opportunity. It heightens the income consequences of innate differences between individuals; it also changes opportunities, incentives, and institutions that form, develop, and transmit characteristics and skills valued in the labor market; and it shifts the balance of power so that some groups are in a position to structure policies or otherwise support their children’s achievement independent of talent.

Thus, those who are concerned about equality of opportunity should also care about inequality of outcomes.

- The CP reports on Canada's role in spying on allies through CSEC's electronic surveillance.

- Frances Russell comments on how both the federal ethics commissioner and the RCMP have all too willingly functioned as servants of the Harper Cons rather than the public interest.

- Finally, Sean Holman writes about the corrosive effect of excessive party discipline on Canadian democracy:

(I)t’s reasonable to assume “there’s got to be times, random chance if nothing else, that some of us disagree with what we’re voting on.”

But the fear of talking about what happens in caucus and cabinet – the private spaces where MLAs, MPPs and MPs are allowed to voice dissenting opinions about public issues – means that Canadians have little understanding of why their representatives make such compromises.

An example of that fear: during a background interview, one politician told me that, as a first-time provincial candidate, “I knew I was part of a larger franchise and I would only be able to sell drinks in the same size cup as everyone else. But I did think I would be able to at least decorate my store the way I wanted and have my own customer service approach.”

But when we sat down for what became a sweaty, two-hour on-camera interview, the politician talked about being a supporter (of) party discipline.

The politician later told me about suffering “sleepless nights” contemplating what may have been said during that interview, which I left on the cutting room floor.