Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee discuss the utter failure of corporate-driven "market" incentives to produce fair outcomes:

If it is not financial incentives, what else might people care about? The answer is something we know in our guts: status, dignity, social connections. Chief executives and top athletes are driven by the desire to win and be the best. The poor will walk away from social benefits if they come with being treated like a criminal. And among the middle class, the fear of losing their sense of who they are and their status in the local community can be an extraordinarily paralyzing force.

The trouble is that so much of America’s social policy has been shaped by three principles that ignore these facts; to fix it we need to start from there.
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(W)e should not be unduly scared of raising taxes to pay for these projects. There is no evidence that it would disrupt the economy. This is, of course, a touchy subject politically: The idea of raising taxes on anyone but the very rich is not popular. So we should start with raising the rates on top income and adding a wealth tax, as many have proposed. The key then would be to link the added revenue to efforts like the ones we describe above, which would serve to slowly restore the legitimacy of the government’s efforts to help those in need. This will take time, but we have to start somewhere — and soon.

- Pearl Eliadis reviews Nathan Andrews and J. Andrew Grant's Corporate Social Responsibility and Canada’s Role in Africa’s Extractive Sectors, while noting that corporations and governments alike have been painfully eager to permit gross human rights abuses and environmental destruction in the name of profits abroad. And Rupert Neate reports on the increased demand for private jets as an indication as to how the ultra-rich are completely detached from the limitations facing most people.

- Markham Hislop looks at Husky's recent layoffs and automation - in the wake of massive tax giveaways - as a signal that there's no future in which the oil sector provides many good jobs. Which is to say that if green growth may not be an option in the short term, nor is there much reason to think pouring more money into dirty energy will actually produce results for workers either.

- Finally, Shifrah Gadamsetti discusses how Jason Kenney is slashing Alberta's future with massive cuts to education, while David Climenhaga points out the lack of any plausible need for the UCP's attacks on public services. Jason Warick reports on the new of undrinkable water in a brand-new North Battleford hospital as just another example of what comes from P3 projects. And Bartley Kives notes that trumped-up separatism is serving as a convenient distraction for Kenney, Scott Moe and other conservatives trying to avoid being called on their antisocial choices in government.