This and that to start your year. – Ian Welsh comments on the challenges we face in trying to turn wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few into a better world for everybody: The irony is that we have, again, produced a cornucopia. We have the potential to
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Accidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Alex Himelfarb and Jordan Himelfarb write about the growing appetite for stronger public services and the taxes needed to fund them in 2014 – even if we’re a long way from having that translated into real policy changes: Certainly tax phobia has framed
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – David Foot and Daniel Stoffman discuss Thomas Piketty’s role in highlighting the need to work toward greater equality, while pointing out a few options to increase public revenues from people who can afford to pay them. And Ezra Klein interviews Paul Krugman about
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne discusses how we can bring about change in the new year by demanding that our political leaders recognize and use the power of collective action: Social justice requires a collective response and political action. It is at the root of wonderful
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Daniel Tencer nicely surveys how a guaranteed annual income could work in Canada, as well as the obstacles to putting one in place: Imagine the government started handing out $10,000 annually to every adult in the country, or implemented a negative income tax
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Mark Bittman discusses the connection between economic and social ills in the U.S., and offers a message which applies equally to Canada: I have spent a great deal of time talking about the food movement and its potential, because to truly change the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Lynn Parramore interviews Joseph Stiglitz about the spread of inequality, along with the need for a strengthened labour movement to reverse the trend: LP: In your paper, you indicate that the power of the 1 percent to exploit the rest seems to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Ryan Meili examines why Craig Alexander of the TD Bank is calling for a move toward greater income equality in Canada: The OECD reports that income inequality is at the highest level in 30 years, and that economic growth has been slowed by
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Thomas Walkom discusses why politicians have thus far failed to take any meaningful action on climate change. But it’s also worth noting that the question of whether voters are pushing for change may not be the only determining factor in government decision-making. Most
Continue readingAlex's Blog: On the Weakening of the Collective
Summary of interviewed, June 23, by Adam Kahane as part of his Possible Canadas project and first appeared here on Possible Canadas website Kahane: What keeps you up at night? Himelfarb: The number one issue for me is inequality. Let’s think of the bottom, middle, and top of society. On
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on this week’s confirmation from the Broadbent Institute that Canadians severely underestimate wealth inequality – as well as the strong popular support to reduce the wealth gap. For further reading…– The Norton/Ariely study of the views of Americans on wealth inequality is found here, and discussed further here, here
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Carter Price offers another look at how inequality damages economic development. And the Broadbent Institute examines the wealth gap in Canada – which is already recognized as a serious problem, but also far larger than most people realize: – Paul Buchheit discusses
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Wray Herbert examines Lukasz Walasek and Gordon Brown’s work on the psychological links between inequality, status-seeking and reduced well-being. And Linda McQuaig writes about the harm increasing inequality has done to Canada both economically and socially: (The OECD’s recent) report puts actual
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – The OECD reports on the relationship between equality and growth, and concludes that rising inequality is as toxic for economic development as it is for our social fabric. And David Rider discusses how increasing inequality is manifesting itself in several Toronto neighbourhoods.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Will Hutton compares the alternative goals of either shrinking government to the point where it does nothing or harnessing it to meet everybody’s basic needs, and explains why we should demand the latter: A financial crisis has been allowed to morph into a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Walden Bello discusses the need for our political system to include constant citizen engagement, not merely periodic elections to determine who will be responsible to implement the wishes of the elite: Even more than dictatorships, Western-style democracies are, we are forced to conclude,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Reviewing Darrell West’s Billionaires, Michael Lewis discusses how extreme wealth doesn’t make anybody better off – including the people fighting for position at the top of the wealth spectrum: A team of researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed 43,000
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Deep thought
In general, we should be appalled by the idea of letting catastrophic climate change run amok and force people to abandon their homes and communities. But for a few self-selected people, it’s tough not to see some poetic justice in the possibility.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Monica Pohlmann interviews Armine Yalnizyan about the undue influence of our corporate overlords in setting public policy: What’s your sense of the state of our democracy? We have a troubled relationship with our democratic institutions. We need to get over the idea
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Polly Toynbee writes about the unfortunate agreement among the UK’s major parties not to talk about the real effects of gratuitous cuts for fear that the public won’t abide honesty in politics. And George Monbiot discusses how the UK’s tax system favours rents
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