Abridged Text of Remarks to Panel on Canadian Political Economy in Commemoration of Abraham Rotstein and Stephen Clarkson, Department of Political Science, September 16 2016 Let us cast our minds back to the decade of the 1960 – which I recall as the best of times – as the time
Continue readingAuthor: Mel Watkins
The Progressive Economics Forum: W. A. Mackintosh: Great Canadian Economist of the 20th Century
There were two great Canadian economists of the last century: H.A. Innis and W.A. Mackintosh. Innis had been much written about but not Mackintosh. This is now corrected by a thoroughly researched biography by Hugh Grant of the University of Winnipeg with the straightforward title W.A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian economist. Mackintosh was […]
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: It is time to confront Canada’s staple trap
Canadian postcard, 1907 Forbidden to text while driving, you can waste your time checking the fluctuating price of gas at every gas station you see and how at each station it differs from yesterday. All you will learn is that the price shifts up and down over space and time
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Impact of Fur Trade in U.S.
The fur trade in Canada is often said to have been less malign than in the US, and it was, but that doesn’t say much given the extraordinary disruption it is said to have createn in colonial America by the American historian Bernard Bailyn in his recent (2012) book, appropriately
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Call for Research
“The interpretation of the history of North America in terms of rum and brandy has not been written, but in the fur trade, rum represented the contribution of the West Indies to trade of the Old Empire, and brandy the emphasis on French vineyards and self-sufficienty.” Innis, 1933 So far
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Kari Levitt Honoured
Kari Polanyi Levitt, one of own, has been given the Order of Canada. Congratulations to Kari. Richly deserved.
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Not Trickledown But Gush-Up
“Trickledown hadn’t worked. But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one fourth of the GDP.” [Yesterday’s election results only promise to worsen that.] That’s how the extrordinary writer-and-activist Arundhati Roy, one of the world’s leading public
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: From pulp and paper to magazines to progessive politics
Harold Innis wrote the history of Canada around its succession of staple exports, first to Europe and then to the US. He then wrote the history of empires and civilizations around the succession of media of communications. One of the bridges between these two phases of his work was the
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Mel Clark 1921-2014
Mel Clark, a long time trade negotiator for Canada, passed away on March 14. His Notice of Death in the April 24 Globe and Mail describes him as “an independent and progressive thinker with a strong sense of social responsibility.“ “Mel`s decades of experience in the world of international trade
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Fur trade and tar sands
Here is Joseph Boyden talking with the Globe and Mail last fall about his novel Orenda: “You look at this novel and you think immigration, who you allow in and who you don’t. The Hurons allow in the ones who ulimately destroy them, because the Huron aren’t perfect either. They
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: In Praise of our Distinguished Predecessor
J. King Gordon (b.1900, d.1989) was not a professional economist, though as a Rhodes Scholar he studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford while inhaling the Fabianism in the air. He was a progressive and a political activist who deserves to be remembered by us. Twice in his life he
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Oil as a Staple
“By 1901, Baku [then part of the Russian Empire, now the capital of Azerbaijan Republic] produced half the world’s oil…Baku was a melting pot of pitiful poverty and incredible wealth…[T]he derricks and the refineries poisoned the city and corrupted the people…[O]il townships were polluted slums. The 48,000 workers toiled in
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Surely lighthouses are simply a good thing?
“From a conventional view of progress, there were few projects more useful and less problematic than building lighthhouses to save life and cargo. From the shore, however, this was not so obvious. Among the local population were wreckers, who waited for storms to drive vessels ashore which they looted for
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Staples Redux: Wheat and Canola
Acceptance or rejection of genetically modified food has tended to be analyzed with respect to the attitudes of consumers. But the attitudes of producers matter. For example, western grain farmers have mostly accepted GM canola and most rejected GM wheat. Emily Eaton of the University of Regina explores why in
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Staples Redux: Oil and Honey
Oil is a staple. Honey isn’t. That’s the point. The odd coupling comes from Bill McKibben’s most recent book, which is titled “Oil and Honey.” Oil is crude. Honey is sweet. That says it all. The central point that McKibben is making is that oil is global and honey is
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Kari Polanyi-Levitt’s New Book
The much respected progressive economist, and my long time friend and intellectual soulmade, Kari Polanyi Levitt, having just turned 90, has published a book of no less than 16 scholarly articles, all written in the past 25 years and mostly much more recently. Its title, From the Great Transformation to
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Wordly Philosopher
This is the title of a recently published biography of Albert Hirschmam by Jeremy Adelman, a Canadian who teaches history at Princeton University. Hirschman’s life as an economist – which spanned so much of the 20th century – is worth learning about for it makes us think hard about what
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Re-reading Hirschman
Since I was a graduate student in the last millennium, I’ve been fascinated by the role of the cotton textile industry in recent economic history, beginning with that momentous event still being heard around the world, the First Industrial Revolution. It just caught fire in Bengladesh. There are books about
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Re-reading Hirschman
Since I was a graduate student in the last millennium, I’ve been fascinated by the role of the cotton textile industry in recent economic history, beginning with that momentous event still being heard around the world, the First Industrial Revolution. It just caught fire in Bengladesh. There are books about
Continue readingCanadian Dimension Feed: From Corporation to Crisis
The authors tell us this book has been “a long time in the making.” It has been well worth the wait. The dust jacket bears endorsements, fulsome even by the necessities of the medium, from four distinguished scholars and writers, David Harvey among them. Living next door to the United
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