Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Jason Hickel challenges the spin that poverty and inequality are being meaningfully reduced around the world as our global economy is currently structured. Sarah Marsh reports on the reemergence of "Dickensian diseases" as a result of cuts to social supports in the UK. And Richard Reeves discusses how maternal depression (caused by poverty among other factors) serves as a barrier to social mobility.

- Meanwhile, Chuck Collins highlights how a wealth tax could simultaneously provide the U.S. with both a massive infusion of needed public resources, and a necessary rebalancing of political power.

- Gary Mason discusses how systematic money laundering may be even more prevalent in Canada than previously known. And Mathieu Galarneau examines our dubious position of paying more to telecoms for mobile data than any other country on the planet - though it's again worth noting that the provinces with public-sector options represent exceptions to the national pattern.

- Courtney Carlberg and Jen Budney examine Saskatchewan's woeful standing in Canada when it comes to child care. And Angela Brown reports on Ryan Meili's needed push for a mental health strategy - including both a greater focus on the causes of mental illness, and the availability of treatment for people who need it.

- Finally, Lana Payne calls out the focus of right-wing governments on punishing perceived enemies rather than serving the public.

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.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Yutaka Dirks reviews Lars Osberg's The Age of Increasing Inequality, with a particular focus on how matters have been getting worse in recent decades.

- Ryan Nunn, Jana Parsons and Jay Shambaugh study (PDF) the connection between geography and inequality, including the role of decreasing migration in locking in and exacerbating existing disparities. And Danny Dorling examines the link between higher inequality and lower life expectancy around the globe.

- Mary Bousted points out how educational inequalities arise out of social and environmental factors long before students ever set foot in a classroom. And Alex Hemingway argues that at the very least, public money shouldn't be spent subsidizing those inequalities through elite private schools.

- Rachel Shabi discusses UK Labour's turn toward democratic socialism - and the resonance of the prospect of economic democracy within the general public.

- Dirk Meissner reports on the denial of cancer treatment to a homeless man as an unconscionable example of the gaps in our health care system. And Hasan Sheikh offers a response to the desire of Doug Ford and others to make the availability of necessary care even more contingent on one's wealth. 

- Finally, Andrew Coyne discusses the climate nihilism of a sadly growing number of anti-carbon-tax demagogues. PressProgress offers a reminder that we stand to lose tens of billions of dollars a year from extreme weather events caused by climate change alone. And Zoya Terstein argues that the primary problem with carbon pricing as it stands is that we're nowhere close to properly measuring the damage we're doing to our planet. 

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Karl Russell and Peter Goodman note that lower unemployment rates in the U.S aren't translating into higher wages. Alena Semuels points out the barriers preventing people from moving in order to pursue a higher income. And Kevin Brice-Lall interviews Jonathan Rosenblum about the need for activism to push beyond the initial fight for a $15 minimum wage:

What can you tell us about the business backlash in Seattle — how did they fight the movement for a $15 minimum wage? Given the Ontario Liberal Party’s promise of a $15 minimum, what advice do you have for activists currently fighting against business lobby?
...
It’s critical for us to recognize what produces concessions in the first place. In my experience bargaining union contracts and negotiating with politicians, I’ve found that it’s easy to overestimate the importance of what happens at the bargaining table. When I’ve led union negotiations I’ve emphasized to bargaining team members that what we win in the end depends 90 percent on what we do outside of bargaining, and only 10 percent on what takes place inside the room.

There are three related principles that constitute the bedrock of effective movement work in politics. First, a clear recognition that anything and everything we win in the political arena isn’t the product of political enlightenment by the establishment; it’s a concession to our power.

Second, a recognition that power — the ability to shape and influence things — is what we get when we band together and take action, whether in the streets, workplace, in halls of parliament, or through political campaigns. Our power is a function of our demonstrated ability to harm, punish, or embarrass our adversaries, to disrupt their agenda. There are no gimmicks or shortcuts to building collective worker power. And third, an understanding that the balance of power is not static, and we have to keep organizing or we’ll lose whatever gains we’ve achieved.

- Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt discusses how the decline of retail sales (at least through many familiar businesses such as Sears) figures to affect political dynamics in Canada.

- Joe Gunn highlights how Canadians are still waiting for a federal government to start fulfilling the promise of reducing poverty.

- Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on Ontario's new guidelines for mental health claims which (like those of too many other provinces) establish an unfair double standard. And Benoit Denizet-Lewis points out the alarming increase in anxiety among teens.  

- Finally, Alex MacPherson reports on a legal opinion from Manitoba showing (to nobody's surprise) that Brad Wall's posturing against federal climate change policy has no basis in reality.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Abi Wilkinson writes that we'll be far better served fighting inequality generally rather than limiting our focus to issues of social mobility:

When we talk about social mobility, we’re talking about movement between the strata of our social class system. (Generally upwards movement – nobody seems to want to discuss the fact that making room for people from poorer backwards at the top might necessitate others, born into privilege, travelling in the opposite direction.)

The ideology is meritocratic. It’s assumed that hard work and aptitude should be the only factors determining your future prospects. The goal of improving baseline living standards is framed mainly as a method of improving the opportunities of individuals born into poverty.

As long as class stratification continues to exist, though, opportunities can never be truly equal. The Time for Change report discusses the impact poverty has on children’s ability to learn but also notes that the best-paid jobs remain “deeply elitist”. Employers continue to hire in their own image, assuming that people like them will “fit in” with clients and the workplace culture. People continue to use their connections to give their children a leg up.

No amount of targeted social mobility or anti-poverty policy can truly mitigate the ability of class privilege to perpetuate through generations. And there’s a whole other moral conundrum around meritocracy that is another column in itself – about whether natural aptitude should mean you deserve a nicer life.
...
More mbitiously, we could try to reimagine our economic system in a way that removes or decreases the power imbalance between people in possession of capital and those who need to sell their labour to survive – while also recognising the issues of stratification within each category. The Alternative Models of Ownership report produced by the Labour party offers some ideas about how this may be achieved.

Focusing narrowly on social mobility is like affixing a fraying rope ladder between the branches of a tree, when in reality the trunk is rotting from the inside and the whole thing needs chopping down. The British Social Attitudes Survey, also released today, has found increased support for state intervention and redistribution through higher taxes. More and more of us are recognising that the current system is broken – this feels like the perfect time for a radical rethink.

- Kevin Carmichael discusses the need for Canada to address its own burgeoning inequality - as well as the danger that politicians with a short-term mindset won't see fit to bother. And the Economist takes note of the impact of high-end tax evasion in allowing the richest few to avoid making a fair contribution to the societies which allow them to succeed. 

- The Observer comments on the role governments should play in reducing the stress faced by citizens as a means of improving mental health outcomes. And Richard Friedman points out that instead, we've settled for an environment which positively breeds addictions by combining easy access to addictive goods with constant stress and anxiety.

- Finally, Romeo Saganash calls out the Libs' callousness in pushing a jingoistic celebration of a history steeped in cultural genocide.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Alana Semuels examines new research showing a decline in U.S. social mobility within an individual's working life:

Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.”

Carr and Wiemers used data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which tracks individual workers’ earnings, to examine how earnings mobility changed between 1981 and 2008. They ranked people into deciles, meaning that one group fell below the 10th percentile of earnings, another between the 10th and 20th, and so on; then they measured someone’s chances of moving from one decile to another. But the researchers wanted to see not just the probability of moving to a different income bracket over the course of a career, but also how that probability has changed over time. So they measured a given worker’s chances of moving between deciles ​during two periods​, one from 1981 to 1996 and another from 1993 to 2008.​

They found quite a disparity. “The probability of ending where you start has gone up, and the probability of moving up from where you start has gone down,” Carr said. For instance, the chance that someone starting in the bottom 10 percent would move above the 40th percentile decreased by 16 percent. The chance that someone starting in the middle of the earnings distribution would reach one of the top two earnings deciles decreased by 20 percent. Yet people who started in the seventh decile are 12 percent more likely to end up in the fifth or sixth decile—a drop in earnings—than they used to be.

Overall, the probability of someone starting and ending their career in the same decile has gone up for every income rank. “For whatever reason, there was a path upward in the earnings distribution that has been blocked for some people, or is not as steep as it used to be,” Carr said.

- Meanwhile, Alissa Quart notes that precarity and economic insecurity reach a long way up the income spectrum. Trish Kelly discusses the growth of working poverty in Vancouver. And Rachelle Younglai reports that an increasing number of Canadians with advanced degrees are mired in poverty despite the work they've put into their education.

- Laurel Gregory reports on the lack of accessible child care for lower- and middle-income families.

- Tom Parkin examines the record amount of lobbying happening at the federal level - and it's particularly worth noting the anti-social causes which are being pushed repeatedly. And the CP reports on the ongoing effects of the Cons' moves to undermine regulations.

- Finally, Aldo Caliari comments on the importance of establishing and enforcing international standards for fair taxes, rather than allowing the wealthy few to exploit tax havens.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Martin O'Neill and Rick Pearce interview Thomas Piketty about possible policy responses to growing inequality:

[Martin O'Neill]...(D)o you think that the response to the increase in inequality might be one that explores the sorts of avenues that Meade opened up, and doesn’t just rely on mechanisms of redistribution through the tax system?
 
Thomas Piketty: Yes, I think that you are right – I am glad that you have asked this question. First I would like to pay tribute to James Meade and this long tradition of British economists, including Tony Atkinson, with whom we have been working with a lot and who is largely the godfather of historical studies of income and wealth. Tony wrote a great book in 1978 on the history of the inequality of wealth in this country – and this has been a source of inspiration to me along with others...

James Meade, just like me, believed that progressive taxation and the development of other forms of property relationships and of other forms of governance are complementary institutions. In the book I probably place too much emphasis on progressive taxation, but I do talk about the development of new forms of governance and property structure, but probably not sufficiently. So I agree with that – that can be for volume two!

Let me make the point that these are complementary institutions, because progressive taxation of wealth will always be necessary even if we manage to develop these other alternative forms of property. Also progressive taxation of wealth comes with increased financial transparency – transparency of assets and company accounts – and that is very important because, if you want workers to be involved in the management of their company and if you want people more generally to be involved in the management of the economy, then you want access to information. You want to know who earns what in the company, and you want to know who owns the shares. When you have financial opacity about property and shareholder structures of the company, and you don’t have access to proper accounts, then you don’t have the information that you need.

Financial opacity is the worst enemy of economic democracy; so you need transparency if you want to have economic democracy.

- Meanwhile, Kieran Healy suggests that people take a look at the seating arrangement on an Air Gini patterned after actual income inequality. And Trish Hennessy crunches the numbers on the billionaire class in Canada and around the world.

- Travis Gettys discusses Gregory Clark's findings that social mobility in the U.S. is no better than that in medieval England, meaning that the myth of being able to succeed merely by working hard is becoming less and less believable. And the Campaign to Raise the Minimum Wage debunks the claim that it's small businesses rather than corporate behemoths that seek to pay workers the bare minimum.

- The Canadian Youth Delegation exposes the embarrassing positions the Cons are taking at the Lima climate change talks, while Emily Chung reports that they've managed to make Canada irrelevant to any international conversation.

- And finally, Richard Blackwell makes it abundantly clear that the Cons' cheerleading for the oil industry has nothing at all to do with jobs, as a new Clean Energy Canada report shows that there are already more jobs being generated in green energy than in the tar sands.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Miles Corak comments on how inequality undercuts social mobility. And Joseph Stiglitz highlights the fact that the vast majority of people hold a strong interest in not having their path to a secure and successful life blocked by a wall of upper-class money.

- If there's anything the Wall government can't stand, it's collective action. And following up on Murray Mandryk's column, Erin points out that the Sask Party's eagerness to set up an opt-out union dues system is a textbook example of how to make collective systems fail by encouraging free riders.

- Meanwhile, there's some good news about the dividends rolling in thanks to Saskatchewan's Crown corporations. But it's worth keeping an eye on how long that lasts when they've been ordered not to use their expertise outside Saskatchewan's borders.

- Finally, Barbara Yaffe recognizes one of the NDP's crucial strengths in addressing Con attacks - as the longtime Harper strategy of answering any criticism with "they did it too" looks even more hollow when the party across the way hasn't actually been in a position to get into the type of trouble the Cons seem to step into by the day.