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By Greg Fingas, on May 7, 2013, at 9:41 am This and that for your Tuesday reading…
- Joseph Stiglitz discusses the abuse of intellectual property law to turn publicly-funded research into privately-held profit centres (no matter how many people die as a result): (A) Utah-based company, Myriad Genetics, claims more than that. It claims to own the rights to any test for the presence of the two critical genes associated with breast cancer – and has ruthlessly enforced that right, though their test is inferior to one that Yale University was willing to provide at much lower cost. The consequences have been tragic: Thorough, affordable testing that identifies high-risk (Read more…)
By Greg Fingas, on April 13, 2013, at 7:56 am Assorted content for your weekend reading.
- Thomas Walkom offers an insider’s look at outsourcing: Arlene says any outsourcing scheme begins with the institution’s senior management. Usually, she says, the aim is to transfer about 60 per cent of the affected jobs — often in back-shop areas like information technology — to India where wages are a fraction of those paid in Canada.
The remaining 40 per cent, which generally require more local support, are outsourced to third-party firms in Canada. They in turn, subcontract the jobs to individual Canadians. The aim here, Arlene says, is to not only to . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on February 17, 2013, at 11:14 am This and that for your Sunday reading.
- Joseph Stiglitz discusses how the combination of increasingly concentrated wealth and deteriorating has eliminated any pretense of equal opportunity within the U.S.: It’s not that social mobility is impossible, but that the upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity. According to research from the Brookings Institution, only 58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income earners move out of that category, and just 6 percent born into the bottom fifth move into the top. Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
By himelfarb, on January 24, 2013, at 3:06 pm
Notes: Keynote talk, CCPA Post-Austerity session, Toronto, January 9, 2013
We are living in the “Age of Austerity” or at least so says David Cameron, the UK’s Prime Minister. He made this announcement in 2009 at the Conservative convention just before becoming prime minister. This meant, he explained, that he would have to fix the errors, the folly of previous governments. He would restore the economy by cutting spending, reducing the size of government, and shifting resources from public to private.
In 2010, the G20 met in Toronto and, apart from arresting citizens, they were also talking austerity. Canada led
. . . → Read More: Alex’s Blog: The Age of Austerity
By Greg Fingas, on January 20, 2013, at 10:38 am Assorted content for your Sunday reading.
- Joseph Stiglitz discusses how the U.S.’ extreme inequality is limiting its prospects for economic recovery: There are all kinds of excuses for inequality. Some say it’s beyond our control, pointing to market forces like globalization, trade liberalization, the technological revolution, the “rise of the rest.” Others assert that doing anything about it would make us all worse off, by stifling our already sputtering economic engine. These are self-serving, ignorant falsehoods.
Market forces don’t exist in a vacuum — we shape them. Other countries, like fast-growing Brazil, have shaped them in
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on January 1, 2013, at 12:02 pm This and that to start the new year.
- Lynn Stuart Parramore discusses the dangers of needless means-testing for basic social benefits: When I spoke to Joseph Stiglitz, he discussed the idea that “means-testing is mean.” Programs like Medicare and Social Security, he explained, are matters of political economy. They are important to social cohesion, where support comes from the fact that everybody is participating. “We don’t means-test public education,” explained Stiglitz, “because we believe that we want people to have the same opportunities and we lose out on that with means-testing.” The same is true of our
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on September 11, 2012, at 9:07 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- Don Lenihan responds to Allan Gregg’s recent critique of Canadian politics, featuring this on the connection that ought to exist between ideology and policy: First, the fact that a policy is based on ideological conviction does not mean it is opposed to reason. According to Gregg, “to follow a course based on dogma or ideology, it becomes necessary to remove science and reason.” I disagree. As I wrote a few weeks ago, each of us has only a limited knowledge of the society around us. An ideology is a system
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on August 14, 2012, at 10:01 am This and that for your Tuesday reading.
- While a misleading “wealth equals health” headline seems to have been the main take-away from the CMA’s health polling, Iglika Ivanova frames the issue more accurately in pointing out that the non-wealth determinants of health are the areas where Canada has far more room for improvement: (L)ifestyle choices are a relatively small factor in shaping health outcomes, much less important than our living and working conditions. In fact, living and working conditions often constrain our choices to a very large extent. The health research is very clear (p. ix): “Chronic disease
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
By Greg Fingas, on July 23, 2012, at 9:36 am Miscellaneous material to start your week.
- Joe Stiglitz discusses the link between increased inequality and the U.S.’ economic frailty: Any solution to today’s problems requires addressing the economy’s underlying weakness: a deficiency in aggregate demand. Firms won’t invest if there is no demand for their products. And one of the key reasons for lack of demand is America’s level of inequality — the highest in the advanced countries.
Because those at the top spend a much smaller portion of their income than those in the bottom and middle, when money moves from the bottom and middle to
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
By The Arbourist, on July 5, 2012, at 8:30 am From a great interview on Alter.net –
“LP: Some say that if we redistribute income in a more equitable way, people won’t want to work as hard. Is that true? What happens to our motivation to work when things are so inequitable?
JS: One of the myths that I try to destroy is the myth that if we do anything about inequality it will weaken our economy. And that’s why the title of my book is The Price of Inequality. What I argue is that if we did attack these sources of inequality, we would actually have a stronger
. . . → Read More: Dead Wild Roses: Joseph Stiglitz – On Redistribution of Wealth
By Greg Fingas, on May 4, 2012, at 10:48 am 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
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
By Norman Farrell, on April 25, 2012, at 5:22 am UK is back in recession, OECD says, Phillip Inman, The Guardian, March 29, 2012
“The UK is heading back into recession and will be among the slowest of the world’s largest economies to recover in the first half of this year, according to a study by the Paris-based thinktank, the OECD.
Only Italy will struggle over a longer period to return to growth, highlighting the difficult situation confronting the British government as it battles to boost confidence and get the economy back on track…”
UK economy sinks back into recession, Norma Cohen, Economics Correspondent, Financial Times, April
. . . → Read More: Northern Insight: Austerity and recession, invariably linked
By himelfarb, on January 16, 2012, at 4:47 pm
Austerity, we have been told repeatedly by pundits and political leaders, is the defining issue in these uncertain times, the solution to our economic challenges.
We have been given fair warning that the next federal budget will be first about cuts – cuts to government even as we continue to cut taxes. We can expect the same from most provincial budgets.
This, we are told, is what must be done. Austerity is not simply the best way, the argument goes, but the only way, and not just for us but for our friends and allies. Canada has become the champion
. . . → Read More: Alex’s Blog: The Price Of Austerity
By Greg Fingas, on December 24, 2011, at 1:08 pm This and that for your weekend reading.
- Thomas Walkom tries to be optimistic about the year ahead, and likely settles on the best reason for hope that Canada’s politics will see some change for the better: Canada, like Australia and Brazil, is getting by on sales of raw materials whose prices are kept high by seemingly insatiable Chinese demand.
But the key word here is “seemingly.” The world has seen so-called Asian miracles before, starting with Japan in the 1980s and running through various so-called Tigers such as Thailand in the ’90s.
In the end, these miracles proved
. . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
By Greg Fingas, on October 27, 2011, at 10:45 am This and that for your Thursday reading.- J. David Hulchanski identifies the most important common theme within the Occupy movement:One thing the “Occupy” movement does not lack is a clear message: the system is broken and the folks who broke it ar… . . . → Read More: Accidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
By redbedhead, on August 11, 2011, at 6:30 am As the old saying goes – expecting different results while repeating the same act over and over again is a sign of psychosis. That, however, has never stood in the way of government policy where bureaucratic inertia, the desire of the ruling class to c… . . . → Read More: RedBedHead: Why Keeping Interest Low Won’t Save The Economy
By redbedhead, on July 27, 2011, at 6:30 am Hate to say it folks but there’s about a snowball’s chance in hell that the world won’t have returned to recession by the end of this year. There are many factors involved that make this likely – the necessary slowing of China’s growth, the defaults an… . . . → Read More: RedBedHead: US Debt War Will Lead To Recession
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