The just-released OECD Employment Outlook – full text not available on line – has an interesting chapter on the sharp decline of labour’s share of national income in virtually all OECD countries over the past 30 years, and especially the last twenty years. The median labour share in the OECD
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Accidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on Mitt Romney’s nine-figure individual retirement account – and the lessons we should learn for our own tax policy. For further reading…– D.M. Levine and William Cohan are among many who have speculated as to how Romney may have amassed his IRA.– Eugene Robinson comments on how the U.S.’
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Lana Payne sees reason for hope in the sheer breadth of citizens who are protesting against the Harper Cons: Scientists. Doctors. Nuclear engineers. Academics. Researchers. Stephen Harper has a big problem. He has ticked them all off. And they are not suffering their
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your weekend. – Will Hutton discusses how the increasing gaps in economic equality are leading to radical differences in opportunity – with the U.S./U.K. push toward private schooling serving as a particular source of exclusion: (T)he middle class of whatever ethnic background is spending more on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your weekend. – In keeping with the theme of my column this week, the Mound of Sound highlights the distinction between a “plutonomy” which serves as the source of easy profits, and a “precariat” which businesses are looking to treat as irrelevant (except when they need
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Don’t Get Uppity. Remember Your Place.
These are hard times for the honest man and they may get a lot harder yet. There’s a societal sort of continental drift underway. Our once cohesive, strong society is ever so slowly but nonetheless steadily being divided, separating. This is apparent, in part, from the growing gap between rich
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Afternoon Links
Assorted content to end your day. – For those wondering what might become of Nathan Cullen’s leadership campaign plan to work with progressives of all party stripes, we now have part of the answer: in advance of the Calgary Centre by-election, Cullen will be reaching out to discuss how to
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Joseph Stiglitz – On Redistribution of Wealth
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
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Roy Romanow comments on Medicare as a major part of Canada’s identity: The achievement of universal health care took a long, acrimonious and protracted road. It is no surprise to me that Saskatchewan was at the forefront of this journey. The province’s
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Growth After Financial Capitalism
A thoughtful short essay by Wolfgang Streeck, concluding with a reflection on how extreme inequality gets in the way of a needed de-emphasis on crude economic growth.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Roy Romanow rightly notes that Canada’s federal government needs to take a lead role in building our public health care system, rather than abandoning the field to the province. – Now that the Cons’ budget has raised the question of whether we
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The Mexican Option – The Poor slaughtering the Poor.
We’re missing yet another capitalist experiment go bad. Chile self-destructed earlier under the watchful eye of the IMF and its neo-liberal reforms. Mexico, geographically, is much closer to us and you would think that its slide into anarchy would garner a little more attention in our news media. Nah. The
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Michael Harris lists ten things the Harper Cons want Canadians to forget before the 2015 election. But it’s worth keeping in mind that their expectations for mind-wiping are surely shaped by their own willingness to completely forget what they were repeating incessantly before
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Plenty of commentators are rightly speaking out against the Cons’ anti-democratic omnibus bill, including Tim Harper and the Star-Phoenix and Vancouver Sun editorial boards. And even John Ivison can’t muster much more than “but the Libs did it too!” in defence of
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: US family net worth crushed by financial crisis
The US Federal Reserve today released its triennial examination of incomes and net worth of American households in the Survey of Consumer Finances. It shows the crushing effects on net worth of a housing and financial bust unparalleled since the great depression. The shocking results of this study overviewed in
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Canada’s Self-Imposed Crisis in Post-Secondary Education
On June 7, I gave a keynote address to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees Education Sector Conference. My PowerPoint presentation (with full references) can be found at this link. Points I raised in the address include the following: -Canada’s economy has been growing quite steadily over the past three
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Trish Hennessy assembles a handy set of ideas to deal with income inequality. – No, there isn’t much new in the Cons’ familiar pattern of deceiving the public, covering it up, then lying by about the cover-up by blaming civil servants who
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Lana Payne weighs in on the Cons’ goal of reducing wages for Canadian workers: As an economist, Stephen Harper must know what his government’s changes to employment insurance (EI), the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), the elimination of the Fair Wage Act
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
This and that to end your Saturday. – Andrew Jackson comments on how a premature push for austerity has driven the global economy to the brink of more disaster – as slashing intended to summon the confidence fairies has instead led businesses to reasonably conclude it’s not worth trying to
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Budget Bill and the Federal Contractors Program
So many big changes are happening in Bill C-38 that some significant issues like the changes to the Federal Contractors Program (FCP) have escaped attention. Part 4 Division 42 of C-38 is very short. It merely says that subsection 42(2) of the Employment Equity Act is replaced by the following:
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